Don't believe the hype

Okay.  I don't do rap, mostly.  I won't rank songs or artists or eras cos I don't really care about the entire discipline, even though I and my generation are wont to do so.  I don't have the knowledge or depth of listening.  I will, however, state confidently that Public Enemy is better than some rap and hiphop artists.  I also dig that one Grandmaster Flash song from back about the time I was born.

Clout goggs for the win. Flav would go.

Alta, that one** place in Utah that doesn't allow snowboarding, has some good terrains.  They claim a lot of snow each season, too, although I'm not sure I believe them.  Or anyone, really, unless their totals have been certified by NOAA.  Even in the modern era of web-based snowfall-stake cameras, there is always an asterisk, something like "official totals taken in a special secret bunker location located secretly somewhere on the hill or maybe not so if you see an obvious discrepancy it's tooooootally not our fault you just don't know the whole story," and then 4" on the webcam is 6" on the report, just like it was before webcams when Herb would tell Denny 3", Denny would figure it'd snow another 3 before opening and tell Duncan 6, and Duncan would Duncan and report 12".  Meanwhile, it'd stopped snowing before Herb could get back in the loader after calling Denny and brewing some more coffee.

At any rate, "Alta is for skiers".  That's one of their taglines.  In truth, they can have it.  I just don't get it.  I remember a day back in April of '96, Pa and I were down there on the way back from a band trip in Breckenridge, See-Oh.  (Speaking of overrated.)  We'd skied A-Basin, Keystone, Vail, and were in SLC for a bit before flying home to the Wet Side.  It'd snowed, probly ten or twelve, and it was a bit thicker than what Lee Cohen always shows in them hash-tag Award Winning Photographs.  Pa and I ripped the shit outa that place.  Seriously.  It's one of the best days I can remember.  Patrol opened some line they then called Glory Hole, which I can't find on the map today, for whatever reason.  (Maybe more on that in a later episode?)  2 in the afternoon, Utah sun still not punishing the snow, first tracks on the skinny skis, it definitely doesn't get any better.

In the lodge, though, one couldn't escape the attitude.  "It's heavy, today." "Fkn Sierra Cement." "What is this shit?!"  The locals, or at least the grumpy dudes who wanted you to think they were locals, were not only looking the various gift horses squarely in their respective mouths, they had out the measuring tapes and were disputing whose hands should be used to measure the beasts.  It was probly mid-20s in the morning, warming slightly to around 30 Freedom Degrees by closing, never really damaging the snow.  Comfortable, good viz, deep, supportive snow, and these clowns were complaining before going home empty handed.

Alta is for traversers.

Fast forward a few decades, Amy and I are in line at the bottom of Collins, waiting our turn on another April deep day.  (Shoulda skied Wildcat, but I didn't know that then.)  Collins is now a detach quad, and as such there's always some shuffling about in line trying to maximise uphill capacity.  A couple dudes next to us, who apparently "weren't from here" or something, asked the two dudes next to them if they could join and make a quad.  The local--he absolutely would not let you forget--spat "that's not how we DO things here," and continued shuffling unfriendly-like up to the ticket checker.  I've skied at around 4 dozen joints, and not a one of em cares if you make up a full chair group ahead of time when the line's long, so long as you don't leave empty spaces once you actually load.  But at Al-tuh not Awl-tuh, we do things just a little different.

Conincidentally, about 6, maybe 8 turns below the top of Collins, I lost my edge on a rock and slid real hard over my pole with my hip and bruised my entire iliotibial band from fibula to iliac crest.  Couldn't bear weight, and had to get a ride down.  Couldn't test ride bikes at work for three weeks.  The patroller was efficient, and in no time we got to the bottom, where he unceremoniously said "This is where you get of bwah, I'm goin back to Alabam."  (I mean, I heard David Allan Coe, anyway.  Maybe he didn't actually say it like that.)  Turns out Alta doesn't staff an aid room with your ticket money.  Some other entity does, and wouldn't you know, they charge you for the attention.  Really, I just needed ice, so Amy got a trash bag full of snow and I sat glumly in one of the bars slopeside while she went and got all schreddy on Wildcat.

Lee Cohen, gettin the shot.  Hash tag award winnin'.

Snowboarding can trace its roots to surfing, I think.  At least, the original 60s era product that is the first recognisable thing related to a snowboard was called a Snurfer.  (I hate portmanteaux, almost as much as I hate Al-ta.)  It's kinda silly, really, this snowboarding.  Everything is asymmetrical, moving through any sort of terrain where gravity isn't the prime mover is basically impossible, and (important for our modern overcrowded slopes) you have a massive blindside on every single heel-side turn.  If you live somewhere, say, Alta, where all the goods are accessed by long traverses with a lot of uphill, you limit yourself to just easy-access spots or Joey-traverse your way into the lines halfway down, ruining those lines for those of us willing to work to get to the top.  Moving through the line at the bottom of the lift is a joke, stepping on your neighbours' skis and generally getting in the way.

Mecca, allegedly. Hash tag number one.

Speaking of listicles, I recently ran into an article while perusing the internet on my morning constitutional.  17 Not So Obvious Bucket List Experiences for Skiers and Snowborders in the U.S., missing hyphens theirs.  In addition to being conceptually incorrect, in that everything on the list has been done to death in a million ski rags since the dawn of ski rags, multiple "experiences" on the list aren't even available to snowboarders at all, number one in particular.  Mad River Glen, Ski It If You Can, as the sticker goes.  Or as the Burton (I think) Snowboards sticker goes, Ride It If We Could.  Set aside for a moment, your judgment of whether or not the Back Bowls at Vail are actually bucket-listable*, or if they're "not so obvious".  The fact that snowboarders can't access some of these things on snowboards is interesting, to say the least.

This argument, to allow snowboards or not, is settled science at {does some internetting and coffee-break maths} 99.4% of the ski areas in the good ol' US of A.  The simple answer is "d'uh".  For some joints, there was some holding out.  For others, say, the number 5 "not so obvious" bucket list joint, nestled up there in Whatcom County, WA, South Canada, between Shuksan and Kulshan, from where one can spend an afternoon working the top of 5 gazing longingly at American and Canadian Border Peaks, and Tomyhoi, and Goat, and Yellow Aster, and the list goes on, the answer was an emphatic "yes", print my money now thanks.  

The Godfather, Craig Kelly, working hard to prove me wrong.

Craig Kelly grew up in Skagit County, WA, that land of extremes.  Spires of accreted sea floor rip foot after feet of water out of the clouds every wet season, supporting vast forests of Abies and Tsuga and Pseudotsuga and, in the slide paths, Alnus and other first succession species.  The Skagit River drains under 2,600 square miles and starts up in the far northern reaches of the Cascades, in Canada.  Yeah, it just crosses that wild frontier like nobody's watching.  Build a wall, there, CheeToh.  On a big flow day, it'll move about 45,000 cubic feet per second out into Skagit Bay.  On a really big day, we're looking at 80-100 grand.  The Boise River, our local stream, looks like a creek in comparison.  The Boise serves a big portion of south-central Idaho, over 4,000 square miles, draining in its course many peaks exceeding 10 grand in elevation.  High spring melt-off flows, the ones that get Eagle Island residents running to their attorneys to sue the Bureau of Reclamation, rarely exceed 7,000 cfs. Less than 10 percent of a big Skagit day out of a drainage something like 50-some-odd percents bigger.

The peaks above the Skagit Valley, the really big ones like Eldorado and Terror and Shuksan and Jack, either barely climb above 9 grand or don't at all, and yet they hold glaciers.  Snowfall, as they say when attempting hyperbole without any sort of creativity, is measured in cords and fetlocks and average-size adult Acer macrophyllums.  (One of the many, many binomials I like.  "What's that tree called? Bigleaf maple.  Cool, let's call it Maple with the big leaves, but, like, in Latin."  It could've gone the other way, too, but I wasn't there.)  Snowfall is famously wet, or more accurately, dense, as all snow is technically wet when it melts.  Having lived within sight of {starts internetting but runs out of ambition and besides, it's a dern volcano} what I think is the highest point in the Skagit Drainage, I can attest to the density.  It makes for physically strong skiers like yours truly, and in the case of Craig Kelly--you though I'd lost the thread, didn't you?--strong snowboarders.

Craig helped push snowboarding from its scrappy roots and goofball image to the same level as skiing.  He was ridiculously smooth.  His time at Baker no doubt helped him build technical strength and skills that folks pointing and slashing in Rocky Mountain pillow fluff wouldn't have needed, nor developed.  He influenced skiing, which would be hard to admit for a lot of PSIA folk, more than a lot of skiers in his day.  Though the rumours of skiing's demise in the early 90s were greatly exaggerated, Craig's style and skill and ambition still helped us out of what could possibly be called mild doldrums.

I mean, who sees this and doesn't think, wow, those cats really can get it?

In the end, the American snowboard discussion seems to have ossified.  The three--yes, just three--resorts that ban snowboarding are at this point loyal to a mistake*** they will never admit is a mistake, and have hardened their stances into legend.  If Mad River Glen, or Deer Valley, or Al-ta ever allow snowboarding, it'll feel like a tidal shift.  (Or just good business sense, but who's counting?)  There will be faithful who will turn on the perceived devil who makes the decision like a shieldback on a squished fellow shieldback.  (I'm not linking anything for you.  You can gooooogle it, thankyouverymuch.)  Boycotts, outrage, all sorta vitriol better aimed at folks who do ethnic cleansing on their neighbours or starve whole nations because there might be one militant left among the rubble.  Their privilege, as the kids are saying, will be showing.

The final thing that frustrates me about this whole absurd argument is the folks who claim this snowboard ban is discrimination, somehow of akin to a civil rights infringement.  Snowboarding is a choice, one that cannot be argued is baked-in.  Where the colour of one's skin is a) not a thing that can somehow be "wrong", and b) not a thing that is chosen, snowboarding is an active choice, one that in some specific situations can actually be wrong, and one that is entirely a first world concern.  To that end, Alta, MRG, and DV do not discriminate against the person, only the orientation of the stick or sticks that cat slides on.  Reduced to such a minimum, both houses deserve a pox.  Banning snowboards, no matter how useless I personally think they are, is simply being a dick for the sake of being a dick.  Claiming discrimination is just absurd.  You, printer of stickers and poacher of lines, are not banned, not in the slightest.  If you want to ski that hallowed High Rustler mogul line (#4), learn to ski.  Or remember how, if you used to ski.  Or, better still, boycott the douchebags outright and go somewhere, anywhere, you are actually welcome.  Sliding on snow is not limited to the 0.6% where skiing is the only option.  My best day on snow wasn't even at a ski area.  Think about that.

Let's be honest.  All you really need is a pile of whatever this is. Enore, gettin rad on the side of the Silver Mountain sled hill, Silver Mountain, Idaho, east of the Cotaldo Mission, due south of Kellogg by exactly a really long gondola ride.

-

Title from Public Enemy's magnum opus, Don't Believe the Hype. If you have not heard it, queue it on up.  It's also the title of my new Snowbird (not snowboard) ad campaign.  Alta, Don't Believe the Hype. And here you thought I'd never get to the actual point. Hit me up, Powdr.  I'll sell the rights for only many many many many ducats.

-

** YES I KNOW THERE ARE TWO WELCOME TO THE ENGLISH LANGUISH

*** Richard Russo wrote whole books about this very human tendency.  If you are in need of some good noveling, give him a look see.

* Annoyingly so, I'd say.  That same Al-ta trip, Pa and I got absolutely shredded by the sun back there, and it, too, is top ten ski memories.  You'll know from reading our pages that top ten lists might be 60 things long, but that's okay.  The back bowls on the backside of Vail's frontside, should you somehow time them to a day where only 3299 of your best friends are at the hill instead of the usuall 70,010, are mellow, open, endless, with views to match.  Vail Corp is one of the worst things to happen to skiing ever, other than all the gatekeeping and abusive coaches and racist bullshit and misogyny and Sinclair Oil and, well, you get it.  The terrain west of Vail Pass, on the south side of Gore Creek, east of the upper Eagle River, north of Turkey Creek, is not to blame for President Katz and all the evil he hath wrought.  It just sits there, waiting for the kiss of a sintered base and some really, really toxic wax.

Never was a world

Learning to tele, like really learning, took a lot of patience, repetition, and rain gear.  I crashed fell over at slow speed so many times that first full winter, and I learned really quick that the best way for me to stay at least sort of dry was a rain jacket, good Gore-tex bibs, and insulated leather gloves from Hardware Sales in the Iowa district.  You know the ones.  They don't need publicity anymore, having Henry Winklered the shit out of that water skiing stunt years ago.

Anyway, the gloves were easy to remove, with a cuff wide enough to hold onto my jacket sleeves, which both kept some snow out and allowed me to easily yank the glove off to shake the snow that inevitably did end up inside back onto the snowpack where it belonged.  They also dried easily on the rack above the propane stove in the shack at the bottom of 5.  I'd tumble, again, maybe the third or forth time in a run, grumble a little, get up, whip the snow out of my sleeves and gloves, and keep going.  I was 19 at the time, and determined that this, this fall right here, would be my last ever.  It would take years to accept that, different from the cheesy sticker that was all over gear and cars at the turn of this century, to free the heel is to free the body to fall.  I don't think my mind really followed, either, come to think of it.

Sure.  Okay.  I believe you believe that.

Below the top of what is now the Northway Chair* at Crystal is a nice southeasterly pitch.  Not super long, not crazy steep, just good open turns.  It's a lot bumpier now that that merger-era Unistar drive sits atop it.  At the turn of the century, it was smooth and creamy in the warm March sun.  Good terrain, then, to find a rhythm.  

I didn't learn to tele from the bottom up like the PSIA says you should.  I was dropping the knee on what Colorado folk think are black runs by the third day on freeheels.  (A little more than two years later I'd straightline the moguls here, skiers' left side of Green Valley, and have what is to this day my scariest crash.  Could've been so much worse than the broken nose and ganked neck and disapperated glasses I went home with.)  I tried a drill that day, one I came up with myself.  I sat all the way onto my trailing heel to feel what the foot and knee and hip and quad needed to feel like, to understand the shapes I'd need and how the turn progressed without needing to know how to actually do it.  I told myself it was only that run, and then I needed to be able to do it correctly.  It took a few moderate tweaks over the years, but by the bottom of the Valley I was what John Becker and Sam Lobet of P-A, WA called, with seeming affection, a telewhacker. 

The next day out, maybe a week later, I made some turns with a handful of fellow freeheelers, and it really clicked.  That wide open ramp under Northway Peak was quiet, and I watched three or four go, and then just made the shapes with my legs and torso that they made with theirs.  I found a rhythm, one I never really lost until my arthritis and tendinopathy took it away.  Looking up, I couldn't distinguish our tracks from some unevenness or poor turn shape I might have made, only that one set ended at my skis.  Somebody casually mentioned that I looked pretty experienced, and I had to hide my smirk when I said it was my fourth day.

If you're doing it right, people who don't know won't be able to tell.

For a long time, I skied in Atlas gloves whenever I could.  They aren't super practical if it's cold or wet, but when it's sunny and the bumps on Upper Nash get suitably big, they breathe well enough and are dextrous and waterproof in the palm and fingers and they smell a certain way in the sun and, I don't know, the smell still reminds of that one time in the ticket office at White Salmon when I was getting a buddy pass and I'd just plumb blowed up the thumb ligament in my right hand and couldn't really grasp the old sticky wicket tickets well on account of the thumb brace I had wrapped over the Atlas glove and this really nice, utterly intimidating lady walked over and said "here, let me do that for you," and I was smitten for at least 5 minutes.  I was 18 and I never got her name and certainly don't even remember her, really, just that brief moment.

I will admit to certain conceits with regard to skiing, especially to tele.  I tried to ski in Carharrts or Dickies as often as possible, along with the Atlas, and later, other types of work gloves.  I had a couple thrift store button-down shirts to wear when I wasn't feeling my usual flannel.  I think I wanted to project a casual disregard for the possibility of actually falling, and to distinguish myself from the bougier elements in our little world with my grease-stained duck workpants and emotional distance.  To belie the existence of any fear or misgiving.  I'd worked so hard to overcome that first year of non-stop tumbles.  I wanted folks who knew to really know.  (There's that guy.  Y'know, Two-turn Eino.  He never falls.)  Also, I found it comfortable and thought myself stylish.  I still really like Atlas gloves. 

See?

About the third time the heel cable on my old Pitbull 2 broke, I caved.  Some idiot volleyball patroller on Nose Dive who stopped the heavily used Black Diamond touring ski with the nice mountainy topsheet and de rigueur Canadian flag sticker it was on told me I'd never lose my ski if I used G3 bindings like he did, despite his not recognising that I'd kicked the ski and not fallen out of the binding. He'd put me off of upgrading the part of telemark skiing that both ties the room together and necessarily needs to be in the background for too long.  It took a minute, but a month or so later a pro patroller named Andrew was selling some Igneous skis with a G3 Targa on it and I bit.  It was the first ski I bought for the binding, the first in a loooooong and still continuous line.  I'd told myself I wanted the ski, but at 197, made of like two full-height maples, and with a less-than-okay top sheet--a pic of Anna Nicole Smith, with a blatant heroin reference as a "pro model"--the ski and I never really jived.  The binding and I did, and I skied it probly another 300 days before I and the Cascadian humidity wore the retention springs out.

The cable wasn't the only thing I broke, just the most annoying.  I broke both ankle straps on my first bumblebee T1 in two winters at Baker, and my humerus on a particularly funky morning, far skiers' left of Gabl's.  It'd rained about halfway up 5 the day before, and then cooled fairly quickly and continued on with the precip for a while before clearing off completely for an absolute North Cascades stunner of a day.  The top of Gabl's was fluff on butter, just real creamy and fast, but right about the Chute 4 bench it locked down under the confectioner's sugar.  I was hittin it full steam, and got knocked off line by the frozen whatevers sitting four or five inches under the surface.  My left ski caught something and stopped hard, and I went down on my left arm.  I lay on the ground for a minute, then couldn't get myself situated to stand up because the arm was completely dead.  It took a while for it to shake out.  When I got to the bottom of 5 to bump chairs, Paul the mechanic asked if it was snowing still, despite all that blue sky and dry air.  I still haven't forgiven that fu    

Anyway, that Sunday night after work I drove to Enumclaw, 170 miles away.  If you haven't driven a manual with a dead left arm, I don't recommend it.  Not as bad as if your right arm was broken, but still.  No fun.  I got in to see Luther, the family doc, and after an x-ray and some poking slash prodding, he told me to take it easy.  I took that to mean borrow my brother's alpine skis, and otherwise go about my business.  Turns out I tore about two inches of deltoid and chipped a piece off the humeral head.  I still feel the muscle, over twenty years later.  Coincidentally, it's right about where the nurse jabs you with the tetanus goop.

When I called home to chat a few weeks later, Ma said Luther asked her to scold me for shoveling snow and trying to hide when he came through my line at the bottom of 5.  170 miles from home and it's still a small town.

Bend the knees to bend the skis.

In addition to the shoulder destruction and the countless slow-speed tumbles, there were a few truly hard crashes in the learning process.

My EMT instructor, whose name escapes my just now, said that some folks see "tracers" when they have a mild head injury.  I had no idea what he was talking about, and assumed it was just a folk tale.  I mean, in all the old comic strips, folks who'd just got a concussion had birds flying about their heads.  The second time I hit something hard enough my skis stopped, after a nice somersault I could never accomplish on purpose, I sat and watched the thousand points of light race each other in very messy circles, their light trailing behind, playing havoc with my sanity.  I described what I was seeing to Stina and she just said "tracers." 

The twisting lights slowly faded as I sat, motionless and concerned about all the trauma I was certain I'd inflicted, but aside from seeing these same stars a little bit easier now in my forties, nothing really ever came of it. I can still remember well the entire run, the hike to the top of the King, breaking trail for Stina and her buddy Mary and them giving me first tracks down the Appliances Chute as a thank you, the straightline and subsequent wallop, the tracers, and the much mellower run to the bottom of DFF, turning and turning and turning, wondering if I'd ever feel normal again. I'm 43 now, and I still wonder.  I still see not only the tracers that show up here and there, but the blood in the snow and all of each tomohawk way back in '001 at the bottom of the Valley and, later, on the frontside of the Queen this time, how the the world looked when I realised I'd stopped, tails tucked into the snow, as though I was poured onto a chair made just for me, without any understanding of why I wasn't still skiing.  That pivotal moment alone is just missing.

It's probly an old timber feller.  Checkin in, sayin hi.

There are things I miss about making that turn.  Real and quantifiable, or ethereal and mearly mystical.  I was almost a cliché, making hay while the sun shone brightly, knowing that--without knowing when--the ride would end.  My legs aren't as strong and I'm not as fond of steeps these days.  Skiing is still paramount for me, but I haven't stepped into a tele binding in a long time.  In point of fact, I just handed my last binding over to my brother when he bopped on through BoyCee in November.  The last real day of making the freeheels was the day my former employee who became my boss took the photos on this page in the Spring of '016.  These photographs hurt a little, just looking.  Things gained and then lost, skills developed and then forgotten. 

So many turns, steeps or flats, crashing hard or pinning it top to bottom, solid, fast, controlled.  I could turn both ways and stop, in damn near any condition, on damn near any pitch.  I'd step into those bindings, and every time the feelings would flood my arteries.  Memories of people and places and times gone by.  Playing a show for 400 college kids in Tacoma or hiking alone at Chinook Pass.

The day I first stepped into those tele boots was the day my maternal grandfather passed away in February of 2000.  The phone rang early in the morning, 6 or so. I heard Ma cry out and go quiet, and I knew.  Grandpa Kelly had been languishing; a stroke had laid him low and there wasn't much to be done. He was 85 and a quiet fighter, a man who could outlast the hard times.  He could fall asleep when all of us grandkids were running around screaming, 41 of us by the time the youngest came along.  

Noël had wanted to ski with me again, or more acurately wanted me to follow her on the hill and chat while riding the chair.  There wasn't much for me to do at the funeral home, nor much room for all of us, so Ma said to keep my plans.  I rented gear, and that was that.  For the next sixteen years I felt like I belonged to something, that I wasn't just sliding along like all the other folks.  Sixteen years of feeling a connection to my paternal grandfather who passed away in '62, nineteen years before I came along.  He was a freeheeler back in the day, leather boots and leather strap bindings, Sámi muscles kicking around far northern Sverige's beautiful and low-slung mountains before moving to the states and meeting my grandmother in the UP, up around Calumet somewhere.  I think of him every time I see a raven on the wind, or hear one calling in the deep Doug fir in the rain.

-

Title from Jonatha Brooke's Landmine, which she released on her first fully-solo record, 1997's 10¢ Wings.  Rock may have sucked in the late 90s, mainstream country as well, but there were some really good artists doing other things who went largely unnoticed because, well, there wasn't a a funky beat you could bug out to or catchy, yet misogynistic rap lyrics written by white dudes who should probly have been cleaning toilets instead.  I listened to that album over and over and over again in my little '81 Tercel driving back and forth to Crystal and GRCC in '000.

*Bonus points if you can spot me.

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 know 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.  

Relatively easy

The hike out the King can take anywhere from 12 minutes to 2 hours, depending on your skill, familiarity, and fitness.  Mostly your familiarity, as you need to know where to just point it, where you can kick steps as fast as you're able until you almost puke knowing that the line you're sweating for is just past the top of a given pitch.  Skill helps, of course, cos those hard corners where you drop a shoulder and glide instead of skidding wide are much faster with the right amount of edge, and the speed'll let you carry up past ten or fifteen side steps other folks have taken, which saves your lungs for those three pitches on the actual peak where you need to kick hard to stay ahead of the Joeys from Bellevue in their bar-mode boots and this year's trendiest goggles.

I swear it's steeper than it looks. First Throne Gate, CM.

The first time I headed out, I think I was 7. All three of us tagged along with Pa, and I'm fairly certain I was the slowest.  My brothers would have been 10 and 12.  I obviously didn't know where I could pump a roller for an extra boost, or where I should double up to rest the legs for a half second of airtime.  The hike is all about conservation, whether it's momentum or lung power or quadriceps energy, and at 7 I knew about none of that. Somewhere in the middle of the second pitch on the shoulder of the King, we caught up to, or more likely were passed by, a couple around Pa's age. The wife, I'm pretty sure, had a Bota bag of apple juice.  I will never forget the taste.  I think about it, the Bota bag, the apple juice, the kindly lady I never saw again, every time I'm out South, or sidestepping out to Lower Mores here in the desert, or walking along one of the ridges at The Place That Shall Not Be Named, or skating back to the Lodge on the 20 Road after a quick Rabbit Ears lap at Mt A, when my throat burns cos I'm too stubborn lazy to carry water.

I don't remember which line we skied.  Knowing the sort of terrain Pa prefers, it was probly Southeast Right.  Wide open and steep, but manageable. Southeast facing, as you'd guess.  In my mid-to late-twenties, it was a ramp of much speed and few turns, but in the spring of 1989 it would have seemed endless.  I don't remember how many turns it took down to the exit, but it probly felt like a few hundred.  Those years in the late aughts tuning skis for Brad, I made a game of how few turns I could make from the top of the King to the bottom of the first pitch on either side.  My best was 4.

-

Yesterday, I woke up and realised I was 42 years old.  My birthday long past, but still, sometimes it sticks.  I know this is universal, whether you're 31 or 75 or 103, one day you're minding your own business, checking groceries, pumping gas, bumping chairs, riding bulls, sweeping dirt off your baseball pants from a successful steal of third in the deciding game of the CWS, playing a show in front of 3000, whatever, and the next day you're older, feeling broken, and praying to God the trade-off is one resulting in endless wisdom and old-guy strength.  Again, not unique amongst any peer group or novel in the scope of geographic time.  Just, well, hard to swallow sometimes.

This wasn't anywhere as steep in '008. Two Turn Eino? More like Two Hundred Forty-Two Turn Eino.

That day, the 4 turn day, was a Saturday.  It'd puked, then puked some more, and Patrol hadn't opened south all week, not even Friday.  (Stina always spat "Baugher's just waiting for Friday cos he hates locals!")  I knew it would open, and didn't have a shift in the shop, so I was planning to just head for the gate and wait until somebody dropped it and fight for whatever leftovers I could find.  Standing in line for 11, just before opening, the line stretching for two hundred people in front of me, I heard the Number Two Lifts Guy (no clue his name, this far on, but I'll call him Adam, cos why not) yell my name.  That year, '008, I was tuning most-time for Brad.  I'd got my pass through lifts thinking I'd need two jobs, so when I realised I couldn't swing both, I told Bob I'd help out when necessary and otherwise deal with fewer Greenbacks.  He didn't really need me much, and I usually skated by with the last of my tips.  That morning, though, they were short enough lifties that they actually needed me. 

Anyway, Adam wanders over and asks me if I can do lunches. Obviously, I can't say no, regardless, but I mumble something about getting one solitary South lap, and he says "Dude!  Of Course!  Gimme your time card and I'll punch you in. Come back and do lunches, go skiing some more, and clock out at 4."  Well, now.  To be honest, I don't even know if he ever clocked me in.  Or care.

That knowledge of the hike and traverse out south, it pays off sometimes.  There was a line at the False Summit, the second Throne Gate.  I kept booting until I was alone at the top of the Throne, only a short ski down the ridge to the A Basin saddle.  Everyone waiting in line for the lower gate had to traverse, duck the krummholz firs and pine and spruce at speed.  I just had to point it and hope the corners hadn't changed too much with all the snow. I had probly a 5, 6 minute head start on them, and I was faster than all of 'em, too.  I hit the bottom of the King knowing nobody could catch me, no matter how many were back there.  I had built another 4 or 5 minutes in by the top and could catch my breath, make my decisions, breathe some more, ignore the butterflies and the crowd at the top of 9, and be ready instead of jittery.  Brad and his now ex were second and third, surprisingly.  He rarely skied, but it was exactly the kinda day that he waited for.  High, thin, beautiful overcast, chilly enough to preserve the day-old snow, visibility clear and unlimited.  When he poked his head through the last whitebark, I looked quizzically, and asked "How'd you pull this off?" He just shrugged.  "How'd you?!" "I'm doing lunches, as you can see.  Hard at it." I saw the cloud of ants chasing them up the last pitch, waved, ignored his invitation to ski where he could see me, and dropped off to the northeast. Slid a directional turn on the ridge and dropped into the Hourglass, the easiest line off the top of the King.  Some lines just feel right, and I hadn't known it'd be that line until I rolled over and saw nothing but an open ramp.  Four turns at speed, whatever radius that is, down to DFF.

When I was shoveling the ramp at the top of Rex during one of the lunches, a pro patroller slid by and said "Nice turns. I know it was you."

You can't see the forest for the glaciers. Ingraham, Fryingpan, Emmons, Inter, Winthrop, Curtis, and Carbon, NE shoulder of Tahoma. There's more species of conifer in this pic than in all of SW Idaho. Name them all and you get 15 points.

The knees just don't work the way the should, and certainly not the way they did.  I remember one morning at the community college squatting outside Noël's old Acura 5-speed at 7 in the January morning, thinking my knees were done, and how unfair it was that I was only 18 and I was already being sold down the river by creaky joints.  I wasn't, though.  Through strength training, and, more importantly, telemarking 100 days a year and hiking 3000' vertical peaks all summer, the muscles and joints starting working together.  Once I got a bike and stopped with the horror of running, things really clicked and I had a stretch of 15 years with only one single second of true knee pain.  Just now, though, I settled weird in my seat to write these exact words and the lateral side of my right knee lit up with that same white flash.

-

Alta is known for traverses.  The High T is probly the best known, perhaps in the whole damn country.  I've never partaken, and to be honest I have no desire whatsoever.  I and Alta don't get along.  Taos, Bridger, Baker, and the like are known for bootpacks straight up to their respective ridgelines.  Mt A for complaining that the Bowl is closed while ignoring the technically-out-of-bounds south and west sides of the peak because the skate back on FR20 is there.  Not cos it's hard, because it just isn't.  Sun Valley for its glitz and septuagenarians ripping the groomers on the Warm Springs side at Mach Stupid.  Mad River Glen for its single chair, co-op structure, and for allegedly being hard AF.  Jay, for the waterslides.  You get it.

The Place That Shall Not Be Named, maybe none of those things.  They have those gilded bathrooms, the English wool carpet lining all of their countless lodges, the grooming, the 3000' vert of grooming.  Nobody talks about the short hikes to the actual reason to ski in Weber County, Utah, which is the same as anywhere else you can think of, even the Driftless.  Quiet, steep, not-always-safe turns in good, unsettled snow.  Not all of the lines are worth it.  Some, though, it's, well, shoot.  There are still some things I miss about Utah.  From the top of Strawberry, you boot up a little toward DeMoisy, then skate around the west side.  In many years, with some adventurous partners, you could drop Burch Creek all the way to town.  You ignore this, ignore the obvious lines back into Middle Bowl, skiers' left of DeMoisy proper, and keep skating and sidestepping and booting until you're on a ridge above a hidden bowl that empties down into the top of Porky.  You can't really see it from anywhere, and nobody will know you're there.  It's not the steepest spot on the hill, not exposed and terrifying like Mt Ogden, nor obvious like the north face of DeMoisy.  It's a ramp with probly 20 or 30 turns, and it's yours if you want it.

Some of the only truly good memories I have from that glitziest of hills are the handful of turns I made back there and the look some tourist lady gave me when I popped outa the limber pine onto the groomer at the top of Porky.  My moustache, drooping every day further below regs, caked in snow when it hadn't snowed in days.

It's right behind that rock, right there, and there's none of those pesky Joey traverse lines or strange skier people you don't know and yet somehow know you don't like.

The hard truths that take lifetimes to grasp don't first arrive as welcome rain drops on a light breeze after a three week drought, they hit like a 2 am tornado.  Just as convective storms are still hard for the atmospheric science hippies to pin down, these lessons, or insight, whatever you want to call 'em, do what they please, and you have to be paying attention at all times or it'll be years later and you'll sit up with a jolt because there was something to learn from that one moment, way back in 2012 or something, that you can't quite visualise.  Scientific understanding has taken millennia for this same reason, that most folks didn't know how to understand what just happened when all they could see is the black of the receding tornado and their belongings scattered hundreds of yards or even miles away.

-

By the time I hit the top of the King last winter, I was scraping rime off the gnarled 5-foot Pinus albicaulis to chew on for water and hoping the feeling in my chest would recede.  Four years of knee problems and anxiety and the fitness I spent all those years cobbling together is long gone, with the weight my far-northerly genes seem prone to add when I'm out of commission complicating things further, and that easy 15-minute hike took me probably 45, for most of which I was out of breath.

The view is the same, that slow spin to take it all in, one more time.  Maybe that was the last, I don't know.  Alterra hasn't made things better up there.  They can't significantly alter the landscape.  They are trying, though.  They are having success pushing out the locals, too, as they are in all of their gathered holdings, legacy and otherwise.  Heather Hansman and Hal Clifford have documented this part of our world better than I can.  Maybe it's obvious, maybe not, but when a large portion of a corporation is built on past legal misdoings--think Intrawest and the fraud they or at least stakeholders in the org committed--one has to wonder whether there's ever any goodwill at the heart of things.  One can't escape these things, only ignore them, and there's a line I can't cross.  It hurts.  It feels like I can never go home, and yes, maybe I should read that book.  I tried Look Homeward, Angel, but never finished it and I associated Wolfe with Kerouac too much and got bored.  I grew up at the exit of the valley, where the lahar fill spreads north and west and flattens the land.  We didn't leave to be gone, but to try to find greener pastures, and yes, the joke writes itself.  Enumclaw averages almost 60 inches of water a year, pretty much all of which falls as rain.  Ashland and Ogden get less than 20, and BoyCee many years never receives more than desert-level water.

From the top of the King, one can see peaks of all shapes, exotic terranes, volcanism old and young, forest, water, and even a little bit of desert.  The constant change and illusion of permanence.  The Emmons, that murderous and beautiful and terrifying glacier, is the biggest thing. It becomes the whole western sky if you don't look away.  It is magnetic, the largest area of any glacier in the lower 48.  If I could choose my death, which I don't want to do, part of me hopes it's underneath another lahar, down on the White some cool fall afternoon, oblivious and calm behind a giant redcedar trunk when the ground shakes and I have a few minutes to understand, to take it all in one last time.  As I said, I don't want to choose.  I hope I'm old and crazy, yelling at all the tourists downtown, some jerk of a business owner calling the cops on me again.

That run wasn't four turns, or even forty.  I was gripped, bordering on scared.  Such a strange feeling in a place I'd long felt at home and comfortable at speed.  I dropped into the Toaster, the third line skiers' left of the peak itself.  I'm sure it's got other names, and I can't even begin to care.  The line is steep, with a nice, deep crux, and an immediate exit onto the huge apron.  I couldn't open it up, couldn't even get comfortable until I hit the groomed exit, avoiding DFF because I was too tired to make more shaky turns in uneven terrain.  Too pissed at the kid at the saddle who said he'd patrolled at Crystal for a year but never returned cos he thought it was boring.  I'd wanted that job, more than I've wanted most things.  Tried, even.  Wasn't cool enough.  Baugher ignored the recommendations of his assistant, the Snow Safety guy, the wife of the ski area owner, and several of his most senior patrollers.  I never even got a chance, and I will never pretend I'm not still bitter.  That anonymous and ungrateful 20-something trustafarian drove that home well and good.  I was so pissed at him I ignored the tightness in my chest and the scratch in my lungs, and only really took a break when I could dig my brakes into the chalk on the summit.

-

I feel like I am starting to learn, though, as though I can recognise the colour in the clouds and know that hail reflects or refracts light in a way that in mass quantities will turn the sky green.  That green sky in turn has showed up before tornadoes, so maybe it's time to head to the basement.  I am doing PT, three days a week, grudgingly each time.  I know my injuries, now, or at least have some understanding.  I know that this is a long, boring stretch and that doing the PT helps, while skipping it will result in not being able to walk and needing crutches just to heat the tortillas.

-

I think there's a transceiver gate at the top of Chair 8 now, the start of the hike out The Arm.  When I was bumping chairs at the bottom of 5 in '002, there was only a threatening sign with lots of red and firm admonishments.  Everyone sorta self-policed, and the winter of '99 was fresh in mind.  From the gate, one just starts kicking steps, grateful for any shorter person who went first, pissed at all tall dudes and snowboarders.  Tall dudes just step too far, but snowboarders didn't really kick their steps.  Something something "my boots are more comfortable than yours" and you all can go

The Arm. Dang.

Anyway, the snowboard steps would slope outward and even with tele boots, the traction would be garbage.  Best if it was a short and experienced alpine skier, so the steps sloped inward and were close together.  Many steps make light work, something like that.

There are some steep steps, and the terrain rolls parabolically away such that the only way to really know your line is to follow someone who does, or just guess and check.  There's only a few big cliffs.  You'll be fine. 

Who am I kidding? The Arm is huge, and consequential.  Don't french fry when you should pizza.  It's rewarding, too, with long and challenging turns, deep, unsettled snow that can rip out easily in the steeps, but a few lower angle ramps.  It's a circus most days that follow big cycles.  There was one day out there, I was on that big ol' red Seth Morrison.  It was late in the day, the afternoon angling toward shoulda-been-back-to-the-E-Lodge-by-now light, and it hadn't snowed in a week.  The wind coming up the Swift Creek drainage over Lake Ann had been slowly depositing grain and feather, and the week-long cold snap and its attendant drying had kept the snow soft.  Each convexity would hide a deep turn in the lee, several pillows unevenly spaced all the way down into the creek draw, surprisingly deep.  It was quiet that afternoon, just me and a couple other lifties.  At the exit we pulled left, silent, followed the traverse over the westerly branch of White Salmon Creek and out onto the bottom of Daytona, and out the cat road from the bottom of Chair 8 as we'd missed last call.  Another day, another dollar.  So many ghosts back there, real and imagined.
- -

I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. But still, this is how my brain tracks.

Title from the last track on Jason Isbell's first record after he got sober, the one with the song everybody cheers when he says he swore off that stuff, forever this time. It sounds trite, and instead it's all the feels. And that More Guns Walleye character can take a long tumble off Mt Ogden.

If it's anywhere, you'll find it.

The stretch of US 40 from somewhere east of Duchesne through somewhere west of Vernal could be anywhere. It feels more like the Great Basin to me than anything, probably because I know how that feels more than I know the Rockies.  The highway curves around the north end of the Uinta Basin, empty when it's not strewn with those sorts of dreams and garbage that pile up in the unwanted places.  It's You-inna, bee tee dubs.  Utah.  Just nod.  This zone is best at speed, just an isolated, dirty section of highway otherwise surrounded by some pretty and interesting country.  It's completely unfair to judge Roosevelt for being hard-pressed.  Perspective, I guess.  Folks live here, have for millennia.

Layers and rocks and hoodoo and stuff.  Dinosaur, UT/CO

To the east is Dinosaur, historically among the lands of the Fremont people.  They predated the Ute and Paiute and Navajo.  Dinosaur is known for its namesake, but it's a stark, beautiful landscape. Pink rock and meanders in the Green.  The Uintas curve around the north side of the basin, protective or ominous, should you be inclined to any specific temperament. There's dinosaurs in them hills, of course.  Turned to stone by the epochs.  It's the rock that you see, though.  From a distance, up close, from the grocery store in Vernal and the Church south of Naples.  Ever present.

It's an empty country, this.  Counting the miles, delineators whipping by the passenger window in the dark, pronghorn dancing off in the distance as though they aren't faster than just about any damn thing that isn't made of metal and physics and dreams.  Silhouetted against the faded blue of that huge sky stretching from SLC to Denver.  As you head east into Colorado at the town of Dinosaur, there's a conspicuous and somewhat mysterious ridgeline curving around you.  Snake John Reef.  It's a sharp little seam in the valley floor, about 6 miles long.  Artemisia and Juniperus and sunbaked earth.  The entire region is mostly sedimentary rock, layer upon layer upon layer.  Streaks of colour.

You can tell those are aspen because of the way that they are.

Eventually, US 40 will drop you off in Steamboat Springs.  I'm certain there's skiing there, but I've never stopped for longer than it takes to grab an iced tea and some petrol.  You can head south to Wolcott and the Eagle River Valley, or southeast through Kremmling and up the Blue River drainage into that most storied of counties, Lake.  You thought I'd say Summit, but if you're headed there, I bet you flew to Denver and hopped in a limo.  Or teleported in on the third rail of some business jet.

Out in the open, the fields roll unevenly to the horizon, sheep and coyote and pronghorn and mule deer.  Artemesia and emptiness and every so often, virga from a passing storm.  The Yampa off to the south.  A story in itself.  Empty meanders through a quiet valley, skirting to the south of the archetypal cowtown of Craig.  To the west of Maybell, it dives into an incredible canyon, walls a few hundred feet high or more.  The canyon walls, the layers of sediment, and the millennia of erosion are reminiscent of the desert Southwest.  Surprising clefts; a deep, cool river bottom.  Friendly shadows.  To the south, it's hill country until the Eagle River, where the Sawatch begin.

Somewhere after the Sawatch began.

I  grew up on the Wet Side, on a lahar plain.  The trees come in close, dark and broody and wet.  Fires don't happen too often, with the sort of consistently high hot-dry-windy index that plagues the Dry Side being impossible most of the year due to the ocean that's always just out of sight, over your shoulder.  The peaks aren't visible from all viewpoints in and around my hometown, a sort of mountains-for-the-hills contradiction made yet more immediate by the forest you can't see through all the conifers.

The Bogus Basin Road is none of this.  It starts out in town, just another city street.  Harrison, a historic, boulevarded lane of sixteen blocks.  You slide through the stop sign at the Elementary School by the old church, now being drawn and quartered like so much of the Treasure Valley, into expensive domiciles too fancy to be called houses, with tiny lots not much bigger than the building's footprint, and then the road just pitches up.  Sixteen miles, with little relent save the half mile or less down into Miller Gulch.  Twisting and turning, made more impressive by the consideration of this highway's history.

Okay, sue me. Sometimes the trees come in close.

Time was, it was dirt, naturally.  One lane, up in the morning and down in the evening.  Before the houses, before the pavement, it was a muddy slugfest just trying to get up to the hill to ski.  It's been paved since '62, after about 25 years of hoping it'd be too cold for mud and that the snow would be crunchy enough for good traction.  It still gets a little squirrelly sometimes, especially in the band between five and six grand.  I've never truly lost control on the road, and only once of any consequence in almost 30 years of driving.  There are some corners, though, to which I give more deference than others.

Most of the new housing at the bottom of the road has come in the last fifteen years.  This is editorialising, I admit, but it is out-of-place, at best, and at worst, a bad idea that should never have been permitted.  There are more rooflines in this small little swatch of grasping nouveau wealth than in some entire boroughs in more tasteful locales.  At the moment, it thins at the first right hander and ends at the second left hander.  There are homes above, and some even ostentatious, but the worst of the ugliness is over, and one can see the foothills and Boise Ridge above it all.  There's room for a hawk and a harrier, for a handful of deer and the seasonal sheep drive.  Cattle in the spring in the draws, and the flies they bring looking to break the splatter of new-grass manure down before it dries and hardens and desiccates, unavailable until the Monsoon finally makes it this far north in late summer.  It's just grass and water, folks, no need to be afraid.  These are rangeland cattle, that hippest of beef, the mythical grass-fed flatiron.

The Bogus Basin Road just goes on, and on, and even if it takes a hundred shifts, it's still better in a manual than any automatic.  Better still if you have the fitness to climb it on your road bike.  The descent is fast, interesting, challenging, and scenic.

Up above the Zombie Apocalypse house, there are tandem rock piles that from below look like a big bison and a little bison.  Little Bison from above is Face Rock.  Past the county line, there's a hard left hander that'll sneak up on a fool if he or she isn't ready, and in midwinter it dives into the shadows.  Some weeks it doesn't melt out like the more exposed pavement just above and below.  Past the big turnout that overlooks Daniels Creek, the road dives into shadows again, starting the really greazy part of the drive.  It stays chilly, the northwesterly aspect not receiving any meaningful sun until March.  Not coincidentally, it's here at the Ten Mile that you'll likely catch the slow driver who will not pull over for anyone.  In our 100% completely totally scientific polling of a very representative swath of Treasure Valley residents, the driver will likely be in a large-to-huge truck or a very capable Subaru. (Okay, it's me, Amy, some BBSEF coaches she worked with years ago, our paid High School intern at the shop, Parker, Legendary Bear National Team Member CarHams, and Ryan (The Owner).)

Little Bison from above.  I swear it's a face.  You believe me, right?

Some days the snake is ten cars, sometimes thirty.  One Sunday last year, it was vintage Puget Sound stop-and-go all the way to the upper lodge, almost two hours.  And I still found good snow because heads is trippin and they ain't got that shit on lock.  (Sorry, the memory of that drive glitched my software.)  I mean to say I skied Chair 5, where most folks never venture, even when that's the exact ticket for which they drove this twisty dervish of a glorious mountain road in the first place.

The last four miles are in the trees, still turning this way and that, dodging shadows and periodically giving a little view of the Sinker Creek drainage to the left and the upper reaches of Boise Ridge, and the ski area itself.

Heading down, it's always a bit bittersweet.  I've never grown out of the desire to just live in the hills.  The view is expansive, the drive easy if you take it like a sane person, exciting in the best of ways if you push it and there's a clear view.  Sometimes it's second gear, sliding corners every so often, hoping it stayed cold behind you but knowing that somewhere along the line it'll get greazy again, that you'll drop out below the stratus deck, town glowing below in the early night, mist on the windshield, night skiers' headlights moving slowly up toward you, who knows what spirits looking on from the Purshia and hackberry.  Just don't forget to let the trolls out at the Troll Gate.  Brian Galbreaith tells us that they don't want to go home with you.

Orcinus orca, Salish Sea local, just downstream from the Nooksack.

The light isn't cold, not this deep in the North Fork.  Doesn't matter if it's snowing, or even if there's snow on the ground.  It's Western Washington, and it really doesn't get cold.  Nor is it threatening, mysterious, or any other damn thing, except dark.  The rain is dark.  The trees are dark.  The light is dark.  The Killing Woods that my buddy Todd talks about are here, of course.  Grand fir, red cedar, Devil's club, salal, hemlock, rotting tree trunks and maybe an owl or two, Strix occidentalis and whatnot.  There's a moment, every few weeks, where it's been puking and stayed cold behind the front, and the light just jumps.  A painting.

The game was reciting what was ten miles ahead.  It kept me awake.  Ten miles above the DOT at the North Fork is Artist Point, buried a few months ago under the lower 48's snowfall outlier, that tiny convergence zone that centres on this huge amphitheatre, the Headwaters of the North Fork.  The Nooksack doesn't drain massive square footage, but it is wet, all the time.  Feet upon feet in a normal winter.  Many species of ferns drip into the organic duff that clutters the forest floor.  Slugs and centipedes and beetles and passerines.

The first ten mile was somewhere near Nugent's Corner.  Highway 9 heads north to Canada.  There's a market, and today a roundabout that wasn't there 22 years ago.  The second, I don't know, somewhere south of the North Fork Beer Shrine.  A random bend in a highway made of bends, in some trees along a highway buried by trees.  I didn't really get interested until Kendall.  Or should I say, I stayed awake most times until Kendall, when the dark got darker and the trees closer.  Kendall's just about the 23 mile, and Maple Falls, home of Maple Fuels Wash-a-ton, just past the 25 mile.  35 is just past the Snowline, which is just upstream from Glacier, which is the last actual town on 542.  Then comes 36, and I could start relaxing.  The DOT is at 46, and then it's twisty, windy, steep, and sometimes gripping until the E Lodge just across the lake from Chair 1.

Just past the DOT, as soon as you cross the North Fork for the last time, there's a 90 degree left.  It never gets any sun.  My brother John talks about spinning a 360 there with Kelly Jo, who incidentally is both Craig Kelly's ex and one of the better cooks whose food I've had the pleasure of eating.  He says she told him to do it again, meanwhile he's tryna get his BP down below 200/150.  Another evening, heading up this time, Eli spins out in his old Metro, that green three-cylindered beast.  I might be misremembering, but I'd just finished my EMT and I'd swear his heart rate was like 199.  I checked.

Shuksan, Upper North Fork of the Nooksack, basically Canada.  Just ask the locals. USGS photo.

Two mornings, same corner.  John forgot his license--and I assume wallet, or he just had one of those moments--so he had me drive the Blazer.  I didn't know the corner, just a couple weeks into my first winter at Baker.  The sleet was tapping on my window on Garden, the streetlights a streaky orange.  It was good going until the corner, having dried up out by Barclay, maybe the Haggen.  That corner, though, just below the 47 mile, it doesn't melt.  Or if it does, it's only so that it may refreeze again, and it was definitely refrozen.  It was also snowing again, as evidenced by the DOT plow driver who pulled us out.  John said he saw his life in a flash, like in the movies.  Fortunately, the snow in the ditch by that massive Doug fir rootwad was rotten, crunchy, non-supportive.  We stopped less than a foot from major problems.

Second morning, late that winter.  I hitched up from Bellingham with my roommate and his buddy.  They were seniors at one of the high schools down there, not sure which.  Roommate's buddy, we'll call him Buddy, had an early-model Tacoma, long before they cost twenty fifty grand for a twenty-two-year-old model with 257 thirty billion million on the spinny thingy.  Two doors and a canopy.  I'll give him this, he had sand bags against the head of the bed.  And a camp chair, which was surprisingly comfortable.  The dark rolled past, snow from town, continuously whipping by at 60 or so, his confidence far outreaching his experience or skill, as evidenced by the ridiculously quick 360 he did not mean to turn at the left hander just past the North Fork bridge.  The snow was going in the correct direction, toward the back of the canopy, then it slowed up until it was headed the other direction entirely.  Without a beat, it stopped and then headed toward the back again, although at a much steeper angle now that he'd slowed down below 35.  Buddy trundled the rest of the way to the E Lodge at codger speed, but we made it.  Six miles he had to calm down, and he was still white as a Peanuts bedsheet ghost.

Somewhere on the first mile or two or three of the climb above the DOT, Shuksan appears through the canopy, that matriarchal Orca.  The Price, the Hanging, and the White Salmon Glaciers white above the deepest green.  October wet, August dry, March sunny break, she's there above the rest.  The remainder of the drive is what you'd expect.  Breathless anticipation, abject fear at 2 a.m. o'clock in the morning when there's a foot of variable on the highway and all you can do is hope the cat in front of your '87 GL didn't drive over the edge first, ghosts and those cold-day sprites, floating ice crystals no bigger than a flake of black pepper.  A scree field that'll swallow a liftie's Jetta like a batter swallowing his chaw after a particularly high insider.  It's sub-alpine, already, not even to four grand.  Then, depending on the day, it's time to boot up, time to go to sleep, time to walk along the Chain Lakes, eat breakfast after Buddy calms down, or just sit in the September sun and watch the pika make hay, the sky eerily empty on the 12th of September.

I didn't believe Pa when he tole me, but then I seent it up on ol' Table Mountain.  NPS photo.

Title from Lee Roy Parnell's epic road poem, On the Road.  Better than the book, I think.  Kerouac was, um, overrated.  Fight me. Besides, Kerouac could kinda write, Lee Roy can shred the slide guitar.