Going Full Skier

In the fresh wake of my fortieth birthday, I have relished my last days of the season in April powder, triggering a significant reference—the time when I left “the circle.” It was ten years ago, almost to the date, with lots of late-season April snow, when I left Steamboat Springs.
I can always come back was the motto I embraced and the only way I convinced myself to pack.

A few weeks later, I feigned a confident adieu to my roommates, and pointed my Pathfinder towards the coast. The next day, when I got to Reno, I couldn’t resist exiting the highway in Truckee to check out Squaw Valley. It had been a lonely drive, and I suddenly felt less detached, and even wondered briefly how much housing cost around there. No. I had to remind myself, you're going to the city, not back to what you just left.

Graduate school in San Francisco, for two years, was trying, feeling the magnet of the circle stab me from afar, with my denial that I had left manifesting in nothing very good. I had no idea what I was doing.

Small steps were taken when I returned to Colorado, two years later. And this time, I had a job. There was a ski area, and by-gosh-darnit, I was going to be a skier again. I returned to season passes, albeit weekday Purg passes some years, and I skied.

But, for a while, I wasn’t really a skier. I was skating around the circumference. Living in Bondad didn’t help, surrounded by all that sagebrush. It wasn’t that full-skier lifestyle. My new friends had never seen Aspen Extreme and had no true bond with Scrapple. I paid strangers to tune my skis, full price, so far from the circle that six packs would have been inappropriate.

Finally, this year, I found my way back. Moving to Mancos helped, along with my emergent new ski buddy—a true skier, and also my college pass at Telluride (and utmost kudos to the T Ski Corp for extending the deal to faculty). At home, the La Platas talk to me everyday, and when I’m not on big mountains, I’m still in the spirit, cross countrying on ridgelines above my neighborhood with my dogs. I am on skis most days of the week.

Even better, my new ski buddy is educating me on the whole new world of the backcountry, which is, indeed, quite possibly, the vortex. Early season, he waxed my boards—all three sets—and I feel like a chick in a ski town again, where a little bit of chauvinism is okay. In the backcountry, I marvel at how tired I get skinning up, wondering why running and XC hasn’t put me in better shape. Pointing my skis takes mindset again on these new pitches, allowing alpine turns as I adjust to this more untamed terrain.

I had so many great days in Telluride, too. I love, and have always loved, skiing alone. I returned to this part of my roots, a real mountain and a resort. The ski area isn’t evil to me; it is real. I park at Coonskin, feeling old school, proud with images of hiking Gold Hill before it was a lift, when I made excursions to this magical place during my early liftie days in Summit County. After skiing, before heading back over Lizard Head, I get big bagel sandwiches at Baked in Telluride, liking my strolls through town just as much as the eats. In Mountain Village, I don’t mind the glitz; I liked it, actually, and in the evenings post ski, razzed my ski buddy about my lunch dates with Tom Cruise.

On closing day last weekend, much of Prospect Bowl was still untracked. Hiking up, we take our time, viewing it up. The end-of-year party is starting to gather in the pine trees at the bottom of the first pitch. We won’t go, but we laugh, and I share one of my own last-day memories from Steamboat with him.

He’s always appreciative of my more irresponsible decade. While some of mine are admittedly pretty good, he trumps me altogether with footage he filmed himself at A-Basin in the 70s. (How cool is that?)

We moved down the run confidently and fast, snapping smoothly and consistently into each pivot, our muscles and minds in good shape after a full season. At the bottom, I feel like it is the best day of the year, or maybe even my best day ever, but how many time do we say that? I am back in my slow motion dream and in my own little zone; I am in the circle. I am back.

Feelin' Scrapple-y

It's that time of year: February, the longest short month of the year. Winter's hunkered down hard, the nights come early and cold, and summer's still oh-so-far away.

A good time to hunker down yourself: crack open a beer, warm up by the woodstove, and spark up ... whatever takes you to where ever you wanna be. And then turn on the TV and fire up a movie.

If your February therapy includes that kind of night for you, I'd like suggest a movie suited perfectly to all those mountain-town moods and needs and hankerings: serve yourself up a heaping of Scrapple.

Scrapple has been called everything from "Babe on Acid" to "A ski bum's version of Easy Rider." In a review I myself wrote when the film came out ten years ago, I sang its dirt-bag praises:

Scrapple [is] a great success of an independent film. The greatest success, though, from the point of view of someone who has witnessed several ski towns sink into the sewer hole of "resort" success (and what is a resort but a place offering a "lifestyle," but with enough modern comforts so you can have the style without the demands of the life once required to live there?) is that it gives a needed reminder for us mountain-town folks of why we live here, what it's really all about, and what the real value of small towns and our tribal subculture is. And still can be.

Filmed in Telluride (and employing back alleys to look like pre-resort Telluride), Scrapple unfolds through the course of one ski-town summer as the main character, Al Dean (played by writer and producer Geoffry Hanson, in a big, beautiful '70s afro) struggles to acquire a house to get his Vietnam-vet brother (Dan Earnshaw) out of a VA hospital. To do this, Dean takes on a variety of mountain-town occupations, from house painting to drug dealing -- particularly taking orders for a mysterious mystical Tibetan concoction called "Temple Balls" that he is sure will yield him his economic jackpot (so to speak).

Meanwhile some other entertaining and classic ski-town plot twists unfold:

• In a greased-pig contest, one of Al Dean's roommates wins Scrapple the pig, which he and his shack-mates decide to fatten through the summer for an end-of-summer pig roast;
  

• bandanna-headed motorcycle-riding stud Tom (Buck Simmonds) wrestles with both the death of his girlfriend (a subplot that casts a dark light on the mountain-town drug culture) and his new-found attraction to her best friend, Beth (Ryan Massey);
  

• and the the sleazy developer (is that redundant?) as he wheedles a new airport to transform the town of Ajax (a thinly fictionalized early Telluride) into a major resort. (I think it was Woody Allen who once said, the scariest words in the English language are "it's terminal." In Western ski towns, it's the developer's line: "We have all the necessary ingredients to make Ajax the destination resort in North America.")

And through it all, Scrapple the porker lumbers along in and out of the plots, on his way toward enlightenment and transformation into "the Dharma Pig."

It all makes for a fun, funny, and festive '70's kinda ride.

And all this also makes Scrapple the Big Wednesday, the surfer culture epic, of ski-bum life -- except that rather than highlighting the skiing (there's only a few minutes of skiing in the entire film) Scrapple fictionalizes but truthfully captures the "bumming" part of the culture -- that real Rocky Mountain lifestyle built around accumulating joy rather than money.

As Errol McNamara, the obligatory ski-town Aussie and philosophizing bartender in the film, says of how he arrived in Ajax: "Life is just way too short to end up at 60 with a gold watch and a pension. Headed out looking for Nirvana. This might not be it, but the back yard's not too bad."

So as you're riding out those caFebruary mountain-town cabin-fever blahs, remember why you do it. And, for a night, anyway, let Scrapple be your guide.

Here's a scene from the film where Scrapple transmorgifies from mere bacon to enlightened Dharma Pig:



Scrapple also delivers an outstanding soundtrack that drives many of the scenes, featuring happy-hippie greats old and new, from J.J. Cale to Jonathan Edwards' classic "Shanty," to some great stuff from Taj Mahal, Widespread Panic, and Sam Bush.

Learn more and purchase Scrapple and the soundtrack here.

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This post also appears on InsideOutsideMag.com.

Fear and Loathing - and optimism - in Mountain Village

A friend of mine just spent a bargain weekend in Mountain Village. Not exactly wilderness, this multi-million-dollar trophy-home enclave set on the backside (appropriately enough, methinks) of Telluride Ski Area's Coonskin Mountain that looms over the more appealing and personable -- and relatively real -- town of Telluride.

Yet he came back with some crazy tales.


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The stories he told me, though, weren't about the skiing -- that was fair to midland, he reported. It was the house he stayed in at Mountain Village that left him dazzled and babbling.

The lodging was the gift of a friend, who has a friend on the East Coast who has a house in Moutain Village. The owner and his family only get to Mountain Village, you know, a couple of weekends a year -- the rest of time time it sits empty, but is kept ready, idling, waiting: heated, stocked, lit, and fully accoutremented.

The "house," as my friend described it, is a gargantuan wood and log structure with gaping glass windows, a multi-floor cathedral-style vaulted central living space, and seven or so bedrooms -- each with its own bathroom. And more. The place, too, he related with some audible awe, was fully outfitted with a Wii game console, super-sonic sound system, and drive-in-sized flat screen TV -- with the cable, of course, turned on year-round for those couple of weekend visits.

And although the owner was kind enough to let his local friend bring some buddies -- like that Buffett song "Gypsies in the Palace" -- to hunker down there with their cheap beer and T-Cards, it still left my friend with some vague, gnawing sense of ill ease, like, That's just not okay ...

I get it.

Living here in one of the most gorgeous spots on Earth, we, of course, are all too familiar with Mountain Village, or some jet-set enclave like it, that has been carved out like a fortified colonial outpost in some beautiful corner of the San Juans or Four Corners. And if you're like me, you can't help but look toward those often-empty but always-lit-and-heated and maintained mega-houses set upon the metaphoric hill above the commonfolk, and scratch out a mental note: Um, Mr. Obama, I have a great idea where the country can save energy and resources right away ...

And we're certainly not alone in our distaste for such waste. Mountain Village itself -- the crown jewel in Four Corner's set of gaudy second-home (and third, and fourth) monuments to ego -- has even been the subject of a funny and biting mockumentary, The Lost People of Mountain Village, by Telluriders Carol Black and Neal Marlens.





Still, I try to not let my cynicism and scorn obscure the big picture here: That those aren't just distasteful shrines to oppulence piled up in places like Mountain Village -- those are also resources held in reserve for a day not far away when we'll need all that stored wood, all those spare parts, all that housing space. Just think: that single-family tens-of-thousands-of-square-foot weekend getaway spot my friend squatted in could one day be ... a hostel for dozens of trekkers ... an indoor village for some future self-styled traveling-buddha-like career-bumming class of wayfarers ... or a series of studio apartments for the future dwellers in some Rewilded West.

For myself, that's a beautiful vision that takes away some of the sorrow I feel for the poor slobs so rich that they feel they need an outpost in some faraway place they wish they could afford to let go of their wealth enough to actually move to. I think now that maybe this is their way of giving back to the future generations of the places and cultures they plundered in their reckless and fruitless search for happiness in their sad, unrooted, tedious, wealthy worlds.

Again, though, I'm not alone in this optimistic vision.

This vision, too, or something like it is being explored elsewhere -- in bigger circles and by smarter people than just some middle-aged low-budget still-ski-bumming multi-jobbed curmudgeon like me. The New York Times recently ran a piece titled "What Will Save the Suburbs," which profiles progressive urban planners who are already looking at potential benefits and uses of abandoned suburban neighborhoods and their accompanying blight of strip malls and box stores.

And those skills we'll need to make use of those in those reclaimed landscapes that got hammered in the last of couple of decades or centuries of urban/suburban sprawl? There, too, there be those looking for a bright side. Check out these "urban foragers," stalking a still bountiful and resilient landscape, even in urban Chicago.


Sky Full of Bacon 07: Eat This City from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

So next time you pass by some gated community or resort slum or McMansion hovel, swallow that bitterness, put away that molotov cocktail, and instead see instead the potential. What bounty is awaiting us in the disappearing and someday-to-be-reclaimed Mountain Villages around the West?

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Proceeds from sales of the Lost People of Mountain Village DVD support the Sheep Mountain Alliance. Buy the DVD here.

This post first appeared on The Monkey Wrench Dad Blog, on InsideOutsideMag.com