Enore and Mimi Go Ski
We are two English majors who are lifelong skiers.
Sunday, February 25, 2024
Put a Sagehen On It
Friday, December 22, 2023
Relatively easy
The hike out the King can take anywhere from 12 minutes to 2 hours, depending on your skill, familiarity, and fitness. Mostly your familiarity, as you need to know where to just point it, where you can kick steps as fast as you're able until you almost puke knowing that the line you're sweating for is just past the top of a given pitch. Skill helps, of course, cos those hard corners where you drop a shoulder and glide instead of skidding wide are much faster with the right amount of edge, and the speed'll let you carry up past ten or fifteen side steps other folks have taken, which saves your lungs for those three pitches on the actual peak where you need to kick hard to stay ahead of the Joeys from Bellevue in their bar-mode boots and this year's trendiest goggles.
The first time I headed out, I think I was 7. All three of us tagged along with Pa, and I'm fairly certain I was the slowest. My brothers would have been 10 and 12. I obviously didn't know where I could pump a roller for an extra boost, or where I should double up to rest the legs for a half second of airtime. The hike is all about conservation, whether it's momentum or lung power or quadriceps energy, and at 7 I knew about none of that. Somewhere in the middle of the second pitch on the shoulder of the King, we caught up to, or more likely were passed by, a couple around Pa's age. The wife, I'm pretty sure, had a Bota bag of apple juice. I will never forget the taste. I think about it, the Bota bag, the apple juice, the kindly lady I never saw again, every time I'm out South, or sidestepping out to Lower Mores here in the desert, or walking along one of the ridges at The Place That Shall Not Be Named, or skating back to the Lodge on the 20 Road after a quick Rabbit Ears lap at Mt A, when my throat burns cos I'm too stubborn lazy to carry water.
I don't remember which line we skied. Knowing the sort of terrain Pa prefers, it was probly Southeast Right. Wide open and steep, but manageable. Southeast facing, as you'd guess. In my mid-to late-twenties, it was a ramp of much speed and few turns, but in the spring of 1989 it would have seemed endless. I don't remember how many turns it took down to the exit, but it probly felt like a few hundred. Those years in the late aughts tuning skis for Brad, I made a game of how few turns I could make from the top of the King to the bottom of the first pitch on either side. My best was 4.
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Yesterday, I woke up and realised I was 42 years old. My birthday long past, but still, sometimes it sticks. I know this is universal, whether you're 31 or 75 or 103, one day you're minding your own business, checking groceries, pumping gas, bumping chairs, riding bulls, sweeping dirt off your baseball pants from a successful steal of third in the deciding game of the CWS, playing a show in front of 3000, whatever, and the next day you're older, feeling broken, and praying to God the trade-off is one resulting in endless wisdom and old-guy strength. Again, not unique amongst any peer group or novel in the scope of geographic time. Just, well, hard to swallow sometimes.
That day, the 4 turn day, was a Saturday. It'd puked, then puked some more, and Patrol hadn't opened south all week, not even Friday. (Stina always spat "Baugher's just waiting for Friday cos he hates locals!") I knew it would open, and didn't have a shift in the shop, so I was planning to just head for the gate and wait until somebody dropped it and fight for whatever leftovers I could find. Standing in line for 11, just before opening, the line stretching for two hundred people in front of me, I heard the Number Two Lifts Guy (no clue his name, this far on, but I'll call him Adam, cos why not) yell my name. That year, '008, I was tuning most-time for Brad. I'd got my pass through lifts thinking I'd need two jobs, so when I realised I couldn't swing both, I told Bob I'd help out when necessary and otherwise deal with fewer Greenbacks. He didn't really need me much, and I usually skated by with the last of my tips. That morning, though, they were short enough lifties that they actually needed me.
Anyway, Adam wanders over and asks me if I can do lunches. Obviously, I can't say no, regardless, but I mumble something about getting one solitary South lap, and he says "Dude! Of Course! Gimme your time card and I'll punch you in. Come back and do lunches, go skiing some more, and clock out at 4." Well, now. To be honest, I don't even know if he ever clocked me in. Or care.
That knowledge of the hike and traverse out south, it pays off sometimes. There was a line at the False Summit, the second Throne Gate. I kept booting until I was alone at the top of the Throne, only a short ski down the ridge to the A Basin saddle. Everyone waiting in line for the lower gate had to traverse, duck the krummholz firs and pine and spruce at speed. I just had to point it and hope the corners hadn't changed too much with all the snow. I had probly a 5, 6 minute head start on them, and I was faster than all of 'em, too. I hit the bottom of the King knowing nobody could catch me, no matter how many were back there. I had built another 4 or 5 minutes in by the top and could catch my breath, make my decisions, breathe some more, ignore the butterflies and the crowd at the top of 9, and be ready instead of jittery. Brad and his now ex were second and third, surprisingly. He rarely skied, but it was exactly the kinda day that he waited for. High, thin, beautiful overcast, chilly enough to preserve the day-old snow, visibility clear and unlimited. When he poked his head through the last whitebark, I looked quizzically, and asked "How'd you pull this off?" He just shrugged. "How'd you?!" "I'm doing lunches, as you can see. Hard at it." I saw the cloud of ants chasing them up the last pitch, waved, ignored his invitation to ski where he could see me, and dropped off to the northeast. Slid a directional turn on the ridge and dropped into the Hourglass, the easiest line off the top of the King. Some lines just feel right, and I hadn't known it'd be that line until I rolled over and saw nothing but an open ramp. Four turns at speed, whatever radius that is, down to DFF.
When I was shoveling the ramp at the top of Rex during one of the lunches, a pro patroller slid by and said "Nice turns. I know it was you."
The knees just don't work the way the should, and certainly not the way they did. I remember one morning at the community college squatting outside Noël's old Acura 5-speed at 7 in the January morning, thinking my knees were done, and how unfair it was that I was only 18 and I was already being sold down the river by creaky joints. I wasn't, though. Through strength training, and, more importantly, telemarking 100 days a year and hiking 3000' vertical peaks all summer, the muscles and joints starting working together. Once I got a bike and stopped with the horror of running, things really clicked and I had a stretch of 15 years with only one single second of true knee pain. Just now, though, I settled weird in my seat to write these exact words and the lateral side of my right knee lit up with that same white flash.
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Alta is known for traverses. The High T is probly the best known, perhaps in the whole damn country. I've never partaken, and to be honest I have no desire whatsoever. I and Alta don't get along. Taos, Bridger, Baker, and the like are known for bootpacks straight up to their respective ridgelines. Mt A for complaining that the Bowl is closed while ignoring the technically-out-of-bounds south and west sides of the peak because the skate back on FR20 is there. Not cos it's hard, because it just isn't. Sun Valley for its glitz and septuagenarians ripping the groomers on the Warm Springs side at Mach Stupid. Mad River Glen for its single chair, co-op structure, and for allegedly being hard AF. Jay, for the waterslides. You get it.
The Place That Shall Not Be Named, maybe none of those things. They have those gilded bathrooms, the English wool carpet lining all of their countless lodges, the grooming, the 3000' vert of grooming. Nobody talks about the short hikes to the actual reason to ski in Weber County, Utah, which is the same as anywhere else you can think of, even the Driftless. Quiet, steep, not-always-safe turns in good, unsettled snow. Not all of the lines are worth it. Some, though, it's, well, shoot. There are still some things I miss about Utah. From the top of Strawberry, you boot up a little toward DeMoisy, then skate around the west side. In many years, with some adventurous partners, you could drop Burch Creek all the way to town. You ignore this, ignore the obvious lines back into Middle Bowl, skiers' left of DeMoisy proper, and keep skating and sidestepping and booting until you're on a ridge above a hidden bowl that empties down into the top of Porky. You can't really see it from anywhere, and nobody will know you're there. It's not the steepest spot on the hill, not exposed and terrifying like Mt Ogden, nor obvious like the north face of DeMoisy. It's a ramp with probly 20 or 30 turns, and it's yours if you want it.
Some of the only truly good memories I have from that glitziest of hills are the handful of turns I made back there and the look some tourist lady gave me when I popped outa the limber pine onto the groomer at the top of Porky. My moustache, drooping every day further below regs, caked in snow when it hadn't snowed in days.
The hard truths that take lifetimes to grasp don't first arrive as welcome rain drops on a light breeze after a three week drought, they hit like a 2 am tornado. Just as convective storms are still hard for the atmospheric science hippies to pin down, these lessons, or insight, whatever you want to call 'em, do what they please, and you have to be paying attention at all times or it'll be years later and you'll sit up with a jolt because there was something to learn from that one moment, way back in 2012 or something, that you can't quite visualise. Scientific understanding has taken millennia for this same reason, that most folks didn't know how to understand what just happened when all they could see is the black of the receding tornado and their belongings scattered hundreds of yards or even miles away.
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By the time I hit the top of the King last winter, I was scraping rime off the gnarled 5-foot Pinus albicaulis to chew on for water and hoping the feeling in my chest would recede. Four years of knee problems and anxiety and the fitness I spent all those years cobbling together is long gone, with the weight my far-northerly genes seem prone to add when I'm out of commission complicating things further, and that easy 15-minute hike took me probably 45, for most of which I was out of breath.
The view is the same, that slow spin to take it all in, one more time. Maybe that was the last, I don't know. Alterra hasn't made things better up there. They can't significantly alter the landscape. They are trying, though. They are having success pushing out the locals, too, as they are in all of their gathered holdings, legacy and otherwise. Heather Hansman and Hal Clifford have documented this part of our world better than I can. Maybe it's obvious, maybe not, but when a large portion of a corporation is built on past legal misdoings--think Intrawest and the fraud they or at least stakeholders in the org committed--one has to wonder whether there's ever any goodwill at the heart of things. One can't escape these things, only ignore them, and there's a line I can't cross. It hurts. It feels like I can never go home, and yes, maybe I should read that book. I tried Look Homeward, Angel, but never finished it and I associated Wolfe with Kerouac too much and got bored. I grew up at the exit of the valley, where the lahar fill spreads north and west and flattens the land. We didn't leave to be gone, but to try to find greener pastures, and yes, the joke writes itself. Enumclaw averages almost 60 inches of water a year, pretty much all of which falls as rain. Ashland and Ogden get less than 20, and BoyCee many years never receives more than desert-level water.
From the top of the King, one can see peaks of all shapes, exotic terranes, volcanism old and young, forest, water, and even a little bit of desert. The constant change and illusion of permanence. The Emmons, that murderous and beautiful and terrifying glacier, is the biggest thing. It becomes the whole western sky if you don't look away. It is magnetic, the largest area of any glacier in the lower 48. If I could choose my death, which I don't want to do, part of me hopes it's underneath another lahar, down on the White some cool fall afternoon, oblivious and calm behind a giant redcedar trunk when the ground shakes and I have a few minutes to understand, to take it all in one last time. As I said, I don't want to choose. I hope I'm old and crazy, yelling at all the tourists downtown, some jerk of a business owner calling the cops on me again.
That run wasn't four turns, or even forty. I was gripped, bordering on scared. Such a strange feeling in a place I'd long felt at home and comfortable at speed. I dropped into the Toaster, the third line skiers' left of the peak itself. I'm sure it's got other names, and I can't even begin to care. The line is steep, with a nice, deep crux, and an immediate exit onto the huge apron. I couldn't open it up, couldn't even get comfortable until I hit the groomed exit, avoiding DFF because I was too tired to make more shaky turns in uneven terrain. Too pissed at the kid at the saddle who said he'd patrolled at Crystal for a year but never returned cos he thought it was boring. I'd wanted that job, more than I've wanted most things. Tried, even. Wasn't cool enough. Baugher ignored the recommendations of his assistant, the Snow Safety guy, the wife of the ski area owner, and several of his most senior patrollers. I never even got a chance, and I will never pretend I'm not still bitter. That anonymous and ungrateful 20-something trustafarian drove that home well and good. I was so pissed at him I ignored the tightness in my chest and the scratch in my lungs, and only really took a break when I could dig my brakes into the chalk on the summit.
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I feel like I am starting to learn, though, as though I can recognise the colour in the clouds and know that hail reflects or refracts light in a way that in mass quantities will turn the sky green. That green sky in turn has showed up before tornadoes, so maybe it's time to head to the basement. I am doing PT, three days a week, grudgingly each time. I know my injuries, now, or at least have some understanding. I know that this is a long, boring stretch and that doing the PT helps, while skipping it will result in not being able to walk and needing crutches just to heat the tortillas.
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I think there's a transceiver gate at the top of Chair 8 now, the start of the hike out The Arm. When I was bumping chairs at the bottom of 5 in '002, there was only a threatening sign with lots of red and firm admonishments. Everyone sorta self-policed, and the winter of '99 was fresh in mind. From the gate, one just starts kicking steps, grateful for any shorter person who went first, pissed at all tall dudes and snowboarders. Tall dudes just step too far, but snowboarders didn't really kick their steps. Something something "my boots are more comfortable than yours" and you all can go
Anyway, the snowboard steps would slope outward and even with tele boots, the traction would be garbage. Best if it was a short and experienced alpine skier, so the steps sloped inward and were close together. Many steps make light work, something like that.
There are some steep steps, and the terrain rolls parabolically away such that the only way to really know your line is to follow someone who does, or just guess and check. There's only a few big cliffs. You'll be fine.
Who am I kidding? The Arm is huge, and consequential. Don't french fry when you should pizza. It's rewarding, too, with long and challenging turns, deep, unsettled snow that can rip out easily in the steeps, but a few lower angle ramps. It's a circus most days that follow big cycles. There was one day out there, I was on that big ol' red Seth Morrison. It was late in the day, the afternoon angling toward shoulda-been-back-to-the-E-Lodge-by-now light, and it hadn't snowed in a week. The wind coming up the Swift Creek drainage over Lake Ann had been slowly depositing grain and feather, and the week-long cold snap and its attendant drying had kept the snow soft. Each convexity would hide a deep turn in the lee, several pillows unevenly spaced all the way down into the creek draw, surprisingly deep. It was quiet that afternoon, just me and a couple other lifties. At the exit we pulled left, silent, followed the traverse over the westerly branch of White Salmon Creek and out onto the bottom of Daytona, and out the cat road from the bottom of Chair 8 as we'd missed last call. Another day, another dollar. So many ghosts back there, real and imagined.
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I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. But still, this is how my brain tracks.
Title from the last track on Jason Isbell's first record after he got sober, the one with the song everybody cheers when he says he swore off that stuff, forever this time. It sounds trite, and instead it's all the feels. And that More Guns Walleye character can take a long tumble off Mt Ogden.
Sunday, October 22, 2023
Wherever you go, it's bound to rain.
Everyone knows that when you list skiing, Colorado is number 1.
Everyone knows that when you talk about the best skiing place you have to go to it's Alta. No, it's Jackson. No, it's Japow. No, it's Stowe in a Nor'Easter. No, it's Bridger when the Cloud wait that's Jay, wait, what if they's a hurricane and Sugar and Beech are open in October on like 36 new and, no, it's Mammoth in May, but, no, that's Alpental in May, and
Sorry. I'll start over. Readers of this blog* will know that we do not choose bests without at least having our tongues firmly planted in our respective cheeks, if we're not telling outright lies. (Thanks, Richard Russo, I think. Read his stuff, just the same.) If I make a list, I leave spots open on purpose. Or we make a top ten that's like 40 or 7.
There was one turn, though, one that cannot be beat. It was somewhere near Flush Gap, whether above or below, I cannot remember. It was a Thursday in February, the day my friends in a band I used to be in released an album, with a party in some joint in Tacoma I can see but whose name I've forgot. This particular turn was a left, or a right, it doesn't matter particularly, but it was a turn. I was on the ol' Jaks, that beautiful matte orange beast, maybe the last actual Karhu ski, maybe not, I can't recall when K2 knocked down their door and ruined everything.
Title is the second part of the line from Suzy Boguss' "Like the Weather". I don't know, I just really like that song right now. I even tole Amy last night it was my favourite country song of the moment. Still, Interstate Love Song. There's a reason it's got something like 333 milliones of listeners on the Spotifier.
*Joke's on me. There aren't "readers of this blog".
Thursday, October 12, 2023
If it's anywhere, you'll find it.
The stretch of US 40 from somewhere east of Duchesne through somewhere west of Vernal could be anywhere. It feels more like the Great Basin to me than anything, probably because I know how that feels more than I know the Rockies. The highway curves around the north end of the Uinta Basin, empty when it's not strewn with those sorts of dreams and garbage that pile up in the unwanted places. It's You-inna, bee tee dubs. Utah. Just nod. This zone is best at speed, just an isolated, dirty section of highway otherwise surrounded by some pretty and interesting country. It's completely unfair to judge Roosevelt for being hard-pressed. Perspective, I guess. Folks live here, have for millennia.
To the east is Dinosaur, historically among the lands of the Fremont people. They predated the Ute and Paiute and Navajo. Dinosaur is known for its namesake, but it's a stark, beautiful landscape. Pink rock and meanders in the Green. The Uintas curve around the north side of the basin, protective or ominous, should you be inclined to any specific temperament. There's dinosaurs in them hills, of course. Turned to stone by the epochs. It's the rock that you see, though. From a distance, up close, from the grocery store in Vernal and the Church south of Naples. Ever present.
It's an empty country, this. Counting the miles, delineators whipping by the passenger window in the dark, pronghorn dancing off in the distance as though they aren't faster than just about any damn thing that isn't made of metal and physics and dreams. Silhouetted against the faded blue of that huge sky stretching from SLC to Denver. As you head east into Colorado at the town of Dinosaur, there's a conspicuous and somewhat mysterious ridgeline curving around you. Snake John Reef. It's a sharp little seam in the valley floor, about 6 miles long. Artemisia and Juniperus and sunbaked earth. The entire region is mostly sedimentary rock, layer upon layer upon layer. Streaks of colour.
Eventually, US 40 will drop you off in Steamboat Springs. I'm certain there's skiing there, but I've never stopped for longer than it takes to grab an iced tea and some petrol. You can head south to Wolcott and the Eagle River Valley, or southeast through Kremmling and up the Blue River drainage into that most storied of counties, Lake. You thought I'd say Summit, but if you're headed there, I bet you flew to Denver and hopped in a limo. Or teleported in on the third rail of some business jet.
Out in the open, the fields roll unevenly to the horizon, sheep and coyote and pronghorn and mule deer. Artemesia and emptiness and every so often, virga from a passing storm. The Yampa off to the south. A story in itself. Empty meanders through a quiet valley, skirting to the south of the archetypal cowtown of Craig. To the west of Maybell, it dives into an incredible canyon, walls a few hundred feet high or more. The canyon walls, the layers of sediment, and the millennia of erosion are reminiscent of the desert Southwest. Surprising clefts; a deep, cool river bottom. Friendly shadows. To the south, it's hill country until the Eagle River, where the Sawatch begin.
I grew up on the Wet Side, on a lahar plain. The trees come in close, dark and broody and wet. Fires don't happen too often, with the sort of consistently high hot-dry-windy index that plagues the Dry Side being impossible most of the year due to the ocean that's always just out of sight, over your shoulder. The peaks aren't visible from all viewpoints in and around my hometown, a sort of mountains-for-the-hills contradiction made yet more immediate by the forest you can't see through all the conifers.
The Bogus Basin Road is none of this. It starts out in town, just another city street. Harrison, a historic, boulevarded lane of sixteen blocks. You slide through the stop sign at the Elementary School by the old church, now being drawn and quartered like so much of the Treasure Valley, into expensive domiciles too fancy to be called houses, with tiny lots not much bigger than the building's footprint, and then the road just pitches up. Sixteen miles, with little relent save the half mile or less down into Miller Gulch. Twisting and turning, made more impressive by the consideration of this highway's history.
Time was, it was dirt, naturally. One lane, up in the morning and down in the evening. Before the houses, before the pavement, it was a muddy slugfest just trying to get up to the hill to ski. It's been paved since '62, after about 25 years of hoping it'd be too cold for mud and that the snow would be crunchy enough for good traction. It still gets a little squirrelly sometimes, especially in the band between five and six grand. I've never truly lost control on the road, and only once of any consequence in almost 30 years of driving. There are some corners, though, to which I give more deference than others.
Most of the new housing at the bottom of the road has come in the last fifteen years. This is editorialising, I admit, but it is out-of-place, at best, and at worst, a bad idea that should never have been permitted. There are more rooflines in this small little swatch of grasping nouveau wealth than in some entire boroughs in more tasteful locales. At the moment, it thins at the first right hander and ends at the second left hander. There are homes above, and some even ostentatious, but the worst of the ugliness is over, and one can see the foothills and Boise Ridge above it all. There's room for a hawk and a harrier, for a handful of deer and the seasonal sheep drive. Cattle in the spring in the draws, and the flies they bring looking to break the splatter of new-grass manure down before it dries and hardens and desiccates, unavailable until the Monsoon finally makes it this far north in late summer. It's just grass and water, folks, no need to be afraid. These are rangeland cattle, that hippest of beef, the mythical grass-fed flatiron.
The Bogus Basin Road just goes on, and on, and even if it takes a hundred shifts, it's still better in a manual than any automatic. Better still if you have the fitness to climb it on your road bike. The descent is fast, interesting, challenging, and scenic.
Up above the Zombie Apocalypse house, there are tandem rock piles that from below look like a big bison and a little bison. Little Bison from above is Face Rock. Past the county line, there's a hard left hander that'll sneak up on a fool if he or she isn't ready, and in midwinter it dives into the shadows. Some weeks it doesn't melt out like the more exposed pavement just above and below. Past the big turnout that overlooks Daniels Creek, the road dives into shadows again, starting the really greazy part of the drive. It stays chilly, the northwesterly aspect not receiving any meaningful sun until March. Not coincidentally, it's here at the Ten Mile that you'll likely catch the slow driver who will not pull over for anyone. In our 100% completely totally scientific polling of a very representative swath of Treasure Valley residents, the driver will likely be in a large-to-huge truck or a very capable Subaru. (Okay, it's me, Amy, some BBSEF coaches she worked with years ago, our paid High School intern at the shop, Parker, Legendary Bear National Team Member CarHams, and Ryan (The Owner).)
Some days the snake is ten cars, sometimes thirty. One Sunday last year, it was vintage Puget Sound stop-and-go all the way to the upper lodge, almost two hours. And I still found good snow because heads is trippin and they ain't got that shit on lock. (Sorry, the memory of that drive glitched my software.) I mean to say I skied Chair 5, where most folks never venture, even when that's the exact ticket for which they drove this twisty dervish of a glorious mountain road in the first place.
Heading down, it's always a bit bittersweet. I've never grown out of the desire to just live in the hills. The view is expansive, the drive easy if you take it like a sane person, exciting in the best of ways if you push it and there's a clear view. Sometimes it's second gear, sliding corners every so often, hoping it stayed cold behind you but knowing that somewhere along the line it'll get greazy again, that you'll drop out below the stratus deck, town glowing below in the early night, mist on the windshield, night skiers' headlights moving slowly up toward you, who knows what spirits looking on from the Purshia and hackberry. Just don't forget to let the trolls out at the Troll Gate. Brian Galbreaith tells us that they don't want to go home with you.
The light isn't cold, not this deep in the North Fork. Doesn't matter if it's snowing, or even if there's snow on the ground. It's Western Washington, and it really doesn't get cold. Nor is it threatening, mysterious, or any other damn thing, except dark. The rain is dark. The trees are dark. The light is dark. The Killing Woods that my buddy Todd talks about are here, of course. Grand fir, red cedar, Devil's club, salal, hemlock, rotting tree trunks and maybe an owl or two, Strix occidentalis and whatnot. There's a moment, every few weeks, where it's been puking and stayed cold behind the front, and the light just jumps. A painting.
The game was reciting what was ten miles ahead. It kept me awake. Ten miles above the DOT at the North Fork is Artist Point, buried a few months ago under the lower 48's snowfall outlier, that tiny convergence zone that centres on this huge amphitheatre, the Headwaters of the North Fork. The Nooksack doesn't drain massive square footage, but it is wet, all the time. Feet upon feet in a normal winter. Many species of ferns drip into the organic duff that clutters the forest floor. Slugs and centipedes and beetles and passerines.
The first ten mile was somewhere near Nugent's Corner. Highway 9 heads north to Canada. There's a market, and today a roundabout that wasn't there 22 years ago. The second, I don't know, somewhere south of the North Fork Beer Shrine. A random bend in a highway made of bends, in some trees along a highway buried by trees. I didn't really get interested until Kendall. Or should I say, I stayed awake most times until Kendall, when the dark got darker and the trees closer. Kendall's just about the 23 mile, and Maple Falls, home of Maple Fuels Wash-a-ton, just past the 25 mile. 35 is just past the Snowline, which is just upstream from Glacier, which is the last actual town on 542. Then comes 36, and I could start relaxing. The DOT is at 46, and then it's twisty, windy, steep, and sometimes gripping until the E Lodge just across the lake from Chair 1.
Just past the DOT, as soon as you cross the North Fork for the last time, there's a 90 degree left. It never gets any sun. My brother John talks about spinning a 360 there with Kelly Jo, who incidentally is both Craig Kelly's ex and one of the better cooks whose food I've had the pleasure of eating. He says she told him to do it again, meanwhile he's tryna get his BP down below 200/150. Another evening, heading up this time, Eli spins out in his old Metro, that green three-cylindered beast. I might be misremembering, but I'd just finished my EMT and I'd swear his heart rate was like 199. I checked.
Two mornings, same corner. John forgot his license--and I assume wallet, or he just had one of those moments--so he had me drive the Blazer. I didn't know the corner, just a couple weeks into my first winter at Baker. The sleet was tapping on my window on Garden, the streetlights a streaky orange. It was good going until the corner, having dried up out by Barclay, maybe the Haggen. That corner, though, just below the 47 mile, it doesn't melt. Or if it does, it's only so that it may refreeze again, and it was definitely refrozen. It was also snowing again, as evidenced by the DOT plow driver who pulled us out. John said he saw his life in a flash, like in the movies. Fortunately, the snow in the ditch by that massive Doug fir rootwad was rotten, crunchy, non-supportive. We stopped less than a foot from major problems.
Second morning, late that winter. I hitched up from Bellingham with my roommate and his buddy. They were seniors at one of the high schools down there, not sure which. Roommate's buddy, we'll call him Buddy, had an early-model Tacoma, long before they cost twenty fifty grand for a twenty-two-year-old model with 257 thirty billion million on the spinny thingy. Two doors and a canopy. I'll give him this, he had sand bags against the head of the bed. And a camp chair, which was surprisingly comfortable. The dark rolled past, snow from town, continuously whipping by at 60 or so, his confidence far outreaching his experience or skill, as evidenced by the ridiculously quick 360 he did not mean to turn at the left hander just past the North Fork bridge. The snow was going in the correct direction, toward the back of the canopy, then it slowed up until it was headed the other direction entirely. Without a beat, it stopped and then headed toward the back again, although at a much steeper angle now that he'd slowed down below 35. Buddy trundled the rest of the way to the E Lodge at codger speed, but we made it. Six miles he had to calm down, and he was still white as a Peanuts bedsheet ghost.
Somewhere on the first mile or two or three of the climb above the DOT, Shuksan appears through the canopy, that matriarchal Orca. The Price, the Hanging, and the White Salmon Glaciers white above the deepest green. October wet, August dry, March sunny break, she's there above the rest. The remainder of the drive is what you'd expect. Breathless anticipation, abject fear at 2 a.m. o'clock in the morning when there's a foot of variable on the highway and all you can do is hope the cat in front of your '87 GL didn't drive over the edge first, ghosts and those cold-day sprites, floating ice crystals no bigger than a flake of black pepper. A scree field that'll swallow a liftie's Jetta like a batter swallowing his chaw after a particularly high insider. It's sub-alpine, already, not even to four grand. Then, depending on the day, it's time to boot up, time to go to sleep, time to walk along the Chain Lakes, eat breakfast after Buddy calms down, or just sit in the September sun and watch the pika make hay, the sky eerily empty on the 12th of September.
Saturday, October 7, 2023
I love the bass when it's low and mean
That first hike was with a kid who, to be blunt, was one of those friends you're friends with cos you think your friends are friends with him, only to find out when he's not around that nobody likes him and everyone is friends with him cos they think somebody else is friends with him, but in reality, you're all just kids in your early twenties, unforgiving, and now, looking back, maybe dude wasn't that bad. Kinda annoying in that socially awkward way that a lot of us were in our early twenties, and we just judged him cos we wanted to think we were better. Obviously, if he pulled some Me Too shit or like killed somebody and joined the Proud Boys, then maybe we were right. Who knows where he's at, but we did some good hikes to some cool spots. Can't complain about that.
Strangely enough, it's Brett (I'm like 75% sure that's his name) who got me my first bike job, and damn near twenty years later, I'm still pretending to be a mechanic, building wheels in between those reveries of afternoon coffee, some sort of Scandihoovian almond pastry, looking out on a montane prairie, covered in snow.
The first time I actually skied in October was around Halloween, or a little before. One of those heartbreaking fall days you wish would never end. It had snowed a little up at Paradise, not much, but enough to scratch a few turns into some frozen melt-freeze in the blazing but radiationally ineffective sun. Patches of grass.
It's hard to say the turns were worth the hike, let alone the drive up from Puyallup. But then, if that's the math you're using, nothing is ever worth doing. I try to ignore that sorta logic. That day, let's say it was the 28th, probly '07, I just hiked until I found enough snow on a steep enough pitch, probly up around Pan Point or so. Seven grand, somewhere thereabouts. I say snow, but it wasn't really. I think I didn't even bother dropping the knee for fear I'd make too long a turn radius and be back at the car before I'd had my fill. Joke's on me, though, cos sixteen years later I still ain't found "enough". I get by, yes, but at this point my desire outlasts my ambition. There's always a wisp of yearning hanging in the air like some deep subalpine valley in January where one house has a fire and the capping inversion is visible, just a lazy line of smoke about three hundred feet above the chimney.
I won't lie and say those turns were good, but they were memorable. Scratchy, challenging, even a little painful on my unprepared feet. When I got back to the old Legacy, I probly shrugged, looked up one last time at Tahoma in the late afternoon sun, and headed back to town. If I'm reading the calendar right, it was the 30th, right after Junior fired me from Bonney Lake Bicycles of Sumner, Washington. The start of the only good month of unemployment I've ever had. The November turns that year outshone the October turns, but it doesn't matter.
October of '08, after getting skunked in the summer tryna ski Muir, Catherine was pretty gung ho about getting up there. It snowed early, and quite a bit. We were a day late, or maybe two, somewhere around the 12th. She met me in Puyallup and we headed up in my Legacy. Another one of those days, clear, cool, visibility unlimited. We didn't hit snow until above seven grand, what would be the toe of the Muir if it were a glacier. While swapping to skis and skins, we ran into a pro skier whose name isn't that important here. He was a full bedutchka to us, grunting and acting like we were in his way. No answers to our questions, just an impatient gesture and he was off down to Paradise. Any time I see his name today, I, too, grunt a little and act like he's still in my way.
The skin up from 7200' or so is long, long, long. Flat, in comparison to the sort of alpine lines most skiers dream about. I joke that the descent was the most exciting beginner run I've ever skied. You don't switch back much, just slorp and glorp your way along until the last few hundred vertical, where consensus holds that it's "steeper". The consensus holds, too, that the Muir Snowfield is only worthwhile for these early fall desperation quests.
Alas, the cognoscenti are correct. The view from Muir is terrible. You only see a handful of volcanoes, there are cracks in the glaciers above, the rock is interesting only if you like rocks and volcanism. The valleys stretch below you lazily, and the Tatoosh look small at this distance. The sun is benevolent instead of harsh, I mean, who wants that? The snowfield is long, and you'll probly just wanna get it over with cos skiing on a volcano isn't that special, is it?
You know what? Joke's on them. Camp Muir is incomparable. Millennia of volcanism tower over you, and this early in the water year, the underlying blue of the Cowlitz Glacier just over the divide peeks out from the crevasses, beautiful and ominous. I know what they can do, and yet I can't look away.
The turns, ah, the turns, you ask. They were, well, challenging. I'd built up excitement for the flat pitch, the long beginner run it would be, and then it was so sticky I had to hold each turn with all the leg muscles I could find. Tibialis posterior? Check. Soleus? Check. Adductor brevis? Check. I don't even know what those are. Tele's hard enough when conditions are ripe, even more so when they are long past. I didn't want it to end, but my legs did. The two-day-old hot pow skied like you'd expect in the direct sun, that exposed southerly aspect. The Muir fades skiers' left away from the Nisqually Glacier. It's so tempting to drift right and find the steeps of the Headwall, but there's no snow there off the glacier until the wet season systems build their snowpack, and it's not 1930 anymore. The glacier no longer runs to the bridge.
The snow was so sticky, in point of fact, all I could do was a 30 metre turn and catch my breath on the transition, and repeat. Eventually, the turns ended, the muscles could relax a bit. It's still a few miles of dirt to the car from Pan Point, but the hiking shoes felt like slippers and it was mid October and I was twenty seven, in the golden years where you still know everything and your body doesn't yet hate you for seeking it all out. Eyes up, the Tatoosh growing with every step, and then the flat of the paved lot and the bemusement of the late-season tourists. Low sun.
The third October day was a full moon, '013. It had puked at the hill, surprising for mid October in Jackson County. Mt Ashland is the tallest point, and by most standards it isn't that tall. Seven and a half grand, give or take. The highest point on the Siskiyou Crest, recognisable from a long ways away. The moon was low when I drove home from work in Medford, maybe a day or two before being truly full.
Amy was surprised at how ambitious I was when I got home. Usually we'd make dinner and mellow out on the porch, a quiet evening above the bike shop, the heat of summer long past and the hippies long gone to warmer climes. Instead, we threw everything in one of the Subies and booted for the hill.
The lot was empty. The snow was thick, and a bit orange from the town light reflecting off the thickening clouds. A weak warm front passed through while we were there, changing the snow between runs from the first run in high quality settled-but-fluffy to a challenging crispiness. McLaughlin off in the distance to the northeast, Shasta just east of due south. The first run was delicious, the second a passing grade, but barely. The warm air off the ocean was too much for the day old snow, and we called it a night. Halo around the otherwise bright moon, a strange glow emitting from the Cascades to the east and the Bear Creek Valley below.
That winter never happened. An early December storm dropped a foot in town on a whim. In the following days a burly Rogue Valley inversion set in and the snow just sublimated and the storm track never really returned. The Weather Service called it the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, to which the late Kim Clark added "Great" so he could just say GRRR. My last turns at Mt A were in March that winter, dodging potholes in what rotten snowpack was around, never once dropping the knee. I could never get a rhythm in anything that winter, and in truth, I haven't really found a good one since.
My last memory from that night was the ghosts of the Shasta Valley, Black Butte and Cottonwood and Anderson Grade and Black Mountain. Basalt. Dark shapes, distinguishable more through memorisation of place than recognition of shape. Old volcanism, uplift, and desert. Quiet, distant and immediate all at once. Impossible to repeat.
--
I could have named this after the John Denver classic Some Days are Diamonds, but that would be too easy, no?
Title from The Judds' Turn it Loose, which is kind of a nice easygoing country song for folks who don't wanna try all that hard. I mean, yes, I like the song.
Eagle Point gets its name from the eagle on McLaughlin that is visible in the shot above. I wish somewhere around the Sound with a boring name--like Burien or Buckley or Renton or Kent--was instead called Elk Head. That'd be fun.
*54-40 or Fight, but you know that.