Love can make you happy

 I am almost 44 years old. Probly will be by the time you read this.  I thought I'd be good at this by now.  The season ends, and all of a sudden I feel like a beginner again.  For so many years, I'd rely on inertia, ski until I just had no energy for finding it.  Today, I can ski until last chair, take some pictures, and head off to some unknown.  Everything just seems to end.  I want to keep skiing, but, I don't know, I can't get to the snow.

Skied to last chair and took this picture.

Back at the beginning of April, my oldest brother and I made some turns up at Alpental.  It was one of Chair 2's last days, after almost 60 years of service.  Not coincidentally, our Pa was on the build crew, shooting footings and cutting runs.  One imagines that when it was built there were wild mountain goats and like prospectors and stuff, but really, other than some small differences in style and a few safety measures all lifts come with today, it wasn't much different than the chair Dopplemayr is building to replace it.  The skiing that day was like many days I've had up at the Pass, threatening rain until it actually does, alternating supportive spring slush and soupy mashed potatoes that just don't quite let your skis run the way you'd like. 

International was exactly as it should be.  Steep, deep moguls, long, crowded, gorgeous.  I skied alright that day, nothing to write home about.  Made some mistakes due to rustiness in the steeps or what have you, but it's been at least 15 years, maybe 16, and Alpental doesn't mess around.  Terrain traps, treewells even when it hasn't snowed in a while, double fall-line stuff that doesn't go the way you'd expect, tall mountain hemlock that block the view and distract at the same time.  The terrain around Chair 2 is especially rowdy.  It stands head and shoulders above what most people know of skiing.  Writers hammer out breathy listicles about places like Alta and CB and J-Hole, but Alpental just hangs out alone, almost unknown.  Legit, as the kids were saying a few years ago.

Steeps.

My knees have been off for a while now, seven seasons as I type, functioning fine for skiing but fighting me sometimes when I ride the bike.  I've had surgery, done countless reps of PT, gotten a PRP injection, and somedays it feels like I'm still 26 the way Stina claims I'll always be, but then I sit wrong or lay wrong and I come back to reality.  Or something in one of the knees just hurts.  The last eleven or so years have felt like a drawn-out dismantling of all the fitness and conditioning I built up in my 20s.  A reduction to a baseline so low I don't recognise it.  I've moved from state to state, friends have moved as well, even to other countries, and there are moments where I am alone, far from anything I knew or cared about.  I've backed myself into a corner, with career skills that have become too expensive for many shops and yet not lucrative enough to live somewhere I truly like.

This past winter I hit a wall.  I'd been at the same shop for eight years, with nothing other than inertia to keep me going.  Skiing felt rote, just something I did between clocking out and clocking back in.  Most mornings I hid how frustrated and sad I was from Amy, although I know she knew.  I'd sigh, say I was headed to work, and leave as though I might not be coming home again that evening.  It's hard to walk away from somewhere I thought I belonged, but I didn't belong, and never would, and if it was wearing me down to the point where something so central as skiing wasn't enjoyable anymore, it was time to move on, time to get going.  The new place is nothing special, but my blood pressure has dropped a few points and I don't hate being there.  There's promise, however small, that I can just settle in and slowly sand all the splinters off the veneer.

More steeps.

I've been rained on nearly everywhere I've skied.  I used to take pride in just going anyway, but I rarely have the emotional energy for it anymore.  John and I got rained on both at Alpental and at Crystal the next day, and it was fine.  The snow was largely fun, soft and supportive.  It felt like home.  It was, really, at least in that I grew up in those hills, skied that snow, breathed in the pollen and drank the water.  The views can be of forever, or of the forest around you and a gray you can't measure and a distance you can't see.  Some folks run from it, others wax ecstatic and can't stop talking about the layers of cloud and the water everywhere, dripping, dripping, dripping, off everything.

Not rain.

When John and I were up at my parents' house, I finally remembered to grab an old pair of skis I bought from some cat named Andrew, who patrolled at Baker back in '002.  For the time, they didn't seem all that big, 195 cm, with a 29 metre radius.  I thought they were powder skis, even.  I had tele bindings on em, for heck's sake.  The last day I remember skiing them was some time in '005, I think, with Pa and my sister-in-law at White Pass, before she married my brother.  The day was exactly what spring skiing should be, a little uncertain, temporary, warm, with some surprisingly good turns to be had.  It'd probly rained at some point, because the snow was clean and fast, that rarity where it never gets sticky.  The grains are the size of corn cobs.  Well, kernels anyway.  I don't know the mountain all that well, even in memory.  I found a line that just went and went, skiers' right of the detach, and like I tend to do this time of year, I just kept making the same turns.  Same moguls, same spots on the groomers.  Over, and over, and over.  I'm not sure where Pa and my sister-in-law were, actually.  I think they didn't want to ski the steeps with me.

White Pass is yet another singular Cascade joint, very much a local's hangout, not much in the way of lodging or even regional appeal, and as always in my view, is better for it.  Massive fir and hemlock line the low peaks.  Deep canyons from another epoch, volcanism both immediate and distant, both recent and ancient.  Rivers nobody really knows outside of Lewis and Yakima counties.  A highway, US 12, that is sometimes the only way across the Cascades when the storms stack up just right, itself an unforgiving mountain road with the commensurate frost heaves and constant threat of washout, streams in every draw, ripping in recent rain or the ever-present melt.

I ended up riding the detach a few times that day with some lady whose name I don't know if I even asked.  I think we were skiing about the same speed.  I don't really remember her at all other than the ghost of an idea.  When I see those skis, the legendary and final Rossi Bandit XXX, there's some hint of the few days I was up to the task.  My competition line down the Elk Chutes at Crystal, under the rope and over one of the only cliffs I've ever actually dropped.  That day at White, or the time I tried to clear the Highway on the way to work at Baker.  (You know how that went, I'm sure.  Even if you've never seen Heather Meadows.)  Paradise Bowl at Crystal, early March, 3° American and snowing like it didn't know how to stop, chunks of avy debris kicking up off those long, absurd tips.  Knee almost to the ski. The King a few runs later, my glasses frozen over so I couldn't wear goggles, skiing blind through what some magazines claim is Top 5 Steepest Runs In Ski Areas In The US of A.  I bet I didn't ski it all that well, but I don't remember anything of the run other than the ice cream headache.

So this one time I was at Whistler with my brother and we were riding the really big gondola with Dan Treadway (OMG SKI CELEB SIGHTING) and he had those funky over-the-head Oakley sunglasses and these skis and they were so damn cool and then I got em and then I got scared and then the other day I skied em again and they were actually pretty easy to ski and lotta fun and I think I'll keep em mounted and also did you see that those are Salomon 916 LAB bindings holy crap you should be impressed with me totally.

If I were forced to choose, I'd ski that good corn forever.  People ask and then are always surprised to hear it.  "What about the pow pow?" they say, as though one can't have any opinion other than what they read in a magazine or saw on some Tic Tac schreddit.  I cringe at the sound of the complaint, but folks call slush and corn and whatnot "bad".  To the point where they stop skiing just when the skiing itself is gettin' real good, and ski areas all shut down, and then here we are again.  

Anyway, I want it to be sunny, but I'd settle for that transitional day, lenticular over Tahoma, threatening rain but too lazy to really succeed.  Dodging fallaway cliff bands in the Alpental hemlock on Snake Dance, or some big turns on that long ramp off Piss Pass and eventually down to Lot 4.  The moguls under Ariel at Mt A, or Greenie's at the end of a long season at Bogus, milking every turn for all it's got.  Chair 3 liftline at Silver Mountain, or Sticky right under Chair 6 at Baker.  The summit of Bachelor, volcanoes lined up for three, four hundred miles.  White Pass, the moguls on Mach V and Hourglass, lofting off the cat track as far as I'm comfortable.  Double 00 Chutes either side of Chair 6 at Crystal just tryna get one more lap before a long summer, snow melting and tumbling down the valley to the White, cold and clear and merciless.

MOAR STEEPS

-

Title from the incomparible Kate Wolf's seminal song about everything but what you think it's about, Here in California, of which couplet the second part is "love can rob you blind".  Dang.

Last chair snow is sposeta be dirty.  Or just dirt. And it should be May or June or July, but nobody believes me and that makes me real sad.

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.

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.

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".

I love the bass when it's low and mean

I wish I had a picture of the sunburn my calves got the first time I hiked up to Camp Muir.  I'd kinda just slurred the sunscreen on quickly, and missed what ended up looking like flames coming out of my socks. Muir isn't a difficult hike, technically, just long. You leave Paradise at around the Or Fight* line and just keep goin until you need real alpinist gear and you're wondering who all these people are, sleeping at six in the evening.  The Muir Snowfield tops out a little over ten grand, at the divide between the part of Tahoma where you only worry about getting lost in the fog and the part where she's actively tryna off ya at every turn.  Being a snowfield and not a glacier, the Muir is skiable year round, easy in pitch if not in sightline. If you hike without skis, it's a long way down.

That first hike was with a kid who, to be blunt, was one of those friends you're friends with cos you think your friends are friends with him, only to find out when he's not around that nobody likes him and everyone is friends with him cos they think somebody else is friends with him, but in reality, you're all just kids in your early twenties, unforgiving, and now, looking back, maybe dude wasn't that bad. Kinda annoying in that socially awkward way that a lot of us were in our early twenties, and we just judged him cos we wanted to think we were better. Obviously, if he pulled some Me Too shit or like killed somebody and joined the Proud Boys, then maybe we were right.  Who knows where he's at, but we did some good hikes to some cool spots. Can't complain about that.

Strangely enough, it's Brett (I'm like 75% sure that's his name) who got me my first bike job, and damn near twenty years later, I'm still pretending to be a mechanic, building wheels in between those reveries of afternoon coffee, some sort of Scandihoovian almond pastry, looking out on a montane prairie, covered in snow.

Some boring volcanism at Camp Muir.

The first time I actually skied in October was around Halloween, or a little before.  One of those heartbreaking fall days you wish would never end.  It had snowed a little up at Paradise, not much, but enough to scratch a few turns into some frozen melt-freeze in the blazing but radiationally ineffective sun. Patches of grass.

It's hard to say the turns were worth the hike, let alone the drive up from Puyallup.  But then, if that's the math you're using, nothing is ever worth doing.  I try to ignore that sorta logic.  That day, let's say it was the 28th, probly '07, I just hiked until I found enough snow on a steep enough pitch, probly up around Pan Point or so. Seven grand, somewhere thereabouts.  I say snow, but it wasn't really.  I think I didn't even bother dropping the knee for fear I'd make too long a turn radius and be back at the car before I'd had my fill.  Joke's on me, though, cos sixteen years later I still ain't found "enough". I get by, yes, but at this point my desire outlasts my ambition. There's always a wisp of yearning hanging in the air like some deep subalpine valley in January where one house has a fire and the capping inversion is visible, just a lazy line of smoke about three hundred feet above the chimney.

I won't lie and say those turns were good, but they were memorable. Scratchy, challenging, even a little painful on my unprepared feet. When I got back to the old Legacy, I probly shrugged, looked up one last time at Tahoma in the late afternoon sun, and headed back to town. If I'm reading the calendar right, it was the 30th, right after Junior fired me from Bonney Lake Bicycles of Sumner, Washington. The start of the only good month of unemployment I've ever had.  The November turns that year outshone the October turns, but it doesn't matter.

The view from Camp Muir could be better.

October of '08, after getting skunked in the summer tryna ski Muir, Catherine was pretty gung ho about getting up there. It snowed early, and quite a bit. We were a day late, or maybe two, somewhere around the 12th.  She met me in Puyallup and we headed up in my Legacy. Another one of those days, clear, cool, visibility unlimited.  We didn't hit snow until above seven grand, what would be the toe of the Muir if it were a glacier. While swapping to skis and skins, we ran into a pro skier whose name isn't that important here. He was a full bedutchka to us, grunting and acting like we were in his way.  No answers to our questions, just an impatient gesture and he was off down to Paradise.  Any time I see his name today, I, too, grunt a little and act like he's still in my way.

The skin up from 7200' or so is long, long, long. Flat, in comparison to the sort of alpine lines most skiers dream about. I joke that the descent was the most exciting beginner run I've ever skied. You don't switch back much, just slorp and glorp your way along until the last few hundred vertical, where consensus holds that it's "steeper". The consensus holds, too, that the Muir Snowfield is only worthwhile for these early fall desperation quests.

Alas, the cognoscenti are correct.  The view from Muir is terrible. You only see a handful of volcanoes, there are cracks in the glaciers above, the rock is interesting only if you like rocks and volcanism. The valleys stretch below you lazily, and the Tatoosh look small at this distance.  The sun is benevolent instead of harsh, I mean, who wants that? The snowfield is long, and you'll probly just wanna get it over with cos skiing on a volcano isn't that special, is it?

You know what? Joke's on them.  Camp Muir is incomparable.  Millennia of volcanism tower over you, and this early in the water year, the underlying blue of the Cowlitz Glacier just over the divide peeks out from the crevasses, beautiful and ominous.  I know what they can do, and yet I can't look away.

The turns, ah, the turns, you ask. They were, well, challenging.  I'd built up excitement for the flat pitch, the long beginner run it would be, and then it was so sticky I had to hold each turn with all the leg muscles I could find. Tibialis posterior? Check. Soleus? Check. Adductor brevis? Check.  I don't even know what those are. Tele's hard enough when conditions are ripe, even more so when they are long past.  I didn't want it to end, but my legs did.  The two-day-old hot pow skied like you'd expect in the direct sun, that exposed southerly aspect.  The Muir fades skiers' left away from the Nisqually Glacier. It's so tempting to drift right and find the steeps of the Headwall, but there's no snow there off the glacier until the wet season systems build their snowpack, and it's not 1930 anymore.  The glacier no longer runs to the bridge.

The snow was so sticky, in point of fact, all I could do was a 30 metre turn and catch my breath on the transition, and repeat.  Eventually, the turns ended, the muscles could relax a bit.  It's still a few miles of dirt to the car from Pan Point, but the hiking shoes felt like slippers and it was mid October and I was twenty seven, in the golden years where you still know everything and your body doesn't yet hate you for seeking it all out. Eyes up, the Tatoosh growing with every step, and then the flat of the paved lot and the bemusement of the late-season tourists.  Low sun.

I guess this is cool if you're into that sort of thing. Nisqually Headwall, skiers' right of the Muir Snowfield.

The third October day was a full moon, '013.  It had puked at the hill, surprising for mid October in Jackson County.  Mt Ashland is the tallest point, and by most standards it isn't that tall. Seven and a half grand, give or take. The highest point on the Siskiyou Crest, recognisable from a long ways away.  The moon was low when I drove home from work in Medford, maybe a day or two before being truly full.

Amy was surprised at how ambitious I was when I got home.  Usually we'd make dinner and mellow out on the porch, a quiet evening above the bike shop, the heat of summer long past and the hippies long gone to warmer climes. Instead, we threw everything in one of the Subies and booted for the hill.

The lot was empty.  The snow was thick, and a bit orange from the town light reflecting off the thickening clouds.  A weak warm front passed through while we were there, changing the snow between runs from the first run in high quality settled-but-fluffy to a challenging crispiness. McLaughlin off in the distance to the northeast, Shasta just east of due south. The first run was delicious, the second a passing grade, but barely.  The warm air off the ocean was too much for the day old snow, and we called it a night.  Halo around the otherwise bright moon, a strange glow emitting from the Cascades to the east and the Bear Creek Valley below.

That winter never happened.  An early December storm dropped a foot in town on a whim. In the following days a burly Rogue Valley inversion set in and the snow just sublimated and the storm track never really returned.  The Weather Service called it the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, to which the late Kim Clark added "Great" so he could just say GRRR.  My last turns at Mt A were in March that winter, dodging potholes in what rotten snowpack was around, never once dropping the knee.  I could never get a rhythm in anything that winter, and in truth, I haven't really found a good one since.

My last memory from that night was the ghosts of the Shasta Valley, Black Butte and Cottonwood and Anderson Grade and Black Mountain.  Basalt. Dark shapes, distinguishable more through memorisation of place than recognition of shape.  Old volcanism, uplift, and desert. Quiet, distant and immediate all at once.  Impossible to repeat.

From Eagle Point in the daylight rather than Mt A in the full moon, and frankly, just another volcano. See one, you seen em all.

--

I could have named this after the John Denver classic Some Days are Diamonds, but that would be too easy, no?

Title from The Judds' Turn it Loose, which is kind of a nice easygoing country song for folks who don't wanna try all that hard.  I mean, yes, I like the song.

Eagle Point gets its name from the eagle on McLaughlin that is visible in the shot above. I wish somewhere around the Sound with a boring name--like Burien or Buckley or Renton or Kent--was instead called Elk Head.  That'd be fun.

*54-40 or Fight, but you know that.

You can't even see the Eagle from up here.