The Circus

The Games come to Buttermilk in January and the smallest of the four mountains becomes, for seventy-two hours, the most watched piece of snow on earth. Scaffolding where there was none. A halfpipe carved to the centimeter. Helicopters that are not for rescue.

It is spectacle, and spectacle is honest about being spectacle, which is more than most things manage. We have no quarrel with it.

When the scaffolding comes down the snow underneath is the same snow, and the people who live here go back to skiing it in anonymity, which is the only way worth skiing anything.