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.
