Bookended by Whiteouts

           February 1 was the first serious day of skiing for me this year, beginning with a Friday morning drive that featured remarkable clouds in the closing arguments of their storm. The clouds moved around the peaks and valley quickly, breaking apart and reforming, dark grays in the middle and diamond white along the edges. I could swear I saw a cloud cradling a huge expanse of peaks that looked like a five hundred foot caterpillar. Skiing the afternoon shift in a full whiteout was nice simply because it felt good to be inside a storm and what it promised for the next day. Sunday morning began as a bluebird but was interrupted by another storm so after a couple hours of accumulation I was back in a cloud, skiing by Braille.           

            There was high quality snow in Mammoth this past weekend, with 10-degree temps at dawn Saturday morning and a harsh east wind blowing snow in the wrong direction, not down into the mountain creating sumptuous sugar deposits on all faces and in gullies but a wind blowing snow up and off of the mountain, but it didn’t really matter. This situation always causes the amusing entry routine on the upper peaks where riders approach ledges while covering their faces against a sandblast of a million tiny snow crystals.

            I skied alone until I ran into John Wentworth at the bottom gondi, a figure who features strongly in Yutaka and my paintings and drawings. He is a very fast skier, and he is adventurous. He courts trouble. He has the long face of a sleepy criminal, a mastermind.

            Untracked cakey feather pow was found all Saturday morning at the top of the mountain in a slot between Huevos and Climax, though every lap required intricate maneuvering to avoid hairball rock zones. 10 degree pow is not exactly a good binding base layer, so again, for the second time this season a cold dump of dry light pow has fallen on rock, so it was no surprise when a couple grand piano sized snow slabs separated, shifted, held—did not slide, while traversing underneath Top of the World. This was the first serious day of skiing this season. Five more chairlifts began loading for the first time all season, 22 & 23 among them, as well as 12, 13, and 14.

            Toward the end of the day I got petulant.

            I’ve never experienced a season so boney, I whined.

            Yes, the unforgiving rock lurking under seductive twinkling powder is a true mindfuck, Mr. Wentworth replied.

            I’m ruining my skis, I cried.

            Trying not to destroy one’s dear skis, the prophet Wentworth continued, is a challenge we all face, but you can’t ski with the wellbeing of your skis as the central thought while descending a mountain.

            But…

            Your precious skis, the oracle opined, are going to take a beating no matter what you do, you just can’t put any weight into your turns.

            No weight?

            You’ve got to ski like Gordon Lightfoot, he said.

            The guy who sang Sundown? I asked.

            Yes, Gordon Lightfoot, the sensitive Canadian with a voice like dry light powder, and you’ve got to pray your skis survive. You’ve got to become more like a butterfly.

Snow Starvation

SNOW STARVATION

            If snow is a mountain’s winter clothing then Mammoth is near naked right now. I was hoping to write a post that shouted joyously about how good the snow is. I was hoping to complain and brag about the tons of snow I shoveled and to suggest places and times to meet on the hill, but November through early January conditions this year are not conducive to that kind of experience. Yes, there are a few smooth carvey turns to be found on the mountain, but only if you start first thing in the morning with machine-groomed corduroy, which sounds like something only dentists can appreciate but has its perverse pleasures when nothing else is available.

            Last December it snowed 13 feet, possibly the most ever for December-in-Mammoth, but then very little snow came after that, a couple storms, yes, but the mountain closed earlier than usual in spring 2013. Mammoth has traditionally had the longest (non-glacier) ski season in North America, often ending on July 4. This season is shaping up to be something quite bad (pardon my snow-profanity) and a road trip might be needed. But to where? My associates at Alta/Snowbird say it’s pretty boney there too. Maybe by middle-late January something will change. Of course Mammoth is still an absurdly beautiful place and every dusk there’s alpenglow pink reflecting off what little snow there is. It’s snow as decoration, a backdrop for parties, not snow sufficient for skiing. The top of the mountain looks amazing with no snow, all gnarly, craggy rock, very intimidating.

            It’s not like zero joy exists on the mountain now. I rode a chairlift recently with two different civilians who were overjoyed to simply be on skis, regardless of the conditions. A bright-eyed San Diego man asked where I’d been skiing. Where? There weren’t any secrets. Only a few chairlifts were open with only a few common trails down, same with the gondola to the top. I didn’t want to bum him out with my ski enthusiasm hovering near its lowest setting. Simply being outside in high altitude mountain air is plenty euphoric, yes, but it’s dangerous to wander off piste when the snow is scant (piste is French for groomed trails, off-piste is the natural forest with snow untouched by snow cats). The San Diego man said he heard there was a 20-something inch base. That might be true, but only where snow has been sprayed onto trails with massive hoses. Snow making goes on all night and into the morning. You can hear it at night. It sounds like jet planes or sandblasting. There’s a huge igloo at the base of Canyon Lodge made out of the fake snow, but it is yellowed and looks more like a gargantuan bio-emission.

            There are days when the storms are fierce and most people are inside marveling at the weather event, waiting for the dumping to relent, hoping for the sun to come out and the so-called nice day to begin. Most core skiers like it stormy and want to be in the thick of it and are suffering tremendously right now, finding new ways to cope with a snowless Sierra winter. Ski movies help. There’s one new one that’s worth a connoisseur’s attention, called Into the Mind (also worthy is this, the making ofthe above mentioned movie). And this, JP Auclair’s freestyle street skiing from Sherpa Cinema’s first movie (my interest in chess began while on an assignment in Whistler a decade ago after watching JP play chess every night after skiing). Sherpa Cinema has more of a naturalist’s take on ski videos which makes they tonally different than all others, gentler, more attention paid to hallucinatory landscapes and animals, as well as the intricate gnarliness of rock climbing and mountaineering. Sherpa’s work also features non-macho dude music, like actually a female vocalist sometimes, plus old Canadian people skiing powder, and stellar camerawork pushed further than the amazing-usual, and trippy digital editing. But ski movies can also torture the desperate skier. Skiers pine, obsessively watch weather reports, and keep hope alive. They go inward, dredging up all the patience inside themselves, which is only there if we can go into powder-memory states of mind and drift back to epic days, specific runs, perfect voluptuous lines, face shot galore. As a life rule, when it snows I ski as much as I humanly can so when there are days, weeks, and God forbid, months, with no new snow, I’m not devastated (but I am). And I owe it to the mountain to not talk disparagingly about it. It’s nearly obscene to speak about it in any other terms besides curiosity, respect, and awe.

            The current Mammoth drought is long and ominous. The general future of global snow is in jeopardy. The Dweebs, or Howard the Dweeber, Mammoth’s amateur meteorologist, thinks it could be deep into January or February before real snow falls again, and don’t hold your breath he also says. I learned about El Nino from the Dweebs, and La Nina. But the other day Howard wrote that we’re experiencing La Nada.

            There’s man-made snow on most central groomers, but all off-piste skiing is tree stump laden, rock infested. Chair 22, the steep chair just above Canyon Lodge that accesses Lincoln Mt., a snow cone of steeps in every direction, featuring the Avie Chutes, Viva, Grizzly Ridge and everything in between, has not spun this season. There are rope closures at the top of Gold Rush, prohibiting scavengers from hiking. It’s truly un-skiable. Even modest little Blue Jay is closed.

            Mammoth local John Wentworth, who appears in several paintings by Yutaka and I, said he’s pulling out the mountain bike. Exquisite ermine are also telling me that they are remaining brown. There’s no need to change to white since there’s no snow.