A Dream of Flying

As a lifelong snowboarder I am often confronted with one simple but infuriating question: why? This pervasive question haunts everything we do in the outdoors, and the answer that question can vary wildly from person to person. As a climber, the question comes up all the time, “why do we climb?” I’ve never heard a truly convincing answer, but it seems that the value of the question lies more in the asking than the answer itself. As a snowboarder, I can honestly say that I’ve never heard anybody ask “why?”. It seems like the answer is as obvious as it is pervasive, whatever it may be.

This isn’t the type of thing I would normally worry about, I’m content just having a good time with no explicable motivation to do so. However, a while back I tried explaining ski mountaineering to my grandmother, who has never once been skiing and lives in Florida to avoid winter at all costs. I said things like “ it’s fun” and “it’s really pretty on the summit”. None of that convinced her that I should risk avalanches, rockfall or extreme cold just to have fun and see some pretty mountains. The question kept bugging me. Then, I had two days, back-to-back, that gave me the answer.

I had spent a week on the couch with a sickness that can only be described as the “snowdown flu”, a combination of airborn pathogens and hangover unique to Durango’s annual winter festival. By the time the weekend came around I wasn’t fully recovered, and I watched as my friends packed up for a couloir skiing adventure, one that that would take them into the mountains for the whole weekend. I loaned out my ice axe and crampons to those who would need them and watched them all leave the house, knowing I had to do something or risk going crazy with envy. So I went to the ski resort.

Purgatory was packed and I was immediately reminded why I had been riding powder for the last month. Drunk tourists conflicted with other, more drunk, highschoolers and the view from the lift made the slopes look more like a zoo than a ski resort. I found my way to lift 2 and decided that I would spend the day in the terrain park, where I could hit rails and listen to music in peace. I almost never snowboard alone. It seems like there had always been people around, teammates, roommates, strangers, girlfriends. I thought about all of them as I avoided social interaction at all cost, keeping my headphones in and sliding the same rails over and over again. I was lost in thought.

I have been snowboarding for fifteen years. In that time, I’ve made friends, travelled, competed, climbed mountains and learned more from those experiences than I have from any school I’ve been to. For once, alone, I had the chance to think about all of it. I hit rails and rode the halfpipe, landing tricks I had never tried before, falling and getting back up again. I spent most of the day in the pipe, getting bolder and bolder and relishing those brief moments of flight, watching the world turn beneath my feet.

As a whole the day was hectic. I helped a man with a broken leg, was harassed by a local alcoholic, lost my backpack and was asked the most absurd question I’ve ever been asked: “are you a good snowboarder?”. The kid was wearing a biggie smalls-style ski mask and drinking a PBR.  Should I lie? Am I a good snowboarder? What does that even mean? I thought about the drills I did on snowboard team, the competitions, the inspiring mountains I had climbed, all those incredible days. I gave the most convincing answer I could, “sure man. I guess.”  At home that night I got a text from my friend Matt, asking if I wanted to go into the backcountry the next day. Thank God I thought. I did.

We Planned to ski the Coyotes Tooth, a long, thin chute that scars the north face of Kendal Benchmark, a mountain that looms tall over of Silverton. On the drive up highway 550 we trailed lines of cars speeding and swerving on their way to Purgatory, where we left them to wait in lines of traffic as we sped along the open road into the high alpine meadows of Molas Pass. When we pulled into the trailhead for the Coyotes tooth we were the only car in the small, icy pullout next to the headwaters of the Animas River.

Skinning up, Matt and I fell into a comfortable rhythm, catching up on the past few months of our lives, our hopes for the future and our plans to follow them. It was already a far cry from the previous day, where I avoided contact with the angry simmer of tourists and park rats at the resort. We skinned up a road, switch backing through thick forest until a high alpine basin came into view, the twin couloirs of the coyotes tooth thick with shadow in the otherwise bright morning and held up by a long triangular apron of fresh powder snow.

The basin was cold, colder than expected, and I found myself donning layers as I hiked. The cold only added to the sense of isolation in that high mountain basin, where I could see peaks in every direction and know that we were the only ones here, hanging above the house-studded valley of Silverton. The approach to the couloir was getting steeper, the snow cold and light. We worked hard just to make it to the base of the line, where I strapped my snowboard to my back and took hold of my borrowed ice axe. The bootpack was long, and I had to kick three or four times with each step to break through the ice. The higher we went, the more alien the environment became.

It is hard to explain the magic of the high mountains in winter, things are different there in a way that is hard to explain. The signs are small at first: waves of windblown snow gathering into swirling striations across the ground, ice crystals refracting and filling the ground with every color of the rainbow flashing bright in the sun. The higher you go, the stranger it gets. Sun dogs grace the sky, circling the sun in rings of refracted light, windblown snow glowing in the heat of the sun and making the sky oscillate like the floor of a shallow sea, trees encased in snow, rock walls encased in ice, a sky as large as the world itself. I saw all these things as I climbed higher through the snow, ever steeper between the tall rock walls.

At the top of the couloir, the snow formed a wall, 55 degrees and steeper, making the bootpack feel less like a hike and more like a climb. I was kicking myself for loaning out my crampons. At the top, we looked east onto the steep ice-covered walls of Kendall benchmark and west across the valley, level with the high peaks. The sky was electric blue, and the mountains faded into turquoise in the impressive distance. It was one of those days where the mountains become mirrors of the sky and everything seems to float, as though the whole earth were flying. I gave Matt a satisfying high-five and dropped my pack. It was time to go down.

When I was in high school I read a book called snowboarding to Nirvana. In the book, a snowboarder goes to the Himalayas and becomes the disciple of a Buddhist monk. There is a chapter of that book that has stuck with me for years, where the monk describes the interaction between a person’s bodily awareness and their mental awareness, that in order to move the way you want to, you must think accordingly. Conflict between the body and mind creates chaos. I began to practice his method and make my own changes, creating a little ritual for myself. Since then, every time I’ve dropped in on my snowboard I’ve taken a moment, drew a few deep breaths, wiggled my toes and found some song that represents how I want to ride the line in front of me. Sometimes it’s classical, sometimes it’s a certain guitar riff or single note that I resonate with. This time, looking down at that steep and narrow chute I chose the song that comes to me when I’m scared and about to do something that I will remember for a very long time. Taking a breath, I slid onto the steep face and launched into a turn, releasing a wave of slough that scattered around my feet as I jumped again. Then again, and again.

Hearts racing, Matt and I met at the bottom of the couloir smiling and laughing. It was the kind of laugh that erupts when you make it back to safety, away from the intensity that nobody wants to fully acknowledge. We rested for a moment, then looked down on to the long apron leading back to the road. It was clean and untracked, cold and soft.

I stilled my breath and stood for a moment, Then tipped forward and fell into a long toeside turn, gathering all the speed I could as I raced across waves of windblown chatter until in an instant the ground opened up, wind whipping all around, and I leaned into the snow with all my weight at full speed. Then again and again, Faster and faster, letting my hand drag into snow and watching it flash in the light of the sun, feeling the force of each turn as I lay into the surface of the earth as fast as I could go, pushing and pulling against gravity. The ground leveled out and I kept turning, left and right, letting the snow put me where it wanted. I ran out of speed and just stood there, watching as matt threw clouds of snow into the air, the wind whipping off the ridges and the sun shining in every direction. Everything had energy. I recalled that feeling from moments before, Kinesis, the lightness of falling and floating, and knew in an instant what if felt like. Have you ever had a dream of flying?  One where you knew exactly how wings felt in the air despite never having flown before? That is how snowboarding feels. Snowboarding is a dream of flying. And that is why I thought. For me, it is the one thing that straddles the line between dreams and reality.

Matt came down whooping and laughing, and I joined him. we made our way back to the road, where we slashed the sides of the road cut, taking minutes to go down what had taken us an hour to go up. Looking up at the mountain we had climbed I felt an immense satisfaction, and looking to Matt I knew that he felt it too. Some people had spent the morning in church, and we had spent the morning walking in the sky, dreaming of flying.