Old ski bums don't die ...

... they just get on YouTube! 

A four-minute doc about 70-somethings keeping the bumming alive in the Kootenays:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYM8tLJLryU&feature=player_embedded

Ski season, at last

So it finally got here.

Yeah, I'd gotten out in the backcountry. And, yes, Purg was open for a few days with a ribbon of man-made so-called snow. But that's not ski season.

Ski season, to me, is when winter finally arrives to deposit upon us those grand and glorious and deep San Juan dumps. And it's when we finally get up there to romp and ride that manna from the Pacific.

This is no small thing in my life. And my family's lives. And in our mountain-town tribe's lives. This is one of several potent and meaningful annual rituals in our lives. Along with the spring's first river trip, and ... well, that might be about it.

It's that big in our personal calendars. Seasonal rites and ceremonies for we mountain-town folk.

So this weekend we celebrated. Driving up the gorgeous gash of the Animas Valley in a driving snow. Gathering with those many other mostly local fellow snow acolytes. (Only in mountain towns does a blessing of "Praise Ullr!" rouse approval and agreement among strangers in a crowd.) And meeting up with other tribal members to practice our rites: Riding the chairlift, discussing and dissecting lines and powder stashes, cruising and carving and crashing and giggling with wintery glee down what were amazingly good early-season powder-skiing conditions this weekend.

And the kids? Oh, we crossed paths occasionally. But mostly they were off, meeting up with their own neophyte mountain-town tribal pals, finding their own lines. Forging their own mountain-town lives.

Damn good stuff.

Sacred stuff around these parts.

Skier's commandments -- rules to live by in and out of ski season

Well, ski season is almost over (for ski-area skiing, anyway). But, the lessons learned from skiing are year-round.

So, with that in mind, below is the "Skier's Ten Commandments," as posted in the Winter Club Room at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yellowstone National Park. The Commandments were proffered by Swiss ski instructor Jules Fritsch in 1928.


Fritsch's commandments:

1. Thou shall have no other sports before ski.
   


2. Thou shalt not take with thee any showshoes, neither any toboggans,
   nor any other means of transportation from the heavens above to the
   earth beneath.
   


3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for what of it?
   


4. Remember the winter-time and keep in wholly, in the summer shalt
   thou labor and do all thy work, but the winter is the season of the
   ski, thy Lord and master. In its evenings thou shalt not fritter away
   the time with backgammon, nor with red-dog, nor michigan, nor
   tiddleywinks, nor jig-saw puzzles, but in the sweat of thy brow shalt
   thou polish and wax thy skis. For in ten hours shalt thou labor and
   climb up the hill, and in ten minutes shalt thou be down again. (Oh
   yeah.)
   
   
5. Carry thy own skis and thy knapsack, that thy friends shall not
   avoid thee, and that thy days may be long on the ski trips that thou
   makest.
   
   
6. Thou shalt not dither.
   


7. Thou shalt not commit sitzmarks.
   
   
8. Thou shalt not swipe thy neighbor's ski-wax.
   


9. Thou shalt not bear false witness of thy downhill runs, nor thy jump turns, nor thy telemarks.
   


10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s sealskins, nor thy neighbor’s
    agility, nor his Stem-Christiania, nor his Closed-Christiania, nor his
    Open-Christiania., nor any Christiania which is thy neighbor’s.

"Sitzmarks are made by fools like me, But only Fritsch can miss a tree."


Amen, Jules.


(Skier's Ten Commandments via Empty Beer, on Teton Gravity Research Forum.)

******

This post also appears on InsideOutsideMag.com. Check it out!

A Bum Family Tradition

It's corn season.

I mean my favorite kind of corn: corn snow groomed into a smooth lake-like surface, or corn snow sculpted into long fall-lines of steep waveforms that ski like surfing white-water chop.

I mean like the corn snow we found awaiting us on the first day of Spring at Purgatory this weekend.

So, as we do for a couple dozen days every ski season, we made some sandwiches and poured some coffee and put on our ski gear and jumped in the truck and headed up through the morning-glory blaze of the amazing Animas River Valley.

Another Wright family rite.

Skiing has been the sinew and tissue of our family. Since holding our three-year-old son under his arms so he can sail on his plastic boards on Chapman Hills' meagre slope, through our teen kids' having to wait for us -- sometimes with visible exasperation -- as their telemarking parents huff and grunt their way to the bottom of the lift, five months of our year is woven together with days passed skiing together.

Every year we make that big financial outlay in ski passes for the family. But, this, in my wife and my minds, is an sound investment in our family-health care. In fact, these frequent and, given Sarah's and my lives built around skiing (we met living at in a ski town, and married at the base of the town's ski area), damn-near religious days passed together on the nearby mountain -- and up in our nearby, amazing, gorgeous home-mountain range -- are the why of the what we have built our adult lives around.

We went from being ski bums to parenting bums.

The lift rides alone are worth it. This is why I hope they never really get around to replacing Purgatory's backside Lift 8 with that high-speed quad chair they've been threatening for years: Not only do I welcome that long rest after a long ground down the face of Paul's Park, but this is some the best time I get to spend with my kids: sitting on the chair and having the space in which you can only free-form chat.

Now, knowing there's only a few years of this frequent, ritualistic, intimate time left in our relationship with our kids, I savor every opportunity I get with them like this. Just-talking time, rather than the more common and pragmatic day-to-day talking-about-something-specific time. Time shared in some magnificent place. Time spent out-of-doors and honing and exploring a physical skill.

And the chance to teach them -- to show, not just tell them -- what I think life and living really are:

Do more. Want less.

The Bum life, however those values are manifested.

Watching them schuss the slush, I think they get it. And watching them run into their friends on the mountain -- friends of their often raised by friends of our who, too, live here to be Bum Parents -- I'm thinking they all -- the "Western Ski Bums: The Next Generation" -- get it, too.

*******

This post also appears on InsideOutsideMag.com. Check it out!

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.

* * * *

This post also appears on InsideOutsideMag.com.

Home Mountain

We get up there around noon. There's no hurry, though. Although the skies hang low as a living room ceiling all morning, the cloudcover isn't squeezing out any snow yet. This afternoon it'll arrive, the witchdoctors from the National Weather Service promise.

And, you know, with a ski pass, one grows into a bit of a snow snob.

Good call. The flakes arrives as we do. And I don't mean those slow-driving sudden-turning lane-wavering New Mexican drivers -- I mean that frozen manna that we acolytes of the church of the mountains wait for, pray for, worship when it finally comes. Especially after a long drought filled warm, lovely but snow-less weather like we've had.

Even though it's a weekend day, and "Local's Day" at Purgatory, there's not that many other people up here today -- at the base area, we ski right up to the lift and get on a chair. We deduce that it's perhaps because the Durango High School ski club is in Aspen, and the local ski teams are away at competitions -- as behests the offspring of those locals whose day it is here.

At the top of the chair, our own kids leave us as well -- same ski area, but they seek their own turns, with their own friends. So we head off ourselves, just my wife and I, toward our own favorite local's destination: Ye Olde Lift 8.

And the snow picks up, starting to accumulate like a layer of albino volcanic ash. We float the fluff fallen on the groomed green and blue runs traversing toward Purgatory's "backside." It's dreamy, like waterskiing a glassy lake.

We have our favorite combinations of routes across the mountain -- across our mountain The mountain where we've spent most of our married years together. The mountain we raised our kids on. The mountain where our kids make their first moves toward taking off, on their own, to find their own runs, to carve their own turns, with their own pack of "locals." Soon those turns will take them off the mountain, out of our home, and into the world.

Some of these routes we claim as our own by dubbing them with our own names -- "afternoon delight," "dreamsicle, "the tibeal plateau" -- and they are the product of years of exploring and experiences and studying and sharing. And skiing. Lots of skiing.

We ski them all today. The snow deepens. Lift lines never materialize. Sarah and I have a great, grand time bumping and carving and gliding and riding the chair together.

We ride Lift 8, of course, all day: That old triple chair that slowly climbs the steep-walled basin that looks out over Hermosa Park. It's a process getting to Lift 8, and it's a long, pensive ride on the '80s-era mechanism back to the top. (And longer if it suffers one of its not-infrequent breakdowns.) But it's worth it, I think. I like the slow ride. I like the time to think, or talk, or just look around and not think and not talk. I like the time to rest my telemark-tortured legs after careening down one of the many radical runs through the trees of Paul's Park or Poet's Glade, or bumped-out battlefields of Elliots or Boudreau's or Blackburn Bash.

(We once had the pleasure of having dinner with the old-time ski-bum Paul after whom Paul's Park is named. That, my wife said dreamily after, would be the greatest honor she could imagine: to have a run named after you ...)

Hard to get to. Hard to get down. A hassle to get around. (Kind of life in the rural West in a nutshell.) That's why Lift 8 is the locals' chair.

(And this year we savor it more than ever, since next year, the plan is, one of them new-fangled high-speed detachable quads, like Lift 3, is going to be installed here. Sure to make it easier to get to, less of a hassle to ride, more popular to more tourists. Kind of like the rural West in a nutshell.)

The snow accumlates quickly. Thickly. Arriving in ocean-fog-like wafts of dumping snowfall. People indistinguishable in their body armor and powdered with snow pant and grin and nod to each other knowingly.

We run into people we know, too, on the chair, at the top of the mountain, at Dante's, the mid-mountain cafeteria. We run into the same people we always see up here, smiling away on a powder day. And we run into many people we haven't seen in a long time -- river people and coworkers and people from the schools we work at.

And we run into one couple we've known as long as we've lived here, and who have kids just a few years older than ours. Also river runners, travellers, campers, skiers, we've been following their tracks for many years now, looking ahead at what they're doing, what their kids are like, what is happening to them, and awaits us.

They're up here skiing today together. And their kids are off -- elsewhere, off into and around the world. And we can see our next big adventure.

But until then, I'm thankful for and savoring being able to bring our kids up here, to raise them here, with this, our home mountain. Where it's always locals day.

******

This blog is also posted on InsideOutsideMag.com.

Amps, Gas, Grass or Algae; Nobody Rides for Free

Congratulations Durango Transit, for announcing that Main Avenue Trolley rides will be fare free in '09. While this covers only a small part of my little corner of self-chosen paradise, it's about time.

Let's not strain anything patting ourselves on the back just yet though, because we're running several decades behind the curve on this one. Many lost ideals ago, I was an operational cog in a couple of free transit systems, in other self-congratulatory paradises far, far away from home...

One system moved a large percentage of 4 million+ yearly visitors from one grand national park view to the next. The buses carried up to 100 people each and ran on propane. The talk was of banning all private cars from park roads in the near future. Then oil prices dropped. The last time I visited, smog from power plants and internal combustion engines clouded the views; and the roads were clogged with cars, SUVs, and tour buses. The free bus system belched diesel smoke, service was reduced to an inconvenience, and the buses ran half-empty.

The other - ah, paradise, at any price! I lived in a cheap trailer slum just outside of a ski town, and drove a free bus for a decent wage. I carried local paupers and self-anointed royals, on my appointed rounds through neighborhoods ranging in price from the low-shelters to the high-exorbitants. An abandoned rail-bed through the valley was on track to become a bike/ski commuter path. We were on the way to post-car craze enlightenment. But housing costs kept rising, chasing job-holding locals down-valley. A few years later, the bike path plan was shelved for lack of interest, the bus system carried mostly visitors, and the 'local' work-force commuted from up to 60 miles away. My 'decent wage' was pushing me down-valley with the rest, so I just kept going.

Now, here we are - fresh from a round of oil industry rapaciousness that pushed Durango-area transit use up 30-some percent over 2007. Our president-in-waiting promises to move us toward alternative energy, and Colorado governor Bill Ritter's statewide focus on renewable energy production seems to be bearing local fruit in last week's announcement of a plan to make oil from algae near Ignacio, and last spring's exploration of solar power farming near the same town. With all this and the promise of free buses to keep us warm, what could go wrong?

Yesterday, I filled my old Subaru up with good old, bad old unleaded gas, and the total on the pump didn't make me cringe. Don't get me wrong, I'm still living in a trailer just outside of town here in our paradise, can't afford $4 gas, and am not advocating the tough love of keeping energy costs at luxury levels. I am pointing out that cost-based conversions are notably temporary. Though there are plenty of reasons (a tanked economy, climate change, trade deficits, etc.) to replace fossil fuels with other means of warming, cooling and transporting our society, faith in change fades with falling prices at the pump. Unless pushed by a committed and vocal citizenry, no administration will be able to convert us to alternative, renewable, sustainable energy production and use.

Though my once high ideals are long tempered by broken promises and the pragmatism of survival, I've lived long enough to prove that change is always possible, so I've been exploring some options lately.

Amping up the ailing auto industry was discussed on radio program Science Friday this week, and here are some avenues for further exploration:

• Plug In America promotes nationwide development of all-electric vehicles. One currently in production goes over 200 miles per 4-hour charge on recyclable batteries. Though the current sports-car model is way, way out of my price range, the Tesla Motors rep revealed that his company has applied for a bit of the guaranteed loans being promised by our government, to jump-start production of a sedan at half the price.

Half of a hundred thousand is still too high for me, so I may be electrifying my old Suby someday:

Whether vehicles have electric, internal combustion, or hybrid engines, energy has to go into the tanks and batteries. Whether it's pond scum algae, solar or wind generated electricity, gas from grass (corn and sugarcane), or the same old fossil technologies we've loved and hated for several lifetimes - should be up to us, not to the rising and falling fortunes of energy corporations and politicians. If you want more information on sustainable energy and economics, check out a Green Festival near you:


If you still have a few bucks to spend, a Green Festival is coming to Denver next year; but why wait? With the economic wounds of fuel price gouging still bleeding, and more corporate bail-outs blowing in the wind, it's time to press the loan officers known as Congress, Colorado's Legislature, Governor Bill Ritter, and the incoming Obama administration to require corporate business plans that deliver sustainable energy production and use to the masses, rather than continuing to transport massive wealth to self-proclaimed oil royalty at home and abroad. It's long past time to press the political brain-trusts of La Plata and San Juan (N. M.) counties to institute a transit system up and down the Animas River valley, to connect the economic zone that stretches from Purgatory to Farmington. We elect them to represent our interests. Now times are hard again, and it's time they get to work.

Stalking the elusive autumn winter

I may not have been successful hunting elk this fall, but on Sunday, I did manage to hunt down some winter.

Of course, a good guide helps. Enlisting the services of those guys who found some stash of winter in October, I joined a group of four other dried-out ski-holics this Sunday (a day reserved for sacred rituals ... even Animistic ones) heading high into this San Juans in search of those elusive autumn tracks.

It was there. Cached up a distant alpine valley hid the stems and seeds of this season's sparse storms. It took only an hour or so of skinned-up climbing to summit -- a chance to also work on the dimming remnants of summer tans in the October glare.

From our lunchtime perch, we could look south and see the long line of the La Platas behind the close-by ragged ranges of San Juans, and then turn north and see the gray and flat table-top top of Grand Mesa, with the brown cloud of metropolitian Grand Junction stuffed up against its western edge.

Then we skiied. That sacred ritual thing ...

It was thin in places. There were rocks. P-tex will have to be applied, edges honed, and at least one core-shot repaired. There were patches and strips of wind-blown crust. But there were also several tasty carves through even, forgiving, relatively deep packed powder, and the day was topped by a long, zipping run out on fast Fall corn snow through an exhilarating obstacle course of boulders and krummholz brush.

Yippee!

This hunt was much more successful.

See more pics in the slide show below.

The ski-bum bailout

This could very well be the government's plan to rescue those ski bums who can't afford to bum:

How to live in your car.

Ski bums finding the bumming hard

A good article on NewWest.net looks at an issue afflicting modern-day ski bums in Rocky Mountain ski towns: The bumming ain't cheap.

"Ski bum housing search grows desperate," by Michael Pearlman, examines how the days of living cheap in some lovely little mountain town so you can work a slave-labor job -- but one that comes with a ski pass -- so you can ski your arse off and hang with a tribe of other powder fiends have fallen victim to second-home and luxury life-style economics.

As gentrification extends to every back-alley cabin and shag-carpeted rental condo, it’s the workers on the lowest rung of the employment ladder that are most affected. When real estate prices skyrocketed in recent years, landlords and deep-pocketed investors cashed in, remodeling and selling older, low-end condominiums, the lifeblood of the rental market in most mountain towns. New owners who financed purchases with no money down had to increase rents to cover their mortgages, while skid housing was demolished to make way for new construction.

Personally, as a graduate of the School of Ski Bumming, this is tragic. College is fine; but for a real education in Life and How To Live It, nothing can beat a season, or seasons (or life, as some of us have stretched this portion of our educations) lived simply and scraping by in exchange for place and tribe and getting out and actually doing things.

And to do that, to experience that, to learn that, there must be places to do that. Entire micro-economies that feed that.

Maybe it's time for a ski-bum bailout, eh?