Mitsuro Ohba has walked to the North Pole and conducted the longest trek on skis, 3,824 kilometers, across Antarctica. He’s spent the last two decades in snow and ice and lost digits in the process. Now he’s taking off his explorer’s hat in favor of a settled life is his native Japan, where he’s opened [...]
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Gravity, as it turns out, isn’t the same everywhere. This will come as a relief to the countless athletes who’ve yardsaled on ski runs and bike trails and needed a good excuse on which to hang their sudden fall toward earth. A few years ago, I was in Northern California with Rob Roskopp, one of [...]
Every boy has a firewood story. Some girls, too. A hand axe was the first dangerous tool my dad trusted me with, and a chainsaw was the first that could do real damage. We’d cut up the deadfall on our two and a half acres in the mountains of Pennsylvania and haul it back to Virginia, where the heap of logs in the side yard would soon give way to a neatly stacked wall of fuel…CONTINUE>
They stand there improbably, straining against gravity, reaching for the sun, eating soil and drinking rain, silent to our ears. They are cathedrals to the heart that beats faster in the wild lands, and they are, hallelujah, stewards of the best powder skiing we have ever known. They are the trees, pillars of redoubt against those who shouldn’t be there and narrowly opened doors of perception for those who should. You can have your bowls, your faces, your cirques, and couloirs—the trees are the most hallowed ground of the greedy, hungry, powder-crazed skier.
Off-season rain is a tease, a tickle. It plasters the windows, the hills, cars, roads, chairlifts. You stare out through the gloomy gray, check the temperature, and do the math: Another twenty degrees and this would be snow…another thirty and it’s blower…one inch of rain equals a foot of snow…four inches already today, if it were January that would be…oh my God.
The world has rhythms. Sometimes we sense them, sometimes we don’t, but one inescapable to skiers is the glorious spring cycle of melt and freeze and melt again. Warm days and cold nights massage the snowpack, work out the kinks, break down the layers between November rain and December freeze and January thaw and February dumps, leaving delicious uniformity.
We exist in an almost infinitesimally small slice of all possible temperatures. On a scale that ranges from -949 degrees Fahrenheit at absolute zero to 27 million degrees at the core of the sun, we live within just 100 degrees, give or take. And yet, as skiers and snowboarders and winter hedonists, we are as attuned to the subtleties of heat and cold as the finest calibrated thermometer.
I want it to snow and never stop. I want big black storm clouds—not those wimpy gray ones—to cover the land from here to the horizon and beyond. I want flakes the size of dinner plates, blizzards that last for weeks, and powder so deep you need spelunking gear if you lose a ski. I’m only satisfied by “storms of the century”—and I’d be even happier with storms of the millennium.
Slip away from the light, away from the east- and west-facing slopes, and slide into the deep dark pitches that angle north, where the sun is a cold and distant orb, its influence as weak as gravity on the moon. The shadowed lands are the hallowed lands, chilly and dim, where night comes sooner and the snow is preserved as frosty and light as the day it fell.
Winter storms don’t glide in gently on puffy white cumulous clouds, they barrel across the mountains like runaway freight trains, full of noise and bluster, prodded by the restless wind. Ski resorts don’t like to talk about wind–or storms in general—because it scares away the tourists, who somehow forget that winter is messy, cold, and wild, as if snow were laid down softly each night like a blanket over a sleeping baby. But wind is a fact of life in the mountains, as much a part of the weather as snow itself.
Somewhere high in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, outside the town of Durango, an aspen grove was doing its aspen thing, shimmering and rustling and whispering aspen secrets. Its leaves had slipped into something more appropriate for the season, yellows and browns that matched the pale, waving grass, and they had begun to give up, let go, and move on to the next part of the cycle. Except for one.
Foolish mortals, we. Like Icarus, we ascend toward the sun, not so much on wings of wax and feather as on hope and spirit, and we never get there, not even close, though from time to time we stumble into luck and clutch at the soft cotton hem of clouds. Is it our arrogance that makes us climb these hills? Curiosity? Our hunger for strength, dominion, and a ripping downhill?
The best news of the morning: In the last 24 hours, Alta Ski Area received 13″ of new snow. In the next 24 hours, Alta Ski Area is forecasted to receive 8-15″ of new snow.
It’s fall, and Orion’s back. Most people probably don’t notice the great constellation creeping up the southern horizon and wouldn’t care if they did, but for the skier its arrival is one of the true joys of autumn. Not only is Orion home to some of the most brilliant sights of the night, its role as the predominant constellation of the winter means only one thing: skiing isn’t far behind.
The first time you swim with sharks should be dramatic. There should be storm-tossed seas, fang-like Farallon Islands jutting from the water, hungry great whites thrashing as the first mate chums stinky fish guts overboard. You’re shivering into your cold chain mail shark suit as the grizzled sea dog captain growls, “Arr! Don’t be a-worryin’, lad! I’ve only lost three customers to the sharks–this week, harhar!”
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