Words: Michael “Izzy” Israelson 2018-01-17 18:34:14
Joy is the response of a lover receiving what he loves. This is the joy we feel when skiing powder…This overflowing gratitude is what produces the absolutely stupid, silly grins that we always flash at one another at the bottom of a powder run. We all agree that we never see these grins anywhere else in life.—Dolores LaChapelle, Skiing Powder Snow: Forty Years of Ecstatic Skiing, 1993.
I don’t recall when I first noticed Dolores LaChapelle. I’d hear the occasional reference to her writings while reading about Colorado ski history. But at some point, I did notice her, and was intrigued. She was someone asking skiing’s core question: “How could I live without powder?”
I began searching for a hard copy of one of her books, a difficult task. In the meantime, I researched this writer, researcher, teacher, mountaineer and skier who had perfectly encapsulated something so simple and profound. And I found the quotes were just the start to this prophet of powder.
Dolores—“one of ski history’s 10 most influential women,” as awarded by the University of Utah—was born in 1926 in the near-frontier town of Denver. She began skiing early, and upon graduation from Denver University in 1947, she worked as an instructor at the year-old Aspen Mountain ski area. Meanwhile, she explored the surrounding mountains, and by age 20 had summited all of the state’s 54-plus 14,000-foot peaks. She even notched the first ski descent of Alberta’s 12,293-foot Mount Columbia.
The ever-curious Dolores found a kindred spirit in Edward LaChapelle, a Pacific Northwesterner with a background in physics. After getting married, the two moved to Davos, Switzerland, where Edward began a lifelong study of avalanche science. After a year spent skiing the Alps, the couple began a seasonal shift between Alta, UT and Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula, raising their son Randy on a mix of untracked Wasatch powder and massive western red cedars.
Edward’s research brought the couple back to Colorado in 1973, to the town of Silverton. Dolores and Edward split soon after, though amicably, and Edward moved to Alaska, where he helped develop the first avalanche beacon. Dolores made Silverton her home. There, she kept up correspondence with legendary poet and writer Gary Snyder, and set down her own writings of the sacred interaction between humans and nature:
One can never be bored by powder skiing because it is a special gift of the relationship between earth and sky. It only comes in sufficient amounts in particular places, at certain times on this earth: it lasts only a limited amount of time before sun and wind changes it. People devote their whole lives to it for the pleasure of being so purely played by gravity and snow.
Dolores would spend the next 40 years teaching and skiing in Silverton. She passed away in 2007, and Ed flew down from his off-grid cabin in Alaska for the memorial. After revisiting the powder fields of Monarch Pass, he suffered a fatal heart attack just 11 days later.
It was from Silverton that I received my first tangible piece of Dolores’ work, a small book titled Skiing Powder Snow: Forty Years of Ecstatic Skiing. I devoured it, dog-earing pages and underlining quotes. Skiing Powder Snow was to become a life coach and literary companion to me—the Portable Dolores LaChapelle.
The little book travels everywhere with me now, wherever there is snow. Occasionally, I open to a random page, hoping for serendipitous words I didn’t know I was meant to read. They are usually spot on. Like Dolores.
Powder snow skiing is not fun. It is life, fully lived, life lived in a blaze of reality…Once experienced, this kind of living is recognized as the only way to live: fully aware of the earth and the sky and the gods and you, the mortal, playing among them.
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