Amplifying Power in Pursuit of Snow

Winter is the only season that arrives with the flick of a switch. Spring can’t figure out what it wants, and by the time it does, it’s summer, which sneaks up on you like the gradual heating of an oven. Autumn’s a bit of a tease. One day it feels like the earth just crossed an invisible meridian where the sun is slightly less potent and the next it’s back to summer again.

But winter, well, winter announces itself with the first cold storm of the year, and there’s nothing subtle about it. It bangs the door open with a huge gust of arctic wind and blasts the world with snow from north to south, from west to east, and if you’re lucky—if we’re lucky—it keeps that up every week or so, storm after storm, a steady accumulation of snowpack, regular freshies for skiers and boarders, and none of that dangerous continental hoar that develops when it dumps in October and stays cold and dry until December and the crystals grow big and fragile and avalanchey.

It is axiomatic that modern humans have become divorced from the cycles and rhythms of nature, except perhaps the most obvious ones. Our seasons now are marked not by the sight of the first hummingbird or departure of the last goose, but by ads for pumpkin spice or mattress sales. We can’t tell a pansy from a peony because we are looking at other things, or are indoors, and neither our social status nor survival depends on it, as they might have not too long ago in our short history here.

Winter is different. We can’t miss it, for one. For two, the economy of entire regions depends on it, as do the moods of town after town built around recreation and the bounties of snowfall. And as we’ve discovered the hard way, through scarcity and drought, the precipitation raked out of its clouds by mountaintops is critical to our stores of drinking water, our agriculture, and forests’ own ability to fight fires by staying hydrated.

In the American Southwest, where feast or famine has long been the rule, ancient people built their lives around the water cycle, and the messages they carved and painted onto rock walls are rich with its symbology. Elements that look like people are anthropomorphized clouds. A tiny sprite held in the hand of a larger figure is Ko’Bitcitia, an Acoma spirit that hides behind clouds and, when frightened, releases the rain. Sheets of it fall in pecked lines, zigzags of lightning unmistakable. What some mistake for headdresses are the figures of Cloud People, who, an archaeologist told my friend Craig for his book Tracing Time, “are all part of a rainmaking tradition. You can see the lightning coming down from one. It’s like prayer. You amplify power, and you get it to happen.”

You amplify power, and you get it to happen. This is not something you need to teach skiers. Ullr, their patron saint (“Schutzpatron der Skifahrer” in German), has been celebrated every year since 1963 by the town of Breckenridge, Colorado. Snow dances, too, are common—in 2012, members of the Southern Ute Indian tribe performed one in Vail and, as their ritual progressed, snowfall increased. Some people sleep with their PJs on backward, flush ice cubes down the toilet, or put silverware under their pillow. In the fall of 1982, not long after joining the staff of Powder magazine in Southern California, I organized a beach party to conduct one of the most ancient of rites, a sacrifice. We gathered a huge pile of beater skis, dumped them in a fire ring, splashed on some lighter fluid, and tossed a match. There was a massive whoomp and flames leaped thirty feet in the air. The fire department arrived not long after, but the drama was over and the sacrifice made.

Winter of 1982-83 turned out to be a gangbuster in the West. Alta, Utah, got six hundred thirty inches of snow. Mount Bachelor in Oregon received more than five hundred inches—over forty-four feet. In the Sierra Nevada, it snowed every weekend from January 15 to May 15, and Kirkwood was hit with a mind-blowing, snorkel-wearing seventy hundred eighty-eight inches. And what about Southern California, whose ski lifts rise to nearly nine thousand feet? We landed two hundred sixty-four inches, an all-time record, and I hiked for my last turns of the season in a north-facing gully in the San Gabriel Mountains on the fourth of July.

A coincidence? I don’t think so.