Thor locks his toes and launches into blower powder on the upper hanging face of Arrow Peak. The no-fall panel above the cliff should have been puckering, delicate skiing in all but the best conditions. Luckily, we had the finest conditions. Stopping only to snap a few photos, we skied the entire exposed shelf in cold smoke as convective flurries swirled around the alpine. We didn’t complain once about the lack of corn snow. This hamlet was the anti-hero outlaw my closest ski part-ner, Thor Retzlaff, and I sought. Boots planted firmly in the gravel roads of downtown, downturned brim of a ballcap tucked beneath a foam mountaineering helmet, trigger fin-ger tickling stoppers and bail ’biners holstered on a lingerie-like skimo harness. There Silverton stands, unapologetically itself, prepared to duel every flaccid, colorless aphorism of a mundane, homogenized, overtly commercial industry. We could’ve picked up snowboarding like a half-dozen of my burnt-out ski friends. But we believed skiing’s renegade soul could still be resuscitated. An injection of bushwhacking and steep exposure was the punk rock oomph we (and the industry, in our less than humble opinions) needed. It was only fitting that, despite a jaded dismissal of Lower 48 skiing not feeling “out there” enough, Colorado—yes, that Colorado, only five hours driving from that Vail—would be our stage. We hitched a ride from the edge of town to the top of Molas Pass and, rather than heading uphill toward the roadside classics, pointed our skis and oversize packs down-ward to the Animas River and the towering peaks of the Weminuche rising in the distance. The amphitheater of the Grenadiers sub-range defies most standard constructs of mountains. Warping couloirs and hanging faces described in such gastronomic fashion as “Pringles” and “bear claws” exist somewhere between a Seussian alpine and a ski mountaineer’s fantasy; the range hardly makes sense topographically. Our style of ski alpinism is a smorgasbord of practical utilitarian and impractical aesthetic choices. We chose bivies instead of tents to save weight; we brought two pounds of maté to enjoy a mindset of abundance rather than scarcity. We didn’t bring a water filter or ski crampons. We brought a chess board. We were walking (and skiing) contradictions, but at least we were self-aware. We skied, shuffled, sidestepped and scooched for about 10 minutes. The snow ended abruptly, and we put our skis on our backs and began walking. At the bottom of the canyon, we crossed dilapidated railway ties and noted the time. If we didn’t wish to climb out of this canyon in reverse at the end of our trip, we had to flag down the fol-lowing Monday afternoon’s 3:10 pm narrow gauge train to Durango. Without tickets, there was no guarantee there’d be seats available, nor that the train would even brake at an unscheduled wilderness stop. But going in with minimal beta was part of the plan. First we show up, then we see what happens. Weminuche Wilderness 045
The Ski Journal Volume 18, Issue 1: Page 45
