The Gift of Snow
Summit Magazine
"The first casualty of These Trying Times is your sanity; the second is your soul. I'm no longer sure just how virtuous it is to be well-adjusted. Anyone who is happily acclimated to the chaos out there must be out of their mind."
What cheerful thoughts for a winter morn! On the other side of the window pane white flakes streaked through the gray pre-dawn past the tip of my nose. I knew I ought to get outdoors and play in the snowstorm, but that was out of the question. Feeling gloomy, I poured coffee and snapped on my office light.
Back at my post, the computer paper jammed, preventing me from sending another missive into the void. I messed around with it for awhile until I succeeded in gumming up the whole works. I looked out the window and sighed. Just then the phone rang. It was a photographer friend, a talented artist addicted to mountain sports, who never lets work get in the way of a day on skis. Consequently, he is perhaps less well-known than he should be. But then he, seemingly alone, has kept it all together. What is success?
"What do you want?" I growled.
"Hey Bub. We've got ten new inches on the ground, and it's still coming down."
"So what?"
"So you are going to drop all that crap and go skiing tomorrow."
"I have too much work."
"I'll see you at eight.”
The next morning I was reluctant to leave the relative comfort of my friend's rattletrap van. New Hampshire 's White Mountains were terrifying. It was frigid out there. The temperature had bottomed out at 40 below at dawn. We could look ahead to a high of twenty below and strong winds. Why were we doing this? Look here, I reasoned. The van may not be in great shape, but the heater still works. We could take a driving tour. Go clear up to Canada . I know a great auberge in Quebec City .
"Parlez-vous francais?" I asked my friend, who was dressed and ready to go.
"Not today Bub. Today we ski."
Who but a total blockhead would be out skiing on a day like this? I wondered. Answering my own question, I slipped into my ski bibs, buckled my boots, and opened the door.
The cold squeezed me in a big bear hug. Mid-winter cold in New England 's mountains is a physical force, an element --something like water, or fire. You don't just plunge in willy-nilly. If you do, you might die. This last point has been made again and again by various ninnies who suffer from what some psychologists are now calling YMIC: Young Men's Immortality Complex. These rugged mountains knock them off one at a time. Every year they keep coming. Every year they keep dropping.
Back At the trailhead, the wind seared my cheek like a hot poker. Ah, yes, it was all so familiar. I automatically donned my face mask, hat, goggles, and hood. Snow banners flew from the tall pines. Drifting flakes reflected the frigid sunlight like silver dust. The pattern was typical: big storm followed by gin-clear arctic air mass. If you like to ski powder in New England , you must be willing to dance with the cold. Consequently, you can generally count on having the powder all to yourself --except for your fellow blockheads.
The snow had been falling steadily since early December. It filled the stolid Yankee hardwood stands, resculpted the wrinkled landscape, and long before Christmas the woods were muffled by a thick downy cloak. On clear days pale sunlight shot through the trunks, laying long zebra stripes on the snow. Other days, gales swept through the woods, bending birches, snapping limbs, and generally playing the forest like a wailing oboe.
We wouldn't go all the way up. No way. Ninety mile per hour winds raked the summits. Above treeline was a death zone. Instead, we discovered powder stashes on the sloping granite ridgelines. There, in the lee of the spruce-fir thickets crowding the summits, the snow lay deep and undisturbed. We quickly rearranged it, laying track after track in the virgin white.
We picked lines through the birch, beech, and maple stands on the mid- and lower slopes too, landing each turn with an audible "whoomph!" It paid dividends to have a light, quick touch. Instant course changes were mandatory. Get locked in to one trajectory and you'll discover why New England skiers call themselves "bark-eaters."
From the top of a typical New England backcountry mountain ski run, you can see maybe two or three turns. From there, you're on your own. It's pure reaction. We picked a tight slalom course, sometimes narrowly missing the peeling white trunks. Oftentimes we fell with great snowy explosions. We dug ourselves out and shook off clouds of snow like dogs, then started down again.
It was the best thing we could have done. The philosopher who once said “There are times when we must be coerced into meaningful experiences” was right. We laughed. We hollered. We regained perspective. Work could wait; take its rightful place at the back of the line. The world made sense again. We reclaimed our sanity, and our souls.
Driving home in the dark, we heard on the radio that others had underestimated these hills. They had gambled --and lost. Two college students had attempted a traverse of the Presidential Range, home to the world's most severe weather. They were above timberline last night! One was severely frostbitten and hypothermic, the other dead. A rescuer, a friend who has carried frozen corpses off the mountain on too many occasions, later said the conditions were the worst he had ever seen.
As the miles passed in the dark I remembered another day much like this one. It was my first day on backcountry skis, a pair that a more experienced friend had urged me to pick up on sale. They looked like cross-country skis but they had metal edges. They were green. They had no sidecut. Telemark skis, my friend said; I'll show you. I bought a pair of leather boots. I grabbed some cheap fiberglass poles to complete the package. The next day we headed to the White Mountains .
It was twenty below and falling when we started up the Hancock Trail off the Kancamagus Highway , but we didn't care. The cold only added to the sense of adventure. We were toasty in our woollies. We put on our state-of-the-art 60/40 parkas when we stopped for lunch. The wind roared overhead, but that was okay because we were sheltered in the balsams where it couldn't get us.
I had never seen so much snow, never felt such cold. We passed frozen, rock-studded streams. Each boulder wore a white mushroom cap four feet thick. Nothing moved except us, and we flew down the trail. We tried to make telemark turns but mostly we fell, laughing. I remember thinking this was the greatest thing I had ever done. Exploring the mountains in winter like this was a gift.
When we got down to Lincoln late that afternoon, the streets were deserted. Storefronts were drifted over. In a cafe we heard that two climbers were lost in the Presidentials. A rescuer had died in an avalanche. I looked out at the high peaks and felt a deep chill. I don't remember if it was that day or the next that the climbers were found, severely frostbitten. One of them lost both his legs.
New England skiing is hard. It's a Puritan activity one feels certain the founding fathers would approve of. It's brutally cold. The climbs go straight up, often through waist deep snow. The best runs of the season are in the trees, where a mistake can be costly. Sometimes you bushwhack down a frozen streambed or even jump-turn a waterfall, as my sports-addicted friend and I once did, not entirely by design.
You learn to ski everything here, and ski it well. But you don't make mistakes, so you rarely relax. This is not casual fun. In fact, it can seem a little perverse, kind of like hitting yourself over the head with a two-by-four because it feels so good when you stop. It is virtually impossible to slap on the boards and slide down the hills in New England without feeling the stern presence of John Winthrop and Cotton Mather --a couple of jolly fellows who believed in the virtue of penance-- tagging along. Only rarely, usually on a warm spring day does a Yankee skier get to tell these two to bugger off.
But despite the cold, despite the rugged terrain, despite the fact that we have to work harder, I know few Bark-Eaters who would have it any other way. Perhaps there's something in the struggle that sustains us, enlivens us, and keeps us coming back for more. Exhausted, frost nipped, and chilled clear through, we end a day on skis enraptured. Perhaps the difficulties only heighten our satisfaction. We just pray the car will start when we get back to the trailhead.
I discovered this joy one childhood Christmas when my parents gave me the gift of skiing. It arrived in the form of a pair of Northland skis with bear trap bindings. I still remember the little deer's head emblem at the tip of each bright-red wooden ski.
Someone helped me into my lace-up boots. They clamped the forward throw on the binding, and then pointed me down the hill in the backyard. I managed to stay upright that first wobbly run, stopping only when my momentum ran out.
I turned around, beaming, to cheers and applause. I had learned an important first lesson about skiing: fight for balance. I proudly waved to the folks on top of the hill. They waved back. They looked so far away. And then I learned something else, something more important even than balance: if you want another run, you've got to climb back up yourself.
For the rest of that winter I came home from kindergarten and skied until dark, climbing the hill after each run, pushing off again at the top. It was cold, it was windy, and I cried every night when my frozen hands and feet thawed when I came indoors. But I reveled under the blue arch of sky; there was something out there I needed, and the next day I was out again. A natural born head-banger. I didn't learn about rope tows and chairlifts for another couple of years. By that time something had taken hold.
Many years later I realized that there comes a time when skiing in your own backyard becomes less and less exploratory, more and more banal. I know skiers who have worn deep ruts in their lives going back and forth to the same tired slopes. New Englanders, I believe, are a particularly parochial bunch, susceptible to the most virulent strains of xenophobia. Time and again I've caught myself in fits of indignation, defending familiar terrain when others questioned its merits, not so much because it possessed great virtue, but simply because I had grown too comfortable with it.
This is not what skiing is about. There's little magic in puttering insipidly around the old haunts. You'll be a ghost soon enough. Skiing is about adventure.
One morning I awoke in a foreign land. The curtains were drawn, and it was dark inside the little house. My friend Ted was already up, handing me a mug of steaming coffee. He asked if I wanted to see where we would be skiing that day.
"Sure." I said, expecting him to pull out a map or guidebook. Instead, he drew the curtains and pointed his finger.
"There."
Filling the windowpanes was a white cone, tinged pink in the early light. An expansive snow bowl pitched from the summit, and then funneled down into a tight sequence of dogleg couloirs, eventually disappearing into conifers on the lower slopes.
" Mount Tallac ." Said Ted. "I've been dreaming about skiing it all winter."
Ted is a transplanted New Englander. He is also the best backcountry skier I know, a gifted athlete, an artist on skis. When he said he was moving west, I questioned the decision. I felt sure he would miss the well-wooded hills of home, the steep chutes in Tuckerman Ravine and the Gulf of Slides . I was wrong.
Looking out the window I saw why.
Whereas the week before I skied in what was essentially a space suit, while skinning up Tallac I wore only a single layer. In the lead, Tahoe native Andy was in shorts and T-shirt. The problem wasn't staying warm, I discovered. It was keeping cool.
Intense sunshine drilled us from a perfect sky. We stopped in the shade of 300-year-old pines. We paused to gaze at sapphire Tahoe, ringed by white peaks. A week before I had been shivering in the trees, slugging down hot chocolate from a steel thermos.
Incredibly, at the summit it was the same --calm, clear, at least sixty degrees. To the west we looked towards the Desolation Wilderness and a lifetimes' worth of peaks: adventure by the truckload. Andy, the Californian, fired up his camp stove and brewed espresso. Mary and Ted made backrests of their skis and soaked up the rays. Ted's dogs Jake and Mugsy --native Vermonters-- snoozed in the sunshine. I looked around at the hedonistic scene and admitted that I kind of liked western skiing.
Ted cracked an eyelid. "They only get about a week of real winter out here. The rest of the time it's like this. La La Land."
Later, at nearby Carson Pass , Tahoe locals Kenny and Jim showed us their private stash of preferred runs. We didn't expect this. We thought foreign skiers might have been unwelcome. But when there is a lot to share, perhaps people are less territorial.
The runs at Carson were long and steep, covered with luscious corn. It was like skiing on silk. We sliced short turns in the forgiving surface. At the bottom we'd look up at a thousand feet of perfect sine curves. And then we'd ski over to another run and do it all again.
We ended up on a ski traverse of the Sierra Crest using the California “high and light" system. Our packs weighed less than thirty pounds. Of course, there was very little in them: a light three-season sleeping bag, a foam pad, a pile jacket and shell garments, some dried food, a few odds and ends. We dug pits in the snow pack and slept under light single-layer pyramid tarps. We spent the evening hours in our sleeping bags, boiling snow for water, eating bowls of dehydrated chicken stew, and telling tall tales.
One evening our tarp mate --a Californian-- told us a harrowing story about a night in Yosemite when the temperature plunged all the way to two below zero. At first I thought he was pulling my leg. Prior to this trip I always wondered who bought all those winter sleeping bags rated to zero degrees. I didn't know anyone at home who had a bag rated warmer than minus thirty.
And so we learn. We were warm and comfortable even when the mercury bottomed out in the high twenties. We agreed that the "high and light" system works well in California , a place I call "warm and sunny." Certainly, the skiing was easier without the fifty to sixty pound beast I lug back home. I resolved to ski out west more often.
Once again, the snow is falling and skiers young and old are preparing for the new season. Countless thousands will glide down the fall line exclusively at the big resorts. And while I will happily join them from time to time, I know that sometimes skiing shouldn't require lifts, trails, or certified instructors to lead us by the hand. Sometimes we need big, wild, open spaces and the chance to be with friends in the snow, to find our own way out and back in a pure, white, and untrammeled natural landscape. We all need this time and space, whether we know it or not. The human spirit requires it.
