The Ski Journal • Volume 15, Issue 3 • THE CYCLE OF THINGS

Big, heavy flakes falling in front of the bright red door at Powder Creek Lodge in southern British Columbia is a beautiful sight indeed, but not as beautiful as the foot-and-a-half of cold smoke that would blanket the Purcell Mountains by the end of the day. Photo: Ryan Creary

On a rural road running headfirst into Colorado’s Front Range sits a purple house. Alongside the road tumbles a creek that swells come springtime, cascading down from the dreamy heights of the Continental Divide, its snowmelt originating near my favorite ski hill. From there, it forms the trickle that gains steam as it begins an around-the-globe trek. It won’t be our snow again until it has evaporated and precipitated down countless times over, covering countless continents and countless years, until at last it lands again—in some form—in the Pacific Ocean watershed. Maybe then, by chance, it will rise into a cloud that makes its way over to my neck of the Intermountain West, freezing into another unique flake floating down onto our favorite hill to facilitate our favorite pastime.

This heroic act carries on without much fanfare. But there’s magic inherent in our favorite flake, the majesty of water’s frozen form.

The back door of the purple house sits less than 20 feet from the creek. To my young boys, we referred to it as “Dangerous Creek.” Not because it was, mind you, but because we didn’t want them to take it for granted as it gained its springtime momentum. Astride the dangerous creek sits an old chairlift chair retrofitted as a viewpoint by King Craig and Kelp. Further on, toward the wooden home owned by Crested Butte Sean, a rebuilt ship ladder to a tree house offers a view westward toward the snowy heights that birth the watery passage.

It is in this place that the lovely Miss Meanie and myself have fashioned our lives—made of music, of science, of water, of words and, most importantly, of a feral scene in which our two young boys can come of age in what Bronco Greg described as “an old-fashioned childhood.”

Meanie and I always knew that this was the place. And while my parents questioned the location of our homestead, I take my ultimate comfort in a life born of tree forts and melting snow. I have a loving wife who instills in our kids a love of melody, hard work and above all skiing, the snow and finding your own way. Here was a place for my kids to learn from their own mistakes and to run wild in the windswept foothills.

Because in a world gone mad, there is no better place to find freedom and experience the amateur testing ground of life than sliding pell-mell down a snowy hill. In many ways, it’s everything. On the ski hill, there are no set rules. We follow gravity’s lead and figure out the rest. How big is too big? How steep is too steep? We learn by pushing our boundaries, sometimes too far, and adjusting appropriately. Life in microcosm, skiing as metaphor. Fast, dangerous, occasionally uncomfortable, but punctuated with moments of sheer bliss and profound beauty. All with the undercurrent of water.

I came of age on the hill west of the purple house, skiing first with my dad, then my friends, then a pretty girl, and often on my own. Now two young boys follow close behind—boys who helped me build the tree fort, who tube and kayak down the dangerous creek, who ride the dirt trails next to the little purple house.

Every fall, snow starts falling. Snow that might have begun ages ago as runoff in the stream running behind our home. And on that snow, I can glide on a pair of slippery planks that help unlock what it is that makes life so special in spite of its brief and fragile nature. The boys will one day flow away from me, fall and cascade and be reborn through a thousand adventures on snow; until, one day when I am long gone and the world has changed, some kin will ski over the exact same molecule of frozen water that once supported my own skis, familiar but uniquely different, pouring off the peaks toward the valley below, eager to repeat the cycle.

The Ski Journal - Volume 15, Issue 3

THE CYCLE OF THINGS

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