I was thinking about skiing the other day and all I could think about was getting those fresh turns in Stanley this past January. It’s so very hard to find any feeling quite like it and all I want is to do is get back to this place and make some fresh turns.
The crackle of white dendrites hitting your hard-shelled jacket and the cold penetrating your core means the snow is falling and you’ve been blessed with another extraordinary powder day. As you skin up the mountain through the Douglas Fir and Lodgepole Pine being buried in crystals, your inner child oozes through the oppressive goo of the realities of life. Worrying about grad school, homework, relationships, or even the day to day noise created by living dissipates as your lungs start burning, climbing, climbing up through the mountain air and into the blank monochrome forest. It’s only there where you can be so precisely played by gravity and snow. It’s only there one can truly understand the addiction to winter.
Being in the moment amongst the storm in the wildness of winter is more than challenging the innate human instinct to reject logic. It’s even more than being able to ski fast through the trees and thick banks of snow or being blinded by the pulsing waves of white as you turn. It is all of these things, but skiing powder is so much more because it is one of those times where one can focus so precisely that everything makes sense. A beautiful paradox of nothing that’s something, an out of body experience that can only be recreated in similar conditions. Deep light snow is not only rear but exceedingly fleeting a brilliant diamond that melts away almost as soon as one can start to appreciate it.
People run their lives around this stuff. Living in the back of cars, eating only noodle cups cased in Styrofoam and plastic it’s a dream for some and unbelievably stupid to others. The closest feeling of flight while still grounded to earth is worth uprooting your life. Dodging reality for just moments in the deep powder snow can turn the smartest of people crazy trying to fuel this endless addiction. Being in the backcountry being a slave to the element’s, crazy starts to make sense a virus just waiting to infect the next person on skis ready to climb 2000 feet vertical for just minutes of downhill freedom.
The crowded mass of people waiting to catch the cable line to the top of a manufactured mountain serves no purpose more than a guilty convince. Merely a pitiful pleasure grounded on a foundation of consumerism, perpetuated by the shameful ease at which powder snow can be skied. This is what the winter wilderness has done to me. It has opened my eyes to another experience that I did not see before, out of focus till I tipped my skies down a hill that I hiked up.
I was raised skiing in bounds dropping more vertical than anyone could hike in a day, but now when I sit in a chair in the mountain air, I feel something missing. Maybe it’s the risk that comes with the wildness of winter, a shared bond between friends catalyzed by tele turns, or even a longing to push yourself to a physical and metal limit. I will be forever changed by the winter wilderness and long for its claws to drag me in again.