Falling & Getting Up

Seems somehow appropriate to my scattered, disorganized interests that the first real post on this blog wouldn't actually be from the Sierra Prieta, but from our other mountain range, the Bradshaws.

I'm sore but happy after a day spent climbing up & falling down in splendid, deep powder in the Prescott National Forest. Anyone familiar with the drought-starved winters around here will recognize that those words don't occur very often in the same sentence any more.

Some change is clearly afoot here in my backyard mountains -- in the previous century, deep snow was the norm around here. Aldo Leopold talks about the snow in the neighboring White Mountains as making them entirely impassible through the winter. It was fodder for a year's worth of bragging to be the first horseman to make it into the high country around here in spring. Now, winter storms typically come through as rain and run downstream immediately to the Hassayampa, the Verde and into the insatiable thirst of Phoenix and Southern California.

I was out with my friend & co-conspirator Will, who is on a mission (this from a guy who's current schedule barely gives him time to eat & sleep, and he's got spare minutes for a mission?) to learn & document the backcountry skiing in the Bradshaws. Lucky for me, I get to go along for the ride; not so lucky, snow around here can be a real hit or miss proposition. With 12-15 inches landing 2,000 feet lower in town earlier this week, though, our chances looked mighty good.

Once we hit about 7,000 feet, the snow banks alongside the icy gravel road had reached rather impressive proportions. We spotted an area where a telephone line cut made an open passage through the trees down into a deep creek gully and then way up the open slope on the other side. This was showing real promise.

For me, this was a first try with lots of brand new gear, namely my favorite telemark skis converted over to an alpine touring binding & boot. A telemark setup doesn't fix your heel on the ski -- which necessitates a lot of bumps and bruises before you learn the graceful, one-knee-down turns that chicks & dredlock dudes dig so much. An alpine touring binding, by contrast, lets the heel lift free while you're climbing up the slope, but then locks down just like a regular downhill ski for the schussy bits. After the move to Arizona, I decided that skiing oportunities would be limited enough that I'd be able to get back up to speed with a fixed heel faster than trying to re-learn telemark turning two or three times a year. Good theory, mixed results.

Will & I descended the slope into the gully, then started the stomp up the other side. Lots of work on the uphill, but I was pleasantly surprised that my year long campaign to get completely fat & out of shape hasn't been entirely successful. We stopped midway up to dig a pit to check out the snow & make sure we weren't on an avalanche-prone slope, and found at least a stunning four and a half or five feet of snow on the ground, and that's without hitting bottom. Not impressive by Tahoe or Mt. Baker standards, but remember that these hills spent much of the last few winters completely bare of snow. Good news all around -- there was lots of snow, and none of it showed any inclination to kill us.

After pulling off the climbing skins & (for me) figuring out how to lock down the heels of my bindings in deep snow instead of my living room, it was time to point 'em downhill. Will bobbled once, then carved a series of linked tele turns in the knee-deep fluff. I dropped in and had an immediate, unsettled sensation; for the first time in twenty years, my heels were fixed to the ski and all that internal dialog that had cluttered my brain for the past few months about how much easier it'd be to ski AT just kinda balled up into a little chunk of gravity and planted me face first in white.

While the skiing got prettier -- for both of us -- through the afternoon, I can't say I ever managed to make it look good. While my self-image fashions me a back-country, earn-your-turns skier, this mornings' aches and pains do tell me that I'd be well served by -- for at least one day -- biting the bullet, spending the money, riding the lift & getting a hundred or two turns in my legs before I let my aspirations run too far ahead of my meager skills.