You can't be young and do that

Loss is universal, and yet individual loss is personal.  It's hard to talk about loss without injecting yourself into it.  We can share, we can feel and understand and extend empathy, and sympathy.  We can never truly know the loss.  When Steve Backstrom brought a pair of brand new skis to the shop for me to mount, the loss he felt was palpable.  Steve and Betsy's son, Arne, had designed the skis.  He didn't just draw some art for the topsheet, or provide feedback on what the Austrian nerds drew up in Solid Works, he conceived the ski whole cloth, including some of the manufacturing processes, and helped shepherd the ski into production.  Arne passed away in a skiing accident that summer.  Details were scarce, but for those of us who didn't know him, they weren't important.  Another light blinked out.  An older sister and a younger brother lost their middle sibling.  Two parents lost a child.  Arne was 29.  From a distance, we all saw a rising star disappear.  Blizzard released their Anomaly series, replacing the bullrider series and their three sheets of metal a couple years ago, and the last nod to Arne's original idea quietly disappeared.

Loss isn't meted out in tidy batches.  Nor is love, or joy, or anything else for that matter.   Neither are loss, or joy, or love, necessarily recognisable immediately, especially when presented with an abstract, a small swatch of canvas with a few colours and shapes, a part but not always representative of the whole.  Sometimes you see it looking back, sometimes you don't, or maybe you don't look back at all.

Better to have skied and forgot than to have never skied at all.

Kelci Cook dropped in on me from time to time my first year in Brad's shop at Crystal.  I never really knew her, probly eight years younger and certainly in a different phase of life.  She made jewelry, and came running through the door one day when she heard me using the Dremel on something or other, a boot fit or toe riser, or just cutting of an old broken basket from a customer's pole.  I can't remember her face, really, some vague impression of a young adult, blonde hair and dreams.  She loved the Dremel.

Kelci flipped her car one morning right by Kastner's house on her way to work for Gerry in the rental shop.  Nobody knows what happened, but there are always elk around the Villages.  I think of her every time I drive by her memorial sign, not surprisingly since that's the whole point.  I feel her presence as one of many spirits out in the trees, watching us, hopefully benevolently.  I never really knew her, nothing more than a flash in the sweep of time, but each flash represents little chip off the veneer.  It can be a single leaf fallen, or a major limb, or sometimes the whole tree.  

I still reach for my phone to send my buddy Jake Sawyer a picture of some broken bike or a coworker's home-customed Trek Sawyer.  It still hurts knowing he's gone, that there's no one there to smirk and chuckle a little under his breath.  If I am at the grocer when I can't find something, or at my eye doctor when I get a new prescriotion, I still joke with Amy's cousin Adriene, gone two years now.  She was in grocery analytics, the sort of field responsible for all the seeming randomness you find instead of finding the capers that are the specific reason for visiting the store in the first place.  She and I had a friendly competition of who could see worse.  She won every time, always at least a half correction ahead of me.

The author, in younger days.

We can only guess at this life of ours, given and taken by chance or fate or by the divine.  Some among us have immense faith in their version of things, that an omnipotent and omniscient God holds His hand above it all, or that it's all a stew of random change, that we've somehow crawled out from the ooze to become The Destroyer.  As in all things, I'm stuck in the middle somewhere, tearing up a little hearing Keith Whitley sing a Christmas song but not sure there's anything more than the things we carry along in our little baskets of the past.

Sometimes loss is just the things we've never done, or never seen.  The Christmas Eve service at Frikirke in Alta, Norge.  A line we might coulda skied if we'd ever learned how to travel.  The way the wind feels in Ushuaia, or the feeling of being home for some important moment that's long past.

When I was 20, I tried to get a patrol job at Crystal.  Baugher wouldn't hire me because I wasn't 21.  He never explained it, and it always felt like a cop-out, an assessment which was bolstered by two subsequent rejections made all the more frustrating by my having references from most of his top lieutenants, including both his number two and the wife of Crystal's owner.  I've done alright in the career I fell into, and I've skied my share of deep Tuesdays, but that memory always bites hard.  I never wanted any sort of glory, just to put the pack on each morning and throw a few charges, to shovel my share of snow and run my share of ropelines.  Pull a few people out of South if they needed it.

My buddy Tim died under a truck on Highway 16 one morning.  I mean, he made it to the hospital, but there was nothing to be done other than try to ease him onto the next chapter.  It hurts today, over twenty-one years later.  I think of him often, usually riding my bike.  It's been a long time since mid-October of 2004 so the sting is muted, but it's there.  These things add up.  They hurt, with very little difference between the literal aches in our muscles and the metaphorical ones in our bones.  There are stabs, sometimes, or needle pokes.  Nothing ever really goes away.  The loss of possibility, the loss of actuality.

I don't want to trade places with anyone who's gone on.  I'll get there someday, and I don't want to know the hour.  I don't idolise Keith Whitley like Grady the Bullrider did back in the day, and I hope he doesn't either.  I hope Grady's grown up, done whatever it is old bullriders do if they survive the years on the circuit.  17th on the NFR bulls ranking is cool while it's here, and pretty awesome to talk about, but you don't get there by takin it easy and slow, and the human body wasn't built to handle that shit anyway.  Regardless of where any of us thinks we came from.

The author, in modern times.

Turns out, despite some folks having their ears plugged, They did tell us, and They were right.  Just wait, you'll be here too, if you're lucky.  You'll be older, and yes, you'll hurt, and yes, you'll miss those young knees.  You'll miss your friends if you ever made any, and you'll miss, too, the folks who just passed through, spraying you with snow while you waited for somebody else by the side of the run.  Maybe you snapped a picture on a mountain top, and maybe that person melted into the distance like the snow on which you were standing.  Maybe the circle shrank until it's just you and the wind.  Maybe you got lucky, maybe that one lady from Minnesota found she liked making dinner with you and talking about skiing.  Maybe she's still here, just as beat up as you from all the falls and shoveling snow and picking up toddlers and working for dirt pay and free tickets and access to slightly cheaper gear.

I've never had any major injuries, thankfully.  I've done my share of smashems, the kind I write about and the kind that might could scare my Ma.  Some things are just bumps in the road.  Some things linger, dig into the tele tendon--patellar, should you not be enough of a boring nerd to know intimately just which part it is that does all that heavy lifting--and shred it until you gotta make James Beckmann's acquaintance in Covid-quiet surgery just to walk.  Pain be damned, just to walk, to turn the pressure and heat of inflammation off for a minute.

There are tons of pre-season workouts out there for your perusal, and just like that day back in 8th grade when you got the cast off your arm, you should do some PT.  The excuses come easily, though, and quickly.  Yeah, that one-legged angular semi-squat feels amazing after doing them for a month, but it hurts now, so maybe we'll skip it tonight, just do the easy ones.  Yeah, it'd be good to do a set tonight, but it's raining, and I don't want to walk in the rain to warm up after standing on concrete for nine hours, so, maybe we'll wait for a nicer day.

Here, too, They were right.  The nicer day does come, and depending on location, quite often, and it doesn't matter.  You can't wait for it.

The author used to have other interests besides being the best skier on the mountain.

The scariest moment for me, probly in all the years of being in and around the ski world, was in the Heather Meadows aid room when this kid named Carson came in.  He was early to mid-twenties, a rippin snowboarder.  It was Sunday afternoon, and the radio had started going crazy.  Somebody had hit a tree after dropping the 542 rock wall.  If you've never skied at Baker, this story's not as wild as it sounds.  The highway, 542, winds its way up to Artist Point along the western edge of the permit area, and for some of that stretch is inside the ski area.  A few runs cross the highway, and one, Home Run, even runs on the highway grade for a while.  It snows so much up there that you don't really notice the highway if you aren't looking.

Near the bottom of Pan Face, skiers' right, is the rock wall, something folks in big storms are willing to send.  Carson did, but got hung up somehow and took on a tree with his head.  He was shocky when the volleyballs brought him in, and my gut started churning immediately.  We needed to get him down the hill as soon as possible, but I was just a fresh EMT, twenty years old, and the patrollers all talked over, under, around, and through me.  Since I had been checking vitals and monitoring Carson's condition, I kept it up while they were jostling about.  I was super worried about his blood pressure, with his major symptoms all pointing to shock/hypoperfusion in addition to his obvious TBI, but they were all so loud and pushy that I couldn't hear a proper BP with a cuff.  I took a basic radial BP, which gets you systolic at least, which isn't ideal when the kid is in and out of consciousness and showing all the classic signs of shock, but it's not nothing and I needed continuity.  One patroller even yelled at me, telling me I was an idiot cos I was taking his pulse and BP simultaneously.  I just pulled back and called the Director.

Once I got them all cleared out, Patrol Director Chris came in to check on Carson and went white.  He asked me why I hadn't already sent him to town, and I pointed out the door at the last receding volunteer patroller.  He just looked sad and got his emergency phone connection going.  I don't know how it worked, just that it wasn't a normal landline.  By then, Carson's partner was with us, and Chris had her get her car and meet the paramedics along the highway.  Bellingham is 56 miles from the Heather Meadows aid room, way too long to be waiting for an ambulance that can't drive as fast through all those dark corners as a small sedan can.  She and Chris got Carson in the front seat, and she put her foot in it and that was the last I ever saw of him.

I don't know if he lived, and I've spend twenty-four years hoping that he did, that he recovered well.  I got booted from Baker, and while I can guess, I don't actually know why.  A friend from childhood asked around, and the only answer he could get was "he knows", which, no, Ole, I do not know.  The only thing I know for sure is Baker is a small, petty, beautiful, gnarly, heartbreaking place.  The sky is rarely blue, and some years the snow never stops.

Snow is like a metaphor, man.  You just gotta endure, and like, you'll build experience and stuff.  Rime tells you the direction the wind came from, and experience tells you where the, um, experience came from?  I don't know, man, I haven't been in English Class in a really long time.

That winter was 800 inches, an absolute gobsmacker if you don't know the Cascades.  It's big even if you do.  When people ask what it was like, I say "my arms got bigger", cos, as they say, you just had to be there, man.  And besides, the big winter was only a couple years prior, and somewhere close to an A-Basin year's worth deeper.  Still, it was humbling, and terrifying, and challenging, and some of the most intense moments and memories I have.  On the other hand, it was just getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, same as it ever was.  Deep days, dark days, sunnybreaks, the moss, the aid room and its--mostly--innocuous injuries.  I skied 127 days that winter, the last of which was on the 9th of July.  The year that followed was dark, long, the strange absence of what, I don't think I knew then and certainly don't know now.  It felt remarkably like getting low blood sugar and then overeating to compensate.  Over, and over.

One afternoon, somewhere between January and April, my roommate Twig asked if I wanted to race.  I don't really know what his motivation was, but I certainly had the hubris necessary to say yes without hesitation.  He said he wanted to race top to bottom down Diehl's to Nose Dive, turning for directional purposes only.  I asked, confused, if he was sure, and he said yes.  I won by quite a bit.  It wasn't really a contest, not cos I was the better skier, though at twenty I would definitely have been adamant that I was.  Really, I just outweighed him by 50 or more pounds and had skis with 30ish more centimetres and a turn radius in the high 20s.  He was on his 165 slalom skis, which get their pop from construction and loading, meant for speed in turns, never meant to be flat.  I still wonder what that kid is up to, and why he was so bad at math.

My last day at Baker was a typical North Cascades day, soupy, chilly, hard to read.  It snowed the next day, all the way to the water in Vancouver.  Denny and I had--literally, like, actually really literally, with Dyno AP--blown up a gun mount in order to get it out of the twenty foot snowpack earlier in the week, and he'd pushed it with the D-4** from the knoll at the bottom of Gold Mine to the bottom of Chair 5.  I and Sam and Sean spent the whole day trying to keep it burning.  We went through probably 20 gallons of propane via torch, and uncounted gallons of diesel that we dumped with growing annoyance on the pile, which was probly 50% creasote-coated 6x6 gun mount timbers, 30% snow, and 20% dirt.  Not to mention the gas driving the sleds back and forth to the shop at White Salmon to retrieve said propane and diesel.  Then, as tends to happen with these things, the next day I threw my stuff into whatever bags I could find, mostly can liners, shoved it all in the back of my friend Chris' Escort, and headed back to Enumclaw.  Eight months with my shoulder to the wheel and then, nothing.  Unemployment, and what felt like failure.  Loss, at the very least.  Weight on my shoulders that I still struggle to lift.

The author, looking dapper in his new glasses and trademark t-shirt.

The conversation streams in every shop I've worked roll and dip in similar ways.  I imagine that to an outsider, it'd be pretty random, running the gamut from actual potty humour all the way to philosophy and psychological theory, from date-night hookups to the physics of weather and even geopolitics.  I won't claim that all of our conversations--and, by extension, likely most shops the world over, since by 44 I've got way more than two plot points and am willing to draw trendlines on that basis--even those about deep topics, are actually deep.  Sometimes nuggets of truth and introspection hide amongst the randomness.  As I age but don't age out, the bulk of my coworkers tend to get comparatively younger, such that at one point I was the youngest by far and am now surprised when I find I am not the oldest.

I have two coworkers who are around 19 or 20, one of whom is a hirsute and stocky Yooper who is even easier to rile than I am, the other a woman only months out of high school.  She was in the back shop with me and a few mechanics, and like normal, the conversation jumped from skis to life goals and the perception of success, and she said she felt she had to finish college with a degree and immediately grab hold of a career in her field, or she "won't feel accomplished".  The other two mechanics, like me, do not have college degrees and are also chasing something, but nothing any of us really know.  We all stopped, unsure what she meant, whether it was simply stating an insecurity out loud, or if it was a dig of some kind.  Likely the former.  We're all of us, all 8 billion or whatever, supremely self-centred.  Her comment stung, though, just the same.  I tried to ask what her comment meant about me, but she was definitely not making any sort of judgment.

I joke when people ask that those two coworkers and I have the same degree as a fourth who got his degree in recreation from Appalachian State in Boone--coincidentally the same school from which my roommate Twig was on sabbatical--the only difference being we didn't have to pay and had fun the whole time.  As expected, it's a supremely self-centred joke.  There's more than a twinge of jealousy, and more than a skosh of self-critique.  Even in those moments, fleeting conversations among folks thrown together temporarily by circumstances we each only barely control, there's the sting of loss, of missed opportunity, of self-recrimination.  I joke, or Sam or Matt do, and none of us can really finish with any gusto.  I've noticed both of them, Matt in his mid-thirties and Sam his mid-twenties, stop short of laughing more than a little and change the subject.  I do as well.  The moments pass, and we bring up the lighter subjects again.  Purposefully awkward segues along the lines of "speaking of tractor tyres, what's for lunch?"  There's always skiing to keep the day moving.

Sometimes you gotta just leave it all down there somewhere, under that one cloud.  That one, right there.  Next to the yellowy-white one.  No, not that yellowy-white one, the other yellowy-white one.  Sheesh.

-

Title from James McMurtry's recent "Canola Fields", the lead song on his tenth studio record, The Horses and the Hounds.  I don't have a thirty-year crush, but I seent some shit, man.

** I think, don't quote me on it; it was a big but not too too big yellow dirt Cat, not a snowcat.

If I had a hammer

If I ran the circus, the fridge would be quiet.  Also it would be spelled frij.  And people wouldn't drive by other people's's houses at 20 over.  There's some big stuff, obvs, but other people would take care of that.  I'm here for the really important stuff, like slapping the inventor of Boa with a broken, um, Boa cable.  

This will make sense in a minute.  First gratuitous shot of Soldier Mountain.  Chair 2, and the surrounding hills, to be exact.  Looks like late season, but it could be early season.  Or January.  Soldier's unpredicatble like that, and better for it.  Just go ski.  Photo by Peter Landsman of LiftBlog and JHMR.  I stole it cos I didn't have this shot.  If we ever make any money on this post, Peter, you get a cut.  I'll roll some ones to make it look fancy or smpn.  

Herewith, my woefully inadequate list of demands.  I'll start with the most obvious thing everybody probly already knows, which is STOP IT WITH THE GRIP WALK SHIT.  To start with, ski boots are harder to walk in than regular street shoes cos THEY ARE MADE OF PLASTIC AND GO CLEAR TO YER NIPPLES.  Of course they are less intuitive than some would prefer.  Furthermore, Your Honour, NONE OF MY BINDINGS ARE GRIP WALK AND I AIN'T BUY NEW STUFF.  It's one thing if your collection of ski is just a Nordica Enforcer 94 and a picture of those edgeless plastic-strap skis from 1976 you got from your aunt when your cousins grew out of em.  You probably don't care if your 16th pair of bindings works with your current boots cos you don't have, need, or care about even a second pair of bindings.  The money side of things just isn't that bad.  For me, yes, I do have at least 16 pairs of bindings, and no, I did not pay retail for even three of them.  Heck, I didn't even pay for more than half of em.  One pair I got in trade for a lesser pair I got as a tip and some labour.  One pair came from my father-in-law off a pair of ski-swap race sticks they didn't match that were also above his din range.  One pair came on a $10 pair of GS skis that I still ski.  And so on.  It took me a long time to get this haphazard mishmash of a wore-out binding quiver together and I ain't give up on all that work without a fight.  

And the supposed function of GripWalk, aka walking easier with more grippy?  Fail.  GripWalk is harder to walk in than real boots cos there's a weird hitch in the giddyup under the ball of your foot such that it feels like you're wearing a high heel backwards.  We did ask for way hella mass grippier boot soles, yes.  And boot companies long ago figured out how to make their retail boots with a both giant, safe, slippy, power-transfering ISO Alpine 5355 anti-friction plate AND walking lugs.  We didn't ask to walk even more funnier or replace all of our bindings just to walk weirder and hafta use stupid terms like GripWalk.  Fkn Marker.

-

Second on the list is SALOMON MAKE ME MY OWN 997 BINDINGS WITH THAT ONE RED COLOUR STAT.  Thank you.  Make sure they mostly metal and brand new and also don't make them for anyone else, just me.  And DO NOT OFFER THEM IN GRIPWALK.

This colour but, like, in the fancy kit and 16 dins cos I'm the best skier on the mountain.  And actually, sure, fine, go ahead and make them for everybody.

This all has got me thinking about the current squabble surrounding binding delta.  Even if you don't know what I'm talking about, you probly do know why there shouldn't be a discussion.  The correct delta is a big fat nothing.  Zero.  Binding delta, if you're somehow still reading and not passed out from boredom in some hotel lobby in the south of Le Français, is the difference in height (or, alternatively here in BoyCee, "heighth") between the AFD and the brake zone.  This sets the starting ramp or rocker (toe down/toe up, respectively) of the boot.  Since the boot necessarily holds all sorta variables, starting with a neutral delta means you can keep all the fiddlin' around between you and your bootfitter and your eccentric boot designer of choice, who is hopefully named something artful and pretentious like Bertrand or Celeste, and the binding won't negate or exacerbate any gains or losses you may create.  While I have not been to see Brent in PC or Charlie in Taos or what have you, I have had some boot work done and there was definitively no 17-point questionaire about my various binding setups.  So, binding gremlins, listen up: STOP DOIN STUPID $#!+ AND MAKE ME A DAMN FLAT BINDING THANKS AND GOOD NIGHT.

Simple as that.

Fourth on my list of demands is keep them old chairlifts going.  In this modern day and age we have instant coffee, instant tea, and instant disbelief.*  We don't need instant transport.  It's the reason we'll always be overdemanding.  If everybody's in a hurry and scurrying by you, you'll know you're on the right track.  I as much as the next cat benefit from shorter queues and shorter lift rides.  I also as much as the next guy benefit from a slower pace and fewer folks on the slopes.  

Yet another excuse to post pics of Soldier Mountain.  1970 Städeli double, which has a name, I'm sure of it.  Chair 1.  There we go.

There is a lot of noise about how double chairs are "rickety", which, sure, maybe there are some that are.  Mostly there are just chairs that are aged, aging, sure, maybe tired, getting expensive to maintain, but they aren't intrinsically bad because they are doubles.  Or cos they are old enough to have been legally drinking when I Can't Drive 55 was heatin up them airwaves.  Heck, I was old enough to be learnin how not to shit my pance and I'm not rickety.  Don't ask my PT or my ortho or my GP or my chiro or my LMT too many questions, but yeah, I'm fine.  Or my coworkers.  Or Amy.  I'm still the best skier on the mountain.  Shut up.  Leave me alone.

In the scheme of things, a new detach is totally fine.  No matter what, no matter how often I complain about it, though, something is lost.  Not in the sense that boring days don't make good memories, or any other purposefully obtuse attitude you've encountered; I don't know.  It's just, hm.  Tech seeps into everything.  I know that some purist back in the deep woods of the Wood River Valley probly got mad when the first single chair went up back in 1936, cos, well, that was some real tech right there, and at every advancement somebody has sat down to do exactly what I am doing right now, yelling out the window at clouds.  And even though Matt Groening can make fun of it doesn't mean I'm wrong, exactly the way being paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.  We have encouraged tech of every kind into every corner of our lives, and yes, it's probly silly to complain about it when the very act of skiing is enabled and emboldened by technology of all kinds.  I don't care.  Enough's enough.

Now we're cookin with av gas.

If nothing else, I really think every ski area everywhere should carry that one hot chocolate that was at the Pine Marten Lodge in 1989.  I think it was cinnamon.  It should have its own public tap.  That weird automatic kind that might could spray all over you or it might should pour you the nicest cup of cocoa you've ever had in your life.  It should be right next to the Buck Hill pancake machine**, say, or maybe one a them popcorn machines that tyre shops and Jayhawks (SunBird, Yard Birds, Menard's, Farm and Fleet, the list goes on, I bet they had em).  Popcorn doesn't really make my boat cross the road, but people seem to dig digging a giant scoop of the stuff out of the "butter" vat and spilling half of it on the traction mat.  Good food is great and all, but regardless of the view from Needles or Seattle Ridge, English wool carpet takes away from the experience of skiing.  If you need that sort of luxury, you can probly afford Europe, and the Euros can have you.  Besides, it's cheaper there, innit?!

-

Title from the eponymous folk classic made famous by Mary Travers of Joey, Jimmy, and Roxanne back in 1937 at the Redding Film Festival in Sudbury, Ontario.  Or was it The Police?  I don't know.  It's a famous song, anyway.  Don't ax questions.

* Quote from Death Cab for Cutie's album Somethin Bout Them Aeroplanes', from the ever-so-smooth trasition between "Amputations" and "Fake Frowns", or for those of you (and by that I mean me) who say things like Trail 5 and Chair 6, between tracks 8 and 9.

THIS JUST IN THE ACHD TOOK OUT THE TROLL GATE ON BOGUS BASIN ROAD PUT IT BACK PUT IT BACK YOU STUPID @$$#0/&$

** You gotta watch to the end

Thyme sweetened honey

I recently* ran across a somewhat breathy article on the hash tag SEVEN BEST STATES TO HIKE WITH GREMLINS AND MEN WITH BEARDS AND HATS or something.  I also saw a video from teh Hash Tag World's Greatest Ranking Person Or Thing, "Peak" Rankings. (TL;DR, they claim WA is less gooder than ID, which as a local to both states in various eras of life, I gotta say, sure, yeah, totally.  I mean Idaho is plumb full of zones like Hemispheres and The King and The Valley of The Cliffs and International and Schim's Meadow and Cowboy Mountain and Northback and Piss Pass and Bomber Cliffs and The Elk Chutes and Table and The Arm and the Microwave and and and and and.)  It got us thinking that we haven't rated the seven best states for skiing.  You're welcome.

1. Colorado.  Everybody knows it.  When it looks this good, you just can't help it:

Like all those WA Lotto Scratch ads, How Can You Not?

Really, CO has its share of true gems like Ski, Cooper, Ski, and Heartland, Woof Crick and the butterfly place.  There's a few little guys like Hesperus (if James Mercer can ever get it open) and Howelson Hill, which, history, adversity, all that, and Echo Mountain, that fit right in there with all the Midwesty joints everywhere.  There's enough not-Vail to fill a wheelbarrow twice and still have a few slices of Port Salut with lingonberry leftover.  Just don't tell me Breckenridge is the best cos everybody goes there or something.  I'd definitely rather ski Crescent Hill.  Which is in the Nebraska part of Iowa.

2. Denial.  I mean, let's be honest.  What's better than finishing a ski day, calling in sick for the next day, then going skiing again?  Nothing, that's what.  Well, actually, come to think of it, doing that when you are 11 and you're skipping school to avoid turning in a paper you were assigned a week prior before having nine days off for Spring Break that neither you nor your buddy Aram have started yet.

15 Mar 2020, yes.  THAT day.  Definitely in denial, definitely tryna mellow the state of anxiety, definitely at Bogus Basin, Boise NF, Boise County, ID.

3. Pain.  Pain kinda goes along with denial, if we're being honest.  I'm gonna keep goin even though it hurts.  It's gonna stop hurting any time, right?  I know it's arthritis and full thickness chondral loss, but if I just ignore it, it'll get better.  Do you have any Voltaren?  Skiing more will habituate the nerves to their current situation and they'll stop sending pain signals. I SAID DO YOU HAVE ANY VOLTAREN?!  I'll just adapt my technique a little.  Or my gear.  If I swap to a longer ski with a longer turn radius and then detune the life out of the edges with a bench grinder, then there won't be any radial torque on the joint.  That'll make it better, right?  Right?  WHAT DO YOU MEAN SAYING IT LOUDER DOESN'T MAKE ANY VOLTAREN APPEAR?!?!

YEAH BUT IS YOURS AUTOGRAPHED

4. Sobriety.  I'm not joking here, even though I almost always am.  Folks talk about startin in on the sowse at like 7.30 in the before noon, or that that liquid courage is the only thing that's gettin em down them thar black diamonds.  If you gotta plumb drunk yerself into doing something stupid, and think that skiing them thar black diamonds is stupid, come to think of it, maybe skiing isn't the best thing you could be doin with your time?  Just a thought.

Proud to say, just like meth, not even once.  Jägerbombs? What the actual f

5.  Solid.  This one's harder to clarify.  I mean, tube amps definitely sound better, but that one Boston song was pretty aight and I'm pretty sure everything that cat did was controlled down to the minute minutiae.  Then again, a nice warm tube amp, some juju I never understood, and a hollowbody, and everything ///bzzbzz THIS JUST IN /// TOM SHOLZ PLAYED A BUNCH OF TUBE AMPS NEVER MIND.  Wait, you were probly thinking states of matter cos snow is solid? BUT HOW DO THE CLOUDS EVEN GET HERE I ASK?!?!?  Never mind. Now I'm just confused.  As I was saying, snow is definitely best for skiing when it's in its solid state.  Water skiing? Heck no.  I'll take these midsize dirtrash scrapes on my arms from riding the mountain bike poorly over drowning in crappy shorts at the bottom of a dirty lake any day.

6. Delirium.  I mean, as long as it's metaphorical.  Delirious with wonder, or with amazement.  I imagine something like this:

Whatever floats yer boat, I guess.  Is this the thing what Lake Louise is talkin abote?

7.  Bliss.  Lest this sound like an ad for Tamarack, hear me out.  We lived in Ashland, lest you forget, and we learned from the best.  If you're blissed out on life, it doesn't matter if the world is crumbling around you or, like, Windsor is broken and there's wolverine-shaped demons in the trees.  Or if it hasn't snowed since October and it's January.  Or if it really is time to go to the ski swap and replace your '99 Piste Stinx with a real up-to-date ski, like the '01 Piste Stinx.  Or if, say, your Micro Grid Hoodie tee em smells like you haven't washed it since the Clinton administration.  I mean, tele till yer Melly is smelly, amirite?

8.  Norrbotten.  Shoot.  That's a county.  Never mind.  Still, it's home to one of the best names in skiing, Riksgränsen.  It's right on the border with Norway, such that you can physcially ski in both countries during one run.  Don't quote me on the political situation, but I'm pretty sure aside from The Swedes thinking The Norrmännen are hicks who only eat knock-off Icelandic food or something and The Norwegians calling The Svenskene Saab Driving Pickled Herring Bankers or whatever, you're good.  Oh, and the name?  If the various translation services available on a popular search engine currently in the late-middle stages of platform decay are to be believed, it means National Border.  And if you know anything bout me, you know I do love me some literal.

CO? More like CNO.  Norrbotten gots that good arctic sun and to us proud Americans, it's about as exotic as it gets.  You could tell me this was skiing in Tajikistan and I'd be like, okay, maybe it is.  But then I'd push up my glasses and be like, WELL ACTUALLY YOU SEE THAT U-SHAPED PASS IN THE DISTANCE JOKE'S ON YOU I KNOW ABISKO WHEN I SEE PICTURES OF IT.

Lest you doubt I could do it twice.  Never forget I am the best skier on the mountain.

-

Title from Steve Young's classic Seven Bridges Road, which you probly thought was written by The Angry Birbs or whoever just like everyone thinks Janis wrote Me and Bobby Flay.  And before you say it, yes, Steve Young is also that one quarterback who played for BYU.  I think he threw some NFL passes, too.  He's no Joe North Dakota, though, speaking of states that have skiing somewheres.

* Just now. On the internet.

And yes, I know it's Sunshine Village.  Don't at me.

bzzbzz///THIS JUST IN THE OWNER OF MOUNTAIN CAPITOL PARTNERS WHO ARE THE OWNERS OF HESPERUS IS ACTUALLY JAMES COLEMAN NOT JAMES MERCER THAT GUY'S IN THE SHINS SORRY FOR ANY CONFUSION THANKS

Now pretend he's in a football uniform.  I think it's the same guy.

Love can make you happy

 I am almost 44 years old. Probly will be by the time you read this.  I thought I'd be good at this by now.  The season ends, and all of a sudden I feel like a beginner again.  For so many years, I'd rely on inertia, ski until I just had no energy for finding it.  Today, I can ski until last chair, take some pictures, and head off to some unknown.  Everything just seems to end.  I want to keep skiing, but, I don't know, I can't get to the snow.

Skied to last chair and took this picture.

Back at the beginning of April, my oldest brother and I made some turns up at Alpental.  It was one of Chair 2's last days, after almost 60 years of service.  Not coincidentally, our Pa was on the build crew, shooting footings and cutting runs.  One imagines that when it was built there were wild mountain goats and like prospectors and stuff, but really, other than some small differences in style and a few safety measures all lifts come with today, it wasn't much different than the chair Dopplemayr is building to replace it.  The skiing that day was like many days I've had up at the Pass, threatening rain until it actually does, alternating supportive spring slush and soupy mashed potatoes that just don't quite let your skis run the way you'd like. 

International was exactly as it should be.  Steep, deep moguls, long, crowded, gorgeous.  I skied alright that day, nothing to write home about.  Made some mistakes due to rustiness in the steeps or what have you, but it's been at least 15 years, maybe 16, and Alpental doesn't mess around.  Terrain traps, treewells even when it hasn't snowed in a while, double fall-line stuff that doesn't go the way you'd expect, tall mountain hemlock that block the view and distract at the same time.  The terrain around Chair 2 is especially rowdy.  It stands head and shoulders above what most people know of skiing.  Writers hammer out breathy listicles about places like Alta and CB and J-Hole, but Alpental just hangs out alone, almost unknown.  Legit, as the kids were saying a few years ago.

Steeps.

My knees have been off for a while now, seven seasons as I type, functioning fine for skiing but fighting me sometimes when I ride the bike.  I've had surgery, done countless reps of PT, gotten a PRP injection, and somedays it feels like I'm still 26 the way Stina claims I'll always be, but then I sit wrong or lay wrong and I come back to reality.  Or something in one of the knees just hurts.  The last eleven or so years have felt like a drawn-out dismantling of all the fitness and conditioning I built up in my 20s.  A reduction to a baseline so low I don't recognise it.  I've moved from state to state, friends have moved as well, even to other countries, and there are moments where I am alone, far from anything I knew or cared about.  I've backed myself into a corner, with career skills that have become too expensive for many shops and yet not lucrative enough to live somewhere I truly like.

This past winter I hit a wall.  I'd been at the same shop for eight years, with nothing other than inertia to keep me going.  Skiing felt rote, just something I did between clocking out and clocking back in.  Most mornings I hid how frustrated and sad I was from Amy, although I know she knew.  I'd sigh, say I was headed to work, and leave as though I might not be coming home again that evening.  It's hard to walk away from somewhere I thought I belonged, but I didn't belong, and never would, and if it was wearing me down to the point where something so central as skiing wasn't enjoyable anymore, it was time to move on, time to get going.  The new place is nothing special, but my blood pressure has dropped a few points and I don't hate being there.  There's promise, however small, that I can just settle in and slowly sand all the splinters off the veneer.

More steeps.

I've been rained on nearly everywhere I've skied.  I used to take pride in just going anyway, but I rarely have the emotional energy for it anymore.  John and I got rained on both at Alpental and at Crystal the next day, and it was fine.  The snow was largely fun, soft and supportive.  It felt like home.  It was, really, at least in that I grew up in those hills, skied that snow, breathed in the pollen and drank the water.  The views can be of forever, or of the forest around you and a gray you can't measure and a distance you can't see.  Some folks run from it, others wax ecstatic and can't stop talking about the layers of cloud and the water everywhere, dripping, dripping, dripping, off everything.

Not rain.

When John and I were up at my parents' house, I finally remembered to grab an old pair of skis I bought from some cat named Andrew, who patrolled at Baker back in '002.  For the time, they didn't seem all that big, 195 cm, with a 29 metre radius.  I thought they were powder skis, even.  I had tele bindings on em, for heck's sake.  The last day I remember skiing them was some time in '005, I think, with Pa and my sister-in-law at White Pass, before she married my brother.  The day was exactly what spring skiing should be, a little uncertain, temporary, warm, with some surprisingly good turns to be had.  It'd probly rained at some point, because the snow was clean and fast, that rarity where it never gets sticky.  The grains are the size of corn cobs.  Well, kernels anyway.  I don't know the mountain all that well, even in memory.  I found a line that just went and went, skiers' right of the detach, and like I tend to do this time of year, I just kept making the same turns.  Same moguls, same spots on the groomers.  Over, and over, and over.  I'm not sure where Pa and my sister-in-law were, actually.  I think they didn't want to ski the steeps with me.

White Pass is yet another singular Cascade joint, very much a local's hangout, not much in the way of lodging or even regional appeal, and as always in my view, is better for it.  Massive fir and hemlock line the low peaks.  Deep canyons from another epoch, volcanism both immediate and distant, both recent and ancient.  Rivers nobody really knows outside of Lewis and Yakima counties.  A highway, US 12, that is sometimes the only way across the Cascades when the storms stack up just right, itself an unforgiving mountain road with the commensurate frost heaves and constant threat of washout, streams in every draw, ripping in recent rain or the ever-present melt.

I ended up riding the detach a few times that day with some lady whose name I don't know if I even asked.  I think we were skiing about the same speed.  I don't really remember her at all other than the ghost of an idea.  When I see those skis, the legendary and final Rossi Bandit XXX, there's some hint of the few days I was up to the task.  My competition line down the Elk Chutes at Crystal, under the rope and over one of the only cliffs I've ever actually dropped.  That day at White, or the time I tried to clear the Highway on the way to work at Baker.  (You know how that went, I'm sure.  Even if you've never seen Heather Meadows.)  Paradise Bowl at Crystal, early March, 3° American and snowing like it didn't know how to stop, chunks of avy debris kicking up off those long, absurd tips.  Knee almost to the ski. The King a few runs later, my glasses frozen over so I couldn't wear goggles, skiing blind through what some magazines claim is Top 5 Steepest Runs In Ski Areas In The US of A.  I bet I didn't ski it all that well, but I don't remember anything of the run other than the ice cream headache.

So this one time I was at Whistler with my brother and we were riding the really big gondola with Dan Treadway (OMG SKI CELEB SIGHTING) and he had those funky over-the-head Oakley sunglasses and these skis and they were so damn cool and then I got em and then I got scared and then the other day I skied em again and they were actually pretty easy to ski and lotta fun and I think I'll keep em mounted and also did you see that those are Salomon 916 LAB bindings holy crap you should be impressed with me totally.

If I were forced to choose, I'd ski that good corn forever.  People ask and then are always surprised to hear it.  "What about the pow pow?" they say, as though one can't have any opinion other than what they read in a magazine or saw on some Tic Tac schreddit.  I cringe at the sound of the complaint, but folks call slush and corn and whatnot "bad".  To the point where they stop skiing just when the skiing itself is gettin' real good, and ski areas all shut down, and then here we are again.  

Anyway, I want it to be sunny, but I'd settle for that transitional day, lenticular over Tahoma, threatening rain but too lazy to really succeed.  Dodging fallaway cliff bands in the Alpental hemlock on Snake Dance, or some big turns on that long ramp off Piss Pass and eventually down to Lot 4.  The moguls under Ariel at Mt A, or Greenie's at the end of a long season at Bogus, milking every turn for all it's got.  Chair 3 liftline at Silver Mountain, or Sticky right under Chair 6 at Baker.  The summit of Bachelor, volcanoes lined up for three, four hundred miles.  White Pass, the moguls on Mach V and Hourglass, lofting off the cat track as far as I'm comfortable.  Double 00 Chutes either side of Chair 6 at Crystal just tryna get one more lap before a long summer, snow melting and tumbling down the valley to the White, cold and clear and merciless.

MOAR STEEPS

-

Title from the incomparible Kate Wolf's seminal song about everything but what you think it's about, Here in California, of which couplet the second part is "love can rob you blind".  Dang.

Last chair snow is sposeta be dirty.  Or just dirt. And it should be May or June or July, but nobody believes me and that makes me real sad.

The light's on in the hall

 My alarm went off at 6.  I know, cos I heard it from the kitchen where I was making breakfast and watching the neighbour's garage burn down.  I don't really remember the neighbours all that much, but I'm pretty sure there was a minivan in the driveway.  It was chilly for April, at least if you consider how folks talk about April.  Never mind that April in the PNW is always a seesaw of warm and cool, of cloud and sun, dominated by convective clouds in between breaks of sun that are equal in intensity to late August, with the midlatitude synoptic flow still heavily influenced by Arctic high pressure.

I lived in a little studio in Stadium, North Tacoma.  A seesaw of wealth and poverty, much like the April weather.  The neighbours were probly on my level, gettin by, but with a coupla kids, higher input and higher output.  The father was a blue collar dude, who looked like all of his earnings were in the house, while the mother seemed to always be playing catch-up with the kids.  A normal family, then.  I never heard them argue or anything, never really noticed anything amiss, and while there's no way I was as devastated for them as they were for themselves when the garage burnt, I could feel their pain in the heat coming off the fire.  Once the fire was out and a few days had passed, they started slowly cleaning up, and by the next April when I moved out of that tiny brick box across North 6th from them, they seemed to have rebuilt and moved on with their lives.

That neighbourhood has changed some since then.  Their house looks clean and remodeled, with a late model Grand Cherokee parked in front of a small but tidy garage.  The old brick Red Maple building I lived in is still there, looking clean and fresh as well.

Whitebark, subalpine, Englemann, and one big mountain.  Tahoma looking all Tahoma-y, from the top of the King.  Lenticular starting to form in the lee Aliens coming in for a landing from the east.  Awesome show, great job.

That morning, after the fire trucks came and I got packed, I headed across town and grabbed my buddy Karl from his and Kari's house near the shop.  The town was quiet that early.  It was Easter, '006, broken clouds thinning as a transient ridge passed through.  Tiana was reporting sixteen new.  For those who've forgot, somehow, this is back when the first thing a lot of us did after our urgent morning constitutionals was pick up the landline and call the snowphone.  I didn't even have a cell phone then.  I can't remember her voice on that particular day, but I heard it so many times over the years before snow reports were fully on the local internet, and while checking in her yearly ski mounts and tunes, and even a little from school where I was a year behind her all the way from kindergarten on, that I can still reconstruct how excited she would have tried to sound.

I still had my '87 Cherokee, then.  It was an auto, but with a manual transfer case.  Pa had snuck on some really nice tyres for my birthday a couple years prior, which still had good grip.  My Rocket Box on the luggage rack that was definitely not load-rated would bounce off the roof between 70 and 75, so I mostly kept it to more moderate speeds.  That morning drive was uneventful, mostly dry until Greenwater and tacky the rest of the way up.  When we hit A Lot an hour early and still were almost at the back, I realised most of The Sound had also heard Tiana's mildly-forced excitement in comparison to all the other joints who'd been skipped by whatever fickle flow pattern had hammered Crystal overnight, and made their own morning trundles up the White.

Okay, maybe it didn't look like this.  Speaking of Tiana.  She and Mr Tiana bought this'n offa Louie and Diane Gebenininininini (I think that's how they spell it) a few years ago.  I wish I'd had the capital when it was on the market.  I coulda been a contender.

Karl was--and hopefully still is, now in his 40s--a fit kid and a ridiculously good bike handler.  While riding trail out in Bonney Lake one time, a typically rainy PNW day, he saw what I remember to be a five foot cedar stump from back in the springboard days.  Massive, rotting, but still with good bones after 80 or so years, springboard notches intact.  He was riding his even-then-old mid-90s Kona Hot, a rigid steel hardtail with v-brakes and outdated drivetrain.  He kinda mumbled something about thinking he could, and then just rode up and over the dern thing.  Even he got excited when he stuck the landing and rode away, stoic Boston kid he wanted us all to think he was.  (I think I got a taste of what he felt when I rode over my own stump out at Lake Sawyer a couple years later, only it was like a foot and a half tall.  Still, I'll take a W whenever I can.)

Whenever we rode together, he'd take off, do whatever it was people who are actually good at mountain bikes do, and wait at a trail intersection until I showed up, then take off again.  He wasn't particularly mean to me about our experiential and technical proficiency differences, he just didn't wait for me to catch my breath.  When I saw the crowd, I realised that that day was my only chance at some sort of payback.  I may not have mentioned this, though.

If you know, you know.  And you probly feel smug about it.  Or at least I did.

Karl was almost as good on the snowboard as the mountain bike.  I, however, knew the ridgleine traverses and tele'd them all twice a week or more at a real high tempo.  I knew the not-very-local crowd would lap up the inbounds snow first and that our only hope for unskied snow would be laps off the King and the Beach and Boxcar and the Exit Chutes.  And then, only if patrol could get South open right away.  I don't know if I ever even said anything to Karl other than "South is the only place to ski today."  Patrol was on it, and they dropped the ropes right at opening.

I'd take off ahead, doing whatever it is really experienced Crystal telewhackers do to cover as much traverse and bootpack ground as possible.  Wait at gates and trail junctions, never long enough for Karl to catch his breath.  Sprint on to the next spot.  Most folks struggle to finish a South lap in an hour.  I was cooked by the time we dropped into the Exit Chute at 4 o'clock on our eighth lap in under six hours.  Karl was worse off, since he had to posthole in his snowboard boots when I could glide easily on skis with free heels.  (Nordic gear and long-track speed skates have a free heel for this same efficiency.)  Each run was good, staying cold even in the angry April sun.  Boot top, sometimes more, snow I was blasé about then and barely even see now, in this arid almost-desert.

It doesn't hurt that tele boots were lighter than any alpine boot back in the day.  And that I knew I could sprint up to the False Summit cos it wasn't long enough to burn my lungs.  Sorry, not sorry, Karl.

I don't really remember the turns in each run, just one long, raucous day.  We'd sprint hard, make some glorious turns, tuck hard and skate as fast as we could back to civilisation, hit 9 and 6, and do it again.  Last Run was (somehow) first tracks down the Exit Chute, Threeway Peak dark and intimidating over our shoulders.  There were some patrollers at the Party Knoll already, a tapped and rapidly emptying keg poking out of the snow.  Stina was there as well, looking a little out of place without her normal posse. We had a slow beer, looking up at Threeway and that iconic gut no one outside the Silver Creek drainage has even dreamt of, let alone heard of or seen.  A skier, John from Christiaan's old shop, poked into the gut from the east shoulder, and ripped the shit out of it.  G.N.A.R. points for weeks, I'd say.  When he slid to a stop at the keg, one of the more itinerant patrollers I didn't know spoke up, clearly baffled.  "There's barely room for a turn in there, John!" John laughed and shook his 1992 Eddie Vedder hair.  "That's why they call it Two Easy Turns!"

Okay, so you gots to make three turns.  The name still stands.  If you're wondering, no I haven't.  I did totally get the shoulder twice, though.  Lookers' left of the summit, skirting the drops but still turning for directional purposes only, both in this condition.  A little wind-consolidated, a lot rad.  The second was Amy's and my pre-first-date date.  Not quite as gripping, but dag.  Them shits is right.

Memory always cuts in and out.  I am no different from anyone in this.  Karl and I hung aboot, languishing and getting cold, chatting with Stina and feeling that Closing Day melancholy.  One beer and I was tipsy.  The sun-effected snow was glazing over, and Triple F* was more like FSF.  Sketch-eee.  The beer didn't help, and I realised right there that I didn't need to beer and ski.  Still don't.  We got through, probly stumbled across the airfield on foot, and then, the memory just ends.  We made it to town, for sure, cos I'm still here and Karl was last I knew.  I don't remember skiing out under Chair 4, or kicking the boots off in A Lot.  I know I probly threw the skis and board in the Rocket Box, and I know for sure we got up over that little knoll at the end of the airfield, the one that Sam always groomed a peak into so you could skate up it quicker.  I'm sure we just up and went to work the next day like nothing happened.

See, what's funny is, if you lived under a rock in 1992, is that Eddie was on a major label, and was not on SubPop, for which this shirt is an advert.  That's what they call irony, young 'uns.  Eddie was probly makin enough cheddar flow to pay Megan Jasper her current (2025) C-Suite salary to come up with more fake slang for the NYT to print as gospel and not notice the missing sums.  I mean, that's at least what I imagine Epic Records was paying.  Who knows.  All I know is Ten still slaps, as the kids are saying, and there's still a Gossard Street in Enumclaw, and I still ski like I did in '92, in flannel whenever I can cos if you see me and don't think "that cat's definitely from the Cascades and he definitely was in bands in post-grunge Seattle and he definitely learnted to tele at Baker" then I'm failing and also I still don't get Nirvana.  Actually, now that I think about it, the live album with all the country songs was pretty decent.

-

Title from Bob McDill and Dickie Lee's classic, The Door is Always Open.  Waylon done did it damn good, and Jamey Johnson may have done it even better, should that actually be possible.

* Triple F has a compatriot on the other side of the King, the exit from A Basin, called Damn Fine Forest.  You get it.