Finding the way: on skis

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

By Brooke Williams

For Christmas this year, my wife Terry gave me a set of cross country skis, boots and poles. These aren’t fat skis for the deep and steep of Teton Pass. Nor are they super skinny skating skis for racing around the Aspens golf course. These are the more traditional waxless, type of skis for skiing through the forest on a path – a way to travel in nature.

This is my first new pair of skis in over a decade. I was once addicted to skiing – powder skiing in particular. When I found skis that I loved, I would secretly buy duplicate, in some cases triplicate, pairs and hide them in the garage or basement. In fact, in storage, I have what I thought were the best powder skis ever made – Dynastar Verticals – mounted with some fancy alpine touring bindings a friend brought me from France. I lived to ski. The Wasatch Mountains above Salt Lake City were my playground, my stage.

During the ‘80s and ‘90s I wrote extensively about skiing, trying to make sense of why I could not live without it. I wondered and marveled about why big mountains, full seasons of watching weather, and having a sustained, intimate relationship with gravity made for such magic in my life. Tai Chi master and Deep Ecologist Dolores LaChappelle, an amazing woman living in Colorado who claims to have learned everything she knows from skiing powder, was my mentor. I realize that my first environmental activism was aimed at limiting ski resort development and commercial helicopter skiing – anything that threatened to spread into my sacred powder stashes.

On discovering my gift on Christmas, I was worried about being frustrated that skiing, once my source of adventure and meaning and indeed, a major part of my identity, would be reduced to basic winter transportation. Now, having been skiing nearly everyday this past month, I find that my only frustration is that I can’t get out even more often. (I chuckled last week, seeing that a Dynastar Vertical had been added to the fence made of obsolete skis at the corner of Deloney and Millward.)
I’m discovering how places I’ve taken for granted are made new by winter. The Moose-Wilson Road. The Bradley-Taggart Lake trails. The Park road south of Jenny Lake. A ranch turned wild by wind and snow.

But most days, I ski on the circuit trail around The Murie Center. With the lack of new snow, this trail is now quite fast and the rhythm one can develop moving through the forest becomes its own mysterious force, an energy supplement like horizontal gravity. Daily, the new Murie Center interns and I “survey the kingdom,” paying particular attention to changes occurring in this place and any new questions.

We found what was once a mallard duck — two sharp wings connected to each other by a bloody bone structure that once held the life of this bird. Day one: the marks of wing tips in the snow suggest the mallard might have been killed elsewhere and transported to this site and eaten by a large bird, perhaps a bald eagle or raven. Day two: the carcass has been taken away by a coyote, based on the serpentine tracks in and out of the adjacent forest.

The ghost moose makes the new post holes we find each day on our trail. We never see the moose. We only feel it.

Regularly, we see marten tracks, made by the latest of a dozen generations known to live in this forest.

Plantlike crystals rise vertically from the ice cover spreading horizontally across the small stream.

We wonder about the strange relationship between light and heat at minus fifteen degrees.

And then we wonder why this seems so natural: a small group skiing through a wild forest on a cold day. Perhaps we are reminded of another time when the lives of our ancestors depended on movement, attention and an intimate, intricate territory called “home.”
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Finding the way: on skis | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

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