edited (no, really) excerpts from my diary of this day
I so wanted to just have a Solstice wilderness ski day. Just me and the wildness. Is that too much to hope for, feeling discouraged by all the hype about crowds, and Covid upswings, and after being run off rutted Rubicon by the ravaging rabble? But where in all our ski domain can such wild wildness be found? I try to think like a Juniper.
An image of the clean geometric landscape of the granite-bound alpine world above tree line comes unbeckoned, where scale is obliterated, and deeper archetypal, existential realities run close to the surface, an appropriate setting for my observation of this most ancient and universal of earthling holy days. That day in the depths of frigid winter, the time of deprivation, when finally the tide turns and the nights begin to grow shorter again. It is striking to realize how much more the ancients knew about their heavens, than the average moderner.
I drive in the dark, Venus aglow. At the trailhead it’s just light enough to see to click into my skis, and off I stride into this shortest day of the year. The sky to the east is lightening across the still lake, sparse clouds at the horizon glowing with diffuse second-hand light, indirect, reflected, refracted, wavelengths delineated, shooting straight into my eye holes, ricocheting around my brain pan.
I head off into the trackless wilderness, the sheer splitter summit of the rugged east face above bathed in golden morning light. I follow little strands of snow between the boulders, and across bare stretches of glacial-scoured granite.
There is a few inches of light powder on a few inches of rotten, desiccated old facets on the laminated frozen snot-coated ground, not enough snow to actually bury obstacles, just to hide them, and to bend the willow and alder bows down into the way. There is less snow here than usual. I mean I knew that, but now here it is, I am living it.
I cross the alluvial beneath the mouth of the funnel gully. With more snow it could be considered an avalanche runout path. Now its just a steep brush-choked boulder field, with decorative snow accents. This is like an advanced skinning technique laboratory, or maybe a back country ski school hazing humiliation ritual? How about a cross-fit sack race? Any which way, I’m slowly making ground up canyon, while staying amused.
Actually I feel good, strong and agile, my skis answering my gaze, intuitively landing where they will grip, angled just so, then isolated solidly as I stride past, fully engaged, like a part of me. I launch up into the brush, linking little patches of snow for purchase, trying hard not to do the backwards sliding slapstick starfish plunge headfirst upside down into the waist deep huckleberry oak, where I’d likely coming to rest hanging suspended by my skis, arms ensnared by my pole straps, with my head hanging inverted at ground level helpless, flushed, sinking deeper the more I struggle, to where the proverbial weasels may rip my face. Thankfully it didn’t come to all that. This life has a strange sense of humor, but as long as you are laughing along, I suppose the jokes not on you.
I follow ever dwindling strands, luring me up, until it is just oak. I gaze at the glacier crest far far above, like a teaser of the movie I thought I was going to see. No fast-forward skipping the trailer and credits, or the establishment of characters and plot points. But from up here I can sort of see below me a more continuous looking snow patch that I believe is the course of the summer tread. Good thing I came up here to where I had a better vantage. That’s the cagey old veteran for you, knowing how to spin happenstance, to justify no-fault backtracking.
I fight my way back downhill, skins on oak, which is actually harder, more dynamic, and fraught than uphill. None of which bodes well for the return trip. I can see the route now, just as it enters the oak-clad boulders. And now I am up on them, spanning boulder to boulder with my skis, dry tooling, carefully placing my pole tips on forks in stout oak branches, methodically, high stepping one strenuous, precarious move at a time, three points of contact, none snow. In places I must engage my toenails to maintain purchase.
I stay low around across the bouldery brush field, where our skin track usually has a steep crux gaining a ledge at the base of a big Jeffery Pine and a steep clean, golden granite outcrop with a sapling growing out of a splitter highball crack.
Around the corner Bittercherry is added to the brushy boulder field theme, for variety and added degree of difficulty. I am working on a grading system for bushwhacking, but then our brush in Tahoe is tame compared to many ranges, and I’m not that enthused about the research. Maybe I should stick to complaining about tourists.
I recall decades ago, walking across here backpacking with my daughter when she was like five, off route in this hideous brushy boulder field, instead of over there on the big open granite slabs with the cool junipers where the usual summer routes go. Tears were shed. Nice work dad.
It’s curious to think of that time so long ago now, and that landmark in the summer so close to this landmark on the winter route, and feeling like two alternate realities brushing by each other unbeknownst, like Jupiter and Saturn apparently converging in the sky, as they are now, yet millions of miles apart.
Finally I crest a rise and the snow covered canyon stretches before me pristinely blanketed, and I feel something open up inside me, like the yawn that clears my ears for altitude, entering a new sensory reality with a shuddering frisson, like coming on to windowpane, with a spontaneous grin of realization. I am at home in my world now, this is what I have come for, the belonging.
Atop the slabs I hardly recognize the terrain undulations where the snow normally smooths things out nice and uniform. It is fascinating to tour this liminal space between the summer state and planet winter. This winter solstice time of year celebrates the triple states of water here, moving in that flux between solid, liquid and gas, which is so key to life on this planet, breaking things up and dissolving them for the circulation and recombination that drives the relentlessly reciprocating fertility of this world. How lucky is that? Maybe not lucky enough.
The challenges are constant, the forest looking chaotic, strewn with obstacles. I route find on dead reckoning, between my practiced winter path, that smooth direct line we draw across the snow covered landscape like a low flight, and my vague recollections of the nebulously braided ever changing summer user trail here that I only hike a time or two a season anymore. With only a foot and a half whatever of snow here now I rely more on the latter, clomping along on my skis as if. I mostly focus on the immediate foreground, figuring how to negotiate the next few feet. When I glance up ahead it looks largely impenetrable, but place by place, I cover the ground, recognizing as I arrive which way I’d best go, with a satisfying realization.
As I progress up canyon and cover gets a little better, I try to read the larger landforms underlying the forest and thickets, the features we follow along on skis, working around little recessional moraine benches, following ledges, crossing the familiar looking overhead alder copse on faith, to the bank of the creek that drains the lake above, and along it to our usual snowbridge, which I now realize for the first time, is just some mostly dead willows matted down spanning the steep banks. I gingerly work across, placing my skis just so, creating my own impromptu bridge as I go.
I am reminded of taking our first dog here, inherited from my brother-in-law, well trained for suburbia, but the mountains not so much. I told him to stay while I teetered across a skinny log over the rushing current in my huge leather tele boots, only to hear him scrabbling right behind me halfway across, and then ploosh into the drink he went, bobbing down stream, with tall snow banks rising on either side. Dude don’t drown, your mom will kill me. Somehow he didn’t. That was his first and last real ski tour. The highlight was having to climb back up a chute we skied to retrieve him, running back and forth on top of the cliff, barking maniacally because he refused to follow us down. Really dude? You’ve got four legs. (Yeah, bad owner, go lay down.)
Dead wood strainers like this give me pause. I have taken a few bad falls through the years, off slippery downed logs and tangled deadfall ‘pick-up-sticks’. Hooking a tip can feel like being blindsided by a judo throw. So I make each step measured, precise, accurate. My practiced eye knows how to do the intricate math of calculated forces, friction and slope, old brain discernment, ten thousand hours worth of feral foot work. Here in the cockpit, I just have to stay focused and steer the thing. I thrive on moving fast and efficiently through rugged terrain all day long, keeping my head in it, that’s where the real endurance lies, it’s mental. I envision sifting along the surface of the planet like a coyote, scarcely touching down.
Now I’m on route, tracing the practiced way up to the narrow hidden passage through the cliff band guarding the lake, where the summer and winter routes are forced together. I love how improbable this all is, this rugged terrain draped in snow, ushering me along.
The last time I was in this spot was a sundown this past August hustling home after a long day, on top of the exit crux from the ramps here, when I encountered a college kid alone with a big pack, apparently following his phone, looking lost, tired, maybe a tad desperate, at the base of this seemingly impassable crux, and very surprised and relieved to see me above, out of nowhere. Is that really the way to the lake? Yes, you are on it, its not as bad as it looks, the lake is just a half mile and you have it all to yourself, enjoy! and I hustle off, leaving him, like who even was that guy? (yet another timely cameo in someone else’s trip)
There is continuous snow cover barely, except for the steep pinch at the crux, getting up onto the base of the broad ramp of clean granite, perfectly situated as the only passable way over the cliff band damming off the lake. I skin up the steep slope to the base of the weakness in the cliff, in a jumble of exposed boulders, putting a little mountain in my ski mountaineering.
I take off a ski and carefully stamp a platform for my foot in the rotten hoary snow, trying not to plunge into the gap between the rock and the tall brush. I click out of my other ski, jabbing them in the snow above, and high step up onto solid rock, and make a couple moves, then turn and reach back down for my skis and poles, replacing them up above me, where I can reach them, find a good handhold at arm’s length above me and yard up onto the boulders, awkwardly teetering in my rigid ski boots.
It is at this moment that the sun shines upon my face for the first time today, as it finally rises above the canyon walls towering over me. This shortest day of the year is like the weightless pause between ascent and descent, a moment outside of the flow of time. It feels potent, like I am part of some celestial alignment, tumblers falling into place, passing into a new reality.
A few steps up and across the boulder tops and I can retrieve my gear and set my skis in place on the snow where I gingerly step back onto them, as if clambering up onto a floating life raft. I make a few moves and an exposed kick turn, and skin steeply up a narrow swath of snow along the edge of the sheer little cliff, before connecting up with the main snowfield here.
The ramp runs along the top of that cliff and is bound stepwise on the other side by another granite wall, clean and perfectly formed, with a geometric symmetry that is a classic expression of our joint-controlled Sierra batholiths, characteristic of our charmed landscape, so clean it looks like its made of fiberglass, part of our cartoon reality here.
I greet the distinctive old Juniper snag which stands atop the feature here as a natural landmark for this crucial passageway, just as it would have been for many hundreds of years for the Washoe, who would naturally have used this route as well. We are all drawn along by this same terrain, like corpuscles flowing.
It reminds me of the tricky little passageways the Ancestral Pueblo (aka Anasazi) utilized in the rugged canyonlands of the Colorado Plateau, which they so ingeniously adapted for human occupation. The natives here had a much lighter touch. They knew better than to try and live in these snowy mountains year round, instead opting for a biannual nomadic sort of life style, splitting their time between a home in the high desert Pinyon Pine groves, and a summer place by the Lake teeming with fat Lahontan Cutthroat Trout. Talk about your fallen empires and their lifestyles of the rich and famous all you want, these folks lived here in the lap of luxury for nine thousand years, count em.
Meanwhile our culture has effectively engineered this ecosystem’s imminent demise in a mere couple hundred years. And we smugly call it civilization, dismissively ignoring demonstrably more effective aboriginal life ways. Ignorance is a choice, and we allow it to be made in our name every day.
This Solstice the message I send skyward on my steaming breath all day is; I’m sorry World. I am so so sorry and ashamed for my people, and for my own part in this ongoing profane desecration. And I will try to lesson my carbon impacts here each day, not just for the direct affects, or the example it makes, but for the rhythm and tone it sets to my activities, the concordance with the sustaining flow all around me, dancing along with this Life, not just thrashing discordantly tone deaf and off beat, moshing in the orchestra pit.
Above me, I spy where a hidden wedge shaped step that I know crosses the ramp, is backfilled flush with snow now, with the lip lingering just below the surface. I struggle a bit to get across, trying to not drop into the gap, with my skins losing purchase on the shallow granite lip. I will have to remember this spot on the way back down. I make long tacks across the ramp, trying to leave it open for my return descent. The snow is beautiful hoary goodness and it would be a treat to ski it like this, instead of the usual refreezing breakable crust I have frequently skied right here at the harried end of long days.
Above the ramp, I find a rock in the shade of a vibrant juniper, where I take off my skis and have a snack and a puff. Its been three hours of strenuous hiking to get here, might be a new record, a personal worst. I have been looking forward to solving these riddles and putting this stretch behind me. Now the focus of my concerns has shifted to the condition of the ski hill above me. I haven’t even gotten a good look at any of it. The approach seemed like the big variable, but I’ve never skied up here with this little snow either. The adventure continues. I reckon there’s a reason there is no sign of tracks here.
Lots of Pine Martin tracks today though, purposeful lines of characteristic offset small round tracks, with short legs but a long gait, fierce little predators, lightening quick, like Riki Tiki Tavi on snow. And boldly curious; I had one zip right up to me where I sat on a log by the creek where I was pulling thistle this summer (or maybe it was his smaller cousin, the long tailed weasel?), apparently on his accustomed route, and he just stopped and checked me out for a while, at close range, before he disappeared again. The Sierra breeds critters of rare spunk and personality, but deadly competence.
I love to take little sit-down breaks every couple few hours, but I can’t sit for long, before I am antsy to be back at it, my stoke unbridled, don’t want my muscles to cool down too much or anything. I engineer a skin track up the steep little knoll, then cut over to pick up the key little spot where you wrap around blind to hit the traverse below the rocks.
I am unsure if I am on the right tack, got high too soon I think instead of too late like usual, but I cut over anyway because up just doesn’t look right. Fake it till you make it. You’ll recognize it when you get there, I remind myself. If you don’t recognize it, you aren’t there. And then, after an absent interval, filled with patient striding, I recognize the spot, and relax a bit, pausing to admire the view.
The lake below me now is mostly snow covered but some old gray ice is exposed along the shady shoreline in the SW beneath the big cliffs and in the little fjord. My view of the slopes above is hidden by intermittent trees, and what glimpses I’m permitted, reveal only rocky chaos, snow and stone, scraps and shards, without pattern or logic. I figure on picking my way down this slope in the easiest way possible, in the gentle protected crease of the bowl where the snow settles in the deepest, which I cant see well yet. I am really enjoying more solid strait forward skinning and am finally getting to space out, letting the dog (of my attention) stray ahead, up around across. The top is steep, exposed, bare rock. It’s a wonder we can ever ski there at all.
Wrapping across the north facing snowfields, which look narrow and lumpy, I run aground on unseen reef in spots, which is disconcerting. The wind has sifted the light snow in just so, smoothing things over, hiding the riffles and swells, and other tells that warn of shallow obstacles. Juker powder, the lads call it. It tries to woo us with its silky smooth siren song, to lure us up onto the rocks.
The way draws me on, switchbacking up into the picturesque Heather glen beneath the Hemlocks, my skis seemingly skim over the top of the Cassiopeia. This is a charmed spot, and I especially relish being here now, at the nascent genesis of the annual snowfield fountains that nurture these gardens. Our indicator rock shows just how astoundingly high high-tide is.
I get my first glimpse of the big face of the peak above, and discount it out of hand. I try to look again closer, focusing to discern some continuous pathway through the maze, but its just too peppery to go smoothly. It makes my stomach feel funny just thinking about being up there on the blind convexities, lost amidst all the outcrops, second guessing landmarks in this novel early season setting, with only the lake visible far below. Its presumptive and in poor faith to force these things. We are guests here after all.
But I can see the top of the lower back bowl and it looks passable anyway. I skin across the lake, taking it all in, utterly rapt in the magnificent splendor. The lower ramps above also look juker. I have to be real careful skiing today, mindfully slow and precise, focused, restrained, controlled, gotta really watch that dog, keep it close. Calling Captain Cautious (wtf, voice mail’s full?)
I’m sailing up over more buried carpets of Heathers, both Red Mountain Heather and Cassiopeia. I just like saying the name, all those rich vowel sounds, Cassiopeeah, dense carpets of evergreen stems, hugged by fleshy scale-like sessile leaves, with delicate urn-shaped white flowers, nodding as if to keep their fair skin out of the harsh sunlight. Said to be one of John Muir’s favorites. Named for a Greek Queen of antiquity, or maybe vaguely three different ones.
Cresting the bench of the neon orange and chartreuse lichen bespangled, darkly rich, mafic boulders, with their lush, attendant Explorers Gentian bushes of saturated cobalt blue, now gone to seed and protected from winter’s ravishments by snowcover, I enter the sun-blazed upper bowl, into a raw glaciated world. One that currently has only a little bit of snow on it. This is the first I am seeing my hoped-for ski lines up close, to find out if the image I have held up before me in my mind all day, actually verifies in reality. I have come a long ways to ask the Mountain if I may ski it today. This moment itself is one of the most potent reasons to come, to test my map, my conception of this world, to calibrate my narratives to actual, objective, concrete realities (or in this case hopefully powder?)
The shattered rock is draped with a thin veneer of snow, accentuating its roughness, rather than burying it. This bowl is crowned by coarse craggy metasedimentary rock, ground up from the ancient sea floor along the edge of the adjoining tectonic plates where the continent floated up against the oceanic plate, and then heaved skyward atop the uplifting granitic Sierra batholith.
But from the mountainous chaos that greets my eye emerges a solid white swath of snow, laying settled in the protected heart of the enclosing terrain. Backlit windblown plumes of snow dance atop a small cornice that caps the bowl, like tongues of cold fire. There looks to be a gentle way around under the cornice at one edge. So that is my answer, yes. Thank you, Mountain. Squinting harder I can also make out another probable ski line, if I work around a few rocks at the top to enter from the side. I pick out landmark trees and knobs on the ridgetop to help find the entrance to the ski lines from above, without having to walk around clueless on the cornice. The snow up there looks wind textured, but I don’t see any shiny spots anyway.
So far the snow I’ve been moving through has all been of pretty good consistent quality, soft but not sticky, considering air temps havent been below freezing for days. Nothing is dripping though, and no sign of crusty refrozen spots in the shade. The breeze is pretty steady and I have had my jacket on so far, climbing gently in the shade. But now I am in full sun and shuck my jacket, and hope the other foot isn’t about to fall. I had worried about my worn out second string climbing skins refreezing and growing barnacles, and this final push to the top will be telling. I hope that in this instance, my imagination is overactive. The old sun-soaked powder should be cooked through, so hopefully the glomming can be avoided. The days exertions are catching up to me and I chip away at the final climb in little pieces. There are plenty of distractions.
The view holds reminders of many great adventures with many potent partners. Me and this place, we go way back, we got history, and have learned to trust ourselves together. I explored up this rugged canyon by degrees through the years, intimidated by its chaotic wildness, unsure of myself and my place in such a world. It is a measure of my accrued skills, strength and knowledge, of how far I have come in the mountains here in over three decades, that I am even here today, on a day like this, moving with such easy familiarity.
When I first started to explore this terrain on skis I would come in the late spring, hiking in sneakers with all my ski gear on my back (and a Nalgene of homebrew), on the melted-out user trail I skinned up today, to ski these snowfields in dirty sun cupped corn when I felt I could completely predict the avalanche conditions. I would see powder tracks here in the winter, and wonder longingly who was out here skiing this stuff so deep in midwinter. I look back that way now, wondering if there is someone standing there now, wondering about my tracks.
I see the Whitebark Pine on the ridge top shimmying in the wind, and the cornice flying snow banners. I am still mostly in the lee of the ridge and I work right up to the edge before stopping to put my jacket and hat back on. I skin up into the wind, and out the ridge to the top of the little bowl just this side of the craggy high point. I sit in the rocks to transition into descent mode. Its blowing hard enough to make my skins flap out horizontally in my outstretched hand, but it is warm enough I don’t even bother putting on my puffy. Let’s hope this isn’t the new normal for the darkest day of winter. I soak up the view of the Crystal Range, another couple ranges back in, looking severe, rugged, but not inviting. Just enough snow to be forbidding, highlighting the complexity of the topography, the shattered rock, sparse vegetation, disguising the larger scale features we use to get around, once the intricacies are buried.
Having completed my transition, as they call it, like a butterfly emerging from it’s chrysalis, like Superman coming out of the phone booth, I sidle to the edge of the cornice to see what I am actually dealing with here. The snow looks pretty roughed up and dense, but poking it with the pole it feels soft enough to carve. It looks like it should be good skiing, but I cautiously step down into it rather than committing with speed, and I poke some more.
I side slip hop down a bit and set my edge to feel the surface beneath, and, satisfied, I snap a quick turn over to the gut of the line, beneath the cornice, carefully eyeing the coverage below, and link into another turn, and another, the snow silky light, fast and uniform, the rhythm settling in as I embrace more momentum, laying out fast round turns, cape flapping, wall to wall grinning, down between the outcrops and out into the open bowl, where I brace for the snow quality to deteriorate as the slope slackens. I see big patches of rougher looking snow, interspersed with the smoother snow like I’ve been skiing, and I aim for the smoother patches, steering around the others. Over enthused, I make a turn too many and have to sidestep up out of the hole a bit to make the traverse back over to the skin track, still panting and glowing.
As I cross the skin track without stopping, it occurs to me that I could have just headed back up, but it feels way too soon to stop skiing yet, like I just got started. Gotta at least go see how the lower ramps are. They looked boney but passable. I sidestep up and ski the little gully, but my tails scrape an unseen rock and I get a little spooked and when faced with the jumbled field of dusted granite Volkswagen bugs and microbuses, right where JR went over the bars that time, and lost his glasses, etc., I bail back to the skin track, milking the low angle, still leery of what I can’t see. This is different than the snow quality I have been skiing in the forest near home, where objects are clearly delineated not disguised by windblown snow. It’s not simply about steering around what you can see, you have to steer around what you can’t see too. I wiggle gently in the troughs to the edge of the shade above the lake, where I flip around to head back up, more or less automatically, seeing to it my days efforts are properly rewarded, to further etch the echoes of those glorious forces into the putty of my being.
Almost an hour later I’m back to the ridge top, debating whether I maybe shouldn’t just be skiing the peak itself, it is much sexier after all. I hadn’t scoped it close but now I felt like I would be able to pick my way through. But then I think, What would Captain Cautious do? No, I’ll stick with the plan and ski the other line in the bowl I had planned on. What was that all about anyway? That impulse to go big dies hard. The wind is a notch higher now (remote sensor at Ward showed 40/45mph and 40 degrees). I make the standing transition, mindful of each piece of gear. A gust blows my poles over, then nudges them along the ground.
The top of the line is low angle and I slip in easy, like a trout into an eddy in the cascade, instantly out of the wind, in a shady, still world of sweet steep pow. I spot the protruding rock in the entrance constriction that I had seen from far below and turn lightly around it, then open it up as I get into the trough and follow the groove over and out, playing variations on a theme, within the structure of the mountain, snow and gravity, putting that bit of swing into it, playing with my tempo, getting in front of the beat, then lazing behind riding the rails, ‘it’s like jazz, man’.
Confident now in the snow quality, I blast out into the open smoking hot, carrying speed and zipping on out my traverse to a little higher approach on the gully I skied last time, sticking with what I knew, but doing it one better, fall line direct, between my tracks and a granite wall. I take it apart, turn to turn, making each one count, intently easing around suspicious riffles and bulges, unweighting my skis, surfing to dump speed, fluidly working the flow like on a mountain bike, banking and swooping, splaying the tails around, tracing the line directly, rather than oscillating on it, skimming along the surface of the next fractal layer.
I picked my way through the junk yard boulders to the bottom tier of cliff band, a similar steep constricted groove in an aesthetic little granite outcrop, dropping in on the lake. Linking turns over the apex, I spy a maybe boulder buried right in front of my outside ski carving hard and I quick ease off and shift weight to my inside ski, as the outer scrapes across the iced over surface of the granite, and then quick pop off a couple smart turns beyond, to scrub back the extra speed I took in my evasive maneuver and ride it on out, gingerly down to the lake, looking over my shoulder, wondering just what sort of epic I may have just flinched around. Sometimes near misses are hard to read, sometimes impossible. We are so reliant on good timing and rhythm, everything is on the one.
I skootch along in my skin track on the flat lake surface, reaching to pop open the backs of my boots, to gain a little stride length. These lake crossings are even more tedious one-handed. My wrists, both the injured one and the compensating one, feel fine so far today, considering the work out they got on the approach.
Skiing the creek I get sketched out on the coverage and bail left and head over to the top of the nice pitch into the falls. Right here, I probably should have traversed right and gotten over to the bowl and hit my skin track down canyon instead, and I would have been out about a half hour earlier, skipping the ski to the lake.
But in the actual event, I dropped the steep slope to the creek feeling my way down, then taking the complicated terrain in the creek bottom one section at a time. The snow was so good, and I wasn’t hitting anything, but it looked sketch, the rugged topography in sharp relief. It wasn’t fluid but I made sets of linked turns the whole way, then skied out the flat, picking around the distinct boulders, hoping to bridge the voids between. The crux where it bends the corner to the ramp leading to the lake was filled too, and the snow was good and I just wiggled all the way to the lake without a care.
I stayed just high enough to traverse around right, over to the campsite, and skied straight out to the tip of the peninsula and sat and had a snack smack dab in the middle of it all, glorying in the vibe. This is where I camped that first time with my daughter. Even though it was late May, she was able to build a snowman here on the slabs.
Then I hustled back up to my skin track, ripped them quick and skied sweet old pow down the charmed ramps below the snag that I climbed this morning, which was sublime, the best turns I can remember here, which admittedly isn’t saying all that much coming from me.
I was wary of the ledge that crosses the ramp and got way against the left edge of it to clear it where it is shorter. Smooth as molasses. It feels so good to ski it the way I had pictured, at one with the flowing unfolding all around me. This is why I am here, to be part of something so much bigger than myself, something I cant know, but that I can feel my way into proximity of, not by force but just by being present and on time, so that I may slip inside when it opens, if only for a fleeting ineffable moment, enraptured in sparkling eternity.
And then I shucked my skis and down-climbed the final step, returning to the more level pedestrian world below. I got back into my skis, gliding down to the creek and across the sketchy snow bridge and on down into the heart of the alders, where I precariously put my skins on, balancing on one ski at a time, trying not to fall off and into the bottomless snow, and whatever mysteries lied in the depths of the copse, laughing at my choice spot for this operation, like a pro. Usually I would shuffle this stretch freeheel skinless, but with the snow pack so lean I couldn’t break a track on a level grade conducive to such expediencies this morning, so instead I have to skin both ways. Ug. This approach is rough, even with good coverage most folks who have done it, avoid it. It takes a certain sort of savy, and adept tolerance for tedium.
But by now I am in the enduro daze, no pain, no effort, just repetition, locked into the groove, my parts following the rhythm of their own volition, frictionless, yet focused, utterly present in the motion, as if my trusty skis knew the way home.
The shadow of the west shore mountains is climbing up the east shore. I keep the skis on through the bushes down below the tread a bit, to avoid the packed-out icy boot trail on the slabs, then put the skis on my pack. I consider getting my headlamp out and putting the batteries in it, while there is still enough light to do it, but figure I wont quite need it, and just keep hustling, head down, creakily striding up the trail, clomping in my ski boots with offsetting limps, skis alternately banging against my calves and the back of my head, hanging up in low branches, dodging the icy spots, high stepping up the boulder staircases with a whimper, as the alpenglow ripens in the vast lake basin beside me. I march right on through to the top of the last rise, with just enough light to get my skis on and ride the blessed glide back to the car. Cheers, to making the shortest day feel long and far.
