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.

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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?!

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

I don't wanna be in a box

The latest I have skied is 9 July, and the earliest is 31 August.  I am not a TAY guy.  I am not hard core, as some of my peers who are now olds used to say.  I do, however, enjoy skiing in a t-shirt.

You can't see here but I was wearing a responsibly UV-combatting flannel shirt, which is actually my favourite ski wear.  T-shirts are nice, though, too, also.  This is that 31 August.  Timberline, OR.

The first song on School of Fish' sophomore slump record, Human Cannonball, is a ripper.  Starts off with all the requisite 1993-vintage distortion, hard driving guitar licks, non-sensical lyrics that still kinda make sense in that way where nerdy high school juniors are all like HE TOTALLY GETS ME MOM YOU WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND.  The first line even makes sense.  "I don't wanna be / in a box until I'm gone."  None of us do.

Let's back up a little.  I was only 11 when that record came out, winter of sixth grade.  My older brother was, as these things go, older than me, 16 that February when the CDs in their incredibly wasteful anti-theft cases hit the shelves.  I think it did alright, sales and chart-wise, if that ever mattered.  It hit right at just the right time.  '93 was pretty good for music, at least the stuff I've been into.  Even the Man in the Moon is Crying, Mark Collie's one hit, was all over the country's country stations.  Radiohead hit the airwaves with Creep, their "cover" of The Hollies' All I Ever Breathe is Your Farts, or whatever, I can't remember.  I just know they got sued for using an identical-ish chord progression and then later, whether as a joke or out of supreme tone-deafness, sued another artist for the exact same reason.  Like, not a different song, the same exact one.  At any rate, that record, Pablo Honey, had some actual good songs for its day, though I'll admit it didn't stand up to time like their next few releases did.  Siamese Dream, that incredibly uneven, but at times absolutely brilliant sophomore effort from Jimmy Corgan Billy Strings Smashing Pumpkins (sorry, I'm getting old, I don't remember so good) came out in the summer, 27 July according to a popular not-for-profit web-based encyclopœdia.

I forgot where I was headed.  My brother, as these things go, who is waaaaaaaaayyyyy older than me, I mean damn near 50 now, the old man.  Sheesh.  At any rate, back then, as these things also go, too, as well, I learned music from other folks.  Some gospel from Ma, country from Pa, and the hipness of the moment from J-O.  I'm not an essentially curious person, at least not in the sense of seeking out something unknown completely blind.  Once I'm on a road, I tend to keep pedaling, though.  My tastes, then, were for a few years headed decidedly down the grunge-then-alt-rock road.

Skip a few tracks forward, it's 1999 and I've got a new stereo deck in the Tercel.  If it sounds sporty, well, with the right attitude, anything can be.  It was a little hatchback from '81, bug-eye back window, off-orange paint, 1.4L engine, 5 speed, and all.  I know that the top speed was 74 mph cos I hit it often enough to get a real expensive ticket for doing 74 in a 40.  The cop reduced it to 70, telling me he was giving me a break.  All these years later, I know he was, cos at the time more than 30 over the limit came with a few automatic things, not the least of which was an immediate suspension of driving privileges.  I paid, incrementally, quite a lot after State Farm booted me from my parents' insurance a few months later after my third ticket in the poor little orange gremlin.  (Not THAT Gremlin.)  The $240 a month for bare minimum coverage in '99 dollars kinda quite a lot.

This gremlin.  Well, not this one, but mine.  In orange.  And, seemingly disappointing my uncle Stan, not the SR5 package.  Toren Carter has one, though, mint.  SR5, I mean.  In this colour, or just a little darker.  It'd bug me if Toren wasn't a good dude, but he is and I'm just jealous.

Anyway, I'd push that flashy disc into the deck, turn it up, reach over and roll the other window down, try not to drive off the highway headin up from Cayuse Pass as I was doing so, and maybe hit the gas just a little.  It was a big winter, the biggest in memory by some measures, and there was just so damn much snow still on the ground in late June and into July.  I'd love to weave some tale about the quality of corn snow that day, or how I pioneered a line on the west face of Naches Peak, but really, I don't remember.  I just have the polaroid of a moment.  Just the start of the song, the car, my black Dynastars in back, the windows down, and the view down Chinook Creek to the Ohanopecosh.

Nobody will argue with me when I say that memory is fickle.  I am adamant that summer skiing is the best skiing, and that in the last 14 years of making almost no summer turns at all, I have lost a little bit of myself.  I don't honestly remember many of the actual days, though.  I know they happened.  I keep records and looking back, there are probly a hundred days over the years.  Actually, probly more than a hundred.  I got about 50 days in just the springs and summers of '001 and '002.  I skied at least once a week--usually 5 or 6 days--from Veterans' Day of '007 through the 4th of July of '008.  And yet, despite all this, I don't know, hubris, very few turns stick out.  That is exactly what I want.  Folks talk about skiing like it's a vacation activity, and it just isn't.  It's vocation.  Personality.  I know there are more important things.  I know I'm not bringing anything new to the table.  It's just, I want skiing to be mundane because I can't take it or leave it.  It isn't need, addiction, any other cliché you want to level at me.  It's just, I don't know, 

This.

I went through a phase in '008 where I really dug pita pocket sandos with spinach and hummus and a hunka sharp cheddar.  Easy on the stomach, lotta protein, some interesting textures, simple to pack for the day.  I had one with a warm Guinness Catherine had forgot to chill after a big June day in the Tatoosh.  At the base of the Fryingpan Glacier after I finally calmed my stomach down and worked the cramps out of my hamstrings, before four of the lowest turn-to-skinning-mile-ratio turns I've ever made.  I had one on the side of Naches on Saturday the 14th of June.  I know it was the 14th cos it was the day after I sliced a two-inch chunk of left forearm misleveraging (like, actual leverage, the mechanical kind, not business jargon) a stuck pedal and taking a dirty and wore-out big ring 4, 5 mm into the subdermis.  Still have the scar, too.  I wish I had pictures.  Fun stuff.  I just hosed it out with alternating dish soap and hot water and alcohol.  I don't even remember it hurting, but there's that pesky memory again.  It probly really did.

The last turns I made that summer were on Silver Peak, just west of Hyak.  We could barely see our feet for the 4th of July June Gloom.  Watermelon algae in sun cupped snow, the sort ya gotta just kinda get on up in there and ski.  Glide like you was born to.  We were with some cat named Penxa and the snow reporter from the Summit, Catherine and I.  I remember the turns were challenging, more than most summer days.  I also remember that I made them as I always do, a left after a right, right on up until the bottom.  Penxa was pissed, strangely even at me.  He couldn't ski for shit, and complained about the viz, the conditions, the mist, the drizzle, meanwhile I just made good tele turns, one after the other.  If you could see my face, it's a rictus of smugness, even seventeen years later.  I won't lie about this.  I absolutely love being the untrained person in a group that gets it more than the ones with schooling or coaching or training.  I taught myself to tele by watching folks who got it.  Stina, GC, Kenny Tataku, and a few others, in the winter of '000.  John Adams at Baker the next couple years.  No classes, no coaching, just boot up and go.

And this.

1993 had some truly big hit single songs.  I mean, that one Naughty by Nature song, the one from Duran Duran that sounds like they listened to The Cure's Disintegration over and over and over again but didn't really get it, heck, 2Pac even had an album on the shelves.  Keep Ya Head Up was startlingly prophetic, along the lines of The Message from way back in the day, and stands up like few songs can.  There was, maybe poetically, maybe just coincidentally, that one "hip-hop" performer named Snow, who had the ridiculous and ridiculously popular hit, Informer, that holds up as well as flushed toilet paper.  The Cranberries' Everybody Else is Doing it So Why Can't We?' came out on the 1st of March that year, a few weeks before Depeche Mode's Songs of Faith and Devotion.  SoFaD didn't go as big as some of their other records, but it was mature and dark and moody and accessible all at once and it still sounds good to this day.  I also might be forgetting one or two of those Seattle bands that were so big back then, I don't know.

1993 was also sixth grade for me.  I don't remember doing any summer skiing.  In point of fact, the last day I remember was Crystal's Employee Ski Day, and if yer wondering, no, I did not work there then.  I was 11, turning 12 that summer.  Baseball was still number one for me.  Aram and I were skiing Sunday afternoon, the last day of spring break, and had a parallel realisation that we were not individually prepared to turn in our Spring Break Paper the next morning, and yes, it was largely cos neither of us had yet written a single word.  We did what any self-respecting ski bum would do and convinced our respective parents--not hard on either account, especially when you consider neither of us told about the papers we hadn't written--to let us borrow some guest passes and headed on up.  Aram's ma, Holly, was a liftie on the weekends.  Both of my brothers and also my pa worked in the base area, so we had access to four passes.  The weather was questionable, but it never really rained.  The snow was gooshy mid-April, something that may have imbedded in my preferences.  Closing day is always best if the weather's a little bit moody and the snow a bit sloppy.

I know we turned in our papers, and that whatever grades we got were good enough.  I don't remember Mindy the Teacher getting mad at us.  For the rest of the year I felt a little smug, like I'd gotten one over on the system.  

If this had been 4 weeks earlier, I coulda skied that one triple-fall-line shot dead centre on the ridge like I did back when I was all young and virile and could still tele like I was the Hindenberg but it wasn't and I'm not and I can't but hey here's some Abies lasiocarpa for your consideration thank you there's probly another conifer or three as well okay now it's bed time

As I said, it's been a while since I've done any peeople-powered summer skiing, and I don't feel right about it.  I really just want to take the spring off one year and ski into July.  Park the RV I don't have at Morse Creek, wear flannel, hide out, look up at the stars at night, and wonder if bears really are Catholic or if the pope really does like to eat pizza in the woods.  If you've got any cash money you wanna donate to the cause, write me at Help Enore Pretend It's 1993 Again but He's Not a Kid; Not Really the North End, Boy-Cee, Not Really the PNW but Kinda, 837 I forget the rest.

Gratuitous photo of Tahoma from above Lower Tipsoo Lake with some lovely conifers you can probly smell now you're welcome thanks for listening.

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I done did explain the title already but if you must have a recap it's the opening line from School of Fish's 1993 record Human Cannonball off the song "Complicator".

- - 

Oh, and if you must know, it was 1 turn per 2 miles skinned.  I checked.  Uff da.