Snowbound: A Ski Lodge Romance

The blizzard wasn't supposed to hit until Saturday. That's what the weather reports said, anyway. By Thursday night, we were buried in four feet of snow with no signs of stopping, and I was stranded at a ski lodge in the Colorado Rockies with forty strangers and one very attractive ski instructor.

My name is Daniel Chen. CEO of a tech startup worth considerably less than it was two months ago. I'd come to Aspen for a week of skiing and avoiding phone calls from investors, a badly needed break from the slow-motion collapse of everything I'd built.

Instead, I got trapped in a lodge with no cell service, dwindling supplies, and Marcus Reeves.

He was the head instructor at the resort, thirty-eight, former Olympic hopeful until a knee injury ended that dream, now teaching rich tourists how not to kill themselves on the slopes. He'd been assigned to me for private lessons, which had consisted of two days of patient instruction and barely concealed amusement at my complete inability to stay upright.

"You're overthinking it," he'd told me on day two, watching me faceplant for the fifteenth time. "Skiing is about letting go. You can't control everything."

"Controlling everything is literally my job."

"Then you're going to have a very long week."

He'd been right. And now, watching the snow pile up outside the lodge windows, I was starting to think the week was going to be even longer than anticipated.

Day one of the blizzard, the lodge manager made an announcement: power was running on generator backup, food supplies would be rationed, and nobody was going anywhere until the roads cleared. Which could be days.

The other guests handled it in various ways. Some panicked. Some complained. Some treated it like an adventure. I found a corner near the fireplace and tried to answer emails on the spotty satellite internet, pretending the outside world still mattered.

Marcus found me there on day two.

"You know the internet's basically dead, right? You're just staring at loading screens."

"I'm aware."

"So why are you still trying?"

"Because if I stop, I'll have to think about the fact that I'm trapped in a lodge with no way to manage the disaster waiting for me back home."

He sat down across from me, stretched out like he had all the time in the world. "What kind of disaster?"

"Company's failing. Investors are pulling out. Two years of my life about to go up in smoke."

"Sounds rough."

"It is."

"Can you do anything about it right now?"