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.

-

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.

-

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.

Sendin postcards when they get there

 It took me a minute the other night to think of my roommate's name, but it was Rory. She wasn't actually my roommate, but she was dating Jason the bartender and he was my roommate, and somehow they fit on that tiny little Mt Baker Employee Lodge mattress.  The things we do for love, I guess.  Or short term ski area romance.  Anyway, Rory and I were having a chat about racing gates, specifically the citizens' Super G we'd just run that day.  Raven's Edge, I think the Howats called it.  I mentioned in passing that I didn't understand how I made up time on the second run, because I'd felt so much more in control throughout the first run.  Having never run gates before, I had no idea what it should feel like.  Rory just laughed, and said you know you're going fast if you're uncomfortable and maybe a little outa control.  Today that just sounds like race coach gibberish, but it was super profound to me then.

Yawgoons.  Learn the name.

Recently, our local hill was voted "Best Ski Resort - Readers' Choice" by the well-known ski magazine,  Newsweek.  As we all know, Newsweek has correspondents in all the major ski markets, like Äre, Innsbruck, St Moritz, the Vail Valley, Burlington, Cham, Santiago, Hokkaido, Scotland, the Eastern Townships/Memphremagog, Santa Fe, Cuyahoga, and the like.

Sorry.  I can't keep a straight face.  I honestly forgot that Newsweek existed.

At any rate, Best Ski Resort.  I won't dig into the list very far, other than to say that one of these things is not like the others.  They rate highly some familiar faces, like Telluride, Sun Valley, and Deer Valley.  Y'know, resorts.  Places with amenities like lodging, after-ski activities, and, I don't know, Maserati dealerships with complimentary Courvoisier served in Swarovski crystal with a side of blow.  Bogus just seems, well, bogus in comparison.  (If this setup sounds familiar, hear me out.  Ima do something different, hopefully.)  Without question, however, the only other joint on their list that's also on our list is Whiteface.  Fur might be commonplace in the town of Park City or the ersatz, ridiculously named, and utterly pointless Town of Mountain Village inside a corner the Telluride Ski Resort.  It stands out like a fur coat in a mud parking lot in the parking lot mud next to Chair 5, though.  And we try to park in the really muddy lots.

Sounds fancy.

The rangeland along the upper Arkansas south of Bueny is like a lot of the West.  Fairly arid, scrubby conifer and sage and aspen, which you can tell because of the way that it is.  Sheep country, if there ever was.  It's gentrified over the years, slowly at first, more rapid now as everywhere.  Salida has definitely arrived.  In the snow of a cold December day, though, it is a quiet winter scene of the sort we all dream about.  You can't see the accumulation deepen, but when you get to Monarch, there's six or eight and the Christmas Trees are holding better turns than you might expect.  The parking lot is half full, a lot of Texas plates this close to Christmas.  The bar is full, Texas drawls and cowboy boots and beers that don't cost a fortune.  It's cold on the hill, windy, inconsistent as the Rockies always are.  

Monarch has five chairs, with plans and okay for a sixth.  Runs the new lift will serve are already cut, and the new Skytrac triple is slated for completion this fall.  If you're not a nerd like me, you might not know that there was really no other option for who they went with on the new chair.  Skytrac's only drive terminal is the Monarch, named after King George III the ski area who bought Skytrac's first-ever drive terminal.  Skytrac is now owned by HTI/Leitner-Poma, but the cats who founded the company were former CTEC engineers.  Probably not coincidentally, the last full lift built at Monarch is a Garaventa-CTEC, and the other four are Halls, which, through a few M&A manœuvres, is owned by Dopplemayr/Garaventa.  The unsexiness of all this business speak aside, Monarch is in my book the best ski area in Colorado.  (And as we all know. . .)  There are arguments to be made, of course, even for Alterra-owned A-Basin and Powdr-owned Copper, but I just don't care.  Monarch is not where you go to be seen, it's where you go to ski.  And that, good people, is the entire essence.

This is a Monarch, but it's not one of that Monarch's Monarchs.

I've been to Burlington, WA, and the Burlington Coat Factory in the SuperMall Outlet Collection Seattle (actually Auburn), but never to Burlington VT.  As such, all I can do is dream.  Not necessarily about Burlington itself, but of all those towering ~ 4,000' peaks that frame the skyline.  (Did I actually say "towering"? Oof.)  There's Mansfield, of course, and Jay, but I'm not really interested in water parks or trams or in paying Vail for the priviledge of accessing the state highpoint.  I want the ragged rawness of Madonna and Sterling, at Smuggs.  The family-owned and -run Bolton, or the hopefully-not-too-too-bougie charm of Mont Sutton, just over the line in les Cantons de l'Est.  (Which is what you call the most English part of French Cannuckistan so that you can ignore names like Glen Sutton and Dunham.)  The Eastern Townships look like what a French prøtègé of Norman Rockwell would paint.  Snow, stout thickets of mysterious trees, gorgeous hills the locals call mountains, snow, cafés, brioche, thick wine from the old country, and probly a poutine or two.

This part of the world is by no means unknown, with Stowe just sitting there like a jewel waiting to be stolen, and Jay up there by itself, smug like a narco who actually got out of the game alive, water park and fraud convictions notwithstanding.  Burke in its corner, the forgotten cousin.  It's not the glamour, or the Boston accents off to do some weekend warrin', that I want.  It's the still-remaining mystery.  The certainty that it'll snow, even if it's not until next year.  And yes, the rain.  I swear, I'd learn how to ski in the rain again if I were there.

If we're parsing bests, and we are, we cannot ignore New England.  There's just so much history, so many little hills and big, so much life.  Little towns tucked into the draws and hollers, amazing views on the days where the sky turns blue and the trees stay white.  Names, gosh, they just roll off the tongue.  Smugglers' Notch.  Saskadena.  Sugarloaf.  Whaleback.  Saddleback.  Owl's Head.  Mont Bechervaise.  (Frantically checking if it's named after a cheese.  So far, no go.)  Bromont.  Catamount.  Yawgoo Valley.  Moon Valley, although that is now Titus.  Which makes me sad.  Big Rock.  Le Massif de Charlevoix, better known simply as Le Massif.  Mad River Glen.  Mont Tremblant.  Loon, Cannon, Wildcat, Plattekill.  Maybe none of them are Hash Tag The Best Skiing In North America Tee Em, but maybe, when the Nor'Easter sets up just right, one of em can be for a week or two.  If you've skied the Platty trees with a Laszlo or Brownski in a classic dump, well, hats off.  Supposedly it does get better.  I got not clue just how.

Do the trolls hide in here?

People ask me from time to time about my favourites, and I always demur.  Choosing is hard, even if it's options for gloves or goggles or helmet liners.  When it comes to where one should ski, it's so personal as to render recommendations null and void or at least more of an impressionist sketch than a real, hard and fast guide.  The truth is, even if the only option is Alterra, one should ski.  In sickness and in health.  If there are options, try em out.  The drive to Soldier isn't half-bad, easier for sure than to McCall, but folks here always go to Brundage or Tam and leave Fairfield to the sad losers who don't know better.  Like me and Amy.  Folks here are wrong about a lot of things, not the least of which is Soldier Mountain.

It's quiet in the loudest of times, and gets less snow than Bogus or Tam.  It hasn't trademarked the useless and untrue marketing phrase "The Best Snow in Idaho" like Brundage has.  There are only two chairs.  The lodge is small, and the parking lot unpaved.  There was a fire here not that long ago, and, unlike at least one recent late-season burn in the west is rumoured to have been, it wasn't started by the ski area to get around permitting issues.  They lost a bridge and almost lost the lower lift and the lodge.  Locals, as always, showed up and saved the structures.  The newly-open pitches are nice, even if the small stands of Doug fir that used to, um, stand here made for some interesting turns.  Soldier has what so many small family joints have, what so many corporate joints with their fancy chondotrams and gondobriolifts and giant blue bubbles and television screens don't.  Space to take a breath and clean air to actually breathe.  Belonging, or at least the room to believe you might could.  Small rollovers, unfamiliar trees, and some old folks from somewhere else who ski every sunny day because that's what they've done since 1949.  T-shirts with a snowcat or ski area logo for sale next to the always decent pot o' chili.  Good grooming, too, once the grass is covered.  They're open three or four days a week, and the local kids all yell at each other from the chair and cheer each other on.  (I'm sure there's some cliquishness here, like anywhere, but I'm painting an idyll at the moment.  Let me have my dreams.)

Best view of a 14er from a beginner chair with many Abies.  Also, since we're stating opinion as fact, best Abies: the fairly aptly named Shasta fir.  The big ones are off to lookers' right.  You'll just hafta imagine.

Mt Baker has the snow, and the terrain, and the absolutely stunning views, and on the face of it in the right crowd, you could easily call them the best.  They have that new mid-mountain chalet, which is gorgeous, and Don Wilcox's fever dream at White Salmon, the main lodge.  Hash Tag World Record Snowfall.  Legendary baked salmon.  And, unfortunately, the attitude to go along with it all.  A mean undercurrent from which you're never fully safe.  One of the rudest, most condescending coworkers I've ever had is one of the top muckety-mucks, and in his on-hill reports he sounds exactly the same as he did in the fall of 2000.  Baker is the personification of the common human misperception that because the place you are is legit, by extension, you are as well.  You could die inbounds at Baker, fairly easily, and folks have.  Baker's been shut down at least once by their liability carrier for exactly that reason.  Many folks then take this knowledge and run with it, believing that since they're alive, they've bested some demon that weaker folks can't.

Folks pass through, good folks, like Rory and Jason the Bartender.  People who stick, though, with few exceptions, are mossbacks, meaner than hell and hiding from something or other.  That fake-chill pseudo-hippie bullshit where you're always wondering when the hammer's goin down.  When the trustafarian in full Arc'teryx kit is gonna unleash a tirade on you for not smacking the icy chair seat with enough angst and wore out sheave liner.  When Howat's gonna just sell you down the river.

See?!  Super Fancy.  Best Ski Areas need Best Ski Area Bars.  Even if neither of us has had a sip since the last presidency.

To call something the best is hubris.  Unnecessary.  There are no objective measures that matter.  Snowfall? Okay, Baker wins.  Unless Alyeska does.  Or Alta.  Japow.  Erie, PA.  Or Bogus, if you can believe it.  Not season or monthly totals, but just last month we got more out of a two-day cycle than anyone else in North America in that same two-day stretch.  It's not just politicians and free-marketeers who bend the data to serve their own ends.  As well, too, also, do we only honour the amount of SWE that falls?  That sticks around?  Or do we start getting snobby and try to quantify what is "best"?  I disagree with Ski Utah, and even with Professor PowPow himself, Jim Steenburgh.  Utah is not the greatest snow on earth, just as Big Sky isn't the Biggest Skiing in the US, let alone North America.  (Although, they seem to have backed off that particular marketing angle.)  The quality of a turn, how it feels in the moment, is so heavily personal, and effected so aggressively by mood, and ability, and timing, and add in your own metrics, that measuring it is as impossible as it is unnecessary.  (Thanks, Stacie.  I'll never misspell that word.)

Is Bogus the best precisely because of that ephemeral, unknowable thing?  Some unknowable that we don't have any idea what it even is?  Or is it because some random in town built a bot to stuff the ballot box?  Does it even matter?  To that last point, I'd say no.  It does not.

This is what Rossignol was talking about when they said "BEST. DAY. EVER." Bonus points if you can name that chair.  Double happiness points if you know what kind.

I can't remember exactly which turnout I waited so long at, but it was one or two or three below Cayuse, on the north side.  410 is a winding tunnel of a mountain road in the Park, always wet.  Maybe not under that one heat dome, the one that burnt Lytton, BC and set records I pray to God will stand for millennia, but otherwise, wet.  It's gorgeous, and the air is clean even with the higher burden of motor tourism this modern era hath wrought.  That day, I don't even remember which summer, was quiet, to the point where I probly shoulda maybe not planned a long descent that ended with a mandatory hitch or two-hour skin.  Who are we, though, if we always follow what is "best"?

I started the day up at Chinook, mostly skiing the east face, looking down the upper American River drainage.  After a few fun-but-perfunctory runs, I figured what the heck?!  I'd been considering a long tour, long for me anyway, for quite a while.  Top of Yakima to wherever I landed down on 410.  I started by booting up the north chute to the peak itself.  Steep, almost a crux at the top.  The turns in the chute were smooth and creamy June corn.  Every turn that day was.

Upon exiting the chute, I traversed left under the cornices that hang menacingly off the the north side of the west shoulder of Yakima, and when I saw the longest descent on the pitch to my right, dropped my right knee and skied to a small bench where some older folks on AT gear were collected, looking up at the ridgeline.  One of them asked if I'd heard it behind me.  "Heard what?"  He pointed with his pole, looking a bit shaken.  I turned around to look, hoping to see my sweet turns, only to see them covered by a slide.  Part of the cornice had gone, maybe two fridges wide.  (I grew up at Crystal, and at least then, some lines off the King were named by the size of common debris slides.  Hence, Appliances, Toaster, et cetera.)  The rubble crumbled as it went, but I'm betting it woulda broke a leg or two, or worse.  I raised my eyebrows, shrugged, and headed off the bench toward the upper end of Klickitat Creek.  From there, it's tree skiing to the road.

Mt Bachelor is the best at rime in the country.  This is just a lodge, halfway up the hill, during a short storm in April.

It took almost two hours waiting, but finally a gray sedan pulled up.  There were four Mexican dudes out on a drive, super friendly, really interested in what I was doing.  They didn't speak much English, and I even less Spanish, but we got the point through gestures and laughs.  They gave me a ride up to Chinook, one of the fellas even taking off his shoe and using the whole thing to tie the trunk down over my skis.  Up top, we took some pictures, and they tried to ski on my tele boards.  There aren't any real easy pitches on the east side of the pass, and they all fell a bunch, but they were clearly enjoying themselves.  I was as well.  We hung out for a while before I realised how late it was getting, and I headed off to town.

The turns were solid that day, but with repetition and exposure, not actually remarkable in the arc of my skiing life.  I am privileged when I say that, I know.  I can't measure anything about those turns, even in memory.  They are long gone, the snow melted two decades ago along with my recollection of any individual motion.  Thing is, though, much like Bogus last month, I have no doubt that for that short time, those turns were the best in the country.

See?!

-

Title from James McMurtry's I'm Not From Here.  One of many incisive tunes from one of the best storytellers and social critics of his or any generation.  

A voice I just wanted to believe

 It's been a while since either of us have published, though I have some things in the works.  For whatever reason, maybe the high mineral content at our new house clogging the pipes, the open taps aren't pouring much water.  However, since it's the time for hype and absurdity, I gotta do something.  Anything.  Powder (online, derogatory) Mag has some of those ever-present listicles up on they site, so maybe I'll do my version of a reaction video.  Which, bee tee dubs, are kinda lame.

Supposedly this is some place out east called Gaspésie?  Or Chic Choc?  I don't know.  Sounds fishy.  Everyone knows Colorado is the only mountains.

Top 10 best ski areas in Colorado:

1. Monarch

3. Woof Crick

3. Loveland

6. Cooper

9. Kendall?

Pretty sure this is just past the Flatirons.

Top 10 skis:

1. Not Bode

2. Corinne Suter

3. OH S#!T I SAID SKIS

4. 2006 Head Monster 88, but only in 175, I've decided.

5. Japan

6. Dammit, I meant skis!

9. 2003 Rossi Bandit XXX

7. Really, Bode?  Guy's a nutjob.  My skis are better than all the others cos one time I got drunk I mean my mechanic cut a hole in my I mean he took off a thing? Aw, heck, I don't know.  Buy my stuff.  I swear they're totally not just cast-off Elans.  

10. I don't know, these?:

1000 Skis. The name is Really Dumb Marketing, but then, I'm old. I'll go back to listening to Ralph Mooney, who, unlike the object of failed 90s alt-rock band Weezer's only half-okay song El Scorcho, did not shred the cello.  The pedal steel, however, he could bend more than this cat will ever bend these skis.

Top 10 best beer towns in ski land:

1. Joke's on you. I don't think Fairbanks is a beer town.  

I good at stuff.  What else you got?

Top 10 best Gore alternatives:

1. Bill Bradley

2. Flannel.  The useder the better.

3. A chamois shirt.  Doesn't hafta be real chamois.

4. McCauley Mountain.

5. Any ol' hoodie.  Unless it's like Kid Rock or some shit.

6. Carharrts. Not waterproof, you say?  Then don't fall.  I mean, I've never fallen.  Ever.  I don't have a broken toe right now from crashing at work, you have a broken toe right now from crashing at work.

9. Diamond Rio's debut record.  So much good twang.  Bend them strangs.

11. West Mountain

Then again, Catamount looks pretty good, too. AND IT'S IN TWO STATES. WHEEEEEEE!!!

Top 10 best ski areas that I am thinking about right the heck now:

1. Cayuse Pass

2. Beaver. The real one. 

3. Mt Ski Gull

4. Beech

5. Bear Valley

6. That one spot above Bunny Flat

7. I think there's some runs on the other side of the Eibsee?

8. Mt Lemmon.  Just ax the Sonoran Avalanche Centre.

9. Bruce Mound

10. Dry Hill

11. Big Rock

12. Skiers' right of Chair 6.  I'm betting anywhere.

0. I just remembered Lost Trail but reformatting is hard.

Going with this skiers' right of a Chair 6 for now.  It's definitely totally my favourite run at Bogus except probly LuLu, which is like, a beginner run, but don't tell anyone cos I'm the best skier on the mountain hash tag G.N.A.R. points or whatever is over there by Chair 5 or like woods and stuff.

Top 10 best preseason workout moves:

1. To Bethel, Maine.

2. Coffee.

3. Sauna, unless you're like me and can't sauna even though all your ancestors did and you're named after Finland.

4. GET YER DAMN BOOTS FIT.*

* Oh wait. That's for me.

11. Burrito

LXXVII. If you have a few spare bucks, go see an actual ski-experienced PT or trainer.

Or, I don't know, try to copy Thibau.

Top 10 best doughnuts:

1. Cruller

2. Glazed Old Fashioned.  Seriously.  If it were a song Ted Cruz would hafta rate it higher than Desperado.

3. The ones you sit on if you gots the hemorrhoids.

4. Mighty-O.  I don't care that they're pretentious.  I don't care that they are in Seattle.  They're the only doughnut hall I'll forgive for not doing crullers.

3.5  Happy Doughnuts at the corner of 2nd, 2nd, Main, and Stewart in Puyallup.  You read all of that right.  AND THEY DO CRULLERS.  (Don't @ me if my info's wrong cos it's 14 years old.)

7. A good apple fritter.  If you make a bad one, we fightin.

17. For some reason, Bloogist changed my formatting in the middle of this post.

27.2. The best seatpost size.

9. Bismark. Higher if the chocolate is actually good, but I ain't choosy.  I'll even eat a Safeway Bismark.

Really, BoyCee?!?! THESE EXIST AND YOU INSIST ON COPYING PORTLANDIAN MAPLE BACON FART SNACKS????!?!?!?!

Top 10 ski songs ever:

1. O Furtuna Imperatrix Mundi

2. Fanfare for the Common Man

3. Toccata and Fugue

4. La Valse

5. Daphnis et Chloé. The whole damn balet.

6. Tanz uf dem Anger

7. Hoedown from Rodeo

8. Dvořák's 8th Symphony, 1st movement

9. Brahms' 1nd Symphony, 4th movement.

10. Habanera. Or if yer a snob, "L'amour est un oisseau rebelle". IKYKYKY.

10. Oh, did you think I meant rock songs? Ha. I win.

11. Okay, fine. School of Fish' Complicator, Toad's Something's Always Wrong, INXS' Don't Change, Emmylou's Where Will I Be?, PJ's Rearviewmirror, Turnpike Troubadours' The Bird Hunters, Patty Loveless' version of You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive, Tool's Pushit (cos why not?!), Highway 101's Long Way Down, Dwight's Blame the Vain--the one with the B Bender Keith Gattis built after working on Clarence White's original that Marty Stuart owns, Fleetwood Mac's Dreams, The Cranberries' Dreams, Patsy Cline's version of Sweet Dreams, Willie and Emmylou and Daniel Lanois' version of Daniel Lanois' The Maker, X's version of Dave Alvin's 4th of July, and Dave Alvin's psychadelic solo version of Long White Cadillac from Romeo's Escape.  Are you happy now?

Actually, too, also, now that I'm thinking about it, "Happy Now" is a real banger, as well.  As the kids are saying.

- -

Title from Dave Alvin's Harlan County Line, which you should listen to right now before you move on to other things that aren't as important as listening to Dave Alvin and besides Harlan County Line is like the Colorado of Skiing of music.

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

A nice snowperson.  Silver Queen lot, Bogus Basin, Boise County, ID.

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.

Oh, dag, I loved this ski.  Maybe it was the time in life, like that second Death Cab record.  Who knows.  Still, armpit deep, man, it's a trip.

I can remember many ski days, from all the years.  I don't have perfect memory, like I don't have perfect pitch, but there are just some things that stand out.  The weather the only time I threw a no-hitter and the way Kellen Hall's Pa accused me of cheating.  The second and last homerun I hit, the one that Jewett Gibson argued and argued over until the ump called it a "ground rule triple". Which doesn't exist, but whatever.  Who's counting?  Who's holding a grudge? I'm not mad, yer mad.  I hit that homerun off his younger son, should that matter.

That one run in the Cache Run, February of '99, all alone and, not gonna lie, a little afraid of how things would turn out.  So clean, the first time I ever truly understood.  The Tatoosh, summer of '008, my knees bruised from wearing knee pads under my Carhartts cos I forgot my bibs, to the point where I had to tell Catherine to look the other way at the bottom and top of a couple laps so I could remove or install the pads on my knees with my pants down.  That last run in utterly beautiful summer corn, smooth, unending, ending too soon.  A warm and unforgettably satisfying Guinness at the trailhead with my hummus and Tillamook cheddar and grip of spinach pita pocket.  A long day with a good friend.  That whole pitch, several pitches really, hoping it would never end and I'd somehow simply ski off the edge and never be seen again, like Bo Jackson in '87 after that 91 yard TD and he kept running off the field and to me, six years old, he ran off the earth and to some finer plane, some elevated place where folks like him lived, Usain Bolt, Mikaela Shiffrin, Jimi, Beethoven, Florence Price, that sorta place.  I didn't, though, I just pulled up at the bottom, gave Catherine the low-pole, probly (maybe not, but it was My Thing) said "I like skiing," and kicked the skis off.

That one turn, though, near Flush Gap, February of '006, may it reign for eternity.  Hand forward, snow to my tricep.  Inimitable. Unforgettable.  Lee Cohen deep.  Like the shot that I could never shake, the one that precipitated our ill-fated move to Utah.

This one.  Shot by Lee Cohen, aka, well, The Best. Powder Magazine, way back when.  The Utah Issue, somewhere around the turn of the century. The cover, if I am not mistaken.  You will not be surprised that I still wear leather gloves because of this shot.  I still prefer race poles, too.  Just look at that shadow.

Chet said he was scared, at the bottom of Lower Northway.  He pulled the cord.  I can't remember the words, but I was as breathless as he.  Two straight runs, deeper than anything else I have ever skied.  Deeper than everything else.  Impossible, like the first time I heard Interstate Love Song, or Loowit from the top of 6 on a cold January Monday.  Chet was the Snow Safety guy at the time, number 3 on Patrol.  I bought my second car from him, a red, red GL.  That glorious little wagon and I grew up together.  Moved to Bellingham, failed at school, skied for two winters of ignorance, bliss, lust, who gives a shit cos the second winter, '002, right after we all lost our innocence, or at least us Gen Xers, was yuge, like an ego or a sophomore crush.  One stretch, I skied 20 straight until I couldn't even put the boots on.  That day I drove Twig to the doc after he thought he blew up his knee, where I almost hit Amy Howat in downtown Bellingham with 3 feet of rooftop snowpack when the ski rack finally released the last 3 weeks of puke, I mean, what are the chances of nearly hitting the owner's daughter with a pile of snow 60 miles from work?  That kinda winter.  And still, that day out North, through Flush Gap in armpit-deep, that stood above.  I don't remember the bus back to A Lot, but I remember the grader finishing the Northway Lot and the next run, you couldn't tell he'd been there. Eight inches in less than two hours.  That Cascade Spring speciality.  

I was probly buried like Snowy Owl the 8 foot rock.

I remember now; it was a left turn.  Right foot out front, left knee to the ski, that gorgeous Finnish plank.  Right hand ready to plant the pole, left foot flexed like a bow.  Right tip barely above the snow, left ski buried along with those Bumblebee T1s.  Perfection, if that were possible.  Appropriately, I'm still paying for that turn all this time later.  I can't tele right now, the tendons and ligaments and weak muscles all conspiring against any ambition I may have once held.  Anxiety like a block of lead in my chest.  It's a joke, really; all those years just ended, like any run does.  Reflection Lake and Catherine's green 5-Speed Outback after that long and immeasurable Tatoosh line; the Northway Lot and the bus, Chet frantic on the radio telling Mountaintop to close the gates; the bottom of Ariel on Closing Day of 2013; Sweetzer Summit in a snow flurry, Thanksgiving of 2016; Acme in October of 2000 in the red GL, Katie singing along with Adam Duritz, "gettin right to the heart of matters", knowing, without really knowing when, that something else was next, something different but similar.  More yearning, more longing, that very characteristic Gen X nostalgia for something still here and happening, or conversely, chasing after what is already gone; what was never really there in the first place.

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".

If you stay, it'll get better.

 The last turn I made at Mt Ashland was the most painful single second I have ever experienced.  Broken arm, blowed out knee, wisdom teeth, lifelong back trouble, migraines, none of that hit like that moment by the rental shop, the only tele turn I attempted in all of the nearly snowless winter of 2014. 

Mt Ashland, Siskiyous, State of Jefferson.  Not exactly Mecca, but you'd be wrong to omit it from your dossier.  Just look at that gorgeous Riblet fan up there!  Seriously, get after it.  Photo via mtashland.com

The hills above Ashland, Oregon have a pretty diverse plant community.  To the northeast of town is oak savannah, right up into a high treeline made by Doug fir and ponderosa.  Down low, it's almost barren, reminiscent of the Great Basin.  Rangeland, sparse white oak that may have been more prevalent long ago.  It's hot, the afternoon sun hitting at right angles in three dimensions on the steep hillside.

To the south, it's cooler, calmer.  Where the heat on the southerly aspects northeast of town make the air feel hectic and the bugs aggressive, the steep, damp, dark mountains south and west of town are quieter, full of shadows.  The streams that drain the watershed are small, collecting together as they tumble.  The hillsides are heavy with the trees of many species, and the landscape changes with aspect and elevation.  The lowest forest is ponderosa and madrone, the soil a combination of slowly decomposing pine duff and even more slowly decomposing granite.  Late in the summer, it resembles moon dust on the trails.  As you climb the drainage, the ponderosa gives way to Doug fir, and eventually to mountain hemlock and Shasta fir.  I love conifers, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel there's a hierarchy among them.  Ponderosa is a widespread species, with many subspecies, and the Klamath-Siskiyou variety (ssp benthamiana) is gorgeous.  Red, red bark.  Tall, imposing, healthy.  Cones that won't kill you, not like a sugar pine will. Wet-side Doug fir, too, feels bigger and more, I don't know, anthemic than its Rocky Mountain counterpart.  It's the higher-elevation trees toward the Siskiyou Crest, though, that stand tall for me.  Mountain hemlock, reminiscent of but stouter than its wetland cousin the Western.  The droopy tops more upright, and the profile more suited to shedding snow.  Above them all, the Shasta fir.  It's a hybrid of some sort or other, depending on your perspective as a lumper or a splitter, of two majestic true firs representing two very different floristic provinces.  From the north, the noble fir, and from the south, the red fir.

Them's some cones, brati.  Abies x shastensis.  Pic from the American Conifer Society.

The crest above town is part of a bridge between the Cascades and the Klamath Range. Mt Ashland itself is the tallest peak on the crest, the tallest in the Siskiyou subrange.  Before we moved there for Amy's Masters program at Southern Oregon, the Siskiyous for me represented only the Summit on I-5, which frequently closes for weather due to its just-high-enough elevation and the sheer volume of trucks and other travelers who use it, and the Shakespeare Festival.  The three years we spent in Ashland showed otherwise, that the land surrounding it is a jumble and a crossroads, old and new piled up and twisted, with deep canyons and ancient species minding their own business.  Where here in the desert of southern Idaho I can count on one of Yoda's hands the conifer species, there are places near Ashland with ten or more in a small space.  The Miracle Mile due south in the Russian Wilderness has at least 17 different conifers, possibly 18, all within a square mile.

On a winter day with just the right flow, one can experience a twenty degree drop in temperature from Exit 14 to downtown, around two and a half miles.  My friend Rob used to live out by the golf course there, and one day when I woke up above the bike shop we both worked at to fog and freezing temps, he thought he'd ride in to work without a jacket because it was darn near sixty degrees at his house.  He walked through the door a little disoriented by the change.  This sorta deal isn't unusual under an inversion regimen, but that change is always with elevation, not just heading two and a half miles west.  It's that same Summit, the one that bedevils so many OTR truckers each winter, that allows strong southerly downsloping.  The warm Central Valley far to the south will be under high pressure, with the Cascades to the north being pummeled by yet another east Pacific low.  Wind will shoot the gap between Pilot Rock and Mt A, and drop down to the valley, heating as it compresses.  The flow usually isn't strong enough to scour the cold air much north of the bottom of the hill, so just that little Mediterranean pocket lives in blissful ignorance of the damp cold a few feet away.

The Bowl, Mt Ashland.  Them shits is right.

We moved to Ashland at the end of April in 2011, a couple days after our only nephew was born.  It was a long day, leaving Greenwater early and driving mostly straight to Ashland.  We got in late in the evening, and my parents helped us carry our lives up the twenty-two stairs to the surprisingly large apartement above the bike shop.  When Merrill and Ron tacked the apartment onto the building in order to fill the "owner-occupied" requirement that came along with being a retail spot in the Hysterical District, they were quite ingenious.  A spacious kitchen, stairs with storage leading up to a raised living room and one of the bedrooms, a ladder up to two rooms that could be offices, storage, bedrooms, a ganj-grow, whatever the Ashland hippie of the early 80s could desire.  It wasn't perfect.  The baseboard heating was inadequate to those damp inversion mornings, and the third-floor elevation without a/c or strong circulation meant we spent a goodly sum on fans and the loud window unit that did its best to keep us only somewhat too hot rather than way too hot.  The Armory (an historic building, to fit its surroundings) hosted shows sometimes that would keep us up late at night and into the early mornings.  We had a spacious attic that was technically shared with the shop, but Merrill hadn't really used it in some time.  The location downtown was ideal, walking distance to most things and riding distance to everything else.  We drove across town to the Shop'N'Kart by choice, because it had both the best prices and the best selection of any store in the valley, otherwise the cars didn't rack up many miles.

We left Crystal that year at the waning end of one of the biggest winters I have been a part of.  A particularly potent spring pattern coated the entire Cascades in a volatile snowpack.  Baker, for instance, got 227" in March. More than an average wet season, for instance, at Bogus, and a number that until this past winter ('023), I thought I wouldn't have the pleasure of skiing again.  At Crystal, it started snowing around the 15th of February, and for at least 8 weeks, there was measurable snow each day.  Not most days, each day. That could obviously be an inch a day for a week, but many times it was eight or ten or fifteen.  Colin Meagher had an ad in one of the bike mags that summer, a photo at Chinook Pass with Keith Rollins standing tall on his road bike, dwarfed by the fifteen-foot snowbanks.  Fifteen feet of snow in June, below 5500 feet.  It was a hard choice to make, leaving home, leaving that much snow behind.  It was at the end of a long run, frustrated, feeling trapped, maybe made a little in haste, but not one I would actually change if I had the choice.  We could have simply held on like the old barnacles so many ski area lifers become; crusty, angry, combative, entrenched.  Mossbacks.  It's easy to romanticise what might have been, but one doesn't really know, now.

THE Mossback.

We missed Closing Day.  Crystal moved on without us, got busier, more anonymous, hipper, more 'grammable.  I mean, the Silver Creek drainage has the same physiography, but don't tell all the new folks that. They DISCOVERED the place.  Mostly gone are our ilk, the Carhartt crowd.  LB is flying bush planes in Alaska, and last I heard, pounding nails when he needs to in Greenwater.  Abby's raising a family and fighting wildland fire.  Lizzie just got her Doctorate at the U in SLC.  Liza is in SLC, too, coincidentally, out of contact even though she is likely the fulcrum for Amy and me getting together and staying.  I lost patience and said some stuff and now there's just some good memories and a hope that she's doing fine.  Curtis and Dawn are long since broken up, Laura off doing stuff and I think she's also got a family, Brad has a Sugar Mama, his words, and a daughter.  The base area is a mess, and the community downstream is no longer a part of the day-to-day.  The entire goal of the new owners seems to be selling beer to bored tech workers and soliciting proposals from various middle-management.  (We watched one of these interactions this past February.  It was a scene from Office Space, to be sure.)

The night before we left, we shared some nachos with Sean Bold in Rafters The Bullwheel Rafters, hung out in B Lot with the few folks who were left, and then disappeared ourselves.  No closure.  We woke up, gassed up in Enumclaw, put our respective right feet down, and went to sleep in an entirely different place than either of us really knew.

Hurts to leave home when this is home. The King, CM Southback, on Pa's 75th. Shank Chute, Pinball, Pinball Face, the Toaster, Toaster Face, some rocks that probly have nice lichen communities, Samsquanch, A Basin Saddle where Eli lost his ski and made us lose valuable ski time all those years ago sorry Ma said it's best to forgive but Pa said it's more fun to hold a grudge or at least that's what I tell people cos it's funny I mean at least Brad laughed and Patrick guffawed.

Some years, Closing Day is timely, the second or third Sunday in April, with dirt showing through, sun, slush, and a kind of frantic last hour where you realise you are counting down the runs regardless of most skiers' superstitious fear of actually calling "last run".  Near panic.  Some years, the better and best years, there are a string of closings that last a few weeks, where if you have a thick enough wallet you can ski a handful of Closing Days without ownership, without the bittersweet drive downstream or the sad stumble into the E Lodge for one last night in the hills.

This year, ours was among the latest of any who don't normally do this sort of thing.  We expect that Mammoth will push into the summer each season--they made they 6th of August this year--as will A Basin.  Snowbird and Bachelor always aim for Memorial Day Weekend.  Timberline usually gets a Sunday or three in August.  Bogus, though, is among the crowd of areas closing regardless of snowpack, scheduled in advance, hoping just to make the projected last day.  Last year, we melted out in March and April turns were just hopping over dirt on the first Sunday cos, well, we can't close in March, now, can we?  Closing '019 was a deep day, 14 April, a bit of a surprise.  It'd been warm and dry on Saturday, and even though the forecast was for tenish inches, nobody thought it'd happen, but it was among my deepest days in an already really good year.

This year, though, was different.  Everywhere in the West had a good year, especially south of the 45th.  Everyone knows how big the Sierra went, but the Wasatch was at least one pay grade above.  Alta hit 900 for the first time on record, a mere 625" above the low set back when we were in Ogden.  Bogus--lowly, forgotten by the industry even though they started the affordable pass trend back in the 90s Bogus--hit 360" in mid May, 80% above average. Seven inches shy of Crystal, when in most winters the difference is Crystal 2, Bogus 1.  Or more.  We stayed open fully until the 16th of April, a respectable closing, then enjoyed three bonus weekends until a slushy, appropriately uncertain finale, the 6th of May.  It's the latest I have skied lifts at my home hill since 2002, and even that would require the asterisk of having moved back home after Baker closed.  It was bittersweet, of course, and I missed a good few runs waiting out a persnickety morning gut, and I left as unsatisfied as I always do.  Not because the turns were anything other than great.  They were memorable, and quiet, and mostly in the sun.  The corn snow piled up in places, ran smooth in others, rarely sticky, and, well, very much like I want from my May turns.  Sloppy, challenging, unappealing to most of the boozehounds who headed up only to find they didn't care enough to really do much.  A modest group of us hung out at the top of Chair 1 throwing snowballs until Patrol got impatient and quoted Semisonic quoting the apocryphal "you don't have to go home. . ."  I skied the Other Ridge to the Other Bowl at short-swing pace.  As many turns as possible, stopping long enough for Patrol to almost catch me before moving on.  Then, just like '011, I left unceremoniously.  Other folks were boozing in the lot, natch.  Honking their horns on the way out, yelling, whooping, doing what privileged white people seem to do in these situations. 

6 May 23.  Late enough, for once.  Of course, nothing is ever enough, now, is it?  Hiding from the Eye of Sauron with Closing Day Poles and shadows, Boise National Forest, Boise County, ID.

I'd like to think the ebb and flow of what most folks think of as ski season, November to April, has given me some sort of ability to handle endings.  I don't know that I handle them well all the time, given that I think ski season should run into July or at least until I just don't have the oomph anymore, but I actually feel good about the season for the first time in a long time, probably since before that white flash of pain by the rental shop at Mt A in 2014. Closing Day in 2013 was fun, a day like the 6th of May this year, a bonus Sunday where I skied with my Closing Day Poles for the first time, Amy and I slopping rather expertly through the moguls under Ariel, oblivious to the fact that it'd be the last time either of us would ride the lifts there.  I wasn't satisfied then, of course, but then I can only think of one day in my life where I actually thought "this is enough", and that was 9 July, day 127 on snow in 2002, and I was so exhausted and burnt out that the next year felt like nothing was ever going to be enough again.

I can still picture one specific run, directly under Ariel. We took turns shooting video of each other, probly lost on a phone Amy doesn't have anymore.  We were in progress, just another day in the life, thinking all things would continue onward, and upward.  The snow was that rare commodity, true corn snow.  Huge grains, easy to push around and yet not all that easy to ski until you know what you are doing and are strong enough to do it.  One day among many, and yet like the tall Shasta firs around us, somehow above the rest.  Only a handful of days measure up.  Cinco de Mayo at Alpental in 2006.  Easter, '06,  Closing Day at Crystal. Closing Day at Snowbird in '016. Opening Day, 4 November 2005, Crystal.  Veteran's Day, Crystal, '06.  Closing Day, Baker, 2001.  All of June, 2008, Central WA Cascades.  There's a theme here. Not many beginnings, and a blur in the middle, and then panic.  Postpone the inevitable for one satisfyingly unsatisfying day.

Daffodils before Closing, just the way it should always be. "Historic" North End, BoyCee, ID.

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Title from a song Suzy Boguss wrote with her husband, Doug Crider, Just Like the Weather. It was released as a single off her 1993 record Something Up My Sleeve.  Lotta good records that year, from all over the dial.  School of Fish's Human Cannonball, for example and for contrast. It's on the internet, kids.  Find out.