The following are edited excerpts from my rambling diary on this day.
It blew like mad all day yesterday, gusts over a hundred for hours (119mph on Ward) and rained hard here at home, supposedly snowed 9” at 8000’. Driving at first light I glimpsed the bare summits and decidedly unflocked forest above and briefly contemplated just going back home to bed. Did it rain right to the top? Ug
Oh well, I’m in motion. The spot I’m thinking of is a nice long gentle tour up, lots of time to think about options, might as well proceed. Which law of psychomechanics is that one? Obstinacy in motion will remain in motion? Conservation of sunk pride cost fallacy? I suppose I’ll just go have a look. It’ll be fine I figure, as long as I exercise due restraint, I nag myself.
As I am contorting into my boots behind the wheel, folks walk by on the opposite shoulder. No skis or snowshoes evident. Is that a bad sign? Probably not. I’m used to it. The only other folks I encounter shoulder season skiing are generally hikers, not skiers. And they don’t get far.
There seems to be just enough snow cover and it’s crunchy but isn’t frozen to a shiny glaze anyway, so I skin up and click in, ratcheting mechanically up the steep rocky hillside like a cog rail engine. Walking would probably be easier in some ways but its early season and I’m stoked to be skiing again, even if it is a bit of a pretense.
I am conscious of how slow my stride turnover is when skinning compared to walking, but settle contentedly into the steady plodding shuffle of the skin track, breathing, letting the rhythm and the gear support me, my big muscles doing the work, letting the little balancey adaptive fast twitch ones relax, focusing on the motion itself, in the now, not some imagined future, yearning to be there already.
Glancing back over my shoulder, I can see myself slowly rising above the valley, and as I crest the bench, the highway sounds recede, and I feel the high snow forest enclose me in its chilly embrace, the Red Fir, White Pine and Lodgepole, that can appreciate the hardships of the high life.
As I approach the pogonip meadow I catch up to the backpackers. Three kids, late teens early twenties, one of whom is howling into the silent morning wildness as I come gliding up. He is a bit startled to see me, maybe embarrassed, and I chuckle, apologizing for my intrusion with a bright eyed, if slightly ironic grin.
I shuffled on up the trail, into the forest a bit where it starts to climb again, and I paused to peel layers before I overheated, noting the boot tracks packed in the old snow beneath the new snow, which provides a bit of a platform to glide on.
I admired the Aspen grove along the creek below the trail, interspersed with Juniper as they often are. I find it interesting that these two species share habitat, when the Aspens seem to like it moist and the Junipers dry. These are the two most long lived species around here (depending on how you figure it), so maybe their common ground is in antiquity as early colonizers, now grandfathered. Or maybe they have some sort of common mycorrhizal connections or partnerships, as many trees are being found to.
The snow cover was even worse than usual here. Which is saying something because I generally only come here when there is hardly any snow. The only time I’ve ever encountered someone actually skiing up here, it was more of a midwinter dry spell, with more reasonable coverage. The grizzled veteran, passing through on some car shuttle point to point tour, whose line we had apparently just skied, grumbled that they hardly ever see anyone in this spot. I told him I had just been saying the same thing to my buddy. He didn’t know what to make of that. Go figure. Usually in the wilds, timing is such that we dont encroach on each others space. And when timing is more suggestive I just chuckle and figure its meant to be. Often enough that puts me in the role of an unwitting prankster ringer of sorts.
I’m usually only here at low tide, when most folks would figure there isn’t skiing. Like now. I’m sharing the trail with backpackers. There is maybe six inches on the ground here. Or maybe only four. Am I doing it wrong? We will see. Being strong and skilled makes my capacity for amusement that much broader. Where others may thrash, I skip through oblivious, as happy as if I had good sense.
I skin through the dried grasses poking up through the snow, around and across the trickling creek, mindful not to wet my skins, and up onto a knoll, shuffling through glacial erratics arrayed amidst the old growth Red Firs. Here I stop to appreciate a particularly compelling pair of boulders, appraising them as I would an art installation, admiring the way the line along which they split curves around each other’s negative space like yin and yang embracing. ‘Halves of a whole’. Nature just calls it entropy, not a thing at all, more of a process, like billowing smoke. We are just cloud watchers, catching glimpses of the familiar, to stitch together into narrative coherence.
This thicket is a key barrier on this route and there is plenty of opportunity for thrashing, but I recognize a few trees along the way and thread through pretty cleanly, considering how little snow there is. At least the creek crossing is low too. I will use this ski track on the way out with no skins on, possibly on a tight schedule, so I try to keep to a continuous grade, to minimize uphill sidestepping on my return.
This place could use some good fire. The natives used to intentionally light fires about this time, before they left for the season, to return to their winter homes down in the valley, calling in nature’s room service, to clean up the detritus from all the messy activities of living.
I skin strong, up past the very bottom of the tree runs where I often stop to snack, but then passing a conveniently arched tree I have used as a bench in the past, I decide to stop and sit after all. It stands higher above the snow than usual but is still usable, backing up to it and skootching my butt up to sit, without taking my skis off, for a quick pit stop, snack break, except there’s no hurry, no one here to race, but the sun. The Clark’s Nutcrackers will heckle me regardless.
But I know I’d regret languishing here if it cost me a run later. Its hard enough to amortize these long tours with such short runs, so I keep my break quick. This is my accustomed rhythm, moving smartly disiplined, at an interval pace, with periodic little breaks, seems to keep my timing crisp and on the one.
This remote old growth Red Fir and Hemlock forest here, tucked way up high, but protected at the base of the bowl, can have a deep gloomy feeling to it when there’s weather, the big old hemlocks spreading their drooping arms like zombies, freakshow lodgepole deformed in contortions by the crushing snow loads. I feel the exposure here too, bone deep, being miles up canyon all alone, a warm blooded critter in a cold cold world. But today its not so cold and shafts of sunlight penetrate, sending the misty gray spirits back to where they came from.
I have to laugh at the shallow tree wells betraying the misleadingly smooth white surface coating. There is still only about six inches of base up here, with no rain or freeze-thaw to consolidate it, but it has been blasted in solid by the wind, topped with a punchy dense surface layer. So it won’t be very good coverage for the descent and it will be tricky to turn in as well. But at least what you see is what you get. If it’s white you’re gliding. Meanwhile the dog in me is tugging at the leash, so I resume my ascent.
The lonely high country Basque shepherds of old used to build tall piles of rocks or cairns on passes, which are known as ‘stoneboys’. Here, there is actually a little freestanding tower of conglomerate volcanic ash/mud flow studded with older surface rocks, protruding from it, which resembles such a stoneboy. I think of this area as the home of the stoneboys, not without some self referentiality. I try to cultivate a cartoon aesthetic out here, not taking it all too seriously. It’s said playing is how kids learn, and that making art is adult play. I’m not exactly sure where that leaves me on the spectrum, but I’m still learning, and giggling.
This bowl is part of what was a large volcanic caldera here, spilling ash and lava flows down the mountainsides, leaving steep, raw, chaotic terrain that tells of violent forces and carnage in times past. It lacks the order and persistent patterns I’ve learned to expect in older more eroded terrain composed of granite, which cooled deep and slow, fine-grained, with more orderly crack systems and joint angles, on a more macro scale, where gravity and time play a more telling organizational role, crystallizing matter along geometric lines.
These newer volcanics, spewed and splattered, flowing every which way across the surface before grinding to a halt, freezing in place, leaving these pronounced parallel gullies cut much deeper and more numerous than either their gradient or the size of the drainage above would suggest, back filling now with fine gravel from the rapidly eroding volcanic cliffs above, making for conducive flat bottomed scree gullies amidst the odd conglomerate outcrops.
So where to ski? Tastes and protocol tell me powder takes priority, so I should exhaust this possibility first, so I head up along the edge of the forest above the gullies. This bite sized terrain is perfect for the taster’s menu. The snow is more punchy here out away from the gut of the gully, still wind affected but not enough to support me. I jam my pole grip down into it until it hits the bottom, about sixteen inches. It blew so bloody hard up here, its hard to tell what the new snow accumulation might be.
Above me the whole top of the ridge is blown free of snow, fetched out down to the ground. I can only imagine what hundred mile an hour winds would be like here, barreling freight trains, tearing at the crags and groves with horrible rending noises, snow filling the air too thick to breathe, but not landing anywhere, just blown to smithereens.
As I near the ridgetop the snow becomes almost too hard to edge into, but I manage to finesse it without having to stomp or pole too violently, or resort to crampons. At the top the snow field doesn’t extend above the trees to the ridgetop. I reach down to caress the sage, and bring the scent to my nose, the smell of the high desert washes over me, with deep connections to the vast unfathomable weight of indigenous antiquity. This is Indian country. It all is.
I refrain from crunching across the sage in my Frankenstein boots, as much as I would like to scope the view from the other side of the ridge. I find another prostrate pine to sit on, milking whatever advantage such a lean snowpack presents. The good part is all the cool things on the ground are exposed to ski around. The bad part is all the exposed things on the ground to ski around. It is brisk up here, clouds scooting about. I put on my puffy and munch some sando as I peel my skins off and make ready.
The snow up top here is solid underfoot, allowing my skis to skid over its surface, still soft and wintery but supportive, and quiet, making for nice easy skiing. I carve down, steering around branches and blowdowns, completing my turns to keep my speed down, ever mindful of the marginal coverage.
As the terrain rolls over, the wind effect diminishes and no longer supports my weight and my skis drop in and become entrapped, no longer willing to skid around a turn, tracking in straight lines, and not always both the same straight lines, which can be problematic. So I have to hop them up out of the snow and redirect them in the air, landing in a new direction, preferably just one, and pointed in a useful direction.
But further down the snow surface is no longer supportive and my skis punch into the crust, getting hung up and locked onto a trajectory, which inevitably leads to some obstacle. This is not easy skiing. It is actually kind of a beating. Forcefully planting my pole, I yard my skis up out of the crust, landing them, without falling on my ass. Sometimes the new ski trajectory is not sufficiently out of the fall line and acceleration is immediate, and an additional hop turn must be hastily employed. A double hop turn. The key is to land lightly so I don’t hit any rocks beneath. I’m good for a half dozen consecutive turns like that, then I stop to pant and swear. This is tough on my beleaguered joints. This is no country for an old man. If I see any, I will remind them. Meantime, I avoid reflective surfaces.
I make my way down into the cool lower stretch of the run, the trees opening up as the slope rolls over more steeply, which then morphs into a low angle, avi runout into the forest below. I continue my laborious descent, one heroic turn at a time, but as the slope steepens, gravity helps out. And I manage to not hit any rocks, or any other such complications. My gully leads me down into the level forest below, where the crust, if anything, gets worse, except it’s so flat that it’s that much harder to jump the skis around.
Okay. So, check the ‘no remaining powder’ box. They say from a data standpoint that a negative result can be as useful as a positive one but I’m having trouble mustering that level of objectivity. Maybe it would have been more clever to just skip the powder experiment. Plan B is the ‘supportive windboard in the gully bottoms’ experiment, which looks more promising. So back up I go. In pursuit of truth, and decent turns.
I hope to find a swath of snow up through the talus fields to the big snowfield at the head of the cirque, but apparently, you can’t get there from here. So I skied back down into the main gut where the snow was reliably solid with a chalky surface and I had a great time cranking quick turns, bending the boards under foot, playing around with my body position in the double fall line, banking to and fro in the concave gully bottom like a grom in the half pipe and generally enjoying making novel turns without mandatory heroic physical feats or imminent dire consequences.
I shot out the bottom and then flipped around and headed back up for more, without hesitation. This time, I aimed for the east gully, linking snowfields above, into the trees, again drawn to the ridgetop but running out of snow. I had already decided to hold it to three runs today. I had time for more, but I also have miles of breakable crusts awaiting me below, already on my tab, and I figured things had softened some now, in the heat of the day, but that if I waited too long it would be refreezing into a truly hideous breakable crust, which is what we usually do, because; reasons. Most of which boil down to dogmatic competitiveness, and the misguided sense that more is better.
I’m here and its good now, maybe I should rally for one more? while I still can? before someone else gets it? Shall we check off any other logical fallacies or heuristic traps? Sounds like a job for Captain Cautious. Faster than a sleeping pullet. Able to not leap tall buildings in a single bound (not just do it because he can). Up in the sky, Look! it’s a bird, it’s a plane, but it’s not Captain Cautious, he went home. And so, utilizing my mighty superpower of restraint, I turned around and headed out.
Starting with another ripping run in the low-angle theme park gully, banking quick little turns on the talc. Such fun easy skiing. I milked the windward edge of the gully as it tapered down into the forest, the bottom of the actual skiing. The rest is just covering ground. I zipped down the incised creek and meadows in my uptrack, picked my way across the trickle, opening up the back of the boots but leaving the heel down, which I found momentarily disorienting, forgetting which mode I was in, gave me a flash of vertigo schussing the blank creekbank with scant ski control. Rondo is so mechanical and un-natural feeling after three pinning last week. The crust was if anything, even more exquisite, and I flat out survival skied down the packed out summer trail and through the burn pile Aspens to the meadow, and the boulder strewn slope below. Post holing would have been easier and more dignified, but its early season and stoke levels are still running high.
And so goes another relatively uneventful day afield. Some folks come home with sexy stories of epic near misses, mishaps and recoveries; forgotten, lost or broken gear, missed turns, tomahawking falls, off route thrashing of heroic proportions, bonking headlamp-lit death marches. I generally manage to avoid all that, but it admittedly doesn’t make for as engaging a story. I’m afraid that says more about our culture and psyches, in our attention economy, than I care to parse at present. When Ravens circle at the top of my descents, I know what they are there for. Same as Nascar, or ski flicks; we tune in for the crashes, so we can pick their bones. So here’s to boring stories. I’ll take it as some kind of Darwinian validation.
