The almost had 'ems and the broken bones

I think in this meme, the yelly lady is wrong, but indulging in common misconceptions, while the cat is right, but totally pedantic about it. Neither is "likable", which always says more about us and our societal mores than the individuals that are being studied. For more on this sorta dichotomy, I direct you to search JSTOR and prepare to do some mental weightlifting in regard to sociology and community/pop--aka armchair--psychology. Or you could just join me in giggling at our modern society's absurdities and frustrations.

 

The above meme and a conversation with Ryan (the Owner) about weathers, on which later there will be specifics, got me thinking for the umpteenth time about the function in our society of being right.  As in, knowing the correct answer, understanding a certain atmospheric pattern of flow, eating pasta like you're "supposed to", and so on.  Spoiler alert, slurping and being messy is wrong, no matter what certain cultures might yell at you from the sidelines.  It's never okay to make more noise than necessary while eating.  And it's okay to cut your spaghetti.  It's just food.

Anyhoodles (quoting our local weather pedant): getting it right. I've been constantly reminded of this sorta thing over the years.  It's often frustrating to me, because most folks act simultaneously like there is no value in knowing things and that if you make attempts to educate them for not knowing things, then you're the asshole.  Which brings us to how ski bindings work.

Hopefully this was not simultaneous prerelease. Keep your jokes to yourself.

Bindings are like meteorologists.  They are correct somewhere between 80 and 100% of the time, they require a little knowledge from the end user, and get blamed for things they do not control most often when the user doesn't understand how they work.  Weather folks in this day and age have so many powerful tools at the ready that they can predict to the hectopascal (1/1000 of the natural atmospheric pressure at sea level for those of you who aren't science hippies) how deep an East Pacific cyclone will get three days before one even starts to form.  They can predict how this will affect, say, the Boise Mountain foothills east of Boise, ID, in Boise Ada Boise County, and they'll get it right to within a handful of miles.  If you can read a map, which I know some folks can't don't have much experience doing, you'll notice there are all sorta ripples on the land between the Pacific and Idaho's misunderstood capital city, and if you understand physics, which some folks actively try not to do don't have much experience with, you'll know that ripples on the ground cause ripples in the lower atmosphere, and if you've ever tossed two pebbles in a lake, you'll know that ripples interact with other ripples and, well, you get the point.

Thing is, it feels like people are militantly anti-knowing-stuff.  Take the simple and not-so-humble binding.  It locks your boot to the ski. With minimal exception, it uses some sort of vertical lock on the boot's heel that engages and disengages in an arc, a spring to exert forward pressure through the boot's sole in a consistent fashion throughout the various compressions and extensions of the ski, and if it's the most common variety of binding, has at least two sorts of releases governed by springs that can be compressed or relaxed to stiffen or ease those two release types in case of a crash.  The obvious one is the heel piece that like goes up and down and stuff, and the less obvious one is a rotational release at the toe, managed either by a rotary motion of the entire toepiece or flappy wings that spread apart.  Marker useta make this binding with a turntable heel that hip folks back in the late 80s would get out of by rapidly twisting their boots rather than hitting the eject button that Marker engineers didn't really make all that accessible.  I'll find a picture if I can.  Otherwise, you pretty much push down on the heelpiece and step out.  At any rate, there's not much more to it.  Thing is, to my endless and constant consternation, it's the last thing that folks focus on and misunderstand.  DIN Release value refers to an adjustment that governs how easy and/or hard it is to do said twisting and/or ejecting upward out of said binding.  If your eyes glazed over, bear with me.

Oops.  Wrong DIN.

I wish I could get paid for every time someone has yelled "CHECK YER DINS" from the chair when somebody fell and their skis came off.  Or every time Unofficial says somebody gots ta crank up his dins.  Or for every comment on some silly internet reel when somebody does a backflip off a sweet jump and their skis just go straight without them.  Release value--the name the law goons require us mechanics to call DIN instead of calling it DIN, even though customers all say and know(ish)what DIN is and get confused by me saying "release value"--is only one part of the equation, just like how many inches of snow fell compared to what was forecast.  Folks will get het up when three days ahead of a small storm the forecast said 6-8" only 5" fell.  Never mind that these same folks can't forecast what time they'll finish dinner when they just started eating.  It took xijillions of whoserwhats of comprurtering power to make that forecast, and given all of the various variables the weather gnomes overshot by 1-3".  They knew that it would be cloudy and not sunny, they knew that it would be cold enough to snow, they knew when within a few hours, and they even knew within a few millimetres how much water would be available 300 air miles from the ocean after crossing every sorta ripple-inducing (and therefore precip-inducing) mountain and deserts that encourage frontal regenesis, and yet this very accurate forecast is somehow seen as a complete failure.

Beware the poisonous tail of the bent-back occlusion.

Which brings us to a point of sorts.  First day on the job, 1 December '007, Brad's telling me about bindings.  This is before my Legacy got stuck.  That's a story for another day.  This is after I froze my fingers helping Murphy install the awnings Ty traded for a lifetime storage pass.  He says there's forward pressure, which does all the heavy lifting, and there's DIN.  Then he's like "but the law trolls will tell you to call it release value."  Anyway, he says, and I subsequently verify through daily interactions, that folks will always be confused and that for the next however many years, you'll just be Abe Simpson yelling at clouds.  Most undesired releases are incorrectly set forward pressure.  Super boring, not a marquee word that everybody knows, but like that annoying cat at the top of this page, the truth.  That yellow-booted Look binding user I posted 55 years ago at the not-top of the page is a learning experience.  He could have twisted out of his bindings in a situation where he applied too many rotational yanks on the toepieces--given where he's (frantically checks DIN chart) likely set, at least 105 Nm, but probly closer to 140 or more--which is what the dang toepieces are for in the first place, or his ski mechanic was like "Forward pressure? What?!" and then they be havin words.

Closer.

All of this to say I'm tired.  There is so much easily available, correct info out there, and folks instead wake up and choose violence.  Focus on one thing, and ignore all the other things.  Decide, somehow, that a fairly random number isn't just a representation of ability and human worth and/or manliness, even though they clearly think it is at least that, but the literal, physical embodiment of it all.  That running a 7 makes you less of a person, or less of a skier, or both, than somebody stackin 16s on his Pivot 2.0 18s (and cracking them cos he can't use the provided pole cutout like a normal human, which, side note, has the added benefit of not destroying your skis' bases), or bending brakes to get his never-indemnified Marker Comp 30 (go ahead and fact check, I'll wait) to fit his 114mm Big Mountain Comp Destroyers, never mind that to a rational person like myself and most folks I know, having bendy tendons and boingy ligaments is far preferable to brittle ones that have been surgically repaired thirteen times.

Further.

You asked for specifics, so I'll give you some.  Ryan (the Owner) was talking to his daughter before his work shift and her school shift.  She was all excited cos there were some snowflakes falling out of the textbook Treasure Valley Inversion stratus deck.  She was 11.  I remember 11.  Any snow in town at all and I'd almost poop myself.  At any rate, Ryan tells her it's not snowing, it's just that the cloud has pollution or dust or something and the stratus (he called it fog even though it was above ground level) is freezing onto the particles and they are collecting ice until they're heavy enough to drift down and appear to us earthlings as snowflakes.  Which is, poetically, a succinct and accurate description of snowflake nucleation and snowfall.

There we go. That DIN. I even remember when this chart came out cos it was the first chart I ever used and now Salomon hates me or else WHY WOULD THEY KILL THE 747?!?!?!?

The other day, let's call it "yesterday", cos it that makes it immediate even if you're reading this in The Future, I rode Chair 1 at Bogus with a fairly big cat and his lady-friend.  Not sure if they's partners or on a date or just ski buddies, but duder was real hard tryna impress her.  Falling over himself explaining the concept of damping (killing vibration) and why he "needs" a DIN of 14.  If you look at that ever-exciting chart up yonder stairs, you'll notice there is conspicuously NOT a 14 to be seen on the chart.  He said, and I'm paraphrasing a little but only cos I can't remember verbatim, "If I run a 12, there's like pressure and I fall out when I land a big trick."  The woman unfortunate enough to spend a glorious ski day listening to Macho Man Randy Shrinkage talk about DINs reacted like my 7 year-old niece Abby did when I explained why I rented a 7-passenger Ford Flex when I was only one person.  A sarcastic "Oh yeah?"  Randy just plugged right along.  "Yeah, my buddy and I ran my DIN chart, y'know, like if you were renting skis?"  (Italics most definitely his, disdain heavy and judgment dripping.)  "I ended up a 12, but like, that was as a Type III."  (Again, his.)  "I'm a III++."

Now, even if you've never performed the simple task of running a DIN chart for a customer, you can still pick up from my tone that this cat was abjectly full of shit.  The lack of III++ notwithstanding, why should I care?  I don't, at least not about him, but it's this adherence to a misapprehension that pervades the ski world and at times makes my job harder, or at least more frustrating.  I have to waste time, time which I could spend on literally anything else, like breaking down cardboard or, I don't know, rearranging my metal scrapers, explaining DIN again, to another customer who doesn't understand physics or care that physics exists and governs everything.  I have to explain how, just like spoke tension vs deflection, DIN is one value and boot sole length is the other, and that on its own, DIN is meaningless.  If you look at my handy chart I stole from Salomon, you'll notice that to the left, where the body has more leverage over the boot, there are higher values, and to the right, where the boot has more leverage over the body, there are lower values.  Up to 2 DINs lower.  All resulting in the exact same amount of torque being exerted on the binding's springs.  Such that, if you have a boot sole that is 335 mm long and you just gotta have that 12 DIN cos yer buddies do, but you're only 5'9" and a buck seventy, say good bye to your Achilles' tendons and all of your cruciate ligaments cos that puts you in the same range as somebody who's taller than 6'4" and at minimum 40 ell bees more massive than y'all.

And, icing on the cake, you can't even chart a 12 as a Type III.

The legendary double e on a backflip.  Silouhette Bros on the Snow are yelling TURN YER DINS TO 37 but in reality, he probly overloaded his skis and they flexed away from him like they were rafflesia flowers opening and he their evil death stench escaping.  Release value doesn't even affect the situation at all.

- -

Title from the unexpectedly good and poignant Nashville country song Dear Rodeo by Cody Johnson, made even better by Reba McEntire cos, well, Reba McEntire could make a song about slug eating a mushroom growing out of dog poop good.

Warning: this post is fulla all sorta arcane minutiae and pop culture references you need to know to get all the jokes.  Wait.  This shoulda gone at the top.

The summer's beginning to give up her fight

 

The shot.  Lee Cohen, Utah Episode of Powder Mag, c 2000.

Pika are lagomorphs.  You will not be surprised that the native pika on Hokkaido is ridiculously cute.  North American pika, however, are also ridiculously cute.  Like, the bestest.  Pika like higher altitudes and a mix of broken rock and meadow.  They make their homes in various formations in covered gaps under scree and piles of talus, somewhere they can take shelter and can store their hay.  Pika make hay in the summer, the same as we do.   They dry it out on slabs and boulders, saving the heartier bits for winter.  Apochyphally, anyway, they store any plants that might be toxic behind or underneath vegetation that is easier and safer to digest.  The going theory is the toxins can leach out over fall and winter and be safe to eat by spring.

Pika are not endemic to any month of the year.  In point of fact, they are one of the few alpine mammals that do not hibernate in any way.  They prepare for winter, the same as skiers, seemingly frenetic in late summer when the light begins to change and daylight starts to noticeably shorten.

What is this new sense of time?

So much of skiing isn't actual skiing. Anticipation, planning, dreaming, grumbling, complaining, and in this modern internet-addled existence of ours, poring over vast metaphorical volumes of ad copy, summer sales, and if you're lucky to find them, back issues of other folks' memories from days long gone. There's only minimal snow to find, way up high and harder to access than the spring turns we often call "summer skiing". Even in my most ambitious days, I still never made any August turns.

This is Silly Season, time of prognostication, although this summer it got off to an early splosion of a start with the promise of a Super El Niño and all of the ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that that brings.  Y'know, confusing the thing you expect, climate, with the thing you get, which is weather.

Those long August afternoons, sunsets when you can feel the climatic corner being slowly turned, those aching State Fair sorta days when you realise just how much of a redneck you really are when you tear up just a little at the smell of a horse barn and the waft of fried onions you never even liked as a kid.  The tractor club across from the hot tub seller, you know, the one with the single-piston demonstration engine.  Sooner or later it'll be September, and then it may as well start snowing because October, also known as The Best Month, is about a week long and that goes by so quickly you hardly have time to enjoy it.

September come, please take this heart away.

I could rarely make it through August as a kid without pulling out my ski pants "just to see if they fit", or buckling the boots and clomping around our small living room in front of the dormant wood stove.  I'd make some excuse about how Ski Bonkers was in a couple weeks, and maybe we'd hafta go see what was left after all the folks more well-off than we were had picked through the end-of-season clearances back in March and April.  It was never very comfortable in the heat, never satisfying, but that never stopped me.  It's not about being satisfied.

I don't remember it ever being as smoky as it is this summer across the PNW.  It certainly could have been.  I didn't really know about fires.  I do remember one, or at least the plume above it in the evening light from town.  I don't even remember smoke on the Wet Side, for that matter.  The Cascades kept it all at bay, or I've simply forgotten.  August when we moved to Ashland was new and different, and sometimes meant standing on our little porch and trying to decide if that street lamp, conspicuously on in the daylight, was three or four blocks away.  It was probably three.

In three years there we didn't weather a fire near town, but the Rogue Valley is fairly deep and narrow and smoke from fires west of GP and any that snuck over Siskiyou Summit from California would get stuck.  Ash drifted out of the smoke-stratus, some twisted version of cloud seeding in an inversion regime.  Some days you just had to stay inside.

6 August 2026.  I think the correct exclamation is "ick".

I spent the summer of '99 running 3 and 10 and 11 at Crystal.  A couple friends from school, Peter and Dustin, carpooled with me.  Dustin and I would throw rocks at each other across Midway and then head home and maybe have band practice, or whatever else we could get into with what little time we had before bed and doing it all again.  Crystal is 40 miles from where we grew up, and though neither of us was good at staying below the speed limit, it was a long drive.  Tall trees, ten or more conifer species with some vine maple and devil's club and salal for good measure.  The White wandering this way and that all the way up the valley to the Park boundary.  Six miles of steepish, true mountain road and then the quiet base area, long before the instacrowd and all the tourists that seem to be everywhere.  I practiced driving my old '81 Tercel without the clutch, cos it occurred to me that my clutch might go out, and what then?  What if I didn't know how to match revs?  When I wasn't grinding gears, I'd turn the engine off to "save gas".  I claimed the power steering made the car's handling to jerky in the mountains, and that I was fine heading home from work with just my wits until I compression-started heading into the last corner at Silver Springs.

In August that year we had a surprising number of thunderstorms.  One afternoon I got booted from the top of Rex when a big cell snuck in from the south.  I was in the shack and didn't really watch it build, and once I was down in the base area all I could see was rain, which that year was like seeing grass on a golf course.  Another evening in the same cycle I sat down at the fairgrounds and watched two slow-moving cells light up the sky.  I lost count after over a hundred lightning strikes in a minute.  Continuous thunder rolling across the Plateau.

I ain't ever satisfied.

The light shifts, especially if you're north of the 45th.  Slowly at first.  The sun sits so high in July, the shadows are crisp and feel harsh.  The subalpine rocks act as something of a microscope.  Everything, time especially, feels slow.  As the light shifts, it softens.  Some of that is the now-inevitable smoke of the Western summer.  It feels like whatever's out in the trees is getting impatient.  You catch glimpses, maybe just a Douglas squirrel, or maybe some cousin of the skunk ape.  Bugs that haven't died off with the drying of the land get pissed, start acting erratically.  Or maybe I do.

On the wet side, bear grass is the definitive in years it chooses to bloom.  Some years it just shrugs and you don't see it.  Late July, early August, somewhere along the trail you'll see those goofy fuzzballs and think, wait, I haven't seen you since the last time I felt this way.  The last baseball game of my short season had passed, I'd finally got my driver's license, I'd got used to working a job, things changed, or colleges started letting the freshman class move in and start developing those incredible and incredibly unearned superiority complexes.  The bear grass, and the pika making hay.

Here in the desert, it's the rabbitbrush.  It starts blooming up high, first, 6 or 7 grand, little tufts of yellow and then an explosion.  Sunflowers, numerous buckwheat, globemallow, all are still flowering, but rabbitbrush is the last big wave.  For some, it's an allergenic nightmare, for others, a gentle wave across the foothills and a reminder that the burdensome heat will wane.  Once the wave descends toward town, the mornings have already begun cooling, and the sun just isn't as brutal.  

She feels the changes in the wind.

Fremont is the highest peak in a seemingly endless ridgeline draped with northeast-facing bowls that would make for some righteous turns were they not behind a locked gate.  The west face is bare shale along the ridge, utterly exposed to the westerly zonal flow that pummels the upper White every winter.  Sluiskin is the only peak near Fremont's elevation, and it's a spiky tower that falls off dramatically to the north, leaving nothing but thin air between the coast and this unforgiving alpine zone.  It is stark and somehow welcoming at the same time.  The valleys below shimmer in the heat late in the day.  The shadows start to play, and that mid-July focus loses out to what is already advancing autumn.  The sun still burns, and the ptarmigan chicks aren't big enough to leave the hen behind.  Everything feels fragile, tired.  Stuck between stations.

I can sit at the lookout for hours, shivering, my sweaty hiking clothes slowly drying in the wind.  I always lay my pack down with the back pad pointed toward the sun, hoping it'll be dry by the time I need to head to town.  Mid-August on the Wet Side is no longer hot like the 29th of July almost always is.  The trail back to Sunrise isn't steep, mostly a false-flat traverse over moderate exposure high above the West Fork.  Little puffs of duff erupt from each footfall.  My shoes will be dirty.  If you are looking, you'll probly see a pika or two up this high.  There's a lot of loose rock amongst the heather and fading lupine in which they can build their caches, hide from the November Pineapples and the late February snow.  There is krumholz fir and spruce and pine to anchor the snowpack somewhat.  

I could watch the clouds for hours, and never need to know their names.

Tahoma looms over everything, as you well know, even Fremont.  The upper White is 12,000 feet below Columbia Crest.  By mid-August, the glaciers are into their angry era.  Most of the winter snow has melted off, especially in this waning-snow epoch.  Some years, 1999, say, the glaciers will keep their blankets, but this year, 2026, they won't.  Booming cracks at the toes of these old giants echo across the valleys they carved.  The tumble of rock confuses the air even further. On the windward side below Sunset Amphitheatre, the Puyallup and Tahoma Glaciers regularly kick out debris flows and glacial outbursts.  The rock is anything but solid.  It is baked and rotted from the inside, temporary.

Usually, the flow is moderate, a danger if you're along Tahoma Creek.  Sometimes, it buries the whole Puyallup Valley.  Most folks don't really think about it on a daily basis; a thing that only happens once in a few thousand years.  For the cities down along Puget Sound, Tahoma is sometimes little more than a disappearing poster on the wall and an unearned identity marker.  

Up close, Tahoma is everything.  The sky, the ground, the weather, life, death, music, spirit, Maker and Destroyer.  The rough edges; rocks and till and sometimes trees covering the lower reaches of bigger glaciers like the Nisqually and Carbon and Emmons and Winthrop.  It is imperfect, constantly destroying itself.

Summit Lake under a late-summer-coated Tahoma.

From Fremont, or Burroughs, or Tolmie, or Bearhead, or Summit Lake, anywhere you are close enough to get a good whiff, Tahoma is bleak this time of year.  The Elkhead is vanishing, some years almost completely.  Glacial dust whipped up in afternoon convection, collected over the years, melting out, rocks and trees ripped from the upper reaches of glacial valleys, the ice looks both tired and wizened.  This mountain has seen some stuff.  The volcanoes up and down the Cascade Arc all start to gather insect debris, loess, juniper pollen, anything that a strong easterly can carry up from the desert.  Local Abies needles and bark dust.  Ghostly gray.

I remember where I was, when the word came about you.  It was a day much like today.  The sky was wide, and bright, and blue.

When I was younger, and to be honest, still today, mid-August was the corner around which the entire year turned.  The last two weeks always flow quickly.  I keep checking climatology for the last day it's possible to hit 100 here in the desert, even though after 10 years I know it's still a month out.  I start reading football prognostications, although that, too, is losing its luster with all the realignment and massive payouts.  Dr J says it's time to watch Div III instead of FBS, which I guess makes sense.  FBS is the Vail of football, now.

Autumn starts peeking out from behind the curtains in the high country.  It's sneaky, the colour appearing at the edges of shrub and forb leaves as early as the first week of the month, at least in the hot and smoky summers like this one.  Autumn is already here by the time September comes.  Time feels like it accelerates again, the days rapidly shortening, the mornings becoming cooler and the afternoon heat letting go sooner.  Everything is dry.  Fire season is months old now, not barely starting like it used to.  Most years we're lucky and the burning happens somewhere else, some years you can still smell the fire in the Doug fir down on 410 at Deep Creek.  The wind picks up, rustles the dried leaves and fading buckwheat. 

It's a lock.  There's no way we could be wrong.

-

Title from Emily Saliers' Indigo Girls classic, Mystery. Back when I drank beer, I'd start thinking about pumpkins.  I still do, just not in beer.  Maybe now that I'm almost 3 years sans alcohol I should start having PSLs again.

You may or may not have noticed some of the captions.  If you did, good for you.  Nerd.  100 double happiness points if you can name all of the songs referenced here today.  200 if you can get even one of the artists to come to BoyCee.  And play, as one does indeed own a bar here.  23 year old me woulda went.

Apologies to B Evans.

Lastly, D and I quit throwin rocks at each other when I spied a real good one on the ground right under 11's top terminal and jumped off the summer ramp.  Without looking.  For those who don't know, a 6-pack Doppelmayr EJ chair weighs like eleventy milliones and at a line speed of 5 metres, even while in the decel zone, the chair is probly doing a ground speed of almost-orbital-breaking and has a kinetic energy of, to quote Carlin, fuckin meow.  Ask me and my broken glasses how I know.