Melting Out in the Backcountry

In late September 2021, a team of archaeologists used ice axes, shovels, brooms, and warm water heated over a Primus camp stove to extract a rare artifact from an ice patch on Digervarden mountain in Norway: a thirteen-hundred-year-old wooden ski, with birch and leather binding still attached. The ski featured a raised foot platform (more leverage for the carve), a groove cut into the base (more stability at speed), and a drilled hole in the tip (attachment for skins?). It was the companion to another ski discovered in 2014 in the ice just a few meters away, and its dimensions will sound familiar to modern ears: The new stick is one hundred eighty-seven centimeters long and one hundred seventeen millimeters at the waist. Powder, anyone?

These are far from the oldest skis reclaimed from the past. That record belongs to a ski discovered in Russia that dates to eight thousand years ago. But only three have been found with bindings, and Digervarden melted out two of them. By coincidence, the mountain is located not far south of an area I ski-toured in 2008. I was exploring the coastline on a sailboat with a group of friends, pulling up to small wooden docks, strapping on skins, and heading into the hills. One of those hills was near Eresfjord, another near Isfjorden. On a clear day, either might have given a view to Digervarden. If I’d known, I could have peered back through time.

For the first fourteen years of my relationship with sliding on snow, I earned every vertical foot of descent. At age four, I scrambled up the slope of our neighbor’s front yard, plopped myself in a giant silver disk, and zoomed back into my own yard. By seven, I was allowed to take my sled, a Flexible Flyer with metal runners and steering, and bomb down Jacksonville Street. In my teens, my buddies and I shared a Snurfer, the proto-snowboard invented by Sherm Poppen in 1965, in parks and golf courses, where we competed to see who could stay on it the farthest before tumbling off and landing on our heads. It wasn’t until my nineteenth year, when I stepped into my first pair of alpine skis, that I sat down and let a chairlift whisk me to the top of a slope. Witchcraft! With twenty-five bucks and this magical device, I could make run after run, and the only work required was picking myself up off the snow when I’d fallen.

Some of the best days of my life have taken place at ski areas, but few of them compare to the best I’ve spent in the backcountry. Friendships forged away from the lifts are stronger and deeper, memories richer and more sharply etched, the satisfactions incomparable. In the backcountry, there’s less of the frantic scramble for freshies, there’s no standing in lines, there’s no industrialization of what should be a sacred experience. Its risks sharpen your focus, exquisitely variable snow conditions hone your technique, the complex interplay of wind, sun, terrain, and aspect teach you mountain sense and heighten your sensitivity to nuance. Everywhere there’s snow is your playground, and, of course, it’s all done under your own steam.

The transcendent experiences of backcountry skiing and boarding are no longer the domain of a handful of hardcores. Over the last decade, use of resort-adjacent backcountry has exploded, as have sales of touring, skimo, and even telemark gear. This is well-known. What’s lesser known is the story of Bluebird Backcountry, America’s newest “ski area,” which you can read in this issue. Bluebird’s terrain is accessed only by human power. It has no permanent infrastructure, no lifts or snowcats or sleds, no cut trails, and a tiny carbon footprint. Rather, it leases mountainous ranchland, evaluates slide hazard, teaches touring technique, rents gear, offers guided or independent ups and downs, and makes becoming backcountry adept as easy as possible. It is the ideal model for a warming future, where winters are shorter and large-scale commercial skiing less defensible, and a wonderful salve for the anxieties of today’s—or any—age.

I’ve thought a lot about the person who lost their skis on Digervarden mountain. “Backcountry” would have been an alien concept to them, as everywhere was theirs to go. But they would have been an expert at reading the snow. They would have known the challenge of lashing a boot and the stoke of dropping in. They would have been right at home in the mountains and, I suspect, a lot like you and me.