A group of tourists, coats folded over their arms, is piling into a minibus as I drive past the Alyeska Resort entrance on the way to the carpark. Two of them are in no hurry to take their place in the line, standing warming their hands over the licks of flame from the gas fire that will earn itself more of a huddle when the days are actually cold. They’re Australians, perhaps. I would once have estimated cold the way they are doing now.

The resort is built in the chateau style, though a functional, straightforwardly attractive version of it, without the whimsy of pointed turrets or crenellation. Aside from its pillar-box-red highlights, it’s mostly oatmeal in colour, around eight storeys high, and it has a bend in the middle like an elbow. That’s most apparent from above, up at the ski runs.

The nearest available parking bay is at the far end, and a reverse park into it leaves me facing the mountain. A tramcar has just left the hotel terminal on its way up the slope, carrying sightseers and diners booked for the early sitting at Seven Glaciers. When the snow comes, it will pack with skiers. Take a left turn when you exit at the top and you can shred North America’s longest near-vertical double black diamond. That is the one run that still comes to me in my sleep. Powder dreams. It is a 2000-foot flight to earth from up there, a swooping carrion flight from eyrie to valley floor. I must have done it a thousand times, a hundred at least, without so much as a ligament sprain.

In the months of rehab since my previous van was T-boned at an intersection on the other side of town – my leg bones snapped like dry pasta, patella crushed into an x-ray archipelago of fragments, painstakingly picked out individually by the surgeon – my relationship with the Alyeska has changed from seasonal staff member to paid-up gym member. Gym member, pool wader, lifter of unremarkable weights, stationary cyclist. But the weights are heavier than they were at the start and the messages I am getting from the nerves in my leg are closer to making sense. I am starting to believe in my knee again. It’s a different joint now without the patella, and it’s had to win me over.

The other vehicle was a van too, its driver arguing on his phone as he cruised through the intersection. The first rubber he left on the road was measured at five feet after the stop sign. He got a faceful of airbag and his phone punched from his hand by the force of the inflation, the other caller still shouting at him as a nearby pedestrian pulled his door open. That’s according to the pedestrian’s statement to police.