Aspen Is Telluride on Steroids

Well, the KOTO Ski Swap worked its weather magic again.

Compassion Fest: Grumpy Pete Hangs Back

My wife attended the Compassion Festival in Telluride last week.

I didn’t go. My mother’s maiden name is Cross. Enough said?

We Crosses are a critical bunch. We renamed a maiden aunt Grumpy Mae because she was so caustic. With her gravelly laugh, waving her ever-present cigarette, she went along; she knew the name fit. She was very funny in a Dorothy Parker, black-humor way, even to a ten-year-old. But very dark. Unforgiving.

And that’s what Ellen came home from Telluride talking about, forgiveness and empathy. These things, when you can muster them, are good for your brain, good for everyone, they said. And one way to foster compassion, to open the door to it, is to meditate. The audience at the Opera House was even led in a guided meditation. Ellen said she could see, with her eyes closed, that it could lead to good places.

My meditation is movement through space. I suspect a lot of people who have chosen to live in the mountains do the same. I’m talking about skiing and hiking and my current summertime favorite, boulder hopping up nearby dry arroyos.

I suppose one could get a related benefit from tennis or hockey. But the best out-of-body experiences, in my experience, happen beyond the courts, in the natural world with its surprising terrain and infinite patterns underfoot. These things are not games; they don’t have winners and losers. But they do have consequences. You don’t want to fall down out there in the wilderness.

So you pay attention, you give the task at hand – ascending this ridge, jumping this creek – the full engagement it deserves. The action itself wipes clean the chalkboard of verbal clutter. The combination of hyper-focus and continuous movement creates the blank mind. Or, as the Buddhists say, the mindfulness.

I like another Buddhist term I’ve heard: liberating discernment. You’re not just going through the motions out there. I haven’t talked to Hilaree O’Neill about walking on the edge at 28,000 feet, one foot in Tibet and the other in Nepal, but I’ll bet she feels pretty darned discerning while she’s doing it. And pretty liberated.

I went up the third arroyo today, and it was extra focusing thanks to the recent rains. Some of the streambed boulders had been loosened by the brief, violent flows; they weren’t as trustworthy as they might have been. Others wore a frosting of beige adobe mud. If you stepped on wet adobe, that sole was greasy slick until it wore off. Not good when you’re jumping from rock to rock and trusting your feet to stick.

The object is to hop from boulder to boulder without touching the ground in between. Lickety-split when possible, in tai chi slo-mo where necessary. Sometimes I can go a hundred yards without touching dirt. And on the best stretches, the bounding flows without stops, syncopated by the spacing of the spilled, gully-bottom boulders. My job is to keep going, unconscious, like water – water flowing uphill.

There are always awkward moments, balance gaffs, but the best sections move like a guitar riff that has no gaps in it, nothing extra and not a note out of place. Afterwards, I think about riffles in a river. Do the words have a common root?

Does meditating – sitting or bounding – make you a better person? I don’t know. Does it work to take selfish time in order to become a less selfish person? I’m not sure it works that way. Ellen does say, when I come back from carving on skis or rock hopping on the hill, that I am a happier husband.

It may lead to addiction. Look at those nut cases in the Arizona desert, on silent retreat for three years, three months, and three days. One of them murdered. The world left behind.

The Compassion Festival wants, I think, for us to be in the world, to try to improve our communities, and the planet, through listening and empathy and altruism. Their program listed an event called “Bodywork as Compassionate Service to Humanity.” The speaker was a Rolfer, so I’m pretty sure they meant that bodywork on other people’s bodies is compassionate, even noble work.

So, does bodywork on ones own body count? Given that we know the mind and body are one? And that endorphins, born of pointless, graceful movement, make me feel magnanimous and mellow? Even though I am a Cross?

Grumpy Pete.

Mastering the ‘Moag Holes’

When Ellen was teaching the Peanut group of tiny kids at Bear Valley years ago, her charges referred to moguls as “moag holes.” They were learning language at the same time they were learning to ski.

Most people have an ambivalent relationship with moag holes. Miss a turn, get back on your heels, and the hole will spit you out into a washboard traverse. Or worse. But knit a sine-wave line together in rhythm and control, and you will believe in the harmony of the spheres.

Telluride just placed four women in the top ten at the U.S. National Dual Moguls Finals in Stratton, Vt. Keaton McCargo, age 16, placed third. Sophia Schwartz, who grew up skiing in Telluride and Sun Valley, finished fourth. Lane Stoltzner, a graduate of the Telluride Mountain School, was seventh. And precocious 15-year-old Kealey Zaumseil came tenth.

With all the good bump hills across America, Telluride produced four of the top ten. That’s remarkable. But hardly surprising. Telluride is a bumper’s mountain, always has been. With its long, steep pitches, relatively narrow trails, and a continental snowpack that builds up in four-inch sips rather than four-foot Sierran gulps, the mogul you careen around at the top of Spiral Stairs on December 15 will be there for you, the old same shape, on March 30. Familiarity breeds bumpers.

This kind of familiarity is relatively new. Look at old ski movies and you’ll see that in skiing’s wonder years, from the 1930s through the 1960s, there weren’t very many moguls. There weren’t as many skiers, for one thing, and not nearly as many good skiers, to sculpt and re-sculpt the troughs. Lifts were slower (or nonexistent), so you didn’t get as many reps. Freestyle, as a word and as a way of approaching skiing, hadn’t been invented yet.

The go-go 70s changed everything. Faced with vast fields of pimpled snow, proto hotdoggers went crazy, relying on acid and athleticism to get them through. Then the technicians moved in. In a few cases, they were one and the same. John Clendenin made his name in stretch pants and big hair (also big air), winning early contests on reaction time and linked recoveries. Now in his 60s, he’s one of the leading swamis in the “Bumps for Boomers” movement. He’s a hero to those of a certain age who still want to ski moguls, but must now learn to ski them smooth and slow.

Lito Tejada-Flores is another one. He was the first person I saw do The Slow Dog Noodle. I doubt he could put his back down on the snow like that now, and get back up. But Lito is another advocate for, and lover of, the bumps – even late in life.

I think the first truly modern mogul skiing I witnessed was by gold medalist Edgar Grospiron, at the Albertville Olympics in 1992. He had big eyes painted on the knees of his ski pants, and those eyes, despite his legs’ sewing machine oscillations, stared Buddha-like at the straightest, fastest fall line.

Telluride’s stars have their distinctive styles. I remember watching Yukon come down Allais’s Alley, back when it was the Chair Six liftline, essentially not turning at all. He just skipped pile-to-pile down the soft tops of the bumps. He had the young back, and the elevator-shaft imagination, to pull it off. Now he weaves a circuitous jazz line – less percussive, easier on the joints, just as imaginative.

Hugh Sawyer taught a lot of Telluride’s first-generation bump kids how to be fast of hand and still of head.

Every-day skier John Roth is perhaps the quintessential Telluride bumper. He reminds me of a dancer in a Busby Berkeley musical, upright and deceptively quick in his unhurried descent of the white staircase.

The current bumper crop of hot-skiing kids owes a debt to all of them. Though I have to say what the team skiers are doing now on their micro-prepared courses, with shovel-shaved bumps and parabolic kickers, is like something from another planet. A planet where gravity can be manipulated with just the right piston action.

On any given day, moguls for me might be a bone-jarring riddle, or they could be a Slinky’s stairway to heaven. Dropping into chest-high bumps on the Plunge is a kind of inch-worm pilgrimage, extension and contraction on the tilt, like the Tibetan faithful prostrating themselves, folding up on the crests then extending into the troughs, one body length at a time along the path to Lhasa – the road (or in this case the snow) worn smooth by pilgrims that have gone before. 

Outthinking the Snowy Torrents

We interrupt this Catalina Island coming-of-age trilogy to comment on the recent spate of avalanche deaths.

I wrote the news story this week about 18-year-old Norwood student Garrett Carothers, and it broke my heart. “Dear, sweet Garrett,” read the caption on a Facebook photo.

To bivy, or not to bivy, that is the question.

It was probably about this time of year, in 1978 or 1979, when Davey O’Brien, late of Olympic Sports, proposed a ski tour to Dunton hot springs.

Davey was one of Olympic’s ski equipment gurus back when the shop was next door to the Floradora Saloon, back before the United States Olympic Committee, citing copyright infringement, made them change their name.

Davey had a heart condition.

Born to Run

I don’t run the Imogene; I’ve never run the 18 miles up and over from Ouray to Telluride. I don’t run much at all anymore, unless it’s to sprint after a grandchild who is crawling toward the stairs.

But I do remember the feeling, from years past, when limbs and lungs were working just right, and the trail led away into Siren-call hills and it felt as if I could run forever.

Hidden High Grade

In the compressor house next door to the mine portal they gave us yellow hard hats and waterproof rain jackets. Then we climbed aboard the trammer and straddled its hard metal bench. A tour guide who calls himself Rock Chip swung up on the engine, and the trammer clanked and jerked into the tunnel. The light of the outside world, the warm summer sunlight of Ouray, quickly shrank to a silver dollar behind us, then vanished altogether.

Private Skiing

There’s a famous wave in Indonesia called Nihiwatu. It peels across the beachfront of an exclusive resort on the island of Sumba, east of Bali. The wave proceeds from left to right – that is looker’s left, if, for example, you were nursing a beer in the resort’s open-air dining room and gazing out to the horizon.

Out of Joint

Here’s an essay I did for SKI’s January 2011 back page.

I had hip replacement surgery one month before my first grandchild was born.

The decision to do it, to go for the new hip, had not come easily. Back and forth I went over the previous winters: I’m too young. I can still ski. (I was 59 at the time.) I can barely walk back to the car after a morning on the slopes, but I can still do it, damn it!

What the coffee table said

The coffee table was piled high with stuff, as usual. We had a visitor coming, a friend from New York who stopped in rarely and so warranted a neater living room than the semi-pigpen we allow when we are home alone. I waded in.

First thing to get put away was the road atlas. We’d had it out to look at New Jersey. We’ve been watching old episodes of The Sopranos, and Ellen wanted to see where the Pine Barrens are. I’d also wanted to check on the whereabouts of Wasilla, Alaska.

That little bit of research happened after I read Nancy Franklin’s hilarious review of Sarah Palin’s new “reality” show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska.