Grateful Life

 

With the earned gratitude of the summit, I checked to make sure my boots were buckled and bindings switched from climb-up to ski-down position, at the top of the peak I had been climbing for the past hour. I was happy to be there since I had not toured the backcountry in three years because of various nefarious disabilities to my head and heart, body and soul. My loss of visual acuity and emotional stability, from too much head trauma on skis and bikes, had left me shaky and tentative. The new pacemaker for my erratic heart had also put me back a few rungs. Then a torn Achilles and a frozen shoulder further complicated my recovery. I was living on my reputation as a hard charging powder-hound, and the memories of what I once was. Age had brought wisdom and social security but along with it - self-doubt, and I questioned what I still had.

Covid had put a damper on everybody’s lifestyle, closing ski resorts along with everything else, and my solution was to retreat into a Waldenesque isolation.  I was trying to live small, not in quiet desperation but deliberately, simplifying life and my own pursuit of happiness or self-entertainment. Subsequentially, the recreational-industrial ski complex had taken over the local resorts, making them crowded and impersonal, disrupting our quiet ski world to its core. We had lost more than a few close friends, some by their own hand and some from a broken heart, unable to reconcile the changes in themselves and their community or unwilling to accept what came with these inevitable changes. Initially it made me sad, now it made me mad. This summit was consequently a test of my mental and physical abilities, but also of the healing power of landscape, snow, sun and sky. Summoning what courage I had left, I started skiing tentatively down the blind rollover to the slope below.

Earlier, my gnarlette wife Tracey, cattle dog Eva and I were looking to do a little midwinter skiing on a sunny Saturday morning to test our ailing bodies and spirits. We knew however, that our local Wasatch ski resorts were unobtainable, especially on a weekend. So, we headed east, to a Wilderness jewel among the local gems, a place untrammeled, where we were just visitors who leave no trace except tracks and we eventually leave. While not exactly an early ‘alpine start’, we got to the trailhead at 10 a.m. and smoothed our climbing skins to our ski bases. It was zero degrees with zero people around.

The snowpack was huge and after 20 years of drought, this kind of coverage was truly amazing. The Atmospheric River had been pointing at us all winter, like a firehose, but nothing lasts forever, not even snow, the earth and sky. As a hydrologist I could appreciate the record snowpack but I was determined to ignore the numbers, live in the moment and make the best of what nature had provided. An old cowboy once told me that only fools and tenderfoot try to predict the weather. Nature always bats last.

We could distinguish a ghost of the normal, low-angle climbing route but we opted for a more direct and steeper approach further upstream. Setting a skin track in shifts we found that it was wicked steep, perhaps too steep for my mechanical heart. Fortunately, the pitch soon moderated, before I blew a gasket, and we settled into a sustainable groove with enough purchase for us and punch for Eva. We shed layers to avoid a cold and clammy sweat and settled into the familiar routine. It felt like home.

For the first time in years, I heard my heart in my head and felt my pulse in my groin from the rigorous exercise. After my heart rate dropped by half last summer, doctors quickly installed a pacemaker designed to keep my heart modulated. It’s like having a weird governor on my engine that keeps me running within the proper limits for my age and ambition, mileage and experience. I am all about moderation these days, but it is disconcerting to have a device or even a doctor dictate that. I was going with it, no matter how humbling at this age. Now with my pulse pumping loud and clear in my extremities, I felt healthy and athletic for the first time in a long while.

The pucker-brush and understory shrubbery that populates these low elevation approaches was buried this year with the abundant snowpack, leaving some exquisite hummocks.  Up higher, the slope was feathered with surface-hoar flakes the size of potato chips, formed by subzero temperatures of the previous night, freezing the moisture rising from the snowpack, shining like mini-rainbows in the low angle winter sun. We called this pitch Ruffle’s Ridge after the corrugated potato chips commercials of the 60’s. This area had almost certainly been clear-cut at some point and fire probably played a role in the succession of the Oak/Aspen to Herbaceous/Conifer vegetation. Nothing is stagnant in nature, and we were looking at a perfect picture in time that develops slowly but is ever changing.

Above 8,000 feet, the slopes opened into low-angle meadows with dwarf red spruce trees, blighted during the latest beetle kill. Topping out, we investigated several pitches and agreed on a shaded, north-facing gully and we de-skinned quickly so we wouldn’t catch a chill. “Thirty-degrees-in-the-trees” is our avalanche mantra for skiing low angle, vegetated slopes for worry-free fun-in-the sun, even on high hazard days. The snowpack was deep, but stable and the usual, subconscious distraction of the sleeping hazards was the furthest thing from our minds. Nonetheless, we practiced prudent safety protocol with one descending and the other watching from an island-of-safety, as we had done a thousand times before, on and off the snow.

While I held the dog, Tracey took the first line, top-cutting the slope to the left, skiing smooth and ever more confident telemark turns as she descended. When she stopped and whistled from her safe perch, I released the hound. Eva initially plowed downhill in Tracey’s serpentine tracks, but eventually centerpunched the deep untracked snow, making dollar signs as she gained momentum and bravado. When it was my turn, I started slow on the roll-over with free heels and an open mind, hugging the left side of the gully. I was surprised how good the snow was and how easily the turns came. I gained speed and began reading the slope further ahead - always a good sign. The pucker-brush hummocks turned into soft moguls to be seen and skied deliberately.  Before long I was launching dynamic tele-turns, hopping between bumps to switch feet, angle and aspect. Near the bottom I dropped one last deep knee for the finishing dynamic carve and stopped deliberately. I was back. Reborn and renewed. My heart was full and my sight was true. Like old times. I had thought I might not ever be able to do this again but the muscle-memory and balance, the soulful and liberating feelings returned.

Although we had planned to be one-and-done after a single run, it was too good to leave. So, we ate, drank, skinned up and did it again and again and again. On the final run we got separated and out of synch on the up-track, which added some drama to the day. With a trace of panic in my throat, I felt momentarily abandoned and vaguely alone, frustrated and emotional, with a head full of doubt. Lately, we had been struggling because of different physical ailments and conflicting priorities. We missed the shared outdoor experiences and adventures that had solidified us in the past and had been floundering in our detachment. This was the first time we had returned to our roots in months, to the places that bond and connect us. I whistled our secret code, to no avail.  Eventually our miracle herding dog connected the dots by running back and forth between us until we happily merged. There is nothing like a moment of uncertainty to solidify what we really know about ourselves and each other. The Boss reminds us, “God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of.”

Eva’s feet were getting cold, as she alternately hung one foot after another, so we ultimately skied to the bottom and headed back to the car before we were tired or hurt, broken or cold. Sometimes less is more. We loaded up the car and headed down for a late lunch in the foothill cow town where we ate burritos the size of footballs and chatted up the new cafe owner in hobbled Spanish. Back on the road, the hometown mountains spread out before us in the alpenglow, hazy in their polluted popularity and the visible sublimation of our old lifestyle. We felt almost relieved to miss another day at the resorts, but also nostalgic for how it used to be. We didn’t need a crowded, corporate ski resort to have a great day, just the grandeur of gravity in the local Hinterlands, as well as the natural purity of fresh snow and blue sky. We had our health of body and soul, the wealth and wisdom of our age, and the companionship and camaraderie of each other.  For that we were grateful.