What makes me do this

Mid-January, 2011 skiing at Big Sky, Montana with the Ski World trip:  It's early afternoon and I have taken the Lone Peak Tram to ski Liberty Bowl by myself.  It's never a good thing, by the way, to take on steep terrain without a buddy.  If nothing else, they can photograph you falling all the way down the slope.  But just off the cat track to the ski field, I hook up with an elderly European guy dressed in an 1980s hot purple jump suit, also by himself.  We ski a bit and talk a bit--he's following behind me.  When we get to the bottom of Liberty Bowl, he tells me that he was letting me go ahead of him so I can ski over all the rocks first--smart guy, eh?  It's only while riding the two-person Dakota lift that he informs me just how smart he really is--this older Swiss gentlemen is Kurt Wuthrich, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  So I take from this chance meeting not only the serendipity that comes with the sport, but also the importance of having some professional integrity with EASY SKI TURNS.  I'm trying not to be just another know-it-all ski instructor--world's full of them.  By the way, Dr. Wuthrich's an awesome skier . . .