I Want It to Snow and Never Stop

It used to be easier to disappear into mystery. Around 1988 or so, I boarded a plane north, landed late in the night, passed through Canadian customs, rented a car, and drove into a shaken snow globe of a storm, paper map and scrawled directions in hand. Cell phones and the internet were years away; I had an address and the name of a place and not much else. It was a pilgrimage into deepening, thickening snow, and that was all I needed, or needed to know.

Hours passed, a maze of mountain roads, and the whole world seemed in hibernation. Snowbanks grew until they towered overhead. The little car strained against unplowed drifts, and then, several hours after midnight, I saw the sign: Trout Lake Lodge Snowcat Skiing. A note tacked to the door directed me to an attic room and a seven a.m. start.

The next morning the snow was falling straight down, stellar dendrite crystals, the kind of snowflakes kids draw, falling without a hint of wind, and there I experienced something I had begun to suspect was a myth: powder, and not just powder, but bottomless powder. It was so light and dry, we scooped up handfuls, blew on them, and giggled as the flakes swirled aloft and moted in the air like dandelion puffs. Before clicking into my bindings, I mistakenly stepped off the cat’s compacted track and disappeared up to my ribs.

Skis were much narrower then, about half as wide at the waist as they are now, and the only way to navigate in snow that deep was to keep them together, to make a single flotational platform, and to point them straight into the fall line. But much could go wrong on those skinny sticks, and you needed to have a finely tuned sense of balance, spatial awareness, and motor control. My first run was a comedy of errors, of tumbling and wallowing to get up, the second was a bit better, and the third is where everything changed.

I pushed off from the top, gathered speed, and aimed for the untracked. Snow boiled up around my boot tops, my knees, my waist. Beneath the surface, the tips of the skis wanted to wander, so I kept them close together and moving in parallel, and as I’d learned to do in the previous two runs, I waited. I waited for the snow to build up under my skis, to feel something not firm but firmer than nothingness grow beneath my feet, for the cambered tips to rise of their own accord and then crest, break free to the surface, and allow me to angle my boots, my knees, and the skis in the other direction. In this way, I porpoised down the hill, emerging from the snow to gasp a breath, redirect my skis, and surrender back into the white room and wait for that buildup again.

Most adventure sports are a reflection of human drive transcribed onto a natural palette, and that’s especially true of modern skiing, writ as it is on much fatter boards than we were using in the 1980s. Think of today’s vernacular: slaying, surfing, slashing. So aggressive, so willful. But the paradox of the old powder skiing technique is that it demanded the opposite of will. Sure, you kept your feet together and you rolled your knees, but mostly you weren’t doing anything but witnessing the magic. On each up, on each down, you were just there, floating, levitating, not only in the snow, but of the snow. As powder pioneer Dolores LaChapelle, who’s profiled in this issue, wrote, “I cannot tell exactly where my actions end and the snow takes over.”

Many times outdoors I have felt adrenaline surge through my body with cellular euphoria, but what I found in deep powder was the opposite: My mind was still, and observational, and knowing. I found peace in the middle of motion and that strange and fleeting sense of oneness with the universe. It sounds very hippy dippy, and I’d probably laugh if I didn’t own it for myself, but much as we like our runner’s highs and body buzzes, I think that transcendence is what most of us are really seeking out there, whether surfing or riding or skiing. Colin Fletcher, the father of recreational backpacking, called it “a sense of common origin and direction.” LaChapelle spoke of a “loss of ego boundary.” Maybe it’s a return to our animal selves or an escape from the higher mind. Whichever, whatever, it seems that getting there involves putting ourselves in the hands of larger forces and finding a way, usually against instinct, to let go. If we do, and if we’re lucky, we might in return receive the gifts of perfection, and wholeness, and grace, along with some humility and a sense of awe.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.