Veneers of Nuance

I’ve done a bit of low-key traveling this winter to far more complex and objectively hazardous zones than mine here in Central Oregon. While complexity regarding terrain is and can be on the menu, it’s my experience that it’s easy for me to avoid tough-to-read terrain altogether around Bend. Call it meadow skipping, conservative choice making, wimpiness, or just the nature of the maritime snowpack of local stratovolcanoes, read-and-run skiing isn’t the tricky calculus problem it might be elsewhere. 

You can find tough-to-read terrain here, but you’ve often got to seek it out.  

As a novice in zones like the Wasatch, I was recently reminded of my penchant for putting my tail between the legs: a submissive sign to larger cosmic energies and the physical reality of unfamiliar terrain. The plan was simple enough: skin up a flank of the Cardiff Fork and drop into a run on the Mineral Fork. I’m certain that Wasatch locals and those with less-frayed nerves than mine would find such an endeavor, no matter the run selection, a casual affair. What I found wasn’t exactly uber complex, but terrain vagaries seemed to shape-shift on the micro rather than the macro scale. I skied first on the initial section into the Mineral Fork. Think sparse trees, here and there, for several hundred meters, and then a terrain inflection point, a pivot a few meters to my left, and I’d pitch onto a rollover and a different aspect. Trending to my right was an open gully that looked more like a way for a mountain to flush snow than a panel offering turn-making bliss. Although the panel looked like turn-making bliss, part of my lizard brain was bathed in chemicals telling me hic sunt dracones, or “Here be dragons.”

I pulled up on an island of safety and radioed to the party that the skiing was fine with a mild case of wind loading to keep an eye on. We regrouped, discussed our options, and continued to find excellent snow to the tarmac, followed by an enlightening ride back up to the Cardiff Fork with a lifty at Brighton, who picked us up.  

The word I keep returning to as I consider my ability to read terrain and realize that maybe I don’t know anything is nuance. Merriam-Webster defines nuance as “a subtle distinction or variation.” In other words, in the mountains, nuance can mean something so minuscule that we blow right past it or pull up, stop, ruminate, assess, and make a judgment. Sometimes it’s a bad judgement.