Mountains

New Year’s Resolutions are (still) Stupid.

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

Before we get started, I should mention that New Year’s Resolutions are still a stupid tradition. I don’t feel this way out of an objection to self improvement, of course, as much as from the belief that if you’re unwilling to effect a change in your life on December 31, you’re probably going to be every bit as unwilling to make that same change on January 1.

More often that not a New Year’s Resolution is an excuse to put off trying something new until some time in the future (how about January?), and the rate at which we fail on our resolutions is, at this point, a cliché.

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Publically stating your goals for the year seems like a good way to increase your accountability. In reality, the act of making the statement usually suffices to let your friends and loved ones know what you’d like to improve in yourself, and that’s about where it ends. With a New Year’s Resolution, a dramatic act of proclamation replaces the slow and deliberate effort required to modify behavior.

I’ve been fairly outspoken about this, which is why it will probably come as a surprise that I’m about to encourage all of you to make a resolution this year.

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Most of these so called resolutions are silly, nebulous things. “I’m going to give up carbohydrates.” “I’m going to exercise more.” “I’m going to eat more cheese.” They’re difficult to quantify, continuous challenges that take significant commitment in order to yield any palpable benefit. On the other hand there are a number of discrete actions, things we only need to do once or twice, that fit more squarely with the nature of The Resolution and still improve our quality of life.

And so, in 2016, you should go someplace alone.

I don’t mean the entire year. Or a month. Or even necessarily a week. For most people even a few days will probably be a huge shock. What I do mean is alone. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to hike into a Wildnerness and stay there for a while (although that does sound nice). It means that you should take some time to travel and disengage from your status quo.

Alone does mean don’t bring anyone with you. Don’t go visit friends or family. Leave town, and don’t take the computer. Turn off the phone. Let an auto-reply tell your world here that you’ll be right back.

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Take a few days away from work and from family. Away from the cell phone and emails, and remember what it is you like to do. Bring a book or a journal. Bring a camera or a sketchbook. Or don’t bring anything.

If you disconnect entirely, if you can be completely selfish for even a few days, you can fill your days with exclusively what you want to do. You’ll remember a lot about what really makes you happy. You might even learn something new. Don’t feel pressure to come back and tell stories, or put pictures on Instagram. Just go and be with yourself for a little bit.

You might remember that you like to paint. Or write. Or that you want to exercise because it makes you feel better, not because you looked frumpy in the hot tub at Christmas. You might even find that eating more kale is something that you’re really passionate about.

The only changes that will stick are the ones that you really want to make. The first step is remembering what they are.

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Crappy Limericks Vol. 1: Notes from the Skintrack

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

The forecast brought tidings of powder,
And the weatherman’s warnings grew louder.
“On ice cars will skate,
The storm skiers will sate,”
Instead Friday served soupy warm chowder.

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Now we’ve all got that best friend we hate,
“At the trailhead, I’ll meet you at eight!”
The alarm time they dread,
Eight still finds them in bed,
On Saturday both Bens ran late.

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One Ben won’t leave town unfed,
The other (for one night) was wed,
‘Spite an evening of ale,
That Ben broke all the trail,
And should really have left me for dead.

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Daybreak that morning was pale,
Soft light bathed the peaks to be scaled,
The party was spritely,
I walked in back rightly,
My legs had the heft of a whale.

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Short days and my fitness pair nicely,
Fall training I have taken lightly,
But days now get longer,
In March I’ll be stronger,
So long as I hike the Bowl nightly.

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In rev’rence we reached the top somber,
Until Matt regaled us like songbirds,
“Here’s to good friends!
The means earn the ends!”
We dropped in to find snow, deep and bomber.

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How Was The Skiing, Really?

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

This time of year ski conditions tend to be pretty variable from day to day. Where last week it might have been twenty below and windy, tomorrow it could rain to 8,000 feet. The snowpack tends to be a little thin, and weather in the valley is frequently wildly different from weather in the mountains. As the season is starting to ramp up, the quality of the skiing is kind of a crapshoot.

Because of this, most water cooler and brewery conversations starting around Columbus Day John Lennon’s birthday navigate toward whether you’ve been skiing, where you went, and how it was up there. This is a highly subjective kind of conversation. Some people are only interested in deep powder, others just like being out in the mountains, and others allow their definition of “good skiing” to shift with the tone of the season. If it’s been nothing but breakable crust for a month, after all, a non-breakable crust starts to look pretty good.

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More often than not, it seems like people feel a need to justify the time and effort they spent to go find snow, which leads to palpable inflation in the quality of the skiing between the time your roommate took off her boots and the time that you met her for a pint. If you’re looking for a reliable story, you’re better off asking your grandfather about the biggest fish he ever caught than your buddy how the skiing was on Halloween.

What’s interesting about these early season conversations is how much superlative language is used to describe skiing that tends to be subjectively marginal. In fact there seems to be an inverse relationship to how fantastic the reports of skiing are, and how good the skiing really was.

So how was the skiing, really? Here are some helpful hints.

“Bro, so epic.” – No it wasn’t. Aside from being categorically wrong, it probably didn’t even meet any of today’s lax standards. The powder was not over their head. They probably hit a bunch of rocks. This person is really just trying to show that they’ve been out already, and have insider knowledge that you, the patient skier who approaches skiing by the season or by the lifetime, do not. Don’t sweat it.

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Epic, bro.

“It was awesome up high.” – It was pretty good, after a terrifying drive and a long walk. Worthwhile? Probably. The best skiing since last February? Certainly not. The season’s just getting going, but if you’ve got a day to spend sniffing around for a turn or two, head to the alpine!

“Not too bad, actually.” – Right here in an honest answer. Hit any rocks up there? You know it. Buried trees and willow? Yep. Carry the skis for a while before even putting them on? Probably. But way back there, the skiing was nice. Maybe they found an inch or two of soft snow on a rain crust. Maybe they found a few hundred feet of sastrugi to lap. Whatever they found, it scratched the itch for Thanksgiving turns.

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The dog prefers more of a supervisory role.

“It’s good! Let’s get out.” – No hyperbole here. Just an honest assessment that if there’s skiing at all, it’s probably a good way to spend some time. If it was all just breakable crust, this person would tell you about it. So go find your skins, change the batteries in your beeper, and try to get all your crap at least in one place. The next time this person calls, you’ll want to be ready to go.

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How was the skiing? Just check Instagram! That’s sure to be reliable.

“Pretty fair.” – You blew it. The casual understatement. The humble nonchalance. This person had a damn good day, and you probably should have gone when they invited you. They know it’s a long season and it’ll be filled with good days to come, so they’re not going to rub it in. But let there be no doubt, this person found the goods, and probably only hit a couple of rocks.

At the end of the day, though, the only way you can be sure is to go out and see for yourself. Who knows? It might even be ok.

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Skiing Isn’t Epic: a discourse on discourse

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 3 Comments

“Oh, I think I get it,” my dad said. “They’re like cold surfers.”

It was the morning after Thanksgiving. The family had trickled down to the living room, each filled a cup of coffee, and filed in one by one behind me to partake in my favorite Thanksgiving tradition: drinking coffee and watching ski movies on YouTube.

“Cold surfers” he said. The implications were damning. Surfing is a helluva sport. It’s as challenging as it’s beautiful, and, in a lot of ways, shares an aesthetic with backcountry skiing. In each sport the putative reward occupies a small fraction of the time spent pursuing it; hours on the skintrack yield minutes of powder turns the way hours of paddling yield moments in the curl. In each case the purpose of the sport far transcends that fleeting rush, and happiness comes from the calm of the day.

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Of course this isn’t at all what my dad was talking about. He was talking about this:

We sound like idiots.

Without detracting from some of the passionate conversations that we all have about skiing, there are a few words I’d like to expunge from the skier’s lexicon, so that we all might be taken a little bit more seriously in the future. Remember, you might have to talk about this at a cocktail party.

Epic – This one is a no brainer. The pow yesterday was not epic. The traffic on I-70 on Saturday is not epic. The 11k vert you hiked one day last winter was not epic, even though it was windy and your buddy was hungover and you had to break trail, like, the whole time. The word “epic” refers to stories of heros and gods that span decades and govern the fates of nations. Nothing you have ever done is epic. I’m sorry you had to hear it from me.

Awesome – This one isn’t just misused by skiers, but I think we should carry the banner for relegating the word “awesome” to the fringes of discourse. To be in awe is to be agape with reverence and fear. To be struck dumb by wonder. Boot warmers are not awesome. Your new $500 hardshell is not awesome. The water cycle that makes it snow every year is actually pretty awesome, though, if you sit down and think about it.

Bro – Bro had a good run. I almost didn’t hate it for a while. It evoked the kinship of fraternité in the rhetoric of our time. One for all, all for one, bro. And then I spent a little time on the beach and guys I just met, otherwise intelligent, successful, articulate guys, kept calling me bro without a hint of irony. It was wrong. A cartoon. A caricature of solidarity. It’s time for bro to go. Also if you keep using it you’re just going to wind up getting ridiculed on Jezebel or something.

Sick – I never understood this one. When has sick been good? Is this supposed to be ironic? If so we should look past the work of Alanis Morisette for that definition, because it’s also wrong. The only way “sick” is a good thing is if you lie about being it to go skiing. Otherwise you’re just putting yourself in the same camp as these guys.

Fireball – I’d like to think that we’re all on the same page by now, but apparently that’s not the case. This word turns up most frequently as your jerk roommate is clamoring for a place at the bar après. Fireball? Really? What the hell, do you not watch Fox News? This shit is antifreeze. Stop drinking it.

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I think I’ve covered the most egregious affronts to the skier’s image here, but if I’ve missed any, please don’t hesitate to chime in.

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What do you do?

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

The scene is a familiar one. You’re in a room full of people you don’t know, and your friend who brought you there has disappeared. You’re standing just far enough away from the buffet table to keep from looking like you’re hovering, but still close enough that you’re plausibly browsing the options rather than just standing in the corner comparing shoe laces. You’re clutching a Manhattan.

You’re doing a good job keeping your head low and not making any unnecessary eye contact until you reach for the last bacon wrapped date at exactly the same time as the fat man to your right. Now you’ve done it. You each go through the ceremony of offering the vittle to the other, and before you know it you’re stuck exchanging small talk with a stranger.

You’re doomed.

The conversation starts with how you got to that room, whom it is you know in common, and how much colder fifty degrees feels in the fall than in the spring. You touch on how daylight savings time always catches you off guard and maybe you exchange names. Then he asks, “and what do you do?”

What do you do for a living? What do you do for fun? How do you spend your free time? Or is this bacon-date sniping man mostly interested in how, in a single breath, you can convey to him your identity? The question is unclear.

What do you do? If you’re anything like me, then mostly you sleep. That’s an unsatisfying answer for a cocktail party. What do I do for work? Paperwork, I guess, reams of it. And wade through a latticework of bureaucratic absurdity that sits somewhere between the Orwellian and the Kafkaesque. That’s also an unsatisfying answer, apparently. The question is one that I struggle with.

“I like to ski,” I said once at a cocktail party to a small audience, and was greeted with raised eyebrows.”I try to ski a lot,” I insisted. I think they meant to ask what I did for work. But I don’t necessarily identify with what I do for work, and that’s common.

We face a social pressure to label ourselves with our professions, rather than our passions. Partially, this is because our passions are intimate, and strangers at a party haven’t earned the right to know us that well. Identifying with our LinkedIn Profiles is an easy defense mechanism. In doing it, though, we sell ourselves short.

By simplifying our existence to how we occupy the hours between 9 and 5, we fail to legitimize our other talents and interests; we fail to acknowledge the traits that make us individuals.

I’ve told strangers that I’m a geologist. That I do paperwork, or ski, or work in water rights. I’ve lied and said I’m a hunting guide, just to make the conversation more interesting. I’ve told people I’ll never see again that I promote bicycle races, or that I’m a hydrologist, or that I do environmental restoration work, which is all true. I’ve never said I’m a writer and I’m not sure why.

It’s certainly easier to give flippant response over gin drinks and crab cakes than it is to have a real conversation, and there’s a place for lighthearted small talk. But the tendency to disavow the way we like to spend our time in favor of talking about the way we pay our bills is a dangerous standard to set.

If we’re not careful, we might just start to believe that how we make our money is who we really are.

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