My brother and I were recently discussing the effects of looking into a sparkling pool with a beautiful blue bottom and how mesmerizing the sight can be, with a plethora of sunlit reflections interacting between the surface and the bottom. It can be as addictive as staring into a beautifully made fire. You don’t want to look away, not even for a moment. When we were kids, our grandfather would bring home bits of various metals such as copper and zinc from a number of construction sites he was working on and would place small pieces into a hot fire burning in his beautifully crafted Adirondack granite fireplace. My sister would join us as we peered into the mixture of flames, now filled with gorgeous greens and blues flitting about, a byproduct of the the burning off-gasses. It was nothing short of spectacular, that primordial sense of fire coupled with the intense new colors dashing here and there, as if the fire was alive.
I was similarly transfixed when peering out onto a winterscape with the vast amount of blue light put forth by the sun shining into gazillions of snowflakes, either out in the open or in the shade of a forest of spruces which subdued the harsher light and allowed for even more blue light to filter through the spectrum, as seen by the human eye. These blue shadows were something I would chase my entire life. My mother and I have talked about the effects of all that blue light and how it must trigger the release of naturally occurring opioids such as serotonin and dopamine, an experience identical to how we feel after a long aerobic workout, churning-up a mixture of brain chemicals designed to make us feel good, euphoric even. A “runner’s high” or simply “being high on life”. I get my love of the snows of winter from my mother, along with a love of the brittle cold even on the most overcast and snowy of winter days. Days where many people are plagued by the “winter blues” and worse, cases of substantial depression. Throw in incessant strong winds and you have the equation as to why, as states, Wyoming and Alaska consume more alcohol and have higher incidences of suicide. The Adirondack Mountains of northern New York are tradionally one of the coldest regions in the country and, back in the 70’s and 80’s, one of the snowiest. But I don’t recall ever being impacted in such a pernicious way. Global warming has led to a shift in the amount of snow that falls there, but it can still be considerable during some winters.
I developed my love of skiing from my father who made sure that my earliest experiences came before I hit the age of three, watching me and my homemade ski suit lovingly crafted by my grandmother, slip and slide around our then backyard in Lakewood, Colorado. I have a clear memory of the occasion. I would have been two and a half years old.
After a lot of traveling around, following my father’s adventurous path as a young project engineer for the Federal Highway Administration (FHA), working on new roads and highways as this infrastructure was being laid down throughout the 1960’s. Ultimately, he put us down near the Adirondacks with a job with NYSDOT just before the birth of my sister and my brother, a year later. The year was 1965 as we settled -in to a new master-planned community thirty miles north of Albany and a hundred miles south of my parents’ childhood homes in the High Peaks Region of the Adirondack Mountains. My ancestry on my father’s side can be traced back some 170 years, to the 1850’s, and, while there were many generations on my mother’s side, I don’t have a number. Probably similar. I was smitten, and my affection for these mountains grew considerably with each passing year. I spent my youth hiking, fishing, hunting, and skiing these Adirondack Mountains and, though I don’t recall feeling like I was missing anything, I knew I could take my skiing up a notch, or two, skiing the big mountains of the Western US. Whiteface Mountain, near Lake Placid, New York had been a two-time location of the skiing events, first held in Lake Placid in 1932 and the second occurred when the town was once again awarded the winter Olympics in 1980. I was eighteen, and an accomplished skier at the time and skiing the famously ice-ridden slopes of Whiteface had made me that way. Throughout my younger years, if I was to be going skiing the next day, I had much difficulty in falling asleep and would instead lie awake dreaming of what that tomorrow would bring. This would continue, on and off, throughout adulthood, particularly if I had traveled to some new-to-me ski area which was well known for it’s deep snow and steep terrain.
I landed in Colorado at the ripe old age of twenty-one, leaving for the West immediately after graduating from college. I would teach skiing at Loveland Basin and work in a Denver area ski shop tuning and selling skis for the first couple of years I was in Colorado. After that, I endded up in Steamboat Springs where I was introduced to a new form of skiing called “Telemarking”, named after its namesake village of Telemark, Norway. I grabbed the seminal book “Freeheel Skiing”‘ by Paul Parker, which was extremelely well written and chock-full of diagrams showing the various techniques used. This form of skiing is quite different from alpine (or, downhill) skiing and is ancient in Scandinavian culture and lore. This was the way people travelled during the long winters asssoicated with that part of the world. In a nutshell, instead of using two shorter skis with the bootheels locked down on each ski and skiing the downhill portions of a mountain with the skis essentially held parallel to one another to achieve enough flotation for the skier to remain pimarily above the surface and, in the old days, using one long pole as a sort of keel to slow down or change direction. This is how skiing developed in North America and how mail was famously delivered to the hundreds of remote mining camps scattered throughout the West. The difficult part was in navigating flat or rolling terrain where a modified “cross country” technique was used. Climbing with skis on was difficult, so the skis were often taken off altogether and carried over a shoulder to the next extended downhill effort. In a word, the techniques involved in this kind of skiing were “inefficient”. On the other hand, the Norwegians (and others) used two much longer and thinner skis which, when combined with “climbing skins” on the bottom (these were literally various types of animal hide affixed to the bottom of each ski such that the direction of the fur was aligned so the ski could slide forward, but there were be considerable resistence when being pulled by gravity in a backward downhill direction). “Skins” are still in use today but are obviously no longer comprised of fur, but some sort of polypropelene material with a powerful, waterproof adhesive on one side to stick to the bottom of the ski. Various ski waxes can also be used to either add glide to each stride, or supply some level of rearward resistence. When traveling through deep snow, the idea was to “drop a knee” and push one ski out ahead of the other and have the trailing leg handle the trailing ski, in effect turning two long, thin skis into one long but much wider one. Modern telemark equipment is tremendously effective for traveling long distances and venturing away from ski lifts and into backcountry settings where you “earn your turns” but pay nothing but a bit of gas in getting there for the priveledge of doing so.
I was tremendously intrigued by watching these guys on “Skinny Skis” navigate their way down the hill, going just as fast as good skiers riding alpine skiing equipment. I invested in the required gear, where the only fixed contact between boot and ski was at the toe, leaving the skiers heels free to drop the knee and initiate the turn. It required a higher level of balance to become a true-blue “free-heeler”, that, and quads made of steel becouse you’d be doing thousands of one-legged deep knee bends each day on the mountain. Leg strength was essential for skiing steep powder or moguls. This kind of strength could take several seasons to acquire, bolstered by cycling, eiher road or mountain in the off-season and lots of steep trail running or hiking. If you were serious about advancing your abilities as a telemark skier, you would do all sorts of training during the off-season. It was that important. Even the muscles you get from logging dozens of days eack year and “downhill” skiing at the ski area, you could’t hope to touch the kind of strength required to “tele”. The year was 1985 and I was in early on what was to become the biggest trend in the history of North American skiing.
Because I had such a strong technical background in alpine skiing and ample power from being a serious cyclist, the transition to telemarking came both easily and naturally and it only took me a half-season, or so, to beome highly proficient. Telemark skiers coming into the sport from a cross-country skiing background took to the change, but the learning curve was steeper and more drawn-out. It was rare for a non-skier to pickup telemark skiing from scratch, but, with today’s equipment, it would certainly be doable. Like alpine equipment, telemark skiing equipment has evolved by leaps and bounds over the span of fifty years, making both forms of skiing much less daunting than they have traditionally been.
Out there somewhere in a backcountry winter-wonderland, I discovered something I’d never known to exist and that was a series of backcountry “huts” scattered throughout Colorado, with the largest private organization being the 10th Mountain Trails Assocition (TMTA) of around eithteen “huts”, like the one above, built in a triangular area ranging from Leadville, to Vail, and on to Aspen. The system was named for the famed 1oth Mountain Division of the Army during World War II. Never before had we had a regiment of troops trained to speciaalize in the art of winter warfare, but it became abundandlty clear that in doing battle on the Western Front, there would invariably be some level of mountain warfare in the Alps. We were about a hundred years behind the eight ball and the 10th Mountain Division, based in Leadville, Colorado at an elevation of 10,000 feet was set in place to play catch-up. I am pround to have had two uncles who trained in Leadville, one of whom would make the switch to the skies, as a 101st Airborne Division paratrooper (“Screamin’ Eagle”) who saw action in theaters such as the Battle of the Bulge, in Belgium. The other remained with the 10th and saw considerable combat in the European Alps. They both survived the war only to come home and never speak of it. They didn’t have labels like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Sydrome) back then so they both came home, had families, took good paying jobs, and lived into their 80’s and nearly 100, respectively. I’m certainly not comparing modern soldiering in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and the hellish experiences contemporary troops face while in some faraway land where there are no longer clear rules of engagement and war has become so politicized. I’m sure that my uncles came back just as damaged as soldiers of our our times, but they were probably treated better and, with the post WWII boom, there were far more good paying jobs to transition to. The fact that neither of of them ever spoke of their experiences says enough. They did have what they called “shell shock” back in the day and I’d go out on a limb to say that it was that war’s moniker for PTSD.
Though I would continue to both “area ski” and venture ino the backcountry for the next twenty-five years, I would generallly be skiing on telemark equipment. I had gotten good enough that, even in extreme terrain, I loved the much lighter weight equipment and the freedom of my heels to navigate very difficult terrain. I was essentially at the same level in both modes of skiing. For years, myself and a very close group of friends would venture into the different TMTA huts, sometimes for four or five days, but it was difficult for each of us to get away, so it was typically over a three of four day weekend. There was a core group, those responsible for organizing the trips but good news travels fast and that number would climb to up to sixteen of us on a single “hut” trip. I keep putting that word in quotations because, at least in terms of the TMTA, these structures were up to 1,800 square feet and were closer to some trophy mountain home than a miserly hut. If you wanted a hut, you could hit any of the seven San Juan Huts Association cabins in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, located in the southwest protions of the state between Ouray, Ridgway, and Telluride. There’s even a small sytem of yurts in the area around Creede and Lake City. A couple of huts it the TMTA system had sauna’s, though that ended when the largest hut, the Polar Star Inn, burned down from an overheated sauna that got out of countrol. They rebuilt the hut but this time without that particular nicety. A couple of other huts have saunas but they are well detached from the main structure. While I absolutely adored TMTA, I found a different but equally enjoyable experience in the San Juans. These huts were run by the SJHA but were each on National Forest property, with far more basic leases than those struck between USFS and TMTA. The huts were designed to meet forest services specifications which included the ability for them to be moved to different sites via helicopter so as to not disturb any one location for a prolonged period. They were literally 16′ x 16′ sheds built by a company called “Tuffshed” and, as opposed to having bunks for up to nineteen individuals were limited to just eight. After having just six of us on our initial San Jaun Hut, a thirteen mile ski-in to the North Pole Hut, we decided to never again bring more than five. If I remember, we self-limited the rest of our trips to these huts to just four. Per person, it was twice the price, but these huts are such a value (at the time, roughly $25 per night, per person) none of us minded one bit. You can only dry so many wet, sweaty socks and underwear at a time and still have clean, mountain air to breathe!
While there may have been differences in the structures themselves, all of these huts were well off the grid. There was propane for cooking and lighting and each party was reponsible for melting and boiling snow for drinking and dishwater. Outdoor latrines were there, generally set twenty, or so, yards from the hut itself. You were expected to haul in your own food and haul-out your own trash. Though there were basic canned goods at a given hut, they were to be left for emergency situations. Of course, the centerpiece of every hut was the pot-bellied cookstove which meant taking turns at chopping and supplying plenty of kindling and leaving a nice stack behind for the next group of guests.
The above pic serves to show all that blue light I’ve been writing about. It was taken ten minutes after sunset from a mile or two from the hut. We’d been at it since early morning with a break for lunch and were all, each one of us, completely exhausted, but only in the best of ways. We would get back to the warmth of the hut an hour, or so, after dark and take turns, two at a time, making dinner. My good friend Bill was famous for bringing in something extravagant, like a some twelve-year-old scotch and Cornish game hens. One year, he went to the considerable physical trouble of hauling in a ten pound turkey, which he put in the oven after breakfast that morning and returned after a full day of skiing to find it cooked, perfectly.
It wasn’t unusual for a couple of us to set back out into the moonlight for one last ski before hitting our bunks. We’d head back in a join-in for a hand of cards or a game of cribbage before it was “lights out” somewhere around midnight. We’d awaken on our last day and quickly set about making breakfast and straightening up around the hut, sweeping it out and bringing in plenty of firewood for the next party, along with making them a fresh basin of meltwater from the stove. The idea was to leave the place better than you found it and to that end, we strived. I’d mentioned that this hut was thirteen miles in. All of the huts are located proximal to some very good skiing and situated at treeline, so there would be a typical elevation gain of 3,500 vertical feet, which meant the journey out would be a lot quicker than the journey in. We’d set out ripping down the trail going as fast as we could to see how quickly we could make it out. We made a game of everything and knew that the following day meant returning from our “Alice in Wonderland” experience to our day jobs and all things, by comparison, completely mundane. I dreaded going bak to work but was thankful to hve a job that paid me enough to enjoy my quiver of mountain sports.
A quick stop for lunch and a few libations to celebrate yet another great adventure, and we would part ways for the four to ten hour drive home, back to the Denver area and me to my mountain home an hour above.
Alpenglow on Sunset Mountain
