The hills turn brown.

By Eino Holm

Like many things in the west, Peter Skene Ogden is credited with naming Mt Shasta.  There isn't a lot of concrete evidence he even knew which mountain he was naming.  The mountain most certainly went by names other than Shasta before him, and still does.  It could be Shasta, yes, but it could be Úytaahkoo or Lemuria or the Root Chakra of the World.  Ogden called neighbouring McLaughlin Sastise, and many other names, and the name was transferred in the way of folk music to another mountain, and transposed, so that today we have Shasta, 80 or 90 miles to the south.  McLouglin was known by many names as well.  Such is the way of things when so many of the peoples within viewing distance don't have truly shared language, or aren't in contact with the regularity that is required of community reference.  This sounds like a criticism, and it is much the opposite.  It is a rich pastiche we modern white Americans are sadder for not knowing or understanding.  Unlike Tahoma, Denali, or Koma Kulshan, there really isn't a widely agreed upon ancestral name for Shasta. Cos, you know, stuffy academic white people need to agree on what somebody else's ancestors called something that will be here long after we are gone for that name to hold steady.

Shasta is in the southeast of Siskiyou County, and is utterly dominant.  It is the most voluminous (no more eloquent way to say it) volcano in the Cascade Arc.  To those of us who are tied by birth or spirit or whatever to Tahoma, it is a bit surprising to note.  Tahoma is massive.  Ever present.  Comfortable and threatening all at once.  I grew up not too many feet above the Osceola Plateau, the mudflat spatulaed into place by the historical Emmons Glacier, its foundational rock, and much of the summit of Tahoma when the northeast aspect liquifacted and ran all the way to current-day Puget Sound.  Well, Whulge.  A rare native name these modern ears find inelegant, which obviously doesn't matter.  To me, Tahoma is the sky, and God, and most everything, so to admit that Shasta is actually bigger in mass is an interesting academic challenge.  Shasta doesn't care what I think, though.  Shasta is a beautiful, asymmetric composite cone with a commanding view of the heat of the Shasta Desert east of Yreka.  The Shasta River (sensing a theme yet?) drains the northwestern aspect and some of Mt Eddy and its foothills to the west.  The desert isn't empty, not in the sense of the southwest.  It's a working desert; the forests around are working forests.  It is bounded on the north by the Klamath River and the Monument--the bridge between the Siskiyou Range and the Cascades--and on the east by the Lost Cascades. The desert is hidden to most, hot and uninviting to the unimaginative.  If one is heading toward Shasta from the south as most folks do, from the Central Valley and the Bay, this small desert simply doesn't exist.  It shares a lot of mystery with all the deserts, well and lesser known.  Shasta's bulk shadows the brown fields a bit and gives cover to any ghosts that may glide along in the night.

From Lake Siskiyou

Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash

Shasta, the volcano, is a hallucination from the summit of Diablo, a flag waving in the distance above the Central Valley.  To some, it is home to dolphins and eternal near-humans from some long-lost island in the Indian Ocean and life-defining crystals of some sort.  I've tried to find out more, something specific, but all the literature is delightfully vague.  Shasta City is a central point on the southwestern slope, a place to gather supplies for the long day of climbing Avalanche Gully, a coffee stop in a dirty and welcoming downtown, or a place in the hills to assemble the last needs before shutting oneself off from the cluttered world of modern society in some sort of yoga retreat or, more likely, a montane hallucination of privileged white spirit quest.  Just east of town, lined up to the north off the highway that eventually leads you to the volcanic wonderland surrounding Old Tehama and New Lassen, are four small buttes on the southerly shoulder of the volcano.  Mt Shasta Ski Park sits on the middle two bumps and a mellow ramp immediately west.  It is a small area, three chairs, some snowmaking, some nice Shasta fir (speaking of disorganised etymology) and knobcone pine, and an incredible view of the southern Cascades and eastern Klamath range.

These southern Cascades are many shades different from their northern cousins.  Well known in ski circles are the jumble of volcanism from the Klamath Basin up through Hood River, the accretionary alpine wonder of the North Cascades from Snoqualmie Pass into Canada, or the high country steeps east of Tahoma.  This mildly bizarre slice of far-north California is just, for lack of a better word, different.  It is so dry that the planners of the PCT took it well to the west through the Klamath Range and only brought it back to the actual crest at the natural bridge of Siskiyou Summit.  As one walks northward, one is constantly playing peek-a-boo with the domineering spirit to the right.  In the winter some years, it is almost as dry.  The south slope of the volcano is also home to some of the most intense snowfall anywhere, with a single-storm record of 189 inches in three days back in 1959.  In a wet, cool, southerly upslope, this mass of orography provides limitless forcing and it can just absolutely puke.  If the storms track in from the west, sometimes there's little if any snowfall as the Klamath Range is mighty, wide, and built out of epochs of uplift such that there is no simple drainage system or terrain gap to allow any low-level flow to pass through.  There are several peaks in the neighbourhood of nine grand, with Mt Eddy due west of the volcano across the low valley at a handful of yards above.

The ski area itself is pretty much lost in this place.  It slides down one side of two small and unassuming peaks and attracts working class folks from Weed and Redding.  The curious, interesting, and oddly formed knobcone pine that make up part of the forests are head-scratching to those of us used to more traditionally shaped conifers.  Its cones curl back toward the trunk.  These cones are serotinous, opening only after a fire.  It isn't a particularly charismatic tree, not like its mixed-stand companion.  These fir stand tall, red-barked, cones upright.  The first ride up Douglas our first day skiing at Shasta, we both were surprised by the weedy little Pinus attenuata, not sure what it was or what to make of it, but it grew on me.  Out here in the desert, away from conifer country, I miss it.  No surprises there; to quote John Prine in the liner notes for Iris DeMent's Infamous Angel, I am a sentimental old fool.  Anyway, diversions, diversions.  That's all I am some days.

I have been in retail, fixing and selling bikes to often disinterested folks, for going on twenty years now.  I try to speak only in affirmatives, this bike does trails and some climbing, that one does descents like Hugo Harrison, that one over there is real good at listening, that one with the skinny knobblies will serve up a nice flatiron steak with mushrooms and pine nuts and gruyère on house-made Finnish crisp bread.  Skiing is no different.  I look to find what a place is good at, such as Bogus' weekday quiet and adventurey willow skiing, or Mt A's views and Chute 4 in the Bowl and the Void off the southeast side from the top of Windsor.  Shasta skis real nice in a cold southerly upslope on Christmas when Anderson Grade is closed to anyone without chains or 4, obviously, but it also sure does a nice job on MLK when Mt A is closed due to wind and the snow gets sloppy.  Douglas has a short, fun pitch full of manzanita that bakes into a smooth whipped cream in the low-angle January State of Jefferson sun, off the south side and not skied all that much.  I learned quickly one winter that Amy's college slalom skis with the race plate ripped off may not adequately float in this wonderful stew, but that's me and not Shasta.  Coyote has some moderate steeps, that fun sort of pitch that with courage and good grooming can be railed on edge, or steered with less vim and maybe less on the line.  Some southwest aspects that bump up nicely, some fir thickets that really benefit from a few inches of wind consolidated.  As with oh, so many ski areas in the west, a little ambition can get you some interesting sidecountry that feeds back into the area.  (The usual caveats apply; slackcountry is backcountry, don't go if you don't know, that sorta thing.)

From Bunny Flat, near the old Ski Bowl

Photo by Eleonora Patricola on Unsplash 

Something the Ski Park has that many western ski areas do not is a varied and longer-trailed beginner zone.  Marmot is one of only a handful of beginner chairs I can think of with a view of a nice fourteener.  It is slow, and pretty long for a beginner chair.  Shasta is a place where one is best served by patience and proper expectations.  The groomers skiers' right of the chair are wide, mellow, fun to just ride along, slowly rolling the skis edge to edge, wide open train tracks and a couple nice nose dives to the left.  It's certainly possible to ski each named run in just a few days, but I wouldn't.  Relax, make some nice turns, watch the Abies x shastensis and Pinus attenuata wash by, maybe have a La Croix in the lot looking up at the amazing volcanic spirit hanging above.

The post-pandemic eddy of this river of time still hasn't arrived.  Some things won't be around in a year or two; I think my favourite coffee and book shop with the wall of mysticism is gone already. That long drive back to Ashland certainly wouldn't be the same without a short stop for a magazine and a fluffy beverage.  It's very pretty, though, Interstate 5 itself notwithstanding.  Surprisingly quiet, the desert to the right and the hills north of Eddy to the left, Shasta looming in the rearview, Ash Creek Butte hiding over there in a hidden corner almost out of sight.

Title from Kate Wolf's "Here in California"

Anyway, the wind blows.

By Eino Holm

An apocryphal folksy aphorism says it's an ill wind that blows no good. I say apocryphal because I don't care to verify its origin, not because I can't verify its veracity.  Basically, it's a simple logical syllogism. If, then.  I learned that back at GRCC, fall quarter, my senior year in high school.  I also got a free Calculus book from a fellow back-row cynic.  In this case, even though it is one of those sayings the old men in the instructor room say during a preseason meeting, it is true from at least the human perspective.  Without any good, there is only ill.  The saying likely isn't meant to convey any meteorological truthiness, though.  Whence it came, it is interpreted by tweedy nerds and folksy Grammas alike as a kind of Bob Carpenter "Stand a Little Rain" sorta dealie.  Rainbows and stuff.  Gold, silver, Spanish galleons.  You know.  Without alpha, there is no omega.

The fences in any windy place, say, the north of Utah, or Kansas, or the steppes of central Asia, or in my case, Enumclaw, gather all sorta detritus.  Russian thistle, ponderosa needles, grocery bags, what have you.  It isn't necessarily a beautiful tableau, but as with so many things in memory, it is lyrical.  The fence at James Oil, for example.  Cold, static charged, gritty in a February easterly.  Given an open prairie, or say, an ocean, wind will not actually flow directly from a low pressure centre to that of a high, but rotate counterclockwise around the low and clockwise around the high here in the northern hemisphere.  Mountains are not open, flat, or in any way resembling an ocean, though.  Gaps, ridgelines, volcanism, 200 foot conifer, rivers, lakes, rock, narrow passes, wide headlands, steep hillsides, complex drainages, pretty soon you have very specific places like Enumclaw where in many winters the easterlies just don't quit.  Ridgelines with sparse populations of krummholz subalpine fir and whitebark pine.  Wind isn't good or bad, it's just a fact of atmospheric physics that in the end is incredibly complex and leaves its trace all across our lives.

An alpine chair somewhere, covered in rime (windblown frozen fog).

The personification of wind is extensive in our collective history, at least to the point of naming frequent and identifiable winds.  Santa Ana.  Scirocco.  Diablo.  Chinook.  Föhn.  I'm certain the older cultures gave them personalities.  Certainly, artistic depictions of wind often had a puff-cheeked fella givin er over the ocean or the plains, the visible whoosh coming out of the clouds.  If one looks at a skilled wind mapping model like earth.nullschool.net, the visualisation is impressive.  Continuous flows around the globe, high and low centres in stark relief given their hemisphere-specific rotations, wind shear evident in the different layers, the ability to at least hazard a mildly educated guess on if there's some lake effect over Erie, PA right now.  Even so, wind is never constant.  It's easy for me to understand why older cultures just assumed some giant moody dude was up there blowing on them, the way the wind ebbs and flows like it would if you or I were creating it.  The same way that so many religions evolved from attempts at explaining the unexplainable.  Simple, if mystical, origins for everything.  There is no harm in any of this, no need to erase the nebulous spirituality in favour of the verifiable science.

-

The crook in the hill Bogus Basin calls The South Face, skiers' left, not quite to Liberty, piles up some nice whalebacks in a good wind.  It runs uphill, dumping snow in the lee of the trees, sometimes six and eight feet high.  That cool ridge-hopping turn, unweighting just before the crest and landing cleanly on the other side.  This being Bogus, it isn't a long run, and quickly one has to find an exit around the willows.  Those six or eight turns are irreplaceable.  This same wind can be a knee snapper on the cat track above the ridge, especially those vintage Bogus freezing fog days where the snow feels cold and unaffected, but the goggles freeze over and the ground goes distant and flat.  There's a windlip every ski length or two, arhythmic.  Many an ad agency would say to pretend they don't exist.  It's another skill to learn, though, something that always reminds me of why skiing is so singular.  I won't win every game.  I'll come back to the board and try again.

Bogus is near the bottom of the middle when it comes to snowfall, comparable to or just a little behind such storied hills as Stowe and Copper, and in some specific ways, it is reminiscent of the higher alpine locales like Copper.  More snow than Sun Valley most years.  I bet yer Epikon Pass doesn't advertise that. That exposed ridgeline, skiable skiers' right, bare on skiers' left.  Exposure, aspect, elevation, protection, all play in to the equation.  The westerly aspect of Shafer Butte, Greenie's and War Eagle and in between, can be hardpan with chocolate chip rocks and little artemisia nubs in one lane and fully covered, with some incredible creamy duff to schmear around in the next.  I have had runs on sunny days where my tracks have disappeared, those free refills that get marketing folk all gooey-eyed and weak-kneed.  These aren't neck-deep, triple overhead days.  They're clear and sometimes mild days between cycles.  Days where the intermountain emptiness provides an empty stage to the varying highs and lows slowly moving all around us.  One can see the Sawtooths and the Seven Devils and the Wallowas, and yet in the right lane of the right aspect, the skis are buried and the turns are sublime.  I can imagine, as my skis kinda just do their thing and I ride along comfortably and happily, Kári building this set with his winds.  A little off the front side here, put that over here in the Doug fir of that little bowling alley.  Draw some up from the creek draw at the bottom of Sunshine and build a whaleback or three up the draw separating the Face from Liberty Trees. Put the rest in the void between Wildcat and Mary's.

-

Without wind, those cornices y'all are so fond of dropping wouldn't be there, nor, truly, would the snow.  When you complain about the wind, you are asking the world to stop turning, water to be something else entirely, to lose that elemental thing in our lives we call skiing.  Wind isn't always benevolent.  The old saying, though, is true.  There is always some good to be found.  The little runnels in new snow from a gentle breeze.  The deep infill in the Alphabet Chutes when it hasn't snowed in a few days and a nice breeze comes up out of the Park.  The Good Wind.  The tracks from yesterday's traverse across the beach up to the Boxcar.  Something about how the snow packs into the sunken tracks must provide a good bonding surface for the windblown snow, such that today they are raised tracks with surrounding snow either settled or blown over the cornice into Stina's Chute and the broader Silver Basin.

Someone on the magic internet box said complaining about the weather is better than complaining about people complaining about weather.  He's wrong, obvs.  Complaining about weather isn't even tilting at windmills.  At least Don Quixote made for memorable lit.  Wishing for perfect weather is bougie and pedestrian.  We aren't that, yet, are we?  We're skiers, or something.  We make meaning out of furtive moments and transient feelings.  We embrace the suck, as the kids say.  

I mean, I don't.  I go home when I'm frustrated, or deep cold, or if my gut is upset, or if the skis just aren't working.  I think, like pain, though, the suck isn't so much subjective as it is uncomparable.  As in, I cannot compare mine to yours.  I realise as I'm writing that I'm arguing with myself, that maybe Ryan really does hate the wind, and that Stina really is tired of skiing in the rain, or that Pa only wants the benevolent weathers now that he's well past retirement age but still making stumps.  People automatically assume that my knee issues (more on that and those and them and everyone's in another post, or other posts) are constantly painful, but I don't feel much pain most of the time.  Not, I AM SO HARD I DON'T FEEL PAIN but there just, well, there just isn't that much pain sometimes.  Beckmann said I'd need a week of bad pain pills after he Dremeled my right knee, but it really never hurt at all.  Again, not me being tough, but my nerves not transmitting anything my brain recognised as pain.  So maybe when it's snowing sideways at 40 knots and graupel and all I feel is some sting on my cheek, others' cheeks feel the abrasion of a thousand simultaneous chemical peels and ice or whatever.  At any rate, we need wind.  This isn't a hurricane.

(Someone somewhere said one measure of intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in your head simultaneously and be able to consider them equally.  I hope they're right.)

-

As I said before, my father is a logger.  He has other terms, but they are more specialised, and besides, none of you like his trade anyway.  Your condo isn't made of imagination and rainbows, it's wood and metal and concrete.  Something of my father is in every town in the west, whether it's a power pole along the main road or the lumber in the walls.  He hates wind, and he's the only person I won't argue with on that point.  Wind could kill him.  It has sent him home when he's twenty minutes from finishing his setting.  It has cost him incalculable wages.  It has in some form hurt--or killed--friends and coworkers.  When he grumbles about the wind, I understand and even agree.  The rest of you, though, in your fancy buildings and with expensive coats and airtight goggles and gloves you didn't find in the ditch while driving the number 3 plow, maybe consider your place in the world.  The wind was been here since the earth formed and began spinning, however it did.

The wind moves through my parents' house more easily than you'd expect.  The house isn't airtight, little slots between some of the logs, or is it just more mystical than we know? That same wind, the Stampede Easterly, will flare Mike Walsh's stove up at 3 am, ghostly flames appearing out of nothing, dancing wildly behind the hazy glass of the stove's door.  The wind dives off the hills above his house and directly down his chimney, a silent, mysterious, invisible Santa with nothing but a little harmless ennui for a gift.  The first time I heard it happen, Mike was off in McCall.  He'd mentioned that the east wind could be a bit, I don't know, spectral, but nothing more.  I stood on the balcony, staring at the stove for time unknown, wondering if this was it.  Maybe Ma is right, there is a God and He comes to visit at odd times in ways we don't understand.  When the wind had finally stirred all the remaining wood gas to burning--combustion is its own unknowable mystery--and the flames blinked out, I lay back down to not sleep until my alarm, slumping into to a day that wasn't quite as calm as it could have been.

-

The upper mountain is closed a lot, at many places that have an upper mountain.  Crystal is my experience.  One of my first bosses up there told me of a day when John and Scott didn't want to close old Chair 3 because the wind was only hitting hard at one tower, but that tower kept deroping.  He and this dude named Kenny, one of the only lift mechanics I got along with in my short tenure as such, had to trade off keeping the rope on the sheaves with a marlin spike.  Sounds safe.  Old 3 being a Riblet, and knowing the profile, it was likely one of the last few towers before the top, with the wind blowing up out of Green Valley from the southeast.  Riblets don't have grips like darn near every other lift out there, they have clips, which are squished spikes that have a flat, short, forked tongue with opposing hooks that is spliced into the core of the rope.  As such, it is possible to sit on a tower cap and keep that rope in place.  A grip could grab the spike, or worse, Kenny's or Todd's hand, and make a mess of things.  The tower side of a Riblet's rope only presents a small expansion in the strands.  Might bump the spike a little, nothing more.  Still, I imagine frustration, and fear, and possibly some anger.  Is it really necessary to be up here, actually risking life or at least limb just to keep this little redundant chair running for a handful of bums and rich folk to make three extra turns before heading to the Elk to pose by the fire?  Probly not.

What that wind does, up there by itself, alone, changes storm to storm and minute to minute.  Down below, in the trees, it's quiet.  The traverse over from the top of 9 isn't too too hard, and then it's Bear Pits and storm day wind-consolidated and often the sort of turns one thinks of when it's August and it's 100 and Boise is choked in some other range's smoke and the sun is just red, glaring angrily.  Through the gate, leftward sidestep, then drop the knee.  All your'n.

Title from Southern Pacific's "Any Way the Wind Blows"

I've seen them all.

By Eino Holm

Let's say you live in Vermont.  Say, Woodstock.  You ski a lotta days at the Beast.  You have a racing background that is, maybe not successful, but informative.  You don't have a lot of money, but on many days you're the best skier on the mountain.  (I don't have the numerical values memorised, but you're pretty rad.)

I'll pause here and say that I was born within breathing distance of the Salish Sea, have skied through multiple 500"+ winters, and have no idea what a real Ice Coast winter is like.  Still.  Hear me out.

Anyway, you've been pounding nails a while and have the seasonal swing down pretty good now.  You pick up hours at the hill scraping wax for a cheap pass and to keep from totally draining your savings each winter.  You are first in line at the ski swaps, and you know how to patch your Gore and rebuild your blown-out Impact CS 120s a fifth time.  You have a pretty good stash of skis in the pantry of your lean-to, the one you told the landlord you'd build so's you could put up food for the winter, but really it's to house all your skis.  There's no doubt about it, you've got a ski for each day.  You grew up skiing here, running gates and avoiding rain days when it made sense to or was possible, meaning you had your share of rain days like any good Vermonter.  You've got that 30 metre Radical WC you found on a trip to Acadia back in '015 when your boss needed shingles he could only get from that one shake mill in Windsor and you decided to make a road trip of it. That board rips on those day-after-the-rain days when it seems like you can see all the way to Mt Washington, but can't find an edge to save your life.  You've go the Big Stix 106 you bought as a joke on ebay a few years back, the one with the faux wood paneling from who knows how long ago, and then found out you like on those rare moments when it's day three of a five day Nor'Easter and the wind takes a breather and there's some okay viz and you burn a free ticket to Stowe a rich customer gave you last summer and you find some of those rocky glades Ski the East always has in their edits.

There's a few skis in there you only step into if you're up for patch hopping down Superstar on the last bits of manmade, or for joke turns on that first heavy frost before the fans and wands really start blowing.  There's a slalom board for whenever you feel like pinning on a number for a beer league night, and that Bonafide you got off KSL in Huntsville a few years back when you had a wild hair and chased a storm for the only time you could afford in your life and the Big Stix were too big cos it didn't fire the way the TV weather folks said it would, but you didn't want to be caught in UT on your skinny skis.  You promised yourself you'd never watch the TV weather folks again.  There's your totally clapped out, but still ripping Monster 88, all blaze orange glory, and its slightly smaller sibling, the one you reach for most days when you're at home, the '07 Monster 78.  Green, and mean, and fast.  You knew the radius once, but you've forgotten in the twelve years since you bought it used from a guy whose cousin Sarah out in Wenatchee met Dean U'Ren from Head at a bar after a demo at Mission and badgered him relentlessly to sell her the ski at season's end.  That ski, man, it rips. Still.  Much metal, many woods, only been drilled at most four, maybe five times; those yellow 900S Equipes totally clash but they still pass the test.  Vermont Safety, natch.  You scored that from a one-man garage shop in Brattleboro who retired in '03 when you were just out of college.  All the shops use a Speedtronic now and tell you they won't test your several non-indemnified bindings.  You are set, though, until VS stops calibrating your, um, calibrater.

The Ripping Monster 88.

That ski, though, it eludes you.  The One Ski to Rule Them All.  Every fall, since at least the 90s, some company or other stakes a claim.  Or all of them do.  It's so tempting, the myth of the quiver killer.  "I could just grab my one ski and go! None of this 'I'll bring three and see how the day goes' bull$#!@."  But nothing grabbed your eye, even though looking back that 185 XXX was probly as close as anyone came in '03. You still couldn't let go of that sexy orange P40, though.  It railed, almost like your high school GS board except better somehow, and, well, FRICKIN ORNJ.  Those are still in the pantry, of course, but you don't really ski em.  198 is just silly these days.  Maybe when your younger sister is in town from out west and you want to show her how big bro still rips the tar out of them groomers and he ain't need none a that rocker business.  Then you put em back away for another year and breath a sigh of relief that you don't always hafta try and keep up with her.  I mean, it's fun and all, really, cos most of your buddies drifted off a few years ago to real jobs in big cities like Burlington or Portland, or, like, Bethel or whatever, but she's just that much better and seven hours straight beats you up pretty good.  So again, you start wondering, what if?

I've seen claims of this brand or that brand's One Ski Quiver, and they are often absurd.  An email I got from MDV one year was an advert featuring Ian McIntosh saying his 117 mm Coastal BC heli weapon was all the ski he needed.  Well, sure, Ian.  I get it.  A) you are a monster, like really really dang good and stuff.  I'm this moderately above weekend warrior status ski guy, while you are, well, Ian Frkn McIntosh. Grade A Badass.  B) You don't schlep your Forester to the local non-profit to dodge California transplants who complain about the wilderness toilet at the bottom of 3, you climb or get a ride to the top of some really æsthetic, wild, huge, and untouched peaks in some really remote places.  You depend on your ability to send it, day in, day out, and most of what you ski demands a big goshdarn ski.  The rest of us?  117 isn't ever useful.  (Well, maybe at Baker or Mammoth.)  Other brands claim their 85 mm all mountain ski with tip and tail rocker and a carbon insert and some P-Tex is gonna handle it all.  Never mind the occasional deep day will swallow it and the second week of a Southern Idaho chalk-drought will deflect it off line all day.  But sure, that mild-mannered lawyer of a ski can do anything!

I won't list all my skis here, but suffice it to say that for once I am a splitter, not a lumper. I like having the right ski for the right day in the right conditions.  Sometimes, I probly miss a run standing by my front door debating.  I always enjoy when I get it right.  Last winter, still rehabbing my knee, I had a cool, sunny Wednesday on my big GS board--yes, I have a small GS board as well--where everything just felt right.  Groomers, obviously, but the chalk bumps in the upper Triangle and some funky scratchy hardpan on the Face as well.  Before you get wistful and say "Back in my day, we skied everything on big GS boards and loved it," remember that that kinda sucked.  I mean, yes, it was skiing and by extension, therefore quite fun, but skis of today, even an unforgiving race ski, are much more rewarding and much more manageable.  My big GS ski is way easier for me to handle than whatever Plake was hucking on in '87, as well.  I'm real dang happy about this, too, cos I am no Plake.  That guy can shape a turn like pretty much nobody else can.  I can, well, as Pa's Army buddy in Garmisch said back in the early 70s, I can turn both ways and stop.

All this to say, just giver.  Watch the end-of-season specials.  Haunt as many ski swaps as you can.  Scroll through Craigslist during your morning constitutional.  You might net a barely used Legend from a few years back that a guy who does demos in the winter with a buddy in SLC is clearing out, or a 182 HRC that some dentist bought because his buddy who still zips up a speed suit at least once a week said it'd lay tracks like a 19th century railroad baron only to find that even if the ski could, he couldn't. If you are lucky enough to chase a storm, see if there's a used shop somewhere nearby.  Rich city people sometimes have different needs and agendas and dump gear rather than take it home.  The Gold Mine in Ketchum, say.  2nd Tracks (now Level 9, I have learned) in northern Utah has a few shops, and pawing through their used and consignment racks is like reading back issues of Powder Magazine from the glory days.  Do you ever wonder?... Or, if you have a flexible schedule or are "funemployed", look for a ski shop or instructor job.  Then work the whole season, keeping your promise.  Don't be that person who shows up all excitedly only to wither in the face of not skiing during the holidays while selling skis or filling the Mercury. Stick it out, all the way, then use that pro deal.  You'll run across all sorta marketing collateral telling you that the new KB7UXW with RaceRocker and Franjo-Carbotinum stringers is the perfect blend of race-room confidence and pow-slash manœuverability.  That the new hybrid pin-tech-race-carve binding with SilkSmooth heel track will ski just as well on your Pat's Peak ice day Tuesday as it does for Jenny Prostuff in the Mt Shredly skin-to slackcountry on her twelfth deep day in a row.  That all you need is those sweet, sweet Euro touring poles with the carbon shaft and exchangeable baskets and you'll be National Team materièl. Truly.  That touring boot will bend your new full metal, full camber 75mm teaching skis just as well as Mikaela's custom Redster WC hors categorie plug boot does.  All this jargon is just that.  Read reviews, talk to friends, find demo days if you are able, and find what you like.  Because a ski, or a boot, or a jacket, something that's real dang good at one thing, it isn't going to be all that great at other things, and that's just fine.  

When the sun gets weary and the sun goes down, well, I'm a skeptic.  I know this.  I was in 7th or 8th grade when Ryan Clevenger told me I was too cynical, and I took it as a challenge and as a compliment.  I don't read marketing copy for anything other than unintentional humour.  I read reviews for a baseline, I try to hit the free demo days, and then I just hope.  Sometimes I get lucky and someone leaves a pair of MX88s in Lost and Found for 18 months and I get to take em home for a nominal fee.  Sometimes I find a good deal on a demo Girish or Katana if I leave the demo bindings behind.  Sometimes there's a 186 Doberman GSR (27 metre, which some dude skiing his older model Atomic SLs on the wrong foot on purpose told me is the best radius) that's only slightly bent at the BBSEF ski swap for $35 and I trade some labour for a PX 15 Racing and use my Father-in-Law's drill press and a paper jig I found on the internet.  What I don't do is expect one thing to do all things.  I could hide money from myself for a year, scrape together enough cash to buy a new ski that's real good a lot of the time, or keep my eyes open, spend much less money, and always have the right tool for the job.  And I'll let you in on a secret:  those Leki poles are really nice, they have a great swing weight, and the big pow baskets don't sink in the deep, but I use my parking-lot-score 90s-replica Scott World Cup GS poles unless it's puking, and them free sticks sure do also do the job adequately!  Now, I just need to find an original.  That'd be worth some couch cushion change.

With apologies to Paul Simon.  Title from "All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints"

I don't want another run. I only want that last one again.

By Eino Holm

The early 90s were fraught.  It's funny or maybe disingenuous to say because all times, any time, any epoch, have been.  Still, here we are.  Aram and I were in Sixth Grade, eleven years old, or maybe Aram had already turned twelve cos I think his birthday's in April, or maybe that's his cousin Kasey the Nascarist.  Anyway.  The New York Times was printing jokes Megan Jasper made up about us kids' slang as gospel.  Skiing was, to paraphrase the going theory, "dead".  I don't know why it was, because Aram and I sure had fun.  Neither of us was amazing, no 35 foot drops to hipcheck or mohawks or whatever.  We got by, as kids do.

-  

Nirvana was the worst big grunge band.  There, I got it out of the way.  Sure, there were worse not-big bands, like Tad or Mudhoney or Gruntruck or whatever.  I feel like Mark Arm said something about being a mediocre band so he'd never have to worry about selling out like the big names had.  Some side-eyed dig at his former bandmates.  Probly many more no one knows about, with names like Juice or March 3rd or Navel Gazing Gutsplosion or Jamie's Dermis is Showing. Nirvana, though, there just wasn't much that lasted.  The unplugged record, the one that came out the fall after Kurt joined the 27 Club, that one had some good songs.  I've since realised that pretty much every good song on that record was a cover.  The best is a David Bowie song, and I am without question a David Bowie doubter.  Going through their handful of records, there's a handful of decent songs, even a few that might stick without the sticky association of memory.

-

Closing Day, '93, none of the really good records like Superunknown and Purple and Diary and Siamese Dream had been released yet.  I'm sure some had been recorded, but that isn't what the world is to some rural kid who still has yet to convince his teacher that yes, I can do maths, you just aren't paying attention, Mindy.  Aram and I were at Crystal, natch.  The moody April skies, I remember it trying to rain, but somehow in the State of Rain, not.  Neither of us had succeeded in finishing our reports or projects or whatever it was that Mindy had us chasing during spring break. Some slushy turn or other, I realised I'd never get anything done, and Aram agreed.  We got Employee Day tickets from our respective parents and said screw it.  Spring turns don't last forever.

And to quote Grady the Bullrider, that's the thing.  They really don't.  Closing day, though, many years it's one of the best bets for reliably good turns.  Slop, slarve, sunburn, or some years a foot by snow phone report time back when that was a thing with more in the air.  (Like Easter '06, when my neighbour's garage burnt down and I finally got to show Karl why snowboarding is useless.  And pay him back for all those rides where I'd be fifteen, twenty minutes behind in the trees, barely breathing, fancy full-suspension bike no match for his ten year old rigid Kona Hot.  16 new, somehow sunny and cold like we were on the High T in mid February, hiking South at full speed, tryna get as many runs in as we could.)

-

Sometimes I think Steve Earle wanted to be Springsteen.

-

There are a few things I associate with those records from '93 and '94, mostly snow and Orion and flannel and Key riggin pants with the cuff cut cos that's what Pa did.  I have always thought hemmed pants to be just a little bougie.  I still have my oldest brother's quilted flannel from back then, no clue why he bought it so big cos I'm not a skinny man, and it still fits me.  He has always had a runner's build, no different at 15. I remember even then the push-and-pull of skiing vs snowbaording (rich white people problems, to be certain) and for a minute or two I thought I'd switch, but one short, turn-free run down the sled hill on a January snow day and I decided I never would.  As well as those things, spring slop and dirty snow.  Aram and I not really turning well, or all that much, but skiing from first chair to last.  Straightlining before we knew that was A Thing. Then skipping school and doing it again, snagging a burger Peter the Geek or Tom Turkey cooked for all their underlings.  Wondering why that one car dealer stockholder from Auburn had to show up in a heli instead of, well, a car.  

-

One of the more interesting last days of the season was 14 July '99 at Crystal.  Summer after the Big Winter. Ice to the bottom of 3, so much that my feet hurt.  I didn't care, and it was still melancholy.  Winter by that point is only a few months off.  The next winter, Dougie and I would bump the clock up a minute or six at the bottom until one day we were closing a half hour early.  Nobody noticed.

A handful of patrollers helped me break ice from the last little schmear of West Face and build a ramp.  Stomping with boots, skis, a shovel, axe, whatever we had.  That cool old elevated ramp, long gone now.  The old maze, a Warren Miller dream.  The ramp in early April was almost flat, 100 inches and more, but by mid July it was almost to dirt.  Bruce Engdahl called it moving sugar a teaspoon at a time.  We didn't have much snow left, but then, I'm at least 90% certain we were the last resort to close that year besides Timberline, and they don't count.  That's their schtick.  That July light on snow, something that I haven't seen all that much.  Crystal usually melts out earlier in June.  It was dark, that morning, after the Solstice and who knows what's next?  The summer stretched out the way it does when you ain't got shit to do except meet whatever's next.  A cheap escape.  Chris taking a job at a brokerage firm with Ted the Aspiring, or smackin buttons on the ol '88 Poma, or chuckin rocks from the top of Chinook at Dustin over at the bottom of Rex.  Did you know a 650 pound chair hurts when it hits you in the face before finishing the decel zone? It does.  Bends yer glasses too, now that we're talkin about it.

Anyway, that day, Closing Day, 14 July 99, my latest last day.  (Or was it 11 July? My phone says that was a Sunday, but I think that year they just went until they couldn't.)  It's hard to just keep going, all the way into summer, into fall, to start again without having stopped.  Turns all year, you can have it.  Last day on rear entry boots, come to think of it.  Salomon 83. (? 84?)  They'd stopped using the "SX" moniker.  We were the last class, the ones who got their hats before the would-be robot takeover and the apocalypse, and then nothing happened.  Peter and I would hang out at one end of the cul de sac afterward, Chris halfway down to the next, that quiet exurban town that used to be a quiet rural town.  I think we played a few shows.  I ran (I know, sue me) a lot that year, especially down the liftline under Chinook. 

That day, though, memory fades.  I bumped chairs for 6 or 8 hours or so, jumped on the last one, and that was it.  Middle of Summer--I am consciously capitalising the seasons now--and it was like a late April rain drop.  Or the Cheese after a particularly deep Tuesday, or choose yer own adventure, cos I don't know.  I was 18 by less than a month, still just blundering, as though any of us really stop.  It was clear, cold, still spring.  Spring.  That time when everything starts to bloom, and yet we close up shop, move on to greener pastures, start running rivers or pounding nails or fixing flat tyres on kids' bikes or going back to school, or really, wondering what the heck this is all about.

-

The best grunge record is Ten.  You can argue this, but I won't listen or care.  After that, who knows.  There's a few, Superunknown, Down on the Upside, Temple of the Dog, Gish--yes, that's grunge, fight me--and Diary--again, yes, that's grunge, and yes, fight me, it came out in '94 and for their second record, Jeremy allegedly didn't finish lyrics cos they'd already broke up and he just screamed a lot, I'd say that's grunge.  There are some incredible songs on decent but middling grunge records, like Halo of Ashes and Dollar Bill from the Screaming Trees. Half of Vitalogy and Vs.  A few songs on Badmotorfinger, one or two songs from Nirvana and one or two from the band that coulda started it all, sorta, maybe, maybe not, Mother Love Bone.  I don't have a specific song in mind, though, or even a twelve song soundtrack from the motion picture.  The internet thinks early Radiohead is grunge, but none of that matters.  Sometimes Closing Day is an arty Jonatha Brooke puller of the heartstrings.  Sometimes it's some Jay Farrar alt-country mumbles or a Springsteen anthem from The River or before.  Emmylou Harris from 1981.  Some sorta manic Green Day single-string run on the bass.

-

John and I decided I should get drunk.  He thought whiskey would do it.  Rye, actually.  Not sure why.  I still can't.  The smell.  Any other whisk(e)y, I can do maybe a sip or two.  Almost enjoy, maybe.  Not really.  Rye, not at all.

Finished breakfast at 7.  Nice big eggs and toast and sausage sorta deal.  Walked past the bathroom.  Well, stopped, caught a whiff.  Nothing untoward, just water and porcelain and a little communal decay.  Man, does that food come back up quick. Eighteen new, and all of a sudden Andrew's old Igneous just wouldn't turn, even with the fancy new G3 Targa that one asscheek of a volleyball patroller told me I had to use.  Chute 4 was like Cham steep.  Deep, warm, almost that "hot pow" bros tend to talk about when they don't really get it, or didn't grow up on the Wet Side.  The sorta stuff I learned to ski in, learned to tele in, learned why I should tele in, and I couldn't do it.  Shoveled snow all day to sweat it out, then threw my belongings in five or six garbage bags and drove home to Enumclaw, all in one motion.  No closure, no sense of wonder, no toasting the sunset over Herman, nothing.  Just cram the GL full of whatever I had, and put the foot down.  Didn't even stop in Bellingham at John's.  Then again, the next year we pulled seats off 4 and 5 and then commenced to learn how to deconstruct two lifts that weren't gonna be sold and drive sleds in hot May slop and find my GL ten feet down the bank after an 86 degree Mother's Day melt-off and then see snow at the water in the Lower Mainland four days later and stuff Chris' Escort with everything I had and leave the GL in the E-Lodge lot for Andy to resurrect, which he did, or maybe it just started? I don't know except when Mike Pierce brought it home on the back of his truck he said "Well, at least it was a nice drive!! Wanna drive it off the truck or should we pretend it still doesn't start?"

-

Patty Griffin's Useless Desires is an incredible song.  Quintessential Patty Griffin, some heartbreaking melody, some beautiful and poignant imagery, a story to be told and a subtle, kind way of telling it.  "Weekend Edition has this town way overrated."  Such a good line.  It could fit a million towns, achingly backward, yearning for a better future, situated in some fortunate place that has been historically treated poorly, like a brothel town at the crossroads, a junction town, like Reno, or Kansas City, or, fittingly, Ogden.  Junction City.  It is every one of those things, and yet none of them.  UP has a strong presence here, the eastern side of the Lucin Cutoff.  Trains from somewhere else, somewhere between longing and leaving, somewhere a train driver could live in between those lonely stretches out deep into the sand and juniper and sage grouse and impossible mountains of the Great Basin.  Closing day here isn't a big thing, just something we bums observe in the parking lot after closing the shop or teaching the last lesson or serving the last beer (at, like, I don't know, 5.00 pm, cos, like, Utah or something) or bumping the last chair or calling out "CLO-O-OSING" one last time.  Don't needa refill yer patrol vest today.  The last turns, on snow that is still good, a snowpack that is just past its peak, weather that is just coming into its own, legs that might be a little tired but have their best form of the year, then, just, nothing.  Just...walk away.  Wave goodbye, we're headin to grab a Star Burger and listen to some Merle Haggard on the way home.  Down Trappers' Loop, or down the draw of Wolf Creek, or just rumbling through the valley on the farm roads that are steadily becoming exurban, and down the Canyon to town.

-

Cinco de Mayo is the best day of the year to ski, misunderstood cultural appropriation aside.  One year Alpental gave a free ticket if you donated $5 to Outdoors-for-All on the 5th of May but only in cash and I didn't have cash and then a couple years later when they fired my friend Katie cos she didn't jive with her overbearing boss, I realised it was better that I hadn't had cash that day and just skied anyway.  Closing Day, though, is the day you can't miss.  That year, '06 if I'm not mistaken, may have been the one the bosses at Alpy would meet at lunch on Sunday and make a call on the next weekend, so I got three or four Closing Days. Deep, gorgeous bumps under Ariel, '013.  6 hours of dropped-knee pivot-slips down International, '06, '07, '08. A sunset snack to toast the season, top of Rex, '08. I can hit more than one closing day, yes? Easter, The Place that Shall Not Be Named, '014, and Snowbird, later that spring, and the next, and the next.  A rain day at Brundage in '018, and a deep day at Bogus in '019.  And yes, whatever it was that Aram and I skied that Monday in '93, deep into the denial most ski bums will recognise, that yes, this is the end, and yes, I am purposefully ignoring it and avoiding it.  It's easy to ignore the end when you are near places like, say, Loveland Pass, or Chinook Pass, or Beartooth Pass, or Mt Washington, or Alpine glaciers, or Cascade volcanoes.  Even so, even if one isn't in a desert where the snow lasts until 4.53 pm on 28 April, that giddy avoidance, stopping to look at a view you've seen a hundred times, or one that isn't all that interesting but all of a sudden it is, or avoiding a simple assignment for 6th grade whatever class, just absorbing Closing Day is sometimes all there is.  It's okay if you forget, or if it never mattered in the first place, or if it isn't your closing day.  One needn't be a part to take part.

- -

Last chair, last day.  Closing Day, Bogus Basin 2017.

Title from James McMurtry's "Hurricane Party"

Introducing Mimi

By Amy Post

Oh hey!  Mimi here.  Actually, my name is Amy, but we thought it would be funny to name our blog after names we've been called that are not our real names.  I thought that was funny, and then I couldn't think of a better idea.  My boyfriend gets called the wrong name all the time.  Pretty must the only name that gets confused with mine is "Mimi," and it's usually when I have congested sinuses and can't enunciate.

When I graduated from college in 2006, I didn't know the first thing about finding a job.  Then the economy crashed, and jobs became even more impossible.  So, I moved in with my parents for the winter to be a ski bum.  Fifteen years later, I've somehow transitioned from ski bum to ski professional, although professional bum might be a better way to describe my career.  Then, in the Year of Our Lord 2021, I dusted off that ole English degree and started writing again.  So, here we are.

Credentials include:

• PSIA Alpine Level 3
• PSIA Children's Specialist 2

Hats I've worn:

• DCT at PSIA-NI
• Ski instructor
• Staff trainer
• Boss lady
• Boot tester extraordinaire
• Race coach
• Education program developer

Places I've Worked:

• Bogus Basin, Boise, ID
• Bogus Basin Ski Education Foundation, Boise, ID
• Crystal Mountain, WA
• Mt. Ashland, Ashland, OR
• The-place-that-will-not-be-named, UT

Also, I also wrote my Master's thesis on ski area development impacts on plant community composition.  To accomplish this, I read a 1,000 page EIS, did botany surveys at a ski area and in the surrounding mountains and taught myself statistics.  Here's my recommendation: disturb the soil on your ski slopes as minimally as possible and don't get embroiled in a 25-year-long NEPA process, because in the end, everyone loses.

I like to go adventuring in the woods.  Sometimes the best snow on the mountain is in the low-angle bushes.  I like to ski fast.  I don't like to leave the ground.  In my un-scientific assessment, when you get to the upper-levels of this industry, the gender ratio is about 15 dudes to 1 woman.  Teaching kids is easier than teaching adults because I don't know how to talk to grown ups.  Kids just want to tell you about their favorite things and if I sing "Do You Want To Build a Snowman?" they look at me weird and then they trust me.  Snow makes me giddy and my feet are always cold.