edited excerpts from my diary of 11/8/2020
18 degrees, 5” new at home, 10” on the hill. Is it skiing yet? gotta go see. I fall into the familiar routine, checking out the qualities of the new snow at dawn while shoveling the drive, and seeing what sort of sky first light reveals.
I picture the various likely spots in our ski domain, how it might play out where. Parsing the data, while my native pattern recognition silently susses the sweet spot, the decisions make themselves, as my hands juggle gear and make ready. This is my happy place, just another critter doing what it’s evolved to do, fully alive, body, mind, and soul.
We ski the snow we get. That’s the game, to read it and decide where is best, and then to go ski it, trying to be there for those maximal moments when we are the mountain skiing itself. It’s a philosophic, somewhat feral, exercise, with skin in it. Gravity isn’t swayed by bluster or bluff, but the bliss is real, if fickle and fleeting, a wary wild thing, to be coaxed, not commanded.
We focus on what the sky brings, and how it might play out on the ground, across our territory, tracking the trends in this rugged world around us, building the narrative, feeding the pattern recognition season by season, the map growing inside.
Its an exercise in pushing aside expectations and persona maintenance, to just do the work, to show up ready, and follow where it leads, plugging into the underlying pathways and currents, the real forces around here, the ones that are in effect whether or not we ever show up to bust a pose.
Relishing the hushed quiet of the snow clad forest, the wind gently soughing in the tree tops, I hear the distant sound of childlike voices and look skyward to find a flock of Tundra Swans in a loose drifting vee formation overhead, with a smile of delight. Shifting positions in the buffeting winds, pendulously beating their broad wings, their long outstretched necks point westward. I was thinking this storm might bring them.
Its that time of year. The Whistlers, as they are known for the musical sound of their chorus, seem to arrive on the tails of big cold weather systems early winter, coming down from their elaborately prepared breeding grounds far to the arctic north, as if they are piggybacking on the storm’s movement, skitching the front.
Apparently couples have a whole ritualized preparation of their nesting mound. It’s amazing how naturally critters adopt such abstract narratives, even the feathered dinosaurs have their devout practices. It gives one perspective on our own.
The other evening walking along the Lake, I was catching snips of swan chatter and peering out onto the surface, could make out a flock floating far from shore, all animated, flapping and raising a ruckus, celebrating their reunion, like pontoon party boats rafted together for springbreak on Lake Shasta .
Tahoe seems to be a Whistler meet up spot, before entering the great Central Valley where they winter over in the fertile sloughs (or the agriculture fields that have mostly replaced them). The Whistlers are a special harbinger here, of the approaching cold crystalline winter solstice time of short days and long shadows. The days of powder.
The fine details of dried flower arrangements like these Angelica, are displayed to best affect by the fresh blanketing of snow, adding a touch of gold to the sparkly wintry pallet.
A few days ago I was sweating beads hiking up out of the gorge, seriously contemplating a swim. Today I’m wearing everything I have, layered up like a bag lady, and my drinking hose is an ice pop. Gotta love it around here. If you don’t like the weather, just wait. Sounds like a bit of a threat though, eh?
I contour up onto the ridgetop following the faint echoes of past ski tracks by muscle memory, terrain driven like the tundra swans navigating up and down the continent. My skis follow those echoes over to the top of the old direct way, down off the pass back to the canyon floor.
This is likely the route of the original natural grade trail, predating the current excavated road, probably primeval in places. The open forest doesn’t really seem to have enough snow cover for making turns yet but maybe the old roadbed? Suppose I should check. Because I’m diligent like that.
It looks smooth, settled in, the contours of the ground below softened, my eye picking up on more than I can say, but it has the look of skiing, maybe just. Might as well sample it anyway, let my skis decide, one turn at a time.
It’s classic mountaineer style, you make moves upward, confident you can reverse them and bail if necessary. You can talk yourself into all sorts of adventures along those lines. But the real trick here is to make a ski turn as statically as practical, short of just making a pedestrian kick turn. Is it skiing or hiking? dancing or walking? Let the tracks be the tell.
I venture down tentatively, ready to have my skis jerked to a halt, but they improbably glide along, sailing over the tips of the presumed rocks beneath. Sometimes we get the right sort of glaze laminated over the rocks so they glide instead of grabbing. I keep my speed down, making slow, tight telemark turns in the narrow confines of the road, intently trying to read every bump or riffle in the snow surface, subtly adjusting my course. It feels about like skiing.
Three pin bindings are floppy and loose and barely adequate to the task. Talk about old school, these are from a design dating back nearly a hundred years, and they transfer scant control to the skis, making it more about dynamic body position and timing, balancing on the moving center of gravity atop the boards, like on a surf or skate board, only there’s two so you sort of split the difference, with a dynamic sweet spot shifting in the space between.
My boots on the other hand are comfy; injection molded plastic shells, with custom liners, buckles and bellows, and all the bling, for helping see to it that my skis get the message. Which is good because these skis have minimal side cut and a Nordic double camber flattened kick zone underfoot, embossed with now worn down scales to aid in cross country shuffling, by now horribly scratched up tip to tail. They are designed mostly to go straight and flat, not to make turns. If you want them to turn, you must insist. But in this friendly powder, the geometry and weight distribution of a bomber tele stance is plenty persuasive.
I shuffle up along the crest to get above a little shot down through the dried Mules Ear to sample a little low angle off-piste, in the lee of the ridgetop where the snow is most loaded in. The snow is silky and the wind has sifted it in to fill the cracks, further hiding the rocks beneath. The snow skis deep and I wiggle in the fall line, trying to keep my momentum while controlling my speed.
I strive to keep my weight transfers smooth and gentle, maintaining a two-footed distribution, up weighting over sketchy looking spots, deftly manipulating the shifting flotation platform beneath my skis, but it is fleeting in this shallow pack, just glimmers of how it can be.
In actual bottomless powder I can feel the pressure under my skis coalesce into a single coherent surface that I balance atop, precariously at first, then settling down beneath my center of mass, becoming a proprio-extension that I can manipulate and ride on.
I feel it all up in here, the bumping in my trunk, my skis shifting below me, back and forth switching leads in one plane, banking and swinging in another, while my center carves across the landscape, on the one in time. That’s what I’m talking about.
Tele skiing bottomless pow gives me wings, in sheer shimmering connection with the fluid moment, sending haptic shivers up my spine, like the squinty frisson of an acid yawn, on the cusp of a different plane of reality, one where I was born with skis for feet, and can hover and swoop at will like a wild thing, over the surface of a rugged crystal clad planet which loves me. Because bottomless free heel powder skiing is that good. Life by the drop
Timing is so fascinating. The more I am out here the more I pick up on patterns of motion and how they intertwine, like we are each moving in some unseen medium unbeknownst, along common pathways with intersecting nodes and nexus. It seems that medium is what we refer to as time, and we move through it on waves.
I catch myself grinning again. I’m trying to be careful to not be too greedy, keep reminding myself, as if. I ski another little set of turns, the snow so good I’m able to turn at will, keeping my speed way down, periodically clipping unseen rocks and hopping quick onto the other ski.
Free heel is conducive for this move. Heel locked down you have less ability to get off of a rock when a ski sticks on one, at which point you may well become a projectile yourself, headfirst hoping there’s not a second ill-placed rock before you. The key is to run right off the top of rocks you hit, like a skater, keeping your momentum moving and your feet under you. It’s just the rapid slowdowns that hurt.
This skiing is decidedly not bottomless. Still I glory in it, as I shuffle along the road way, continuing west along the ridge deeper into the untracked wonderland. The sun shines through some distant agitated clouds roiling. I feel surrounded by the echoes of the primeval Washoe and Nisenan lifeways here on this ancient trade route, this murmurating flyway, drawn to dancing now across this same exquisitely beautiful landscape, under this same nurturing sky, tracing the cycles of this potent place, just a few beats behind. Many of these same Red Firs and Hemlocks were growing here in those times, just a couple few centuries ago. They know.
And I can’t deny it’s bittersweet, given the progress of the current trajectory of human history. It’s like an elegy for us all, here marching in a second line to the burying ground. It colors all we do, whether we acknowledge it or not. Dance before you go
The Coyote in me slinks over the edge of the roadway and eases down into the Mules Ear, making smooth turns through the rustling leaves, plying the soft snow. A meadow skipping, knee-dipping tree faerie, on a circuitous path between, I’m following my dowsing rod ski tips as if drawn by divination. Dropping in on the great West Slope of the Sierra, feels like a ritualized gesture, my mini trans-Sierra.
I make tentative turns through the big crunchy fragrant leaves, dropping into a low stance, poised, combat ready, I deftly link up a final set, and carve to a snappy stop, to find an unseen boot top tall boulder right beside me. Ug, dude? see …? enough? whatever. Feels like talking to a dog.
I spin around to tack my way back up the couple hundred feet to the road, tail wagging, apparently chastened, but not sorry.
I shuffle up through open forest, losing the trail in the drifted snow, drawn up to the top of a gentle open meadow at the base of a little peak. I’ve been hustling up and down and across with these deep-sea diving boots on my feet for almost five hours now and its catching up to me. I’ve finally warmed up enough to stop and sit for a spell.
I take off my skis and make a bench of them and spread out my picnic lunch. Ambience makes the meal, especially when it’s a pressed p.b&j. and an apple with browned bites missing. I am still blinking like a newborn in the glare of this bright snowy world, blood endorphin levels optimum, flushed from sustained panting of the high bracing air, residues of the rush of performing thrillingly intricate and precarious flirtations with gravity, that and low blood sugar. Who knew such simple things could feel so filling.
But with a bit of food in my belly, the chill returns propelling me back into motion. It still seems early but I feel pretty beat up from the unaccustomed activity. I’m also feeling humbled and gifted and grateful and gracious, and do not want to overstay my welcome, and so I point it homewards.
I steer through the open meadow, just steep enough to make turns, which feels just right to allow for proper appreciation of, and participation with, the just so arrangement of dried flowers and nodding hemlocks cradling the craggy skyline.
I continued on down the crest ridge, dropping little sets of turns and shuffling back up to the next as I worked my way across. Fishscale skis are perfect for this sort of travel, switching from uphill to down and back again without pause. They are a far more organic, less mechanical tool for travel than my randonee setup. The trade-off for the limitations and the extra conditioning and skill necessary, is a more intimate, less mediated experience, because it’s like that around here.
