After an epic season in the Wasatch, writer Peter Vordenberg wonders about it all and what’s to come. He writes: Winter is joy. And skiing is life. Or you are on the wrong webpage.
Deep hues in the Wasatch. Photo: Peter Vordenberg
Talk to the old timers and they’ll tell you the big years come in twos and threes. Remember ’82-‘84, they’ll say, I’m still shoveling my roof off from ’84. Same with low years, they stack up like tumbleweeds against a fence. Dry and sharp. Until, once again, the jet stream turns just so and storms start lining up off the coast, the powder buoy is bobbing with the promise of a fat, fat winter. One just like last winter, the winter of ’22-’23, a winter so fat people started getting pissed off. Even ski bums as die-hard as your mom warned you about were driving to Moab just to see the color brown.Even if it was once true that the big years come in sets, is it still true?
On the one hand, optimism is a nice way to face the uncertainty of life. Might as well smile every chance you get, and you get the chances you make. As part of my crafting here, I was going to mention the other hand—let’s put that off for a moment.
As I type this the season isn’t over. There is still snow to ski. But. Let’s say you’ve stuck a fork in it, if only to recover from some aches and pains, how then should we think about next season and the future in general?
The Buddhists may say something like, go ahead and have whatever expectations you want, but don’t hold too tight. It’s the holding on that hurts. That’s easy to say, but I’m willing to bet the Buddha never cut a fast arc through cold smoke, an experience so fantastic that you and I both have and would suffer whatever we must and without qualms to do it as often as possible. And you know where I’m coming from. Winter is joy. And skiing is life. Or you are on the wrong webpage. The ‘22-’23 season had so many good days I can’t remember them all. I was that guy that always wins the hotdog eating contests (Joey Chestnut) and skiing was my hotdog. Wait. Let me rethink that last line. Gobbling ski days like hotdogs. No. Anyway, I wasn’t skiing like it was my job. I was skiing like it was my religion. And I am a zealot. Chock full of zeal. I do remember this one ski in particular. It was way back in December. My wife and I got out together, and ate some freaking powder. Choked on it, laughing and coughing and swooping downhill in great clouds of joyous glory. And that was December. It. Kept. Coming.
My wife and I got out together, and ate some freaking powder. Choked on it, laughing and coughing and swooping downhill in great clouds of joyous glory. And that was December. It. Kept. Coming. Photo: Peter Vordenberg
Month’s later and I haven’t quit for the year, but life’s obligations have made the time I have to get to skiing shorter and the distance to snow longer. This, I will admit, has brought on the blues. I was able to almost single-mindedly ski from mid-October until they let the freaking elementary school kids go for the summer. The true end of ski season. The Rug Rats want to go to the pool, and… look, I am their father. Dad joke.
So, I woke up this morning, and I couldn’t go skiing
I said, that I woke up this morning,
and I couldn’t go skiing
And it gave me the blues.
According to the great singer Todd Snider, That’s how you know it’s really the blues, when it starts in the morning.
I adjusted to the change in circumstances, as adults are supposed to be able to do, and am now enjoying life in mostly non-ski ways. Though every now and then I get the chance to shoulder the skis and take them for a long walk through fields of wild flowers, over jumbles of lichen covered stone just to lay white marks like a snake’s shape in what is startlingly dirty snow.
Now, about this summer snow. The biggest snowpack in history went very fast. Wind blew, dust flew, the snow turned brown, the sun heated the brown snow and melted that shit right quick. It is also very likely that brown dust is highly toxic. See it blows off what was the Great Salt Lake, whose imminent drying demise caught a slight hiatus with this huge snow year, but nevertheless, a lot of toxic dust has been exposed by the drying lake and this makes up a good bit of the dust hastening the snow’s melt. Now this cyanide laden dust is flowing back down stream toward the lake and into our water supply. So what we didn’t already breathe, we now drink.
There’s your teaser about the other hand.
“Optimism may or may not be a choice. There is a gene for that. And certainly our life’s experiences snap it on, or not, leaving you a smiling do-gooder or wearing all black and smoking cigarettes because fuck it man its all going up in flames anyway.
On the other hand, we’re facing the undeniable consequences of our eternally optimistic faith in technology. Burn a few dinosaurs too many, we’ll figure it out. Well. Maybe. But the scientists tell us things are going to get hard and then get harder. And what happens after that is up to what we do right now.
My wife, an optimist of such power she can summon joy from the pits of hell, also lives by the seemingly contradictory motto, that low expectations are the key to happiness. (I’m unsure what that says about her choice of a life-partner.)
Optimism may or may not be a choice. There is a gene for that. And certainly our life’s experiences snap it on, or not, leaving you a smiling do-gooder or wearing all black and smoking cigarettes because fuck it man its all going up in flames anyway. There is a draw to the freedom of total pessimism. Nihilists, Donny… “We believe in nothing Lebowski! And tomorrow we come back and cut off your Johnson!” One thing is for sure. We can’t optimism ourselves out of this mess. We have to face the very music we’ve composed and figure out a way to add less carbon to the atmosphere. Though the outcome of our work may be hard to predict, we better act fast and with the expectation of success or start figuring out how to eat cyanide dust and ski hot ash.
I rarely look in the mirror. Basically only to put in contacts. I go through life with egg on my face. But at least I am blissfully unaware. Occasionally I do catch a glimpse of myself and I ain’t as young as I feel, but I’m no old timer. I ain’t a Buddhist, but I wish I was. I don’t burn a lot of gas, but I ain’t a radiantly glowing part of the solution either. This ain’t about skiing. I know. I get that. But we’re skiers and as such we are canaries in this coal mine, we’re front line, we’re witness to rapid change that lies so far outside the normal ebb and flow of fat years and dry years that it’s like finding a hippo in the shower. Jesus Christ man, you have to shout, “there’s a hippo in the shower! There’s a hippo in the shower! The British are coming! The reservoirs are so low they’ve found Jimmy Hoffa and the boat he went down in!. The glacier is gone! The Polar Bear can swim no more, the snow is the color of death, this is not a drill!”
Through luck or choice I am an optimist, but I am here to tell you that about next season and the seasons after that, I am scared.
Zig and Zag. Photo: Peter Vordenberg
The problem is that this isn’t scary enough. As fast as it’s happening it isn’t like a bomb going off. It hasn’t really caught many people’s full attention. Honestly, I’m not sure what scares people any more. Climate change isn’t an angry guy storming the school with a rifle. And even that hasn’t proven scary enough to evoke anything like a reasonable reaction. We’re going with the thoughts and prayers strategy on all this stuff. A form of sweeping it under the rug and returning our full attention to the screens in our hands – where you might be reading this, if you happen to be bored at an especially long red light. I cast no stone. I plead guilty on all counts. I’m down on bended knee.
This snow year has held off panic. Inappropriately. Because it seems the old timers are no longer correct. If they ever were. Let’s confront the statistics. With the right math there is no doubt we can make up a story that fits our narrative. 1948, ’49 and 50 were stellar years. Then ’52 stands alone above 600 inches and is followed by five unremarkable years. This pattern persists, up and down, years in tandem, years alone, up and down. ’69 through ’75 were good years, and ’82, ’83 and ’84 were indeed epic. ’93, ’95 through ’98, very strong years. 1981-82 had 748 inches and 1994-95 had 745, both of these records we eclipsed with this season’s 901 inches. That’s porno material. You can’t watch those kinds of numbers in Utah without proving your age first.
The pack dipped below 400 inches just 9 times in the 54 years between 1946 and 2000. In the 10 years between 2012 and 2022 the pack dipped below 400 inches 8 times. 8 times in 10 years vs 9 times in 54 years.
If there are patterns to see here it is younger eyes that are seeing them. 2011-2016 never saw the snow pack over 393 inches and in that period we saw a record low over the 2014-15 season of 267 inches and the ’21-’22 season came close with 282 inches. We never had a season under 300 inches before 2015.
Yeah. Those early 80’s were good years for those who remember them. The snow was deep. Burt Reynolds was at the top of his very long peak, and if you are a life-long pubescent white male this is when America was Great. You could picture yourself driving that Trans Am so god damned fast the law could never touch you, Sally Field was by your side, the Confederate flag painted across your hood, and you roared down the road without a worry in the world, or your world anyway. Though that Trans Am never got a scratch there was a lot of wreckage in its wake. And that’s what we’ve got to reckon with now, the results of our exuberant greatness. Next season may be fat. But the smart money is on thin. The pattern is clear and it isn’t an accident. It is our own doing. It is with shame that I admit I’m complicit. I do not stand apart let alone above. I used to think I never looked in the mirror because I wasn’t vain. Now I realize its because I’m afraid I might meet my own gaze.
But wait! Don’t give up! Do you ever wake up tired in the morning? If you are like me, you might. And that is why I like coffee. Because climate pessimism, self-blame, guilt, and the resulting helpless inaction are a cycle we can break free of. There are actions you can take. And we are people of action, we skiers. Pour yourself a cup. Here is the solution I’ve found. I asked myself what my role could be. I knew I wasn’t going to be a Greta Thunberg or an Al Gore or my neighbor who gave up just about everything, or my climate warrior friend Bill Barron. But I knew I had something to offer, some things I could do better. In my case I asked my friend Bill what I could do. And so I started doing some work for Citizens Climate Lobby. I did some writing, some filming and photography, some outreach and organization in my ski community. I even sat on a panel once, as close to Al or Greta as I’m likely to get. There is likely more than one way to beat the blues, but for me action is always the best way. I have to try to do the best I can within the life I’m living.
I mean, I have kids, and in the end it isn’t really my own gaze I need to meet. It’s theirs.
