10:37pm Christmas Eve: the lights shut off in my dad’s house leaving us opening early Xmas presents in the dark. We quickly checked outside, and all the power in town seemed to have gone out. The only lights seen were headlights of the few cars still driving around at that hour. After rounding up some flashlights, my dad and I ate some of his homemade cookies and turned in for the night, not thinking much of the blackout.

The next morning, I awoke to the crackle of the fire blazing in our old Franklin stove in the living room. The smell of steak and eggs filled the air, as my dad busied himself with Christmas morning breakfast. This is an odd sight, considering our ski bum bachelor tradition of getting out of the house early to ski and teach on Bald Mountain, usually with just a muffin or granola bar to see us through the day.

But this Christmas was different, and as my bleary eyes adjusted to the early morning dark, I realized the power had yet to turn back on. As the sun began to light up the day, and after multiple calls to the ski school office with no answer, my dad figured he wasn’t teaching for the day. He settled in, replete with bathrobe and slippers to wait out the power outage to see if the ski lifts would even start turning. At this point we discussed ramifications of a blackout in this destination ski resort, and lamented the misfortune of all who were stranded in hotels and the like across town.

With no power to run computers or to turn on the TV, I used what little battery was left on my phone to access Facebook and see how wide this blackout really was. From all the exasperated posts and complaints about a chilly Christmas morning, I realized the outage spread as far as Bellevue, 13 miles to the south. This was to be an unforgettable holiday.

Around eleven o’clock, we decided to head out into the single digit weather, though the sunny skies brought a little extra warmth on our walk through town. With few cars, and even fewer people strolling about, Ketchum felt like the small town of the 1970s that my dad wishes it still was. No stores were open, and some had signs saying they’d be back when the power comes back.

For fun, we walked to the Idaho Power station located on Sun Valley Road near the old barn. A man representing Idaho Power was there, busy on his cell phone fielding calls. He assured ius that they were working hard to determine the cause of the problem, and seemed tired from being up all night working.

It was only noon by the time we returned from our walk, and with a bout of cabin fever threatening to kick in, I decided to go out and hike Baldy. There were just a few other cars in the Warm Springs parking lot when I pulled in; it seemed that others had gotten antsy too. I passed a few groups of folks on climbing skins, but I kept mostly to the cat-tracks since I was bootpacking. 3300 vertical feet later, and I made the final push to the top. I was greeted by a silence that proved eerie during regular season in the middle of the day on a ski hill with million-dollar chairlifts and no electricity to run them.

After a leisurely ski down the hill, my dad and I met up for dinner at an unusual place for the Tatsunos during Christmas: Panda chinese restaraunt. Our normal family dineer with our good friends, the Greers, was not to be, since their power had yet to return. So, my dad and I stuffed ourselves on chow mein and general’s chicken, telling stories of ski bumming in the Alps of Idaho. Not a bad end to the Christmas that almost wasn’t