I am almost 44 years old. Probly will be by the time you read this. I thought I'd be good at this by now. The season ends, and all of a sudden I feel like a beginner again. For so many years, I'd rely on inertia, ski until I just had no energy for finding it. Today, I can ski until last chair, take some pictures, and head off to some unknown. Everything just seems to end. I want to keep skiing, but, I don't know, I can't get to the snow.
Skied to last chair and took this picture.
Back at the beginning of April, my oldest brother and I made some turns up at Alpental. It was one of Chair 2's last days, after almost 60 years of service. Not coincidentally, our Pa was on the build crew, shooting footings and cutting runs. One imagines that when it was built there were wild mountain goats and like prospectors and stuff, but really, other than some small differences in style and a few safety measures all lifts come with today, it wasn't much different than the chair Dopplemayr is building to replace it. The skiing that day was like many days I've had up at the Pass, threatening rain until it actually does, alternating supportive spring slush and soupy mashed potatoes that just don't quite let your skis run the way you'd like.
International was exactly as it should be. Steep, deep moguls, long, crowded, gorgeous. I skied alright that day, nothing to write home about. Made some mistakes due to rustiness in the steeps or what have you, but it's been at least 15 years, maybe 16, and Alpental doesn't mess around. Terrain traps, treewells even when it hasn't snowed in a while, double fall-line stuff that doesn't go the way you'd expect, tall mountain hemlock that block the view and distract at the same time. The terrain around Chair 2 is especially rowdy. It stands head and shoulders above what most people know of skiing. Writers hammer out breathy listicles about places like Alta and CB and J-Hole, but Alpental just hangs out alone, almost unknown. Legit, as the kids were saying a few years ago.
Steeps.
My knees have been off for a while now, seven seasons as I type, functioning fine for skiing but fighting me sometimes when I ride the bike. I've had surgery, done countless reps of PT, gotten a PRP injection, and somedays it feels like I'm still 26 the way Stina claims I'll always be, but then I sit wrong or lay wrong and I come back to reality. Or something in one of the knees just hurts. The last eleven or so years have felt like a drawn-out dismantling of all the fitness and conditioning I built up in my 20s. A reduction to a baseline so low I don't recognise it. I've moved from state to state, friends have moved as well, even to other countries, and there are moments where I am alone, far from anything I knew or cared about. I've backed myself into a corner, with career skills that have become too expensive for many shops and yet not lucrative enough to live somewhere I truly like.
This past winter I hit a wall. I'd been at the same shop for eight years, with nothing other than inertia to keep me going. Skiing felt rote, just something I did between clocking out and clocking back in. Most mornings I hid how frustrated and sad I was from Amy, although I know she knew. I'd sigh, say I was headed to work, and leave as though I might not be coming home again that evening. It's hard to walk away from somewhere I thought I belonged, but I didn't belong, and never would, and if it was wearing me down to the point where something so central as skiing wasn't enjoyable anymore, it was time to move on, time to get going. The new place is nothing special, but my blood pressure has dropped a few points and I don't hate being there. There's promise, however small, that I can just settle in and slowly sand all the splinters off the veneer.
More steeps.
I've been rained on nearly everywhere I've skied. I used to take pride in just going anyway, but I rarely have the emotional energy for it anymore. John and I got rained on both at Alpental and at Crystal the next day, and it was fine. The snow was largely fun, soft and supportive. It felt like home. It was, really, at least in that I grew up in those hills, skied that snow, breathed in the pollen and drank the water. The views can be of forever, or of the forest around you and a gray you can't measure and a distance you can't see. Some folks run from it, others wax ecstatic and can't stop talking about the layers of cloud and the water everywhere, dripping,
dripping, dripping, off everything.
Not rain.
When John and I were up at my parents' house, I finally remembered to grab an old pair of skis I bought from some cat named Andrew, who patrolled at Baker back in '002. For the time, they didn't seem all that big, 195 cm, with a 29 metre radius. I thought they were powder skis, even. I had tele bindings on em, for heck's sake. The last day I remember skiing them was some time in '005, I think, with Pa and my sister-in-law at White Pass, before she married my brother. The day was exactly what spring skiing should be, a little uncertain, temporary, warm, with some surprisingly good turns to be had. It'd probly rained at some point, because the snow was clean and fast, that rarity where it never gets sticky. The grains are the size of corn cobs. Well, kernels anyway. I don't know the mountain all that well, even in memory. I found a line that just went and went, skiers' right of the detach, and like I tend to do this time of year, I just kept making the same turns. Same moguls, same spots on the groomers. Over, and over, and over. I'm not sure where Pa and my sister-in-law were, actually. I think they didn't want to ski the steeps with me.
White Pass is yet another singular Cascade joint, very much a local's hangout, not much in the way of lodging or even regional appeal, and as always in my view, is better for it. Massive fir and hemlock line the low peaks. Deep canyons from another epoch, volcanism both immediate and distant, both recent and ancient. Rivers nobody really knows outside of Lewis and Yakima counties. A highway, US 12, that is sometimes the only way across the Cascades when the storms stack up just right, itself an unforgiving mountain road with the commensurate frost heaves and constant threat of washout, streams in every draw, ripping in recent rain or the ever-present melt.
I ended up riding the detach a few times that day with some lady whose name I don't know if I even asked. I think we were skiing about the same speed. I don't really remember her at all other than the ghost of an idea. When I see those skis, the legendary and final Rossi Bandit XXX, there's some hint of the few days I was up to the task. My competition line down the Elk Chutes at Crystal, under the rope and over one of the only cliffs I've ever actually dropped. That day at White, or the time I tried to clear the Highway on the way to work at Baker. (You know how that went, I'm sure. Even if you've never seen Heather Meadows.) Paradise Bowl at Crystal, early March, 3° American and snowing like it didn't know how to stop, chunks of avy debris kicking up off those long, absurd tips. Knee almost to the ski. The King a few runs later, my glasses frozen over so I couldn't wear goggles, skiing blind through what some magazines claim is Top 5 Steepest Runs In Ski Areas In The US of A. I bet I didn't ski it all that well, but I don't remember anything of the run other than the ice cream headache.
So this one time I was at Whistler with my brother and we were riding the really big gondola with Dan Treadway (OMG SKI CELEB SIGHTING) and he had those funky over-the-head Oakley sunglasses and these skis and they were so damn cool and then I got em and then I got scared and then the other day I skied em again and they were actually pretty easy to ski and lotta fun and I think I'll keep em mounted and also did you see that those are Salomon 916 LAB bindings holy crap you should be impressed with me totally.
If I were forced to choose, I'd ski that good corn forever. People ask and then are always surprised to hear it. "What about the pow pow?" they say, as though one can't have any opinion other than what they read in a magazine or saw on some Tic Tac schreddit. I cringe at the sound of the complaint, but folks call slush and corn and whatnot "bad". To the point where they stop skiing just when the skiing itself is gettin' real good, and ski areas all shut down, and then here we are again.
Anyway, I want it to be sunny, but I'd settle for that transitional day, lenticular over Tahoma, threatening rain but too lazy to really succeed. Dodging fallaway cliff bands in the Alpental hemlock on Snake Dance, or some big turns on that long ramp off Piss Pass and eventually down to Lot 4. The moguls under Ariel at Mt A, or Greenie's at the end of a long season at Bogus, milking every turn for all it's got. Chair 3 liftline at Silver Mountain, or Sticky right under Chair 6 at Baker. The summit of Bachelor, volcanoes lined up for three, four hundred miles. White Pass, the moguls on Mach V and Hourglass, lofting off the cat track as far as I'm comfortable. Double 00 Chutes either side of Chair 6 at Crystal just tryna get one more lap before a long summer, snow melting and tumbling down the valley to the White, cold and clear and merciless.
MOAR STEEPS
-
Title from the incomparible Kate Wolf's seminal song about everything but what you think it's about, Here in California, of which couplet the second part is "love can rob you blind". Dang.
Last chair snow is sposeta be dirty. Or just dirt. And it should be May or June or July, but nobody believes me and that makes me real sad.
