Eyeing a nuanced entrance. Stop. Look. Listen. Feel.
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.
Eventually, will a new digital app (with an AI boost) or some decision-making matrix presented at the 2030 ISSW mitigate terrain nuances for us? Some new tools might eventually be useful. Some might reek of an over-promise. To say I’m suspect opens me up to criticism of being a Luddite, a non-futurist (which might be the same as a Luddite-lite), and certainly someone who cannot relate. Fair enough, I don’t ski switch.
Finding equilibrium and allowing gravity to take over. All the while, keeping watch for the nuance streaming by.
My friend Pete Vordenberg sent me an avalanche accident report the other day, cataloged by the Utah Avalanche Center. Two tourers sought turns on Horsehead Peak in the Abajos Mountains outside Monticello, Utah. A few notes: these were locals, these folks had the know-how, and according to the UAC forecaster’s note on the report: “The UAC does not have the resources to provide daily updated forecasts for the Abajo Mountains but instead provides updated snowpack summaries when conditions warrant.”
If you’re not compelled to read the report, maybe these sentences will get your attention. “I dropped in and made my first few turns around the bushes and grass, I shouted back to my partner that the snow was going to be soft enough to make some turns and continued my descent. After 4 or 5 turns the entire, and I mean the entire bowl, shattered like a pane of tempered glass.”
If we want to lock onto today’s theme, the rub here is nuance. The slide ripped in a very shallow snowpack—something like a foot deep.
Pete and I discussed that we were 100 percent certain we would have decided to ski the slope that slid. The nuances, in this instance, would have been lost on me. I can visualize myself making those four or five turns. I guess I am saying that when considering nuance, the margins are sometimes infinitely small, and the warning signs aren’t necessarily like a siren. (We are grateful for the folks who submitted the Abjos report and even more grateful that everyone came home unscathed, and it became a learning opportunity for us.)
For the afflicted among us who cannot stop touring until long after we’re skinning over dirt, pine needles, and stones, there are still hazards out there. We want everyone to come back safe. Perhaps an admission of humility at our inability to fully perceive the veneers of nuance can help us do just that.
