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Every Winter, I Read the Same Brilliant Essay About Snow

abarronian — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 11:00:27 +0000

Seasonal reading—that’s my boring-but-apt term for enriching the mood and meaning of a certain time of year with the addition of a certain text. Each April, I reach for the “Spring” chapter in Walden. Every July, I take a lap in E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake.” And in November, when the brown ground freezes and the weatherman predicts five months of blizzard, I cozy up on the couch with a mug of chamomile tea and “The Ascending Spiral,” a short, dense essay by the legendary snow scientist Ed LaChappelle.

Lynne Wolfe, editor of The Avalanche Review, which published “The Ascending Spiral” in 2005, calls the essay a seminal work. I got turned on to it a decade ago by my friend Jerry Roberts, a retired avalanche forecaster for the Colorado Department of Transportation and self-described “snow-viewer.” (Seventeenth-century haiku poet Matsuo Basho: “Come, let’s go / snow-viewing / till we’re buried.”) Roberts and LaChappelle were colleagues and pals. They worked together in the San Juan Mountains in the 1970s and shared a bottle of pisco a mere week before LaChapelle suffered a fatal heart attack at Monarch Pass—skiing, of course—in 2007. “Required reading,” I was told.

LaChappelle frames��his essay as a contribution to the never-ending discussion among snow-viewers, both professionals and hobbyists, regarding how best to “evaluate avalanche hazards, consider human factors, and communicate (or execute) decisions.” There is much practical wisdom in these pages, actionable advice for telemarkers, splitboarders, snowmachiners, alpinists, and gonzo backcountry tobogganists. But the really special thing—the reason I’m drawn to “The Ascending Spiral” each November—is the brief and tantalizing treatment of rheology and the Deborah Number.

The what and the what?

My initial reaction, too.

Rheology is a branch of physics that deals with the deformation and fluidity of matter. For instance, gummy bears—pop a few in the microwave and behold the freaky carnage. Snow is another fine example, defined by LaChappelle as “a granular visco-elastic solid close to its melting point” that subtly, constantly, and complicatedly responds to its environment, fluctuations in temperature and pressure in particular. He asks us to envision a peak in winter. “From the external perspective of a passing observer, snow on a mountainside is just sitting there, apparently dormant. The snow cover, however, is neither static nor dormant, but a positively seething mass of activity.” Learning to see it as such—to see it as dynamic, as lively and perhaps even alive—is the challenge and the fun.

Enter the Deborah Number. Proposed in 1964 by the pioneering rheologist Markus Reiner, the concept (it does not refer to a specific, fixed number) takes its name from a Biblical prophetess who sang of the mountains “flowing before the Lord.” LaChappelle sums it up like this: “In the limited time frame of human perception, the mountains are static and eternal, but for the Lord, whose time frame is infinite, they flow.”

LaChappelle was a Professor of Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington and a co-inventor of the modern avalanche transceiver, whereas I flunked Algebra 2, confounded by the damn TI-82 graphing calculator. Nevertheless, this stuff greatly excites me. Per my layman’s understanding, the Deborah Number is an expression of the relationship between time spent observing natural phenomena and perception of flow—high D equals scant time and we ��ǲ�’t see the flow, low D equals tons of time and we do see the flow. A hastily dug snowpit on an unfamiliar slope (high D) yields “a static view of what actually is an active (‘flowing’) snow cover.” LaChappelle continues: “In other words, stability evaluation has to be an��ongoing process, the longer the better.” Ideally, it starts on a given avalanche path with the first flakes of winter.

Meticulous and relentless monitoring of this sort is the hallmark of an avalanche��forecaster’s job. As Jerry Roberts told me in 2016, during an interview I conducted for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle about the Zen-like aspects of patrolling (meditating on?) the sketchy San Juans and their avalanche-prone high-mountain passes: “You’re afraid to go shopping at the supermarket an hour away because you might miss a wind event. You can’t be absent from your place. You have to be totally present.” I recall him chuckling, shaking his head, seemingly amazed by the stamina and focus of his younger self. “You ��ǲ�’t think about Christmas or your wife’s birthday. You ��ǲ�’t go on vacation. A series of storms in ’05 lasted ten days. I got very little sleep.” Chuckle, shake. “From November through May, paying attention is what you do. It’s who you are. There’s no difference between on and off.”

Indeed, for the snow-viewer whose entire existence is devoted to detecting and registering slow-motion transformations occurring at both micro and macro scales, whose sacred daily mantra is lower the D, lower the D, lower the D, lower the D, the on-versus-off question is moot. Case in point: After a career in the field researching glaciers, LaChappelle retired to a remote cabin in McCarthy, Alaska and busied himself tracking—surprise, surprise—the nuanced behavior of his local glaciers.

I’m sporadic and undisciplined when it comes to studying the ever-shifting details and ever-morphing character of Colorado’s Elk Mountains, my home range. Hence my need to sit with “The Ascending Spiral” each November as the thermometer’s mercury plunges and the touring gear beckons from my mudroom’s cobwebby corner. I skin up and float down a couple mildly dangerous peaks most winters—beacon, shovel,��probe, goofy buddies, and lots of laughs—so in part I read to humble myself: Pay attention, boy, or else! According to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, one hundred and forty-nine people got caught in slides last ski season and, sadly, two didn’t survive. The or else is exceedingly real.

Ultimately, my enthusiasm for rheology and the Deborah Number is less utilitarian—a means to the end of protecting my vulnerable ass while poorly carving powder 8s—than it is aesthetic and spiritual. I like to poke around the valley floor and gaze at the intricacies of the snowscape. I like to sculpt a drift into a chair, crack a beer, and stare. I like to approach perception as a kind of basic yet mysterious adventure. I like to notice, and notice that I’m noticing, and keep on noticing, and keep on keeping on. So in part I read to be humbled, yes, and in part—in large part—I read to be inspired, encouraged, nudged toward a cool way of inhabiting my place: Pay attention, boy, because lowering your D is a worthy end in itself! An awesome pastime! A beautiful and demanding practice! A raison d’être!

Do I aspire to godliness, an omniscient and infinite vantage? Nah, too grand for my earthly tastes. But looking through those eyes now and then, on occasion, is a huge thrill. Stealing a glimpse of the perpetually changing, fleeting, flowing planet. Feeling that glimpse, at my luckiest moments, as an electric tingle racing the length of my spine.

I felt the tingle recently, following my annual twenty-minute check-in with dear old Professor LaChappelle on the couch. Five or six inches of snow had fallen in the high country the evening prior and I suspected that, unlike the flurries of early autumn, which disappeared quickly from the summits, this coating of white would stick. Or maybe I hoped it would stick, eager for the schuss, the glide, the burn, and the turn.

The essay finished, at least until next year, I drained the dregs of my tea, stepped into the yard at sunset, lifted my binoculars, and scanned the wilderness of ridges and faces and bowls that rises abruptly to the west of town. Conditioned by my quasi-ritualistic re-reading of “The Ascending Spiral,” what I saw had the quality of epiphany. It was “a granular visco-elastic solid close to its melting point.” It was gummy bears in the microwave, a quintillion protean crystals. It was the foundational layer of a new winter’s breathing, pulsing, growling, tail-whipping snowpack—a snowpack guaranteed to spawn the avalanches that Jerry Roberts and other animistic snow-viewers call “dragons.” It was simple and complex, common and strange, mundane and magical.

I pocketed the binos, zoomed out.

What I saw was a paradox, tingle-inducing for sure—the whole world perfectly still, not a bird, not a cloud, not a hint of a breeze, not a single trembling blade of grass, and there on the horizon, washed pink with alpenglow, something deep inside the stillness beginning, secretly, to move.

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This Is What It’s Like to Camp in One of the Hottest Places on Earth

jversteegh — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 12:00:05 +0000

Let me acknowledge, right up front, that in this ghastly era of anthropogenic global warming I combusted a whole bunch of fossil fuel in order to descend from the cool green sanctuary of the Colorado Rockies, where I’m blessed to reside, and cross the hot, dry, fiercely sunburned interior West. My destination was the kiln of the Mojave Desert and, sequestered within that immensity of thirst, a line on the thermometer: 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Or perhaps worse. It depended on where my best friend Sean suggested we camp.

Was this a vacation? A gross display of privilege? According to the CDC, extreme heat waves cause . Granted, I do not belong to the especially endangered demographic groups: infant, senior, unhoused, impoverished, employed outdoors. The list is tragic and long. But trust me, the trip wasn’t idle amusement. I felt compelled to make raw somatic contact with our new and thoroughly dismaying climate regime, to face the faceless temperatures of the 21st century.

Sean is a social-studies teacher in Las Vegas who spends much of his summer break driving random dirt roads, exploring the desiccated, dust-choked hinterlands of Nevada and California. His style is the opposite of athletic, unless geography paired with existential contemplation constitutes a sport. He pokes around, parks the Hyundai, plants a parasol, eats and drinks, hikes a mile or three at dusk, counts shooting stars, sleeps, moves on. The very emptiness and quiet are his activity, the elemental place—overwhelming in a dozen different ways—his passion.

Chatting on the phone in early July, he informed me that the mercury in his apartment in North Vegas was registering 120 degrees, a record for the city. “A/C shut off yesterday,” he said. “Kicked back on this morning. The grid…a surge…my unit…I dunno. In any case, I’m heading out for 24 hours.” Air temps at Furnace Creek, in Death Valley National Park, were approaching the world’s highest reliable measurement of 130 degrees, made there in 2021. “I bet it’ll only be teens in the Mojave Preserve,” he continued. “And single digits or lower at night.”

This omission of the “hundred” prior to “teens” and “single digits” reminded me of how folks at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, where I once worked, eschew the phrase “below zero” because, quite simply, “above zero” doesn’t occur in that part of Antarctica. I’d confronted (negative) 80 degrees during my stint on The Ice and handled it pretty well. In fact, I’d relished the challenge of strenuous labor, the steady, drudging effort that pumps blood to fingers and toes, lungs and brain. Our apocalyptic present is another matter. Strenuous labor is potentially lethal and the steady, drudging effort is that of patience: hunkering in the shade, trying your damnedest not to budge.

Sean isn’t exactly a fan of the heat, but he accepts its authority, and this allows him to briefly sneak outside even when doing so is deemed reckless, or at least exceedingly unpleasant. We decided I should visit him ASAP to join one of his 24-hour excursions into the reality that almost nobody is eager to embrace—call it our current and future home.

I wrote an email to my parents in Vermont after hanging up the phone, explaining the plan, tacking on a paragraph about anxiety and electrolytes. My dad replied: “Do be careful as we bubble at 108 degrees.” I was unfamiliar with the verb “to bubble” in the context of human physiology, but caught his drift. My mom, whose hairdresser claims I am responsible for the grays she is paid to dye blond, cut to the chase with her usual no-nonsense wisdom: “You’ve never experienced that kind of heat. I ��ǲ�’t think we are meant to experience that kind of heat. I’ll just say this—show it the utmost respect.”

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Working in Antarctica Was Mindless Boredom. Until I Found a Pair of Skis.

jversteegh — Tue, 23 May 2023 09:00:42 +0000

My favorite spot on the East Antarctic plateau, the planet’s highest, driest, coldest, windiest, deadest desert, is the Love Shack—an uninsulated plywood box the size of a modest bathroom, painted black to absorb the 24-hour sunlight, furnished with a chair, a desk, a cot, and a pile of coarse cotton blankets. Rumor has it that researchers and laborers at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which sits about two miles away, occasionally require a refuge for romance, something I tried not to think about when I was in there. Like a prep school or military base, the station is insular, a cheek-to-jowl compound of laboratories, workshops, dorms, and supply depots, and the 250 inhabitants during the austral summer are hard-pressed to find privacy sufficient for their (ahem) needs.

In my case—that of a 22-year-old Vermonter who in 2008 ditched his wonderful college girlfriend to chase the ineffable at the bottom of the globe—the Love Shack was a strictly celibate hermitage: pencil, notebook, a couple cans of Speight’s Gold Medal Ale, immense quiet interrupted by chattering teeth. I frequently spent Saturday evenings shacked up with only amorphous breath clouds for company, shivering and gazing through the plexiglass window, simultaneously contemplating the sprawling abiotic wasteland and—beneath thermal undies, a fleece sweater, and a fat red fur-ruffed parka—my own navel. The idea was to space way out and space way in. Touch the edge, the border where inner and outer converge. Take some solo time with The Ice.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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In a World of FKTs, I Prefer to Go Slow. Really Slow.

mskenazy — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 10:00:18 +0000

I’m not a fan of bragging, especially about so-called accomplishments in the outdoors. Smashing records, claiming titles, putting my name down in the books for posterity, all this strikes me as utterly ridiculous. Just this once, though, I feel compelled to toot the badass horn, trumpet the awesomeness of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. You see, yesterday I finished a project—a bold, visionary, paradigm-shifting expedition—on Camel’s Hump, a 4,083-foot peak in my home state of Vermont. A small but mighty landform, her bald summit rising proud from the central ridge of the Green Mountains, she’s my own��personal Chomolungma, Goddess Mother of the World.

I first climbed the Hump at age four, partially riding on my father’s shoulders, partially scrambling on my own pale, pudgy legs. We followed the Burrows Trail: 2.4 miles, with an elevation gain of 2,200 feet. That early encounter with braided roots, black mud, lichen-splotched schist, and a dizzying 360-degree view was impactful, formative. Since then I’ve returned there in all seasons and conditions to explore, experience, engage. I’ve jogged amid October’s swirling rainbow leaves and bivvied in January’s blizzards. I’ve sledded powdery troughs and strung hammocks between hardwoods. I’ve tiptoed barefoot and tiptoed in crampons. Basically, I’ve exhausted myself by approaching the inexhaustible Hump from a thousand angles.

But yesterday’s outing, damn, it broke new ground on this old familiar peak. Sixteen hours, twenty-three minutes, nine seconds: yours truly set the slowest known time!

It wasn’t easy. My body wanted to fly up the miserable hill, to spread its wings and soar, while my blathering mind, accustomed to caffeine abuse and rapid-fire internet stimulation, fought nonstop, undermining my confidence, attacking my resolve with insults and ultimatums: You idiot, who cares, this is boring… I’m gonna crack like an egg and land you in the psych ward… drop the hammer or else. By the tenth hour, I’d sat on enough rocks and gazed at enough mottled birch bark to last a lifetime. Ditto listening with closed eyes to birdsong. Ditto chewing twigs and caressing ferns. Day slipped into night. Fingers went cold, ankles hurt. Tree line proved elusive. The Hump—the itsy-bitsy Hump, the knock-it-off-after-work Hump—morphed beneath my boots, expanding in every direction, stretching to fill the universe. Chomolungma indeed.

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The Unexpected Joys of a Shabby Wildflower Guide

jversteegh — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 11:00:47 +0000

I first heard of the book seven years ago from Jack Turner, a bioregional essayist and retired living in Wyoming, at the foot of the Teton Range. He was talking about Henry David Thoreau—specifically, how climate scientists utilize Thoreau’s two-million-word journal from the 1850s as a reference, a kind of before-shit-hit-the-fan baseline, because it so dutifully and meticulously documents the arrivals and departures of birds, buds, ice, and the like. Turner riffed for a while on phenology, the study of cyclic and seasonal phenomena, and the ecophilosopher , who claimed it was “what the mature naturalist finally comes to…a deeper understanding and a more refined sense of mystery.” Then he enthusiastically recommended , published��in 1963, written by John Craighead, Frank Craighead Jr., and Ray Davis.

I stumbled on the book this April and have been reading and rereading it as if it were a work of unsurpassed literary beauty, an elaborate lyric poem. Which it isn’t, of course. But which, paradoxically, it absolutely is.

Frank (left) and John Craighead Jr. (Photo: Courtesy Craighead Institute)

About the book’s authors. Davis, a systematic botanist, traveled widely to collect specimens and established a top-notch herbarium at Idaho State University—definitely an inspiring guy, but hardly a celebrity. The Craighead brothers, on the other hand, were two of the most well-respected scientist-conservationists of the 20th century, comparable to and . Identical twins born in 1916 (I picture them dropping from the womb in matching flannel-and-denim outfits), Frank and John grew up in Maryland and became infatuated with falconry as adolescents. After high school, they drove a Chevy out west on dirt roads, catching raptors en route, and published an article about��the experience in National Geographic. They developed a wilderness-survival manual for the Navy during WWII, drawing on their command of bushcraft and indigenous North American lifeways. They conducted a long-term grizzly research project in Yellowstone and pioneered the use of large-animal radio-tracking collars in wildlife biology. They petitioned for the , passed in 1968. They hiked and camped everywhere.

Given the adventurous elements of this ��é��ܳ�é, you may assume a dusty, musty field guide to tiny ephemeral flowers would be unlikely to catalyze Craighead mania (aside from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, it’s the shabbiest volume in my local Crested Butte, Colorado, library). But Jack Turner wasn’t kidding—the book is a treasure. At the superficial level, it’s just very helpful in teasing out the buttercups and mallows and primroses and paintbrushes. Furthermore, it’s a welcome reminder that the slide from winter to spring to summer in the high country is nutso, totally dynamic and exciting and suspenseful. What’s today’s surprise gonna be? Who’s gonna emerge between the melting snowbanks and glittery trickles and patches of hallucinatory green grass? Aha, dogtooth violet! Aha, shooting star! Aha, long-plumed avens! The book gets me crawling around outdoors—curious, engaged, zoomed in, nose-close—and that’s always good. Muddy knees. Soggy socks. Yessir.

OK, but I mentioned “literary beauty,” and that’s the really special thing this classic field guide offers. To emphasize the poetic power that tingles my spine whenever I browse its faded, brittle pages, I’ll arrange a few passages as verse.

From the “Flowering season” subsection of the swamp laurel entry:

Latter part of June to first part of Aug.
Mosquitoes are becoming
a nuisance
both where and when
this plant blooms.

And the yellow monkeyflower entry:

May into Aug. First look for it
when Scarlet Gilia appears.
Still in bloom in Sept.
when Rocky Mt. whitefish begin
to spawn, bull elk
are bugling, and beaver
have made their winter
food caches.

And the larkspur:

From April to July.
When they are beginning
to bloom, sparrow hawks
are defending territories.

You get the idea. There are hundreds of species in the book and almost every one receives this same nuanced treatment, the flowering season defined with regard to an encompassing ecosystem, a phenological context. As the artist-naturalist Roger Tory Peterson, the book’s editor, puts it in an introductory note, “Such facts are often more illuminating than the bald statement ‘late June to early August,’ since the Rocky Mountain region is a vertical land where spring and summer ascend the slopes and a flower that blooms in June in the river valleys might not unfold its petals until July or even later at higher altitudes.”

So it’s a concrete strategy to design a user-friendly field guide for eager duffers in need of assistance (e.g. me). Fantastic. Much appreciated. But again, the poetic quality—little language, big vision—is the really special, spine-tingling thing. Can you imagine attending to your backyard, your watershed, your place, with the degree of care and focus that would generate these phenological passages? If I shot plant names at you, rapid-fire Latin binomials, could you tell me what the chipmunks are doing at the time of blossoming? And what the trout are doing? And what the geese are doing?��It’s incredible, this omnidirectional knowledge, this attunement to overlaps and interconnections, and it starts, as you spend more hours with the book, to feel like a vision of a world that is whole. John Muir’s oft-quoted, quasi-mystical quip can’t be avoided: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

Earlier this summer, wandering at dusk on a Thursday evening, I discovered three blue columbines and a nest of squawking raven chicks in a lodgepole pine. That Saturday, climbing a tundra ridge at 12,500 feet, I witnessed the collapse of sun-rotted cornice into a cirque, then spotted a pair of horned larks and a microgarden of alpine forget-me-nots. And a few days later, taking a dawn stroll at the edge of town, scanning the wetlands with my binoculars, buzzing on black coffee, surging with the joy of aimless caffeinated searching, I saw a cow moose bedded among marsh marigolds, a broad-tailed hummingbird perched atop a leafing willow, wispy clouds, cloud-reflecting puddles, fresh coyote scat, and a sticky geranium. In other words, I saw a mosaic, a gestalt—many pieces fusing to form a sum greater than the parts. I saw it smack-dab in front of me and I saw it later, at breakfast, slurping oatmeal, a certain trusty book open on the kitchen table.

Little language, big vision. I read. And reread. And marvel over the beauty of these phenological passages puzzling together in my mind and heart. But they aren’t the only aspect of the book that evinces wholeness. For each species, there’s also an “Interesting facts” subsection, and they tend to highlight edibility and medicinal properties, in particular the applications honed by generations of Native Americans, the Rockies’ original residents (Apaches, Crows, Utes, Bannocks, Shoshones, et al.). Silky phacelia makes a salad? False hellebore contains alkaloids that lower blood pressure? Elk and humans alike relish nibbling mountain sorrel? Death camas kills indiscriminately? A Field Guide to Rocky Mountain Wildflowers suggests that the feral creature called Homo sapiens can fit snugly inside the ecological web, the elaborate lyric poem of the land, and though Craighead, Craighead, and Davis ��ǲ�’t say it outright, it’s easy to infer a verse that goes something like this:

Blooms when days
are T-shirt-warm and children
are learning from their parents
to harvest yummy
ripe berries.

Or better yet:

You’ll notice it
when nerdy dudes
are crawling in meadows,
counting sepals and stamens,
guided by an old shabby book,
grinning and sometimes
shouting Aha!

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Climbing Mount Nothing

jversteegh — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The mental wilderness, the mindful wilderness, the landscape-meets-headspace wilderness that I’ve been exploring for two decades, always alone, always without a map, always motivated by this same curiosity, part fear and part excitement—here I am again. A subalpine basin in the backcountry of Colorado’s Elk Mountains this time, a rugged spot accessed by rugged bushwhack. It’s the first evening of a late-spring weekend that I’ll spend, for want of a better description, climbing Mount Nothing.

My bivy sack is spread out beside a shallow tarn, the teal surface of the water rippling with leaping trout that I do not intend to catch. Hanging in a stunted spruce, my pathetic kitchen bag (peanut butter, tortillas, instant coffee, gas-station sugar packets) inspires zero elaborate dinner ideas. I have no camera, no phone, no watch, no thrilling spy novel to read, no blank journal to fill with doodles and dreams and distractions. Half a dozen beautifully craggy peaks surround my minimalist camp, but despite the enticement, I will scramble precisely none of them tomorrow at dawn.

If there’s a plan, it’s an anti-plan. Sit patiently on this thin bedroll, rocks and roots digging into my butt, faint stars pricking the purple sky above. Challenge myself with the boredom, discomfort, and basic humming weirdness of an unattempted route on Mount Nothing. Gaze out from that rarely visited summit. See what there is to see.

My life of outdoor adventure—experimenting with it, creatively tinkering with it—began on the Long Trail, a 272-mile wilderness footpath that traces the spine of Vermont’s Green Mountains. I through-hiked it one summer, at 16, as a novice backpacker. Relentless rain, mud to the armpits, blistering blisters, ravenous mosquitoes, dismal lows and the infrequent, enlivening high—it was an education and a transformation, a proper rite of passage. After three weeks, I emerged from the tunnel of foliage, dead on my feet and utterly elated.

To borrow a term from the philosophers, that formative trek was purposive: a linear trail, A to B to C, and your task, young lad, is to reach Z, to sweat and swear and ultimately stand triumphant at alphabet’s end. Returning to school down in the Champlain Valley of western Vermont felt flat by comparison, and I incorrectly attributed the malaise to the absence of any raw wilderness in my daily existence. Another couple of years elapsed—time spent crisscrossing New England, ticking off traditional objectives on skis and bicycles, in kayaks and cramponed boots—before I realized that the actual source of my intoxication and addiction was clarity of focus, disciplined commitment to a well-defined goal.

During the winter of my senior year in high school, I grew concerned that in concentrating exclusively on the linear, goal-directed model of adventure, I was missing out on other variations of Earth and Self. To break loose from habit, I devised a quirky project. On a single-digit weekend in January, equipped with only a tarp, a foam pad, and an enormously puffy sleeping bag, I tromped into the thickety forest behind a neighbor’s house and set up shop on the plate of a frozen creek, then listened for 50-plus hours to the gurling, groaning, moaning, muttering, maddening, crazy-making water below the ice. Whoa. Is that my inner dialogue or the damn creek that won’t quit yammering? In either case, can somebody please lower the volume?

While the rigors of my project were profound (hands and toes burning with cold, belly begging for anything at all to eat), the psychological test was twice as severe. Trying to keep hold of the familiar human realm of language and logic, I studied the fine-print legalese of a Sugarbush ski ticket attached to my jacket’s zipper. When that ran its course, I obsessively inventoried pocket lint. Finally, I rolled a giant snowball and marched untold miles around it. It was a second rite of passage: the purposive, linear trail, A to B to C, had morphed into a circular path leading nowhere. This was my first pilgrimage to Mount Nothing.

Nowhere—going there, arriving there—is tough. Ditto for deliberately undermining the will: eschewing the agendas, schemes, designs, and framing devices (run the rapid! shred the gnar! snap the photo! upload the photo! establish the FKT!) that defend us against the existential ass-whupping of nature’s pure meaninglessness. Perhaps in this utilitarian, achievement-oriented culture of ours—one that celebrates Mount Something but seldom acknowledges its silent, shadowy twin—just loafing in the mental wilderness, the mindful wilderness, can be a worthy expedition. Maybe we ought to consider alternating the active, sporty excursions (I still love them dearly) with more contemplative outings. It isn’t my place to predict what exactly we’ll gain by embracing aimlessness. I’ll only suggest that once freed from the confines of our ambitions, the world has a tendency to grow, to expand. And so do we.

Mental, mindful. Those terms smack of pop psychology; nevertheless they’re useful. The former, to me, connotes a hog-tying, goose-chasing, gerbil-wheel-spinning brain, fidgety and neurotic, poking and poking and poking at the bonfire. The latter connotes Buddha-like peace—a calm, empty consciousness able to receive the present moment’s infinite gifts, whether that’s birdsong, a racing cloud, a pebble’s smoothness, a spiderweb’s silvery flash of dew, or the sudden scent of pine pitch. Typically, we conceive of these modes as polar opposites, but I suspect they are in fact two sides of the same coin—nay, of the same mountain. In my experience, the mental isn’t a barrier to overcome, beyond which awaits the bliss of the mindful. The climb involves both, and it’s their interaction that generates a fascinating adventure.

So here I am again. Sitting by a tarn, surrounded by craggy peaks, vacillating between WTF-confusion (a gang of buddies and an epic quest sure would be a lot more fun than this) and OMG-gratitude (praise be to the fading light, the glowing chartreuse lichen, the shivery breeze, the stupendous glory of all!). Even after these many years of prodding at Earth and Self, repeatedly braving the steep slopes and narrow ridges of Mount Nothing, nights remain hard for me, intense with doubts and cravings. What I’d give for the safety blanket of purpose, a telescope and a star chart, a straightforward reason for easing onto my back, reclining into the loneliness and the eerie quiet. The nights are best, though, too. That lonely quiet now a vast and mysterious unknown, deserving of my attention. Lying supine. Flying through the deep black gaps inside constellations and inside my own twinkly thoughts. Seeing what there is to see.

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On Sleeping in the Largest Organism on Earth

mskenazy — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was born and raised in Vermont, in the glory of maples. Driving to Colorado in 2004 for my freshman year of college, not only was I feeling the general ache of leaving home, but I was also dealing with the specific sorrow—worse than saying goodbye to Ma and Pa—of missing the hardwoods and their phantasmagorical foliage. What have the Rockies got to offer? Blue spruce? Dark, brooding firs? Little did I know.

My first weekend in the West, a classmate and I cruised into the high country without an agenda, ending up on Kebler Pass, a dirt road that links the small mountain town of Crested Butte with the even smaller mountain town of Paonia and, en route, weaves through some of our planet’s largest, oldest organisms. Populus tremuloides, the quaking aspen, grows in clonal colonies, which means each stem in a grove is genetically identical, connected by an immense underground root system called a rhizome. A few hundred miles away, in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest, the (a.k.a. Pando, Latin for “I spread”)��is estimated to weigh 13 million pounds and cover 100-plus acres. Nobody’s sure of the exact stats on the mosaic of Kebler groves in the Gunnison National Forest, but researchers suspect they could be bigger. From what my friend and I observed that stunning September weekend—a wash of gold extending over entire mountainsides, an infinity of leaves, untold groves blending and blurring to yonder horizon—I’m pretty well sold.

That astounding arboreal vision inspired a dream, a fantasy, a crazy idea that I’ve been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to shake. What happens when you hike for hours, eschewing map and GPS, intentionally losing yourself in the labyrinth of an über-tree, a megabody? What happens when you pull a hammock out of your pack, rig it 30 feet off the deck between two pale, chalky branches, and ease into the lazy daze of an autumn afternoon? What happens when, having dozed off, you wake at dusk to coyotes howling and woodpeckers drumming and deer browsing the ferny understory? Do you realize, in an instantaneous epiphany, that these animals, like you, are akin to the mites and other microcritters that reside on a human’s eyelashes—that you are all so tiny, so very tiny? Does your mind explode from the joy of this realization, from the bliss of being grasped by such hugeness?

These are not rhetorical questions. At least they ��ǲ�’t have to be.

Hammock, sleeping bag, foam Thermarest pad—check. Harness, carabiners, extra slings, Prusik loops, ATC for rappelling—check. Coil of disconcertingly abraded rope donated by a buddy who actually understands knots and anchors—check. Dubious skillset but enough grit and gumption to (hopefully) get the job done—check-a-frigging-roo! Quasi-prepared, I stepped from the dusty Kebler Pass road��on a recent September morning and, at long last, entered the sun-shot intricacies, the shade-dappled mysteries, in search of the perfect hanging campsite.

About that search. I learned technical tree climbing in Arizona’s ponderosa pines while employed by the Forest Service on a demographic study of northern goshawks. (Nab the nestlings, lower them in a sack to the ground crew, wait for measurements to be taken and blood to be drawn, haul the nestlings back up.)��Typically, my boss used a hunting bow to fire fishing line over a beefy limb, lifted a strand of parachute cord with the fishing line, lifted a static rope with the parachute cord, then gave me the nod. Mechanical Petzl ascenders were important, and a scuffed red helmet was reassuring, but ultimately the beefy limb made everything possible. Limbs of this type abound on pondos. Not so much on aspens.

Bushwhacking south from Kebler, I was rewarded with��sightings of a dozen squirrels, a great horned owl snoozing on her midday roost, a sweet mossy boulder facing a sweet mossy creek, and precisely zero beefy limbs within my limited reach. Alas, I ��ǲ�’t own a crossbow, slingshot, or potato cannon and was thus dependent on a skinny biceps and an iffy sidearm to launch my gear into the canopy. Furthermore,��I refused to settle for just any über-tree, just any two-bit, run-of-the-mill megabody.

(Courtesy Leath Tonino)

According to a Forest Service ��on aspen ecology,��“The members of a clone can be distinguished from those of a neighboring clone often by a variety of traits such as leaf shape and size, bark character, branching habit, resistance to disease and air pollution, sex, time of flushing, and autumn leaf color.” This final trait was my guide—color. I didn’t pretend that the trip was a legit expedition tasked with discovering and accurately delineating a Kebler version of the Trembling Giant, but I did know from experience that certain groves remain green well into late fall, whereas others pop their gold early. A casual visual survey, I figured, ought to steer me directly into the heart of a particularly woolly botanical beast. And that’s what I desired.

I eventually found my quarry—found myself stumbling around inside it, giggling and gleefully swearing, neck craned—a few hours before sunset. White columns scratched black with bear-claw calligraphy. Stout pillars supporting a gilded ceiling reminiscent of ornate church domes in Venice and Rome. A thousand stems, 10 thousand stems, 10��bazillion stems! I would have liked to make a rough tally, pace a perimeter, jot notes, but the slanting light and chill in the air insisted otherwise. Nerdy citizen science could be postponed until tomorrow. I had to empty my pack, sort my tangled equipment, review the art of the Prusik hitch, and commence the shitshow.

Er, the safe and methodical climb. Yes, that’s right. Safe and methodical.

Jack Turner, in his book , writes,��“I’ve always wanted to hang a hammock high in an aspen grove and live among the leaves.” This coming from a member of the elite Exum Mountain Guides, a grizzled alpinist who has spent decades in the Greater Ranges—the astonishingly epic landscapes that you’d assume would render relatively dinky Western deciduous forests boring. But no, the murmuring, vibrating, mesmerizing aspens compel our attention in a way that icy slopes and soaring granite buttresses cannot. For the aspens are alive—they��are, in the case of Kebler Pass, a vast encompassing life. Those ethereal zones above treeline, albeit thrilling and savagely beautiful, present us with the heavens, not the homey earth. (Recall that our primate ancestors sought refuge from marauding predators in the forest canopy, and that allure is likely coded into us at the cellular level.)

I thought about this once the awkward, arduous battle (twigs in the hair, fumbled Nalgene, wild flailing galore) was complete and, whew, I was suspended in my nylon aerie. Far from comfortably suspended, due to the harness I planned to wear all night and the severe wedgie it caused, but suspended nonetheless. A couple stories above the ground. Sweat drying. Spiders keeping me company, traversing invisible filaments, playfully mocking me with their graceful mobility.

And I thought, too, of about giant sequoias that I read in the New York Times Magazine back in 2017, not long after Trump became president. The author, Jon Mooallem, made the point that it was a good moment for humility and perspective-taking in America, and for that reason he was embarking on a pilgrimage to encounter lives older and grander than his own. While I applaud Mooallem’s initiative, a part of me—the part that swayed, that gazed, that reveled in the exuberant smother of hues and textures and tones, the riot of receding chlorophyll, the dendritic complexity—feels the need to amend his notion, to push it further. The Kebler aspens dwarfed me, indeed, but better yet they left me with a sense of embeddedness and immersion, a sense of how habitat holds us. My tentative hypothesis is that the average outdoorsy person’s love of nature has less to do with scenery and sporty fun and whatnot than it does with being embraced by the world. Locating a niche, a place within the broader place. Appreciating the wilderness that surrounds and sustains.

Peanut butter sandwich for dinner—check. Airplane bottle of Scotch for dessert—check. Baby in a crib, cozy and drowsy, his fancy ecosophical thoughts hushed by the lullabye of a leaf-rustling breeze—check-a-frigging-roo! My heavy eyelids closed and opened, closed and opened. Drifting at the edge of consciousness, I delighted, despite the persistent wedgie, in the image of stars through foliage, a glittering universe beyond cracks in the ever-shifting crown.

And then, seemingly a mere 15 minutes having passed, the dawn chorus roused me, warblers and nuthatches flitting around my head, perching beside my toes. My spine was kinked. Frost had silvered half my sleeping bag. I pounded a cold instant coffee, dismantled camp, and rappelled.

Not out of something, but deeper into something. Call it Populus tremuloides, the über-tree, the megabeing. Call it whatever you please.

The post On Sleeping in the Largest Organism on Earth appeared first on ��ԹϺ�� Online.

The Theft of Grand Staircase–Escalante

jversteegh — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Deanna Glover’s voice hits a high note along with her eyebrows, tone and expression conveying the same grandmotherly concern.

She’s not my grandmother—we met for the first time an hour ago—but that hardly seems to matter to the sweet, white-haired 80-year-old. “Tell me you’ll have a friend hiking with you, because it’s a lot of country,” she says. “And, you know, I start to worry.”

The , in Kane County, Utah, is cluttered with arrowheads, wedding gowns, antique farm implements, and sepia photographs of the families that founded the town of Kanab in 1870. I phoned Deanna, a descendent of these Mormon pioneers, earlier this April morning, and though the museum, her baby and brainchild, was closed, she insisted on opening it so that the displays could inform my upcoming 200-mile, two-week trek through Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument.

Hiking with a friend? I shake my head, and a latent anxiety rears up, the prickly fear-thrill of engaging a desert that demands resourcefulness (drinking water found in sculpted potholes), extreme caution (camouflaged rattlesnakes in the middle of the trail), and a tolerance for solitude (my girlfriend, as I hugged her goodbye before leaving for Utah, told me to enjoy peeking into the recesses of my own skull).

Recounting this quip to Deanna, I notice the grip on her walker tighten. “Oh, I’ll be praying for you then,” she says. “I’m not kidding—it’s a whole lot of country.”

Ocher buttes, umber scarps, maroon hoodoos: whole lot of country indeed. Extending north and east from Kanab, the monument encompasses one of the gnarliest stretches of the lower 48. To borrow writer Charles Bowden’s apt phrase, it’s “the heart of stone.”

Ever since President Clinton established the monument in 1996, it has been contentious: old-timers versus newcomers, Republicans versus Democrats, advocates of using the land versus advocates of protecting it (as if these were mutually exclusive agendas). Conservative politicians in pressed blue jeans and blazers tend to see it as an affront to economic growth. Dirtbag adventurers in Chaco sandals deem it one of the epicenters of North American slot canyoneering. In Kanab, mention Edward Abbey, the Southwest’s iconic nature writer, and you’ll receive either a high five or a tirade, depending on your interlocutor.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument seen from Utah Highway 12 (Education Images/UIG via Getty)

The latest dispute began on December 4, 2017, when President Trump cut the nearly 1.9-million-acre monument into three units, reducing the overall protected area by almost 50 percent. The White House’s stance, as outlined in the official proclamation, was that the Clinton administration had designated far more terrain than the law allowed. Deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas played no part whatsoever in the decision, obviously. Environmental organizations immediately filed lawsuits, arguing that Trump lacked the authority to shrink an existing monument. Nevertheless, the Bureau of Land Management went ahead and drafted several plans, one of which, if implemented, would open almost 700,000 acres to mining and drilling. With the final decision on those plans tied up in court, nobody can predict whether the original boundaries will be reinstated.

My interest in the place is personal. Working for the Forest Service in my twenties, I resided in a cabin an hour south of the original monument: bought my groceries in Kanab, thrashed myself silly every weekend in the intricate backcountry of arroyos and yuccas and coyotes. It was upsetting to picture the wilderness ransacked for profit, to sense my cherished memories of the region disappearing into the abstraction we call news.

Thankfully, I didn’t forget Almon Harris Thompson.

Nicknamed Prof, Thompson was a school-superintendent-cum-cartographer from New England who wore a bushy mustache, abstained from smoking tobacco, and, according to a colleague, was “always ‘level-headed’ and never went off on a tangent doing wild and unwarranted things.” John Wesley Powell, the Civil War veteran famed for boating the Grand Canyon’s whitewater in 1869, was Prof’s brother-in-law and boss. Together they were employed by the federal government; a congressional appropriation funded their brave, meticulous research into the geography of the Colorado Plateau’s remote canyonlands.

Remote is an understatement. An 1868 map indicated a massive blank space in this area of Utah. In 1872, at the age of 32, Prof led a small party into the unknown country. The final river to be named by the U.S. government (the Escalante) quenched his thirst that spring, and the final range to be named (the Henry Mountains) registered his horse’s hoofprint.

Emotions rarely inflect the spare prose in Prof’s diary, a document devoted to mileages, elevations, the shapes of watersheds, the dips of strata, and, tangentially, cold rain and “a sort of dysentery attack.” What does come through, however, is a seriously badass route that, by chance, flirts with our modern monument’s boundaries, weaving in and out of both the Clinton and the Trump versions.

“Prof” Almon Harris Thompson (FOR ALAN/Alamy)

For the next two weeks, I’ll attempt to retrace Prof’s route (he took roughly 25 days), mostly by walking, occasionally by hitching. The itinerary that earns Deanna’s worry has me heading northeast from Kanab: up Johnson Canyon, past the Paria amphitheater to the Blues badlands, along the headwaters of the Escalante River, through the Waterpocket Fold, and, finally, over the 11,000-plus-foot Henry Mountains. In my pack I’ll carry a sleeping bag and headlamp, two single-liter water bottles and a four-liter reserve dromedary, and not much food besides instant coffee, pita bread, and salami. Hopefully, beer and potato chips will greet me at the few and far between gas stations—in Cannonville (pop. 175), Escalante (pop. 802), and Boulder (pop. 240). I’ll lug no tent, no toilet paper, no GPS, no smartphone.

The goal is to drop below politics—to find, and hear out, the lovers of this unique landscape. Even better, to drop below conversation, below language, and viscerally, with my ache and my thirst, contact the land itself.

April 10 is my departure date, until it’s not.

The visit with Deanna runs long, so I decide to spend the afternoon riding shotgun beside 43-year-old Charley Bulletts, the soft-spoken, quick-to-laugh cultural-resource director of the Kaibab Band of Paiutes.

A local boy, Charley left for a spell—tried his luck in Cedar City, Utah, and Mesquite, Nevada—but now he’s home for good, raising his kids in the same desert where he was raised. His late grandfather was one of the last medicine men of the tribe. If the Kanab Heritage Museum situates the monument within a frontier context, Charley’s perspective, which he shares as we drive the outskirts of town, links it to an even deeper oral history.

“This is so bad it’s comical,” he says early in our tour, parking with the windshield framing a cartoony mural on a supermarket’s cinder-block wall. The painting depicts a procession: covered wagons, livestock, dogs, young men carrying rifles. “I get a kick out of it, I really do—the happy Mormons entering an ‘unpopulated territory,’ following their destiny.”

Charley Bulletts (Courtesy Charley Bulletts)

The Southern Paiutes have inhabited this region since time immemorial, and their songs make reference to woolly mammoths and flowing lava. For generations the rhythm of human life was, by necessity, synchronized with the rhythm of the seasons: when the rabbitbrush turned yellow, the piñon nuts were ready for harvesting. The modern concept of private property, unsurprisingly, didn’t exist. “Fences did it,” Charley says. “After they sprang up, and we crossed them, and we got shot at numerous times, then we understood that land could be owned.”

Charley elaborates on this difference in worldview. “With European culture, it’s pieces of paper that tell who you are and where you come from—your birth certificate, your deed, or whatever. But for my people, tradition instructs us that once your baby’s umbilical cord comes off, you have to put it under either a young tree or an ant pile. That way your kid can be connected to a place.”

He shifts the truck into gear, and momentarily we’re part of the wall’s cartoony procession. Then we’re cruising, our talk gaining momentum: tortoises, earthquakes, prejudice, fisheries, alcohol, dams.

I ask about the monument, and Charley answers with grim humor. “If we let this man, this businessman, run the country, the end of the world might come earlier than we want.” But we spend less time discussing current events than talking about, as Charley says, “old ones.” After discussing the and pausing at a site where a reburial ceremony was held, we pull into a gravel lot overlooking a reservoir. Charley’s grandfather used to tell of certain spots along the road where he’d seen spirits, places you wouldn’t want to change a flat alone in the dark. Perhaps this is one such location; the remains of 53 bodies were unearthed here during construction.

It doesn’t look like much, metaphysically speaking. Swallows fly with their reflections. Pebbles line the shore. Kanab’s buildings stand toylike in the distance, backdropped by blocky red ledges. But this nondescript quality, I suspect, is the very point: everything isn’t visible to everybody. I try to envision the scene in the spring of 1872—a timber stockade and a scattering of adobe houses, Prof sorting supplies, tinkering with his theodolite, glancing up and out, seeing a problem to solve, a mapmaker’s challenge.

Charley nods at the horizon. “People always say, ‘Oh, it’s desolate!’ But no, that’s not desolation. Spirits live out there. Beings live out there.”

Out there.

It’s where I’m aimed. Tomorrow.

Strolling the paved road in Johnson Canyon the next morning—the road that leads past the Vermilion Cliffs and the White Cliffs, lower steps in the gigantic topographical staircase for which the monument is partially named—I walk by some of Trump’s scissor work. This zone east of the road still appears unaffected: no drill rigs, no ATVs tearing cryptobiotic soil crust to hell, no indication that the tilted slabs and twisty junipers have undergone a transformation. Says a sudden voice in my already-getting-dehydrated brain: A cut on paper draws no immediate blood from the earth.

A dozen parched, solitary miles later, I top out the White Cliffs, turn onto Skutumpah Road, and soon after slump down in a heap, the 85-degree heat having taken its toll. Pure serendipity: a dented white pickup with a cooler tied to the flatbed eases to a stop alongside me. Forgoing the usual hello, the driver mentions that people like him might not get a lot of ranching done, but they sure are good at leaning against the truck with something cold at sunset. It’s the long day’s second voice, and it belongs to Quinn Robinson. I hobble over on blistered feet for a Gatorade dripping with ice slush.

The author (Ace Kvale)

“Suppose I’ve been anywhere you can see,” Quinn says, gazing across a rolling sagebrush bench bordered to the north by the Paunsaugunt Plateau’s limestone ramparts (the rim of Bryce Canyon National Park) and to the south by endless violet sky. “With our few hundred acres private and the permits, well, I couldn’t say how much land it adds up to.” He rubs his forehead as if to massage loose a number. “Put it this way: five hours on a horse east from the ranch house, two hours south—we summer our 250 head on all that.”

The ranch house—renovated by his dad atop the foundation laid by his great-granddad—is about two miles off, down in a hollow, spitting distance from the monument’s western edge. Quinn was homeschooled there, but he skipped grades seven and eight, because “you learn more working.” He’s 23 years old and has 22 years of cowboying to his name, give or take 12 months.

Between tilts of Gatorade, Quinn articulates, without a hint of frustration, the numerous frustrations of keeping the family ranch going: ramping land prices, scarcity of available grazing allotments in the monument, the need for a couple of sidelines (he’s got a degree in welding). Great-granddad Malcolm ran a herd of 1,000 cattle on the Skutumpah Terrace in the early 1900s, but around here that kind of open-range operation is out of reach in the 21st century.

Regardless, the dream of an uncomplicated time persists. The Robinsons, Quinn tells me, would prefer to manage their home landscape for “productivity,” without government agencies butting in and “locking things up.” They favored the monument’s reduction, hoping it would put more acres in play. “But it didn’t help us anyway,” Quinn says, “because the cuts weren’t around here.”

That’s it for political talk. The sun is now sinking through a scrim of clouds, patches of ground—50 feet away, 15 miles away—pulsing with a peachy light. For a while, nothing moves but that light, including our conversation. We’re mesmerized, entranced.

“Love’s kind of corny, but I do love it.” Quinn gives the cooler a friendly pat, breaking the spell. “And it’s not only the land. You get on a horse and ride the same places your dad rode when he was your age, and his dad rode, and his dad rode. You call them by names passed down the generations, names that aren’t on any map. You do the same chores, maybe think the same thoughts. Shoot, it goes back and back.”

He hops in the truck and suggests a nearby campsite, a protected cove along Thompson Creek. Black exhaust uncoils from the tailpipe and I’m alone. Sort of.

Thompson Creek? I’d almost forgotten about Prof. Sure enough, there’s the name on my USGS quad, labeling a blue thread that enters the monument just beyond the Robinsons’ ranch house. And there also is the day’s third and final voice, speaking up to me from one of the diary pages I photocopied: “Friday, May 31. Broke camp at 8:00. Traveled 16 miles by 3:00, when we came to a beautiful valley with a fine cool spring in it, and we camped.… Country over which we have passed rather rough.”

According to a friend of mine from Boulder, a speck-like village in the heart of the heart of stone, the roads in southern Utah follow pioneer trails, the pioneer trails follow Native American footpaths, the Native American footpaths follow bighorn sheep tracks, and the bighorn sheep tracks follow faults, breaks, creases—any available weakness. It’s an elegant schema, an image of travelers stacking through time. Whether you’re Prof in 1872 or Wannabe Prof in 2018, stubborn bedrock is in charge, pushing this way and pulling that, providing scant options for forward progress.

I leave Thompson Creek at 8 A.M. on April 12, eager to knock off a significant chunk of Skutumpah Road. A mere 17 seconds into the march, though, an employee of , an outdoor treatment facility for troubled teens, offers me a ride, and despite the pep in my step, I jump in. Jouncing along, my chauffeur, Teague Perkins, mentions that “there are 60 kids in the monument as we speak, sitting with their thoughts, some of them detoxing.” She also mentions a “magical” denizen of the canyons, a luminescent deer-man hybrid named the Guardian who watches over the land.

Fifteen minutes later, Teague drops me at a trailhead so that I can make a detour into the narrows of Lick Wash, a gorgeously cross-bedded feeder of the Paria River. By the time I return to Skutumpah Road, the morning’s warmth has been replaced by a chill. During the next six hours of walking, it gets colder.

Christa Sadler (Mike Buchheit)

That night I make camp in what feels like 40-mile-per-hour gusts and a sideways snow squall. Hunkering, shivering, I curse myself for underpacking. I toss and turn, waiting for the darkness to give so that I can pull my sneakers on and go.

The upside to creeping hypothermia is that it cracks the whip. I make 15 miles by noon of day three, descending into the Paria amphitheater, a shattered, rainbowed, kaleidoscopic basin, at the bottom of which sits the hamlet of Cannonville. Christa Sadler, who I’ve arranged to meet at the town’s BLM visitor center, is running ahead of schedule, and she passes me in her pickup. Window rolling down: “It—is—blowing!” Blond hair tangling with dangly turquoise earrings: “Get—in—here!”

A science educator and environmental activist based out of Flagstaff, Arizona, 56-year-old Christa swung a paleontologist’s rock hammer in the monument before it was designated as such. Specifically, she swung that hammer in the Blues, a roughly 2,000-foot-high barricade of fractal badlands adjacent to Scenic Byway 12, some 15 miles east of Cannonville. We camp there, sharing the misery of another bitter night, and rise early on April 14 for an excursion into the unknown country of prehistory.

Christa requires no caffeine to jump-start the day, her manic energy firing nonstop. “Fucker,” she shouts, her hand forming a fist around a rolled map that highlights Trump’s cuts. We’re sorting supplies on the truck’s tailgate, loading snacks and sunscreen into her daypack. “Where is the monument? Are we even in the monument anymore? Honest, I’ve never cursed so much as in the past 18 months.” She musters a fresh batch for emphasis, unrolling the map.

Our plan is to reconnoiter the Blues, the core of which remains protected, the northwestern corner of which has been excised. The Kaiparowits Formation represents, arguably, the planet’s best record of terrestrial late-Cretaceous ecosystems, while the Straight Cliffs Formation below it represents, to some, a profit in the offing. Christa has published a book about the monument’s superlative paleontological resources (more than a dozen unique dinosaur species identified over the past couple of decades), and she knows plenty about the coastal swamps that deposited copious organic matter (i.e., future coal) in the Straight Cliffs Formation. Hence her breathless venting as we strike off for six hours of scraping around in the Kaiparowits dirt.

Inhale. “I’ve rafted the Grand Canyon about 90 times, educating other rivergoers and whatnot, but this place is extra special to me, because there’s still so much to discover.”

Exhale. “I ��ǲ�’t have kids. This place is where my love goes. This place.”

Inhale. “What’s happening to the monument has been worse than any of my breakups, ever. Problem is, instead of wanting to kill myself, with this I want to kill someone else.”

Exhale. “OK, let’s set the crap aside for a bit and prospect. I could use some prospecting.”

Prospecting is the search for fossils, plain and simple. Our outing, which yields hundreds of petrified-wood shards, dozens of clamshells, and three bits of dimpled brown turtle carapace, requires a peculiar style of ambulation, a unique mode of being. To prospect, abandon the trail. Blur your eyes. Meditate on the delicately patterned, crumble-at-the-slightest-touch ground. Meander and scan. Scan and meander. Stay loose, easy, open to whatever might emerge.

“It’s called float,” Christa says. “That’s our name for the stuff eroding out of these slopes and floating to the surface, indicating there might be something worth digging for nearby.”

“The float zone,” I say.

“The float zone,” she echoes. “You’ve got to get in that headspace.”

Hikers in the monument (Ace Kvale)

This coinage inspires her to share an anecdote about prospecting the Blues in the late 1980s, era of the Walkman and cassette tape. Alone, classical music crescendoing in her headphones, she wandered away from the so-called real world and temporarily lost herself in the realer world: the textured earth and possibility. That the anecdote doesn’t mention a jaw-dropping find—say, a new-to-science dino skull—strikes me as significant. The point is just being out, in, and with the land.

Memory transports Christa, and when she returns, the morning’s cursing and the outrage and sorrow are absent. “I can never come out here too often,” she says. “Never.”

But where, I’m soon wondering, is out here? Consulting the map, I can’t tell whether we’ve veered from the protected section of the Blues into the BLM’s open-for-business lands. It all appears of a piece. For now.

Christa invites me to join her and some fellow paleontologists for dinner that evening in Escalante, 19 miles east of the Blues. I hem and haw—I’d not expected so many rides—but the offer is too interesting to pass up. Notwithstanding Prof’s disciplined leadership, my trip is taking a turn toward the random, and I spend two days in town. On Sunday, exiting Escalante, I chat with an octogenarian historian who suffered a stroke and struggles with the Prof anecdotes he recounted confidently in his prime. He and his wife, the gentlest of couples, longtime critics of the monument, insist that I spend the night in their guest bedroom.

Finally, on Monday, I once again roam the backcountry alone—Antone Flat, Death Hollow, nameless slickrock alcoves. After 17 miles I’m back on Scenic Byway 12, pounding pavement. An ache develops in my hip, disappears, reappears, doubles down. The ache swaps hips. I take it easy—feast on my remaining salami, sleep 11 hours, spend the bulk of an afternoon journaling—before limping onward, ever onward, into the unknown country of the 21st century.

Day ten, lips chapped to splitting, nostrils scoured bloody by relentless blowing grit, I crash at my friend’s home in Boulder, the speck-like village surrounded by incised tributary canyons of the Escalante River that, according to Prof, “no animal without wings could cross.” Wait a second. Do I have wings? How did I get here? And is this whiskey in my mug? I’ve slipped into a state of dopey detachment. Increasingly, I’m losing the sequence, the order: Tropic Shale, woman who feared I was lost; Dakota Sandstone, man who rooster-tailed me with mud.

“You’ll flip for Grant,” my friend says, pouring another dram.

I drain it. The hip tingles.

“Really, Grant has the Escalante’s nooks and crannies in him like nobody. Wait until you see his house.”

Grant Johnson has been exploring the Escalante canyons since 1975, and for 22 of those years, while running a horsepacking guide service, he spent five months annually in “the wild spaces,” as he puts it. Working sporadically during his winters off, the chip-toothed, barrel-chested 62-year-old dynamited an orange bulb of Navajo sandstone to create a network of hollows that he calls home: den with bookshelf of obscure geology tomes, jam room with PA system and harmonicas, larder brimming with foods harvested from his Deer Creek homestead. Totaling 5,700 square feet, the dwelling feels nothing like a dwarf’s dank hovel and everything like Architectural Digest melded with The Flintstones.

The Escalante River (Ethan Welty)

It’s April 21, day 11. I snagged a ride here from Boulder with my friend, the two of us peering into a mad frenzy of snowflakes. Prof didn’t swing this far south—he kept to the Aquarius Plateau, a forested behemoth hidden this morning by swirling gray weather, making an ascent less than appealing. No part of me regrets deviating from Prof’s historic route, perhaps because I’m a wimp, perhaps because I bedded down on the deck last night and woke soggy, the duct-tape patches on my ratty sleeping bag not exactly waterproof. To understate the case, I’m totally psyched to be a guest of Grant’s sheltering caves.

“There’s only one suspect crack in the whole structure,” he says, craning his neck, inspecting the nearly invisible fracture with a squinting focus. We’re perched on stools at the kitchen counter, a bazillion pounds of sand swirling in ancient compressed stillness above our heads. “But heck, my life will be over before the thing collapses.”

About that life: it’s eclectic, an obsessive passion for the unknown country’s hideaways (obscure pictograph panels, secret springs) lending coherence to what might otherwise appear a random mishmash. Grant landed in the region as a teenager, taking quarters off from college in Washington State to apprentice with itinerant uranium miners. He cofounded the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance in 1983; for his activism he was hung in effigy by the anti-enviro faction in Escalante, more than 40 miles away. He built roads and fought the building of roads. He stabilized Ancestral Puebloan ruins alongside professional archeologists and hauled supplies for AmeriCorps crews eradicating the invasive Russian olive.

“Everywhere that I hadn’t been was my goal,” Grant says. He passes me a bowl of steaming black beans enriched with salsa from last summer’s garden and bacon from his former pet pig. “But there’s too much for anyone to know it all.”

I’m enjoying the restful lunch, but Grant’s antsy; the sunshine burning off this morning’s overcast seems to remind him of neglected chores. “I better get my ass busy and milk the cow,” he says, not getting his ass busy. Unfolding my map prompts him to unfold a map. Shortly, the counter is papered with hogbacks and rincons, features labeled Lamp Stand and Woodruff Bench, and we’re nerding out on the minutia of Prof’s journey.

“I haven’t used a topo in ages,” Grant says, explaining that, fundamentally, it’s the mystery of the wilderness he’s after—the beauty of the mystery.

He slides his index finger across the overlapping maps: east from Deer Creek along the Burr Trail road, out of the monument, through the warp of the Waterpocket Fold (centerpiece of Capitol Reef National Park), up to the crest of the Henry Mountains. The finger pauses there, as if catching its breath.

Grant Johnson (Hannah Ohlwiler)

“Dude, I seriously do need to get my ass busy and milk,” Grant says. “Aw, but can you imagine? Can you imagine this in 1872?”

“I’ve been trying,” I reply.

“Me, too. Since I was a teenager.” He lifts the finger. “It’s pretty much all I’ve done.”

Days. They pass. And I pass through them, trading the monument for Dixie National Forest, the forest for Capitol Reef National Park, and the park for Notom-Bullfrog Road, which parallels the eastern flank of the Waterpocket Fold. On the 14th day out from Kanab, instant coffee flooding my bloodstream and the Henry Mountains looming, I’m hit with a dual realization. One, the trip is concluding, Prof soon to spin a 360, absorb the panoramic view, ink his understanding onto one of the American atlas’s remaining blank spaces. Two, this conclusion must for me be mute, inarticulate, the time arrived to shun characters, perspectives, varieties of dedication and fascination and love.

Grant was the last local whose story I heard, more than 48 hours ago. My hip is throbbing again, the temperature is climbing into the eighties, and I’ve got 27 nonnegotiable uphill miles to make. I’ve been planning this grueling ending since the beginning: trudge a knobby BLM road through gulches and rimrock, bushwhack the scraggly forested slopes above Pennellen Pass, gain the alpine ridge of Mount Ellen’s south summit (named for Prof’s wife).

Sneakers laced tight, I hike the complex mess spilling from the Henry foothills for five, six, seven hours—squiggly passages with vertical walls, scorched mesa tops, mauve and dun and apricot soils. Prof’s diary consistently downplays challenge and travail. (“Could not find trail so went up canon exploring side canon. Find trail out. Have not found one yet.”) But an assistant’s report mentions that around this point, the party pickaxed notches into the cliffs and wedged their shoulders against the equines’ rumps to heft them over various impediments. Referring to southern Utah’s contorted topography as a maze is lazy and clichéd. That doesn’t alter the fact that it is a maze.

Painfully, by inches, the dark mass of Mount Ellen nears, resolving into detail: conifers, talus chutes, wizened snowbanks. I apply myself to the task of making those details more detailed and, simultaneously, quieting my brain with exhaustion. For some reason, though, in spite of the heaving effort, my brain won’t quit. At tree line, the range’s crest an hour distant, the symbolic finish line so close, I’m still occupied by words.

People think they have the monument pegged, what it’s made of and, accordingly, what it should be made into: a coal mine, a cow’s supper, a preserve for scientific investigations, a stirring wilderness experience, an anchor for family history, a sacred grave to receive our prayers. The list is long, so long. But if enough people know something, and if they know that something differently, is that something actually known? If I’ve learned anything from two weeks of walking and hitching—two weeks of listening, both to people with my ears and to the ground itself with my ache and my thirst—it’s that there are layers upon layers to this famously stratified land. Always more layers. Untold layers. And that to interpret the place via a single layer is to miss the place entirely. To know nothing whatsoever of the truth.

The author (Ace Kvale)

So goes my little monologue, a distraction from ragged lungs and cramping quadriceps. At dusk I achieve the desired spot—the mental spot (blank mind) and the physical spot (pad of crunchy grass straddling the mountain’s narrow spine). I’m dazed, depleted, barely able to spread my sleeping bag, entirely unable to wrap my belief around the scale and power of the scene. The new monument sprawls within the sprawling old monument. Both monuments sprawl to the horizon and beyond. Limitless naked desert, as I remember it from my twenties, as I hope to always remember it, is here beneath me and before me: strange, spooky, utterly unknowable, utterly unknown.

I can feel Prof close, scribbling in his diary, disagreeing: “Sunday, June 23rd. Fred sketched our trail since leaving Kanab. Got it done at 5:00 P.M., when we started on our way back.” Not wanting to interrupt, yet unable to withhold comment, I speak to him, whether aloud or just internally is difficult to say. You tried your best, buddy, but you failed. You had to fail. Look at this. Look at this. There was no possibility of succeeding.

And then, at last, the words really are gone. The view is saturated with black, the black sparking with stars.

Leath Tonino wrote about snowplow drivers in March 2017.

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The Most Ridiculous, Possibly Suicidal Sport You’ve Never Heard Of

cthompson — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It sounds like the setup for a joke: an ex-world champion, a would-be world champion, and a journalist are cruising Vermont’s winter roads in a minivan on a Sunday morning, looking for a place to buy beer. The ex, Ethan Bond-Watts, a 33-year-old glassblower with a blond ponytail, sits behind the wheel. The would-be, Craig Bunten, a 32-year-old carpenter with a scraggly brown beard longer than the hair atop his head, rides shotgun. A few months from now, these childhood buddies of mine will mount odd snow-sliding devices called jack jumpers—basically a stool attached to a single alpine ski—and square off in a contest for fame (yeah, right), glory (you wish), and a $100 bill (more likely crumpled than crisp). Bitter rivalry? Not exactly. At the moment, picking up a couple twelvers is the shared mission and the top priority.

“Some session IPAs? Keep things civil on the hill today?”

“What about a chocolate stout, a breakfast milkshake?”

Held the first weekend in March at ski resort in West Dover, the has been going strong for 37 years. Competitors , side by side. They’re not racing one another—they’re racing the clock. After a racer goes down one side, they then race down the other. The best combined time wins the championship. Racers are drawn from the Green Mountains’ deep hollows, from its crooked barns and cluttered garages—a semi-inebriated, fully obsessed gang of hobbyists. I say “fully obsessed” because jack jumping is as much a proud pastime, a homespun folk tradition unique to Vermont, as it is an action sport. That doesn’t mean devotees eschew aggressive ripping—Bond-Watts and Bunten have reached what they refer to as “felonious” speeds (50 miles per hour on groomers)—but rather that the pleasure of adrenaline is paired with the pleasure of history, of knowing that farm kids have been shredding the local topography since at least the 1800s (early JJs featured a barrel stave in lieu of a ski) and that loggers once used a kind of proto-JJ to exit the woods after hard day’s sawing.

Jack jumpers have never been mass produced, let alone mass marketed, and thus exist in a kind of extra-economic zone.

And then, too, there’s the bonus pleasure of flipping a bird at Big Ski, aka the Commercial Establishment. Jack jumpers have never been mass produced, let alone mass marketed, and thus exist in a kind of extra-economic zone. At last year’s world championship, which saw 70 competitors—56 adults, 14 children—every rig was personalized, custom-made, funky. Some boasted antique tractor seats and shock-absorbing springs, others a seatbelt allowing for arms-free carving. Bunten’s got a fancy one in the back of the minivan nicknamed the Smithsonian (maple post, horseshoe handles), and Bond-Watts also has a “museum piece” (walnut post, brass tacks on an upholstered seat). But ��ǲ�’t be fooled by the fine craftsmanship: the skis on these things are dumpster-salvaged junkers—yard sale scores at best—and their graphics (read: brand names) are hidden beneath layers of sloppily applied spray paint (read: another flip of the bird).

“I waxed mine with lip balm the other day,” Bond-Watts says, emphasizing the goofy, playful side of the sport.

“The hunger,” Bunten replies, tipping the balance toward focus, athleticism, passion. “It’s totally worthless if you ��ǲ�’t have the hunger.”

Thirty minutes and one liquor store later, at the foot of Lincoln Gap, an unplowed pass that crosses the Green Mountains' spine and reaches a sustained grade of 24 percent, we park the minivan in front of a “Road Closed” sign. While Bolton Valley and Jay Peak allow jack jumpers on the slopes, and Mount Snow hosts its iconic race, for the most part the sport hews to its backwoods past. The east side of Lincoln Gap, dropping toward the village of Warren, offers two miles of twists and turns, dips and dives—a guaranteed smile-till-your-face-hurts descent. If there’s an ideal training ground for the world championship, this is it.

Beneath a gauzy gray sky, we load Bunten’s daypack with enough beer to stun a horse (for the record, both IPAs and stouts), toss a rack of all-natural beef franks in with the cans, and prepare for the hike. Standard jack-jumping attire is more rags than riches: tall rubber boots like those that dairy farmers wear when mucking out the barn, Patagonia jackets so torn and stained that they appear to have been found somewhere within said mucky barn, baggy Carhartt pants, floppy wool hats of uncertain provenance.

“These were the second-place prize last year,” Bunten explains as he pulls on a pair of tattered, seam-busted gloves. “Mark Stirewalt, from up in Waterbury, he beat me by four one-hundredths of a second. Can you believe that? I came into the finish fully laid out, begging for whatever time I could get, and plowed through the spectator fence. Regrettably, I knocked down a ten-year-old girl. She was balling and Mom was shocked and I was like, ‘How’d I do?’”

“At least you podiumed,” Bond-Watts responds, lowering his eyes and shaking his head in mock dejection. “I used to be the Champ, the Guy. I won three out of four years. And now?”

“You brought shame upon your family by finishing fourth last spring.”

“The kids ��ǲ�’t talk about me anymore. They’ve forgotten my name.”

“Complacency. Lack of drive. A sad, sad story.”

With that, we sling jack jumpers over our shoulders—think of the stereotypical hobo, his bindle tied to a stick—and hoof it toward the crest of the state. No lifts, no lift lines, no nonsense. Just two inches of fresh powder and an intention to flow, to fly.

Bond-Watts and Bunten have reached what they refer to as “felonious” speeds—50 mph on groomers. (Mount Snow)

Coyote-fur seat covers, whiskey-induced design flaws, three-year-olds on toy-sized JJs, possible connections to the European activity known as skibock, the challenge of converting a freeform style to a tight, rigid, gate-bashing technique—yes, it’s fair to say that the jaws get worked no less than the legs and lungs when jack jumping, that aimless chitchat is as integral to the sport as snow.

The Ex: “I remember having Donovan on my lap when he was a toddler. I was cruising, telling myself, ‘Don’t kill your best friend’s child, ��ǲ�’t kill your best friend’s child.’”

The Would-Be: “Last April, Sean and I got to the top of Mount Ellen and I realized my ski was broken, holding on by the P-Tex. It freed me up to romp those sloppy, melted conditions. You can actually get it going pretty good in the grass and dirt.”

Pause. Crack delicious hopped beverage.

The Ex: “A jack jumper made of cedar. That’s next on the design bench.”

The Would-Be: “Man, your problem is that you’ve been riding a burred edge. You got to file that shit off, clean it up. Come on, man, it’s like you’re riding sandpaper.”

Pause. Drain delicious hopped beverage.

The Ex: “LipZipz Lip Balm…soothes, heals, protects. I’m telling you, it’s going to revolutionize the sport.”

The Would-Be: “See this fluff on the side, this little fun-pile? I will be slashing the bejeesus out of it on the way back down. I give you my oath.”

At the top of the pass—nobody around, just pillowed conifers and more pillowed conifers, a view of distant bluish mountains through the cracks between trunks—we sit down (chairs are always available when jack jumping, which is awesome) and debate whether to make a bonfire for the hot dogs immediately or after our first run. Tucker Bond-Watts, the Ex’s younger brother, shows up mid-deliberation, having received word of our whereabouts via text message. He spent the past four hours alpine skiing at nearby , where he has a season pass, but cut out after lunch to meet us here, the JJ that lives in the bed of his truck coming in handy not for the first time, and not for the last.

“How was the Bush?”

“Any good?”

He shrugs, reaches into Bunten’s daypack for a refreshment. Click. “It’s like a damn call center up there. Hordes of Jersey boys on their phones. ‘Dude, where are you? I’ll meet you in ten minutes. Call me when you get there. Wait, where are you?’ Honestly, it’s intolerable. And on top of that”—he glances at the Ex, whose ponytail is folded inside his hood—“they’ve all got ponytails.”

We laugh, imbibe, keep laughing, and forget about the picnic. Eventually, our buzzes rising and toes going numb, it’s time to act. At low speeds, a jack jumper is wobbly. At high speeds, it is as secure as Sean White’s snowboard. Which is to say that the first hundred feet of flattish road make us look like a gang of toddlers learning to operate bicycles sans training wheels (except instead of holding handlebars, we’re gripping the undersides of our seats, legs extended out front in the manner of a hamstring stretch). Then, without a pistol shot or dropped flag, without any warning besides the hint of Bunten pulling ahead as the pitch steepens, our kiddie bikes transform into rocket-fueled booster chairs. And the race is on.

No lifts, no lift lines, no nonsense. Just two inches of fresh powder and an intention to flow, to fly.

Bitter rivalry? Again, not exactly. It’s fun to weave in and out of the pack, to jostle for position, to hip check and shoulder check, to spray your buddy with a rooster-tailing bank turn while calling him names unfit for digital publication. Making it down in the lead, though, is entirely beside the point. In fact, caught up in the joy of gravity, in the grip and carve and rush of this favorite “trail” in the state, there is no point. We’ve reached DIY nirvana, flannel-lined enlightenment, middle-of-nowhere bliss. We are one with the road, one with the season, one with the jack jumpers (things) beneath our butts and the jack jumpers (people) who extend back through the ages in an unbroken chain.

I close in on the Would-Be, reading his line, and pass on the right. The Ex drafts me for a second before passing on the left.

Lobotomizing wind.

Tears on cheeks.

Paradox: crystalline perception meets crazy blur.

One, two, three, four massive, energy-dispersing power slides and the run is over, a mere five minutes after it began. Everyone is grinning that mindless grin—the grin that appears after piddling thoughts have been scoured from consciousness by pure contact with pure elements. Here is the hush, the fleeting moment in a jack jumper’s day when no trash is talked, no extemporaneous disquisition on meaning or heritage or immortality offered to the mute forest.

Bunten stands, shakes a cake of snow from his voluminous beard (plus a few muffins, maybe even a scone), and dispenses libations. “You’ve got to race like you practice,” he says, looking up the slope at our crisscrossing tracks. “Just shut the brain off and ride the edge.”

Click, click, click, click.

“I’m feeling good about Mount Snow this year.”

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Keep Your Hands on the Wheel and Don’t Look Down

cthompson — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It’s an exceedingly white January afternoon on America’s sketchiest road—white flurries rushing the windshield and swirling in the mirrors, white ridges and cirques disappearing among torn white clouds. Heck, even the road is white, though it won’t remain so for long. Dack Klein is behind the wheel of his 18-ton Mack plow truck, laughing his big laugh, navigating yet another lethal curve with all the casual confidence of a man who has done this some 7,000 times before. Or maybe it’s 8,000 times.
An equipment operator with the (CDOT), Klein has worked the 15 miles of U.S. Highway 550 that climb from Ouray to the top of 11,018-foot Pass since 2003. He has worked them at dawn and midnight, on Halloween and Easter and Cinco de Mayo. He has worked them in every imaginable type of blizzard—from the fierce to the downright savage, from the protracted to the never-ending.

Forty-two years old, with a black buzz cut, a stout build, and a probably-should-have-died crash under his belt, Klein is familiar with every inch of Red Mountain Pass. A typical shift for one of the four full-time employees stationed at Ouray lasts eight hours but will stretch to 12 or 18 when the weather insists. Weekends are more of a theoretical possibility, monthlong runs of consecutive days to be expected. Between late September and early June, Klein spends half as much time with his wife and three kids as he does with his Mack, doing the job, which he calls “pushing.”

Klein stands by as workers trigger avalanches above the road. (Grayson Schaffer)

The avalauncher at work. (Grayson Schaffer)

Red Mountain Pass has 16 treacherous switchbacks, most without safety rails. (Grayson Schaffer)

Milepost 90, passing below an : “You’ve got to appreciate the dangers when you’re pushing. Last winter we had a chunk of rock the size of a football field detach right here.”

Milepost 87, entering , the road’s only flattish section: “There have been nights I could barely see past the wipers when I was pushing. It can take 20 minutes to manage this one nasty mile if it’s blowing.”

Milepost 81, beneath Blue Point: “The saying goes that Blue Point will run if you sneeze. Usually it’s a bank slip, but occasionally it’s a giant, and then you’ve got to do some serious pushing.”

Milepost 80.28, at the summit: “Jackknifed 18-wheelers, four feet of fresh powder in eight hours—pushing on Red gets crazy. But that’s what makes it special, right?”

The San Juan Mountains average 349 inches of snow annually, and much of it falls twice: first from the sky, then from the crests and headwalls where it tries, and fails, to cling. Seventy named avalanche paths��intersect Highway 550 in the 23 miles between Ouray and Silverton, the town on the south side of the pass that serves as a base for another of CDOT’s 200 patrols across the state. The infamous East Riverside slide can dump 50 feet of concrete-thick debris and has —in 1970, 1978, and 1992—as well as a preacher and his two daughters in 1963, and two men and most of their team of mules in 1883. Since 1935, when the first attempts to keep the road open through winter were made, dozens of people have perished trying to get across, though an exact number is impossible to tally.

The threats are numerous: soaring cliffs, towers of brittle ice, 8 percent grades, unexpected doglegs. I spoke with Klein over the phone, and he explained that the lower portion of the road is literally chiseled into the vertical rock of the Uncompahgre Gorge—a narrow geologic throat 1,000 feet deep in places. The upper portion, beyond Ironton Park, traverses subalpine slopes largely scoured of trees. We talked for 15 minutes and he used the word respect often enough that I lost count. He also exuded a kind of pure, almost childlike enthusiasm for the elemental power of the range, the clarity of purpose his job engenders, and what he called his “Tonka truck.”

By the end of the conversation, an invitation was on the table: come ride.

So here we are—inside Klein’s shiny orange 4×4 Mack, a crucial player in a fleet that also includes a grader, a blower, a pair of loaders, and two other plows. It’s mid-January 2016. A three-day storm kept the Ouray patrol pushing straight through Christmas, and a fresh one is gathering. Our 12-foot rubber-coated carbide blade is lowered, our ten-foot wing extended on its hydraulic arms, jutting from behind the passenger-side door, forcing snow farther off the road. The rig is 13 feet tall, costs $200,000, gets two and a half miles to the gallon, and fills the lane like a football player in a too-small suit. Three hundred and twenty-five horses snort beneath the broad hood. The cab is richly perfumed with diesel fuel, warm and snug.

The dashboard of a Mack snowplow truck—though stuffed into a small cabin, is packed with gauges and switches for everything from surface temperature monitoring and air filter restriction to manual transfer case lockup. (Grayson Schaffer)

Staring down the narrow road that the massive Mack truck needs to squeeze down. (Grayson Schaffer)

“Less spacious than your Toyota Tercel,” Klein says with a grin after I mention the make and model of my car. “Little for comfort, but a blast to drive.”

Spacewise, the cab is indeed reminiscent of a compact—and thus concludes the vehicular similarities. We’re lording over F-350’s, enthroned seven feet off the ground, a sand-salt mix spraying from a massive hopper mounted to the truck’s rear. Electronics abound: ground thermometers, GPS tracking systems, so many screens and gauges one thinks of an airplane cockpit. A toolbox at my feet contains emergency supplies—MREs, rope, a space blanket, a Maglite, a wrench—and at my elbow, Klein has wedged in an additional backpack loaded with enough food, water, and clothing to last at least two days. Avalanche beacons strapped to our chests blink, their batteries fresh.

Having tagged the top of the pass 3,200 feet above Ouray and pulled a U-turn, Klein and I are now descending Upper Switchbacks, a set of precarious zigzags balanced on the mountain’s steep face. Pressing my nose to the window, what I notice is an absence. Despite the narrow shoulder and stomach-tightening exposure, there are no guardrails in sight. (A few exist along the route, but they are rare.) The reason, I’m told, is simple: plow drivers have to put all that snow somewhere. On Highway 550, that somewhere is over the edge.

“We’ve got nicknames for everything,” Klein says. “Paul’s Plunge, Scary Larry’s Rock, Upper Switchbacks, Dack’s Dilemma.”

The dilemma occurred in 2007 on a typical Red Mountain night: temperatures in the single digits, bad gusts, snow flying in every direction. Visibility was a few notches below poor, and a terrified kid in a sedan was hogging both lanes, approaching Klein head-on. Given the conditions, this member of the “traveling public,” as Klein affectionately calls such drivers, probably should have been at home playing video games or making out with his girlfriend. Klein slowed his rig—he was only doing about ten miles per hour to begin with—and eased to the side of the road. A bit too far, it turned out.

“It was this slow-motion tilting,” he says, recalling what happened next. “I kind of reached for my seat belt, reached for the door, thinking maybe I could jump out, but there wasn’t enough time.” Picturing his wife asleep in their house at the bottom of the pass, her belly round and pregnant, he gripped the wheel and “went for the ride.”

Klein dropped 60 feet before the truck’s cab crumpled around his body with a sickening metallic crunch, his Mack coming to rest upside down on the road. A lower switchback had caught him, nearly killed him, and saved his life, all at once. Bruised but otherwise uninjured, he tried to kick through the windshield. Ten long minutes later, when a car stopped nearby, he was still kicking. His rescuers were absolutely hammered— knocking back beers, aimlessly touring the storm—but their drunken hearts were in the right place. They bashed the glass, pulled Klein free, and stuffed him in among the dozens of empties in their back seat.

“I didn’t think the roll messed with me,” Klein says. “But ever since, I’ve had trouble getting over toward the lip in this spot. I’m fine everywhere else, but at this spot it’s like my body won’t allow it. I just can’t get over as far.”

With that, the memory residing in his hands takes the wheel and tugs gently left, inching us away from the shoulder and the void beyond.

Dack Klein, who survived a 60 feet 'ride' down to a lower switchback. (Grayson Schaffer)

Klein and his colleagues refer to this behavior—cheating the yellow line a bit, erring on the side of caution—as “favoring the mountain.” They refer to snow falling at a rate of a quarter-inch per hour or less as “nuisance snow” and to scraping compressed snow from the pavement as “peeling pack.” They refer to a job well done as “safe enough for your mother.” Neighboring patrols out of Silverton, Ridgeway, Cascade, and Norwood are “extended family” and are accordingly the target of much good-natured trash talk regarding who’s “keeping it pretty” and who’s “falling behind.”

Ouray’s four and a half drivers—two on the day shift, one on swing from 4 p.m. to midnight, one on graveyard, and a part-time backup for “when things fall apart”—maintain fewer miles of road than almost any other CDOT patrol, which is a testament to both the local terrain and the rowdy weather. In the summer, they do road maintenance, but the real test comes with the snow. Drivers complete a weeklong course in plowing before they start the job. They receive a 10 percent “hard to fill” bonus atop a starting salary of around $3,000 or $4,000 per month. The seven-bay garage at the beginning of Highway 550’s ascent from the south end of Ouray brims with bull plows, rotary blades, chin-high tires, and Peewag chains for increased traction. Some drivers prefer the rhythm of a career in, say, metro Denver. .

There are dozens of treacherous passes in the American West. Colorado alone boasts Lizard Head (48 avalanche paths), Berthoud (25), and Monarch (19). But none compare to . In addition to Red, this portion of the road includes Molas Pass (50 paths) and Coal Bank Pass (20 paths), both south of Silverton. It’s the most avy-prone road in the lower 48.

The slides are colossal. Some of the starting zones span hundreds of acres, release 150,000 cubic meters of snow, and generate wind speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour. Add to these monstrous forces the ’s gaping maw and you get the well-worn CDOT expression: “If the slide ��ǲ�’t kill you, the sudden stop at the bottom will.”

“‘At midnight I’d drive by and she would flicker the lights in her window and I’d flicker my headlights back. You know, it was a way to say, ‘You can go to sleep now, Mother. I survived another night.'”

Ouray is a small town—800 residents on a seven-block grid that appears lifted from a snow globe—and is made smaller by its surroundings. Brute origami comes to mind, as though a trillion postcards of sublime scenery have been folded and refolded into an orogenic Frankenstein. The topography is unavoidable, the mountain range young and sharp and everywhere, rocketing 5,000 feet from the sidewalks.

In 1993, a year after the third plow driver died at East Riverside, CDOT got serious about managing road-threatening slides and began a collaboration with the Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC) that continues to this day. No one has been killed by an avalanche while driving the pass since, thanks to a mixed strategy involving teams of forecasters nerding out on the snowpack, gates that can lock the road shut when necessary, and explosives.

Take for example the Christmas 2015 blizzard. The sky dumps and keeps dumping. A CDOT driver, eyes burning and head aching from a tough shift, gets on the radio. “Hey boss,” he says, “I think it might be time to close her down.” Meanwhile, two CAIC forecasters stationed in Silverton, and one stationed in Ouray, have been eyeing the Doppler radar, monitoring the slopes, cruising the road at ungodly hours, worrying themselves sleepless over “what’s getting loaded” and “what wants to run.” More calls, more conversation, and more snow finally lead to a decision from CDOT headquarters: OK, lock the gate.

Ambulances, commercial truckers, and crazed snowboarders in need of a pow fix rely on the road being open, which means that the locked gate represents a ticking clock. Mitigation usually starts when the weather cooperates, often around six in the morning. According to , crews can employ any of the following to trigger slides: “5-pound charges set by hand; a truck-mounted ‘avalauncher’ that uses pneumatic pressure to fire 2.2-pound rounds; a 105 Howitzer leased from the Army that can fire 40-pound missiles up to seven miles; a helicopter that drops 30- to 50-pound bombs.” The debris, once down, doesn’t move on its own, and so they start pushing again, the clock still ticking. Klein has occasionally found himself working the Mack, the guns, and the front-end loader all in one slog of a shift.

“Every run’s different,” says Elwood Gregory, who plowed the road from 1979 to 1986. A mustached 77-year-old with a bald head, he misses “the thrill of battling Red.”

“You come around a corner and there’s an ermine in the road, or a ptarmigan, or a crippled elk that got swept away by a slide. Or you come around and headlights are shooting out of the gorge, straight into the air. One time I saw a car burning down there, flames and everything—turned out that a guy had murdered his wife and sent her over.”

“What about your family?” I ask. “What did they think about your work on Red?”

“My wife understood how much I enjoyed it, so she was fine,” he says. “It bothered my mother, though. Her house was right there at the bottom of the hill. At midnight I’d drive by and she would flicker the lights in her window and I’d flicker my headlights back. You know, it was a way to say, ‘You can go to sleep now, Mother. I survived another night.’ ”

A snowplow pushes snow off the edge as it makes it's way through the canyon. (Grayson Schaffer)

Another night. It should be a bumper sticker slapped onto every CDOT truck. During my first afternoon ride with Klein, he emphasized that Red Mountain Pass morphs into a “different creature” with the fading of dusk’s alpenglow. The guys rotate shifts—two months of days, two months of swings, two months of graves—to share the burden. That order comes apart under the weight of heavy weather, though, everybody pushing together to make the road safe regardless of whose shift it is. And even when the snow finally quits, there are rocks to clear, vehicles to fix, a whole series of tasks to prepare for the next big dump.

“The storms usually come after dark,” Klein says. “Clifford’s on graves, but he’s been puking with some kind of flu, so I ��ǲ�’t think you want to seal yourself into a truck with him for eight hours. We’ve got to make sure you ride with Michael on swing.”

Michael Harrison is a 52-year-old from Chicago’s South Side who moved to the San Juans after college and still retains the accent of his childhood. (He stopped working on the patrol before the 2016–17 season.) Compared with the ebullient Klein, he is a monk of the road, focused and intense. “It’s fucking spooky up there,” he says. “Really fucking spooky. You sure you want to do this?”

“These dudes gave their lives to keep the road open, East Riverside took them all. Different events, but the same slide.”

The weather that’s been growing on the pass is finally peaking, snow falling at three inches per hour. Harrison just finished his first run, and already his efforts are close to erased. There’s no time to waste. Clean gunk-ice from the lights, load the hopper with sand, and go. Rule number one of plowing: push with the storm.

As we drive, the temperature dives to two degrees in the gorge, visibility tightens to 25 feet, and the wind makes a menagerie’s worth of animal sounds. Harrison says nothing, his right hand working the three joysticks that adjust the angle of the plow and wing, while his left hand stays steady on the wheel. We’re low-beaming it, squinting, billions of snowflakes flashing in our yellow and blue strobes.

What by day felt like an airplane cockpit presently feels like a spaceship. Town is gone for good, a distant planet, a false memory of security and laughter and cheery neon lights in tavern windows. The 1,000-foot abyss yawns invisibly to our right.

Milepost 90, passing Ruby Walls: “In sideways weather, I’ve got to be able to get out of the truck, take three steps, and touch the mountain. If I can touch the mountain, I’m safe. If I can’t, that means the mountain might drop out from under my tires.”

Milepost 87, entering Ironton Park: “Sometimes I catch myself saying, ‘Where’s the road?’ I’ll be humming to myself: ‘Where’s the road? Where’s the road?’ ”

Milepost 81, beneath Blue Point: “This is definitely the let’s-get-the-fuck-out-of-here section. You see these sloughs spilling across our lane? They came down in the last hour. That’s bad. We call those indicator slides. They mean trouble.”

Milepost 80.28: “It’s life and death up here, no doubt. People think you can just drop a plow and go for it, but you can’t. That’s why so many CDOT drivers ��ǲ�’t want anything to do with Red Mountain Pass. If you make a mistake, it will probably be your last. You’ve got to be on it. You’ve got to be in tune. You’ve got to be in the game, totally in the game.”

Minutes later, creeping back down toward Ouray, Harrison downshifts as we approach milepost 88. “I’m going to pull over for a second,” he says. “I want you to see the Monument.”

We adjust our safety helmets over our wool hats, open the doors, and exit into knee-deep powder. Inside the truck, the weather is something to fear and respect. ��ԹϺ�� it simply is—equal parts motion and stillness, chaos and calm, violence and peace.

Harrison trudges into a drift, pulls a Maglite from his pocket, and shines it over a polished slab of granite that is fast on its way to being buried. Below the engraved image of a plow truck almost identical to the one idling behind us, I read three names and dates: ROBERT MILLER (MARCH 2, 1970), ��TERRY KISHBAUGH (FEBRUARY 10, 1978), EDDIE IMEL (MARCH 5, 1992).

“These dudes gave their lives to keep the road open,” Harrison says. “East Riverside took them all. Different events, but the same slide.”

We stand there for a minute, maybe less, the names on the stone disappearing beneath so many weightless flakes. Soon enough the engraved plow will be resting on its own white road.

“The mountain’s got a lot of different moods,” Harrison says finally, without turning toward me. “In its own sick little way, it can be kind of magical.”

He switches off the Maglite and tilts his face to the sky.

“I guess we’d better get back to pushing. It’s really coming down now, isn’t it?”

Leath��Tonino��wrote about soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause in the January/February 2016 issue.

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