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.

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.

If you stay, it'll get better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bowl, Mt Ashland.  Them shits is right.

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

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

THE Mossback.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- -

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

The pilgrimage has gained momentum.

By Eino Holm

Unofficial Networks, aka the Bestest Ski Blog Site in the Whole Woild, has a thumbtacked post, or whatever, on their blog currently.  Something about a hajj or, like, what y'alls is sposeta do as major skier broskis.  It's funny.  Like, who are you to tell ME what to do, Matt?! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!?!?! I AM THE BEST SKIER ON THE MOUNTAIN.

I check all the cornices.

Anyway, what makes me laugh about all of these listicles, along with the twin facts that some jackass made up a cutesy and annoying term for them and that they still somehow exist, is the confidence with which folks post them.  #1 is Corbet's, natch, cos, y'know, intermediate-skier folks should book a trip, waste thousands, just to stare down into a very steep, incredibly challenging chute with a SORRY I KNOW IT'S A COOOL-WAHR mandatory air and realise they were lied to.  That skiing just isn't that easy, and that maybe, just maybe, some dud dude on the internet isn't really all that knowledgeable.

The list continues, with some random chair out east, a junk show in Tahoe, my least favourite ski area in Utah, and Alyeska.  Honourable Mention is Baker, which, well, maybe? But also maybe not, for the same reasons as Corbet's.  Baker can kill you.  (More so than most places can, not like when somebody does a routine crash and happens into a tree, which can happen anywhere, but like when a person makes a misguided but innocent left at the bottom of the Chair 5 side of Hemispheres and falls off a 200 footer and isn't seen until August.)  Let's be honest.  Most of us just want to ski.  I can speak for precisely nobody else, but since everybody does, I'll try anyway:  if I'm spending money, it's not to ride a chair folks claim is from the 40s (spoiler: it has been updated to the point where it's real dern challenging to claim it's older than my father) or to get all confused when tryna figure out Olympic Valley's crazy Spaghetti Bowl of chairs and trams and--wut?!?!--funitels and base areas and mid-mountain lodges just to get hosed by another northeast Pacific cyclone that comes in hot, but just a wee bit too far north and closes all the legit terrain with some righteous Pineapple Expressery.  If I'm spending money to ski, especially if it's at the end of a hajj, it ain't gonna be shit people do all the time.

The Back Bowls at Vail.  Supposed quiet and solitude.  People pay for this, and travel cross country.  Wut.

Here's my top 10, cos I'm too cool for just 5, with a predictable-for-me amount of uncertainty and unwillingness to say one is better than another:

- Shasta.  Seriously.  Squallywood is just up I-80 from SF, and there's like lots of houses rich folk use at least 10 days a year and there's like a lake and lots of fancy lights over on the Nevada side and basically Palisades is fine if you are looking to fulfill someone else's dream, but let's be honest: you are not Shane, and you are not Ingrid, and you are not Jonny.  Neither am I.  Save yer money, and Drive North.  (Your choice, John Hiatt or Suzy Boguss.)  Mt Shasta City is funky, weird, cool, foreign, dirty, in the trees, and, simply, not annoying like Tahoe.  Tahoe would be rad without, well, being Tahoe.  Plus, there's Pinus attenuata and Abies x shastensis on them hills. Weird is better, believe me. Also, too, as well, you just might be the best skier on the mountain, and you absolutely will not be on KT. And did you hear they built a new chair and people think it's hard to access cos you have to--gasp--ski there? Seriously.  You should read the Instagram comments.  "BUILD ME A BUS OUT OF A SNOWCAT AND PUT CARPET ON THE FLOOR AND A FEATHER BED SO I CAN GO SKI GREY BUTTE."  "I WANT A TOW ON A SLED BUT LIKE, WITH EXTRA SPECIAL SNOW PROTECTION AND MAYBE A GLASS OF PORT AND A DOG TO CUDDLE WITH COS I WANNA SKI GREY BUTTE." It's funny, but I don't get it.  Last time I was there, one simply ducked off the back side of Coyote and skied fall line to the bottom of the butte, where the chair is now.  Hm.

- Woof Crick.  I mean, how, Matt, did you miss Col-o-RAD-o?!?!?!? Everybody knows, when you list skiing, Colorado is number 1.  And, natch, Woof Crick isn't in one of your fancy multiverses or even part of the Colorado ski area exchange.  One of the chairs is called Treasure Stoke, and aren't all skiers all about the stoke?  Seriously, though, Woof Crick isn't near anything.  CW McCall aside, nobody outside knows where Woof Crick Pass even is, even, and outside of ski mag nostalgists and nerds nobody cares if there's skiing outside of Telluride or Aaahspen or Vail or Summit or Steamboat.  Or Winter Park.  (Okay, so, CO is pretty well-known.)  Anyway, to get to Woof Crick, if you are the jetsetting type, you gotta fly into Farmington UT NM (KFMN) and start asking for rides.  If you just think "it's in Colorado" and book a seat in a giant wingèd tube bound for Stapleton, you'll then be looking through the rental catalogues hoping for an Escalade with good gas mileage, cos it's a loooong damn way to the other side of the hill. Hence, hajj.  You go through places like the real South Park, Gunbarrel Station, Saguache (important cos you probly can't say it correctly), and Poncha Springs.  You'll cross the Rubicon Rio Grande, be humming Woof Crick Pass, way up on the Great Divide, truckin on down the other side, except that you don't hafta truckin on down the other side cos Woof Crick is right there on the pass.  You'll get confused again cos, of course, you'll think you're in Canada.

- Bormio.  (Seriously, Matt, how did you not Europa?) It's near the Stelvio, and, like der Schweiz, and Österreich, and when you can fly into Milano, flounder about like a tourist, try to find a Stelvio to drive up way into the Ortlers on a road called STRADA DEL PASSO DELLO STELVIO HOW COOL IS THAT.  Anyway, I got lost.  Just go.  It takes forever, and people do pilgrimages, like the real kind, through Italia all the time.  You heard it here first.

Everyone knows you hafta drive an Alfa if you are a skier.  Or something like that.

- Okay, I'll admit it, Mad River Glen (MRG) is cooler than most places.  I'd like to go there.  There's probly at least a little bit of pilgrimage-type travel involved.  Still, if I gotta go all that way, the first place in Vermont I'm skiing is Owl's Head, QC.  I mean, it's named after a dude called Owl.  And it's in Canada.  That's like, if you're going to Vermont, but you forgot and just kept going and then some Sirens called out and you took the boat into shore, and then you woke up from your dream and found some real nice poutine and hopefully a Trois Pistoles.  Seriously.  Also, I've seen pictures of the view from that place.  And it's next to Lake Memphremagog, which is a pilgrimage just saying it and also, it's kinda like Gog and Magog, and that's all sorta connotations right there.

- Bigrock, Maine.  It's way up there.  A long way from anywhere except the NWS office in Caribou.  I think you can see Canadia from the top of the big Mueller double.  I know, I know, you can see Cannuckistan from lots of ski areas, like Baker, Bromont, Mont Bechervaise, Whistler, Lake Louise, Mount Saint Louis Moonstoone, Stoneham, et al.  But those places are all IN Canada.  Just ask the locals.

That one peak at the back is in Canada and that's all that's needed, thank you very much.

Photo credit: Peter Landsman, Lift Blog.

- Lofoten.  Just go.  Seriously.  Stop arguing with me.  Say hi to my family, too, if there are any of us left in Skutvik.  Skutvik's across the water, but there's a ferry.  My grandma's cousin Bodvar painted there, and, probly not coincidentally, that part of my family is the Skutvik part.  Like, that's literally our name.  If you don't believe me, then you can take a flying f

- Manning Park.  Before you ask "where's Manning Park?" just listen.  YOU CAN SEE HOZOMEEN FROM THERE AND THAT'S LIKE JACK FRICKIN KEROUAC AND SHIT AND GOOOOOOGLE MERTH SAYS IT'S 42,753 FEET AS THE RAVEN FLIES (seriously, why do we care how the crow flies when ravens are so much cooler?!) WHICH IS LIKE, I DON'T KNOW, SOME MILES.* AND, since we're talking about long walks drives, Manning Park is a Wet Side ski joint on the Dry side of the Cascades.  Think about THAT.  I bet you didn't even know there were Cascades in Canadia.  It's a bit of a drive, 160k from Abby, and is in the Similkameen drainage, which drains to the east and is like, International and stuff.  Also a cool name.  And even though this beautiful Murray-Latta is no more, the views are unstoppable.  Did I mention Keraouc?

That's more like it.  Manning Park, BC, and yes, Hozomeen.  The big one right there.  Next to the other big ones.  Keraouc sat in a really cool shed at the top of a small peak behind that one peak, actually more of a ridgeline, and wrote a real complainy book about being lonely even though it was his choice and he was like sposeta be seeing God or something? Anyway, he missed the point so that you can get the point.  Now, go take on the day.

- Discovery, Montana.  It's in the middle of nowhere.  It's the biggest joint in the country without a detach.  If it isn't, I don't care, it still is in my mind.

- Cannon.  I mean, the name, the history, the tram (I hate trams, but I'd get over myself), Lahout's, bad weather, big mountains, the funky layout, trees, cold, rain, rime, it's got all the things.  It's so far north, if it were in Washington it'd be in Coburg, OR, just north of Eugene.  It's between two places with such storied names as Bethlehem and Woodstock.  I mean, neither is the real one, but that's okay.  Also, interestingly, the western portion of Cannon is Mittersill, Blizzard is listed as their official ski, and wouldn't you know it, BLIZZARD'S FACTORY IS IN MITTERSILL, ÖSTERREICH HOLY SHIT MIND BLOWN.

You can tell this is Skutvik because of how it is.

- -

Just kidding, I know it's not Stapleton.  It's the new Illuminati Spaceport out in the desert into which you fly on hajj.  The one with all the secret tunnels.

*8, give or take.

Bonus:  Spaghetti Bowl in SLC.  Lookit a Palisades map if you don't believe me.

- Title from REM's Pilgrimage.  But you knew that.