You know you have to do some soul-searching when your own spouse says, “Don’t be a wimp”.

We had just walked out of Target, and the first snowfall of winter was cascading down all around us. I looked over at my wife. She reminded me of a bright-eyed kid on Christmas morning. There was a skip to her step. My recollection is that she actually lifted up her head and rolled out her tongue to lap in a few stray flakes.

Then there was the seasonal sourpuss at her side—me. Actually, I was lumbering along a few paces behind her, cussing under my breath and shaking the flakes off my unprotected scalp.

“Ridiculous,” I muttered. “Unbelievable.”

Less than three months earlier we were spending no small amount of money on an air conditioner. Less than three WEEKS earlier I was playing a round at Pinecrest Golf Course in Idaho Falls—in shorts. To me the early storm was nothing short of a personal insult—a reminder that I should never get too comfortable with the weather around here, as it will most certainly turn on me when I least expect it. (Now in the thralls of a high-mountain spring, I think many of you out there can attest to this.)

“So much for golf this weekend,” I told her.

“So, take up skiing,” she said, then reminded me that it was already well into November, anyway.

For good measure, she also asked me to not be a wimp about it. (That reminded me—she had said the same thing the previous April when I threw a tantrum about how the 40-mile-per-hour gusts screwing up my golf game.)

Stumbling along on the snow-laden parking lot, I was about to reply with something unrefined and foolish. That’s when she told me about one of her friends who had moved here from warm, sunny southern California a few years ago.

Apparently, this person’s reaction to the Intermountain winterscape was not a far cry from my own. She knew at the outset that the winter months would be a challenge for her warm-blooded constitution. Armed with that expectation, she and her husband went for it. They braved the snow. They braved the wind. They braved the bone-rattling cold of January nights, and they settled here without complaint. That’s right. They bought a one-way ticket onto the sub-Arctic Plate and never looked back.

Now, I’m the last person who would ever argue against moving to the Mountain West. The summers here are spectacular. The autumns are to die for. And the winters? My wife’s friend offered one more nugget of inspiration, and for me, it makes winters in this region not only tolerable, but also a source of pride. Here it is:

From L.A. to Atlanta to the streets of Hong Kong, the fair-weather pockets of our planet demand little from the people who flock there. They are easy places to live. So easy, in fact, that they quickly become heavily populated, noisy, expensive, crime-ridden, polluted and kind of sad. Living and playing here in the harsher conditions of the Mountain West may not be easy, but it is more than worthwhile for a very special, very capable strain of people who can take it.

Now, what are the odds that by the time you read this, I will have packed away my new set of skis and pulled out my trusty old golf clubs? Either way, I’ll do my best not to be a wimp about it.