Today my step-daughter, Evelyn, shadowed me on the hill. She says she wants to be a ski patroller someday, and who am I to discourage her? Evelyn enjoys even the most mundane of ski patrol skills: cleaning rope lines. “Hey look Kim, a rope line. Can we go clean it?”

“Sure,” I tell her. “But didn’t we already clean that one this morning?”

Today, she got an even greater pleasure–we buried her in a hole for the dogs. Christina and I put her in a snow cave, shoveled in the entrance and let Newman search for her. He found her in two minutes.

When I asked her how it was, she said it was “Awesome”, and Newman’s handler, Lynn, was quite proud. Looks like I have a new shadow.