Give Monogamy a Chance

Another evening of neighborhood couloir skiing. No traffic. Photo: Dillon Spencer

Consistent touring partners are a fickle beast. Good ones—the sort you build a “partnership” with—require the confluence of several factors. It’s like dating, but maybe even harder. It’s a very Goldilocks sort of quest.

My girlfriend’s third cousin Matthew moved in with us in Salt Lake last winter after several years in the San Juans. He and I were friendly beforehand and had toured together a handful of days, but not much. After years of seasonal weekend and holiday work, my schedule was flipping to a more traditional weekend warrior model, meaning many of my friends would be working my days off. How rude. I would need to find a few new friends to ski with. 

Last winter, Matthew lived in a carpeted, windowless garage abutting our kitchen. Initially, I worried this arrangement would be noisy for him and bothersome for my clonking around the kitchen.

I quickly realized that being able to ask him to ski while eating Cheerios was worth the bother. Disturbing him proved difficult, too, as his computer-based job often required less time per week from him than most folks spend cooking, so there was little work to interrupt. The upshots were we skied and we skied and we skied, and Matthew got a great performance review this year.

Consistent touring partners are a fickle beast. Good ones—the sort you build a “partnership” with—require the confluence of several factors. It’s like dating, but maybe even harder. It’s a very Goldilocks sort of quest.

My dream partner must be fun to be around all day, safe (obviously, but not too safe either), mountain capable up and down, motivated to get out (on bigger objectives far from the road), dependable (to me, but not their employers, friends or spouses), available very regularly (with simple, flexible logistics), willing to enjoy bad snow and bushwhacking adventures, and, perhaps most critically, amenable to my many bad ideas. And, just like dating, ships can pass in the night if the circumstances aren’t quite right. 

Basically, I am looking for a psyched, unemployed single person with no pets or other partners who live close by and will succumb to peer pressure. Ideally, they don’t mind bad snow, blisters, or uncertainty. Am I asking too much? You bet, but there’s no harm in looking for a Prince Charming. 

As most know, last winter was deep from start to finish, wet and wild at every turn. It was a winter of very few full moon tours but exceedingly good skiing around the clock, day after week after month. Almost every tour held an untold bounty: the perfect accelerant for getting out a lot. I won’t froth for a winter come and gone, especially sitting under this current, dismal, high-pressure dome, but suffice it to say, we were all very excited to get out to the limits of our bodies and schedules.

Miraculously, Matthew moved in just as that six-month storm train kicked off. Our skiing and partnership entrained itself as the days grew longer. We snuck in our first few tours mostly in the dark as I had to study for fall semester finals. The tours were cautious as both the early season instability and our boyish politeness towards each other slowly healed. 

Splendid glade skiing across the hall from heavily travelled touring terrain in the Wasatch. Spencer Dillon

Schwackineering in a neighborhood couloir. We took a wrong turn. Photo: Dillon Spencer

For a time, we frequented glades too deep to ski, but it was all there was to be done. As the bigger terrain opened up in January, we began to push each other more and more. My schedule mandated afternoon and evening tours, but we didn’t let that stop us from skiing the low elevation couloirs near our house. It was splendid. There was a lot of grinning and late dinner. My rechargeable headlamp was flogged.

My spring trip ambitions began to take more affirmative shape throughout the winter. I would need to ski as much big terrain as I could as fast as possible. Since I was training for a big traverse, I committed to skiing big lines every stable day regardless of snow quality or access challenges. Bushes and crust be damned. Thankfully, as Matthew said, “I struggle to say no to Spencer,” so we did that in our little home range, linking up as much terrain as possible on our few bluebird days. Thankfully, there was not too much bad snow to ski. However, there were piles of access issues.

As anyone who has skied the Wasatch knows, the canyons are a hilarious duality of amazing access and total nonsense. The roads can be an absolute mess, from closures to parking to endless traffic. And the 30 road closure days Little Cottonwood presented forced us to get inventive with our skiing. Sitting in traffic was unattractive, especially when I had homework, and Matthew maybe had to hold down a job. So we skied from the valley floor.

Early season storm skiing while I procrastinated studying for finals. We tried to ski down Little Cottonwood that night. Photo: Spencer Dillon

The weeklong Little Cottonwood closure this past April produced one particularly memorable bushwhack-rich valley bottom ski. The stuff along the road was sliding, but we had a hunch that the highest terrain in the range had stayed cool, so we started walking from the lowest trailhead. We planned to ski one or more marquee lines in Bells Canyon and Hogum Fork as time and enthusiasm allowed. We might exit elsewhere and hitch back to the car or something along those lines. Our plan was faith-based. 

Scrub oak dominates the lower elevation bands in the Wasatch. It is stiff, scratchy, dense, and mean. Which we were reminded of. But eventually, we emerged. As we rounded the corner into the upper basin of Bells, about a 1/3 into our day, Matthew admitted he only brought a handful of food for the day, shrugging. 

This was typical.

However, of the many times I’ve sandbagged him, he has remained the optimist, maintaining that three bars would be enough. But then he would also agree to just one more lap, so three bars was never enough. Thankfully, I was ever-prepared for this eventually and bribed him with several peach cups. Excellent children’s food. 

So away we chugged, onsighting fun skiing and eating peach cups on an exceptionally quiet spring day in Wasangeles. As the sun inched down and we ran out of snacks, the question of how we would get back to our car, or even the road, came up. 

Matthew’s food optimism is matched by my terrain optimism. Five miles of gloppy flat skinning? Easy. Turns out not so much.

We ended up on the road, hoping a convoy of cars would be released from the ski areas to whisk us the last few miles back to our car. But we were not so lucky. We walked down the road in ski boots and then barefoot for several miles. Blacktop is rough on the old tootsies. We were both limping when we got to the canyon’s mouth. We giggled, slaphappy, at the mouth as a cop yelled at us (incorrectly) for supposedly violating the backcountry closure (we most certainly did not). Three bars was almost enough. The blisters were terrible. Matthew couldn’t walk for a couple of days. 

The author and Matthew Sumner looking down the Red Line to see if an arcing couloir goes. It did not, but we learned that later. Photo: Matt Skorina

Approaching the unseen ice choke in an unnamed Sierra line. The one-axe downclimb was Matthew’s first ever ice pitch. Photo: Matt Skorina

So, was Matthew a good partner last winter? Hell. Yes. Speaking for both of us, we had an amazing season together. Perhaps more importantly, were we a good partnership? I would say so. Like someone in a great romantic partnership, “I didn’t realize it could be this good.” And that’s been the interesting thing, reflecting on this past winter. 

I hadn’t skied so many days with one person before, and I was gobsmacked by how great it was. Knowing each other and the mountains and having so many shared experiences to draw on makes it so damn fun. And easy. There’s no hemming and hawing about whether to spin, where to ski, or what gear to bring. 

Uncertainty is baked into uphill skiing. That’s part of the joy. Chasing conditions is why skiing a big backcountry line feels more whole-grain satisfying than riding a big loop on my mountain bike. But uncertainty within your partnership? Totally unnecessary for that pleasure unless you like that sort of thing. 

I implore you to try it. Shack up with someone for a season. Probably not someone you’re sleeping with unless you want to make the whole thing more complicated. But someone you’re sleeping near is a great option. And also, like romantic relationships, don’t let great be the enemy of good. Was I the perfect partner for Matthew? No. I had a weird schedule with law school and am a ruthless sandbagger. But he settled for me, and I think we had a great winter together. 

This season has been off to a splendid start. We found a new zone right under our noses and skied it until the sun had long set. We skied a couple of miles out, holding our phones for light, smiles on our tired faces.