The Greenness of Green
"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
―
And then, Southeast Alaska was green beyond all green.
Tennis-ball green. Green like the glow of bioluminescence trailing a kayak blade in the Florida Keys. Honeydew green. After weeks of grizzle skies flocked with mist and rain, summer's sudden saturation startles.
The sun crowns the fjord in Klondike gold and, with it, comes a regional heat advisory, though the temperature barely tops 65.
Locals comb the beaches for ingredients for "beach green burritos." Along the Chilkat, they're harvesting spruce tips for beer. The neon-green shoots grow heavy as they ripen, pulling the boughs downward.
A young couple plays with their infant in the intertidal zone. The mud shimmers and ravens circle. The boy sheds his clothes, throws back his head, and screams.
"He was born in winter," they explain, almost sheepishly. "Today's the first time he's ever seen the sun."
A woman with snow-streaked hair walks her dog along the beach, her pants rolled to expose calves the color of cod. Here, comments about the weather carry the weight of intimate conversation rather than pleasantries. Last summer, they say, there were only three days without rain. So much sun, so early in the season, feels almost overwhelming.
"The ache that always lives in my bones," she says, turning toward me, "it's finally gone."
Life in Alaska has a short window in which to get everything done: be born, grow fat, find a mate, raise young, and prepare for winter. It is a meticulously choreographed performance in which all who hurry to the stage know their roles, and nothing hesitates.
The green acts as a scrim to the grand reveals: the brown bears, who I learn are serial monogamists. The oldest female bear recorded in Alaska lived to 39; the oldest male, 38. If I were a brown bear, I'd already be dead.
The only bear we've seen on our lake tours so far is a small black one, romping through the Jurassic skunk cabbage that soars its yellow between plunging cascades. Each day, the sun siphons more snow from the mountaintops, and the water rushes thicker, louder.
On the lake's east side, enormous beaver chips litter the shoreline. They punctuate the green creeping up the mountainside like ivy. The beavers are turning poplars into toothpicks. We never see them attempting the impossible, but if we're lucky, we catch sight of river otters sliding down the banks and disappearing into the water.
One afternoon, we return from a tour to find a dozen tourists spilled from a bus, telescopic lenses trained on the far bank of the river. A cow moose is shepherding her calf through the shallows. The calf's spindly legs wobble as it picks its way around the eddies while its mother pauses, alert and watchful.
Everyone is watching them: the tourists, the guides, the river itself. Eagles peer down from the Sitka spruce. The forest is like a restless audience, holding its breath.
A few days later, I'm tying up kayaks when a veteran guide comes down to the boat ramp. Unlike the green twenty-somethings, who post up for the season in their beater cars with bandanas tied around their foreheads, he’s all brown. This soft-spoken Oberon has eyes like a bear in the forest and wears a weathered khaki jacket. He asks if we've been seeing any bears.
I tell him about the little black bear on the eastern shore.
"Well," Oberon says, glancing toward the river, "they found that baby moose right there on the rocks by the boat ramp yesterday. I reckon that little black bear got it. Lots of scat on the road, too. That's a bad sign. Means they're hungry and coming into town."
He pauses.
"But they got the weir in. Sockeye should be here any day now."
No sign of the mother. They cut back the brush to better see the bears coming.
A group of young guides—the boys shirtless and the girls in bikinis, all of them in Xtratufs—smoke old-fashioned cigarettes on the dock on a sun-spilled day when, for now, no cruise ship is anchored in Haines harbor.
"Smoking is actually good for you because it teaches your lungs to clean themselves," I hear one girl say.
They load cases of beer where they normally load overstimulated tourists into their fourteen-person voyager canoe. The motor roars to life and they bounce toward the back of the lake, slicing through a glassy reflection of mountains collapsed into sky. Their laughter is soon swallowed by the waterfalls.
Like the bears, the otters, the skunk cabbage, and the moose, they are part of summer's great performance. They emerge from the green like the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream: overconfident Nick Bottom turning the color of a boiled Dungeness crab while refusing sunscreen; Peter Quince directing traffic on the dock; would-be Thisbes in tie-dye overalls; Robin Starveling, the mushrooms already kicking in, convinced she's Moonshine.
Merrily they stumble onward, performing their play within a play. There is something beautiful about it—the recklessness, the costumes, the certainty that summer will last forever. On one of nature's grandest stages, far from the critics of the cities, a riot of green.
The last performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream I saw was a decade ago in Central Park. I spent the day waiting for tickets—less standing than picnicking with friends and inching slowly forward, nursing a bottle of rosé.
As the four young lovers ran through the enchanted forest in witless confusion, rain began to fall over midtown. People drifted away, but I stayed. The show went on.
Somewhere as the spell loosened and the lovers found their rightful partners, I realized the play was not really about fairies or magic at all. It was about youth—its certainty, its foolishness, its conviction that every feeling is permanent.
The moose calf had been born like a prop presented to an audience. Dozens of cruise ship tourists stood along the riverbank photographing its uncertain first steps. By now those images are scattered across phones and social media accounts, tiny souvenirs of a life that lasted less than a week.
Most of those people will never think of it again.
But I find myself wondering about the mother. Do moose mourn? Is she still searching the riverbanks? Or has the forest already folded her loss back into itself?
The salmon are coming, Oberon had said.
Summer is short.
Someone Who’s Been There Before
We paddle from Haines to Juneau.
―
Beyond the windows, the Lynn Canal wrinkles beneath a cold wind. White flashes appear between the waves. A gull. A whitecap. A whale.
It is April. Humpbacks are moving north with their calves, leaving Hawaiian breeding grounds for the nutrient-rich waters of Southeast Alaska. Soon the herring will spawn, turning sheltered coves silver. Eagles, sea lions, bears, and whales will gather for the annual feast.
Winter, meanwhile, seems unconvinced it is over. Snow from a record-breaking year remains piled around the parking lot of Haines' waterfront RV park. Meltwater streams down the mountainsides. A damp chill drifts off the fjord. Tomorrow I will spend hours immersed in that water.
For now, there is coffee.
The clubhouse offers the comforts of shore life: showers, Wi-Fi, washing machines. A whiteboard blocks the view. Scrawled across it is an ambitious syllabus: incident management, expedition skills, sea survival.
There are four of us in the guide course. It is scheduled for sixteen days. It will eventually stretch to nineteen.
The Grey Heron is already in the room. Among sea kayakers, he is known as an expedition paddler, coach, and guide. Decades on the water have carried him along remote coastlines from Japan to Norway. He has spent much of his career teaching paddlers how to become guides and guides how to become seamen.
Tall and long-limbed, the sixty-something Brit moves with the economy of someone who has spent much of his life outdoors. He has a habit of pausing before speaking, as if checking conditions. Weather, tide, wildlife, group dynamics—it all appears to occupy the same mental shelf.
In the absence of bears and rough seas, we become the object of observation: a seasoned outfitter from Sitka, a young NOLS graduate already guiding in Alaska, the Wolf whose enthusiasm arrives several seconds before the rest of him, and me, fresh from a winter of teaching skiing.
When the Grey Heron paces before the whiteboard, the room takes on the feel of a vessel underway.
"As kayakers, each individual is captain of their own ship," he says. "Through your leadership, they're going to follow you. Seamanship is about knowing what's coming up."
The course is full of mnemonics: STOP. SAFER. SHEETS. CLAP.
A tourist paddles a kayak along a stretch of coastline.
A sea kayak guide reads the same coastline the way a fisherman reads a tide rip or a hunter reads tracks in fresh snow.
The distinction sounds simple. It isn't.
Long before maps, roads, and GPS satellites, traders crossed deserts, pilgrims crossed mountains, and sailors traversed unfamiliar seas by following someone who had already done it. Guiding remains essentially the same arrangement, albeit with lighter equipment and more expensive gear.
The lessons move quickly from theory to practice.
"Stop! Capsize! Swimmer!"
One by one we tumble from our kayaks and feign hypothermia until the real thing begins to creep in. We tow one another through confused seas, rescue swimmers beneath rain-slick cliffs, descend rock faces in improvised harnesses, and build fires with whatever will burn. The line between exercise and reality proves surprisingly thin.
The Grey Heron's preferred teaching method is disruption. Whenever the group settles into a comfortable rhythm, disaster arrives. A flooded hatch. A shoulder injury. Cold shock. A cardiac arrest. One moment he is paddling quietly among us. The next he is upside down, holding his breath while someone struggles through a rescue.
Every module points toward the same conclusion: weather deteriorates, equipment breaks, people become tired, and assumptions fail. Rarely all at once, but often enough that some scale of catastrophe should be expected as the guide’s constant companion.
Just because people follow you doesn't mean you always lead them well.
A month later, I find myself leading a group of six experienced river kayakers from Letnikof Cove. Their goal is ambitious: paddle the Inside Passage from Seattle to Skagway the following summer. Our job is to show them tides, crossings, and the practical realities of traveling through bear country.
The strongest paddlers quickly pull ahead. A high-school teacher drops behind.
"My arms are screaming at me right now," he says.
"Push with your feet."
Later, around camp, he recounts my advice.
"'Push with your feet,' she told me. Shut the fuck up."
The group laughs.
The guests show little interest in rescue scenarios. What concerns them is weather, mileage, and wildlife. They care about making camp on a beach with a short carry across sand or small rocks. They care about the porpoises surfing a ferry wake and the river otter snacking on a fish until an eagle arrives and attempts to steal it.
They care about seeing Alaska.
The previous summer I had traveled this same route under the watchful eye of a local guide. Waterfalls poured from hanging valleys carved by ice. Evening light moved across the Chilkat Range. Humpbacks surfaced offshore. The place seemed less like Alaska than a rough draft of the planet.
Now I was returning with a pencil. The landscape itself was unchanged, but I had begun to read it differently. Freshwater here, lunch beach there, porpoises off this point, bears on that one. The rough draft was acquiring footnotes.
On the final day, the high-school teacher pulls alongside.
"All jokes aside," he says, "without you guides pushing me along, I would've turned back on day one."
When we reach Juneau, rain falls in sheets. Everything is soaked.
We emerge from the water like seals flushed from a haul-out and gather beside a stranger's fire. Steam rises from wet fleece. Around us, the guests swap stories from the crossing as though it happened years ago instead of hours.
I smile. Before he left, the Grey Heron offered perhaps the simplest definition of a guide: someone who's been there before.
44h 41m (2,635 mi) via Alaska Hwy
Travel sketches from a long drive north.
―
Road trip epigraph:
The interstate goes—
America’s alphabet.
Speed limit: eighty.
The farther we drive from Denver, the more the land opens. Southern Wyoming is so flat it seems to fold back on itself, like a section-sewn hardcover spread open on a table, flexing without breaking its spine. I-25 pursues broad pages of plateau, its gutters stitched with cattle gates and fence lines binding enormous ranches together like exposed thread.
Mile by mile, the truck keeps going, waiting for the story to write itself.
The Wolf flew in from New York to be my copilot on the long, lonely drive north to Alaska. Nearly seventy-eight now, he still wears his guide hat with a hawk feather tucked into the band and is remarkably spritely for someone who stepped off a dawn flight and straight into eight hours in the cab.
He rides shotgun peeling a clementine in one long spiral. Outside, the land opens wider and wider until it can hold almost anything. Memory rushes in to fill it. Herter’s catalogs. Roadside taxidermy. The old American West still flickering at the edges.
He was raised on its iconography in a way I never was. To him, the mesas and antelope are not symbols but returns to a place he’s never been. But his father came here in the 1950s, when the Wolf was a little boy, and shot an elk. He recalls:
Elk head on stone wall—
we bragged to the city kids
about the Wild West.
The wind wakes up and presses against the truck. I watch the fuel gauge sink as we climb hill after hill. It feels like Wyoming is trying to push us back toward Colorado.
Jackalopes linger
on the flat backs of mesas—
taunting the highway.
“They open the Strait, then close it. Open and closed,” the Wolf sighs after we top off at $4.39 a gallon. “They need to just make up their mind.”
There’s the book folding back on itself again.
The sunsets in Montana are so violently colorful they bruise the sky. Neon bands stack along the horizon like pancakes on a griddle. The truck follows the light slightly west, though for two days we have been driving almost exactly due north.
Northern light lengthens—
a compass pointing in twilight
up the latitudes.
The Wolf talks while I drive, though he still leans forward at every vibration in the truck. He thinks something is wrong with the new shocks and pulls up YouTube videos comparing suspension noises, holding the phone close to his face beneath the brim of his hat. I take his criticism personally, as if the truck were something I built myself.
In third grade we drew buffalo and talked about how magnificent it must have been to see them roaming the plains that had become our playgrounds.
Manifest Destiny—
taught like the dinosaur’s end:
violent, natural.
“The white men arrived in ignorance,” they told us, “like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.”
“Huge and clumsy, yes, but ultimately a force of nature: inevitable, impersonal, beyond today’s judgement.”
Little Bighorn wind,
Custer dissolves into sage—
myths riot in dust.
We pass a sign for Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the Wolf jolts upright, startling Sasha who’s claimed him as her cushion.
“Can we stop? I didn’t realize we’d pass this way...”
He feels about Old Westerns the way I feel about skiing in Banff. Along this endless route, we each have our private sites of pilgrimage.
It is off-season, midweek, after hours. Still, a field is a field, and many people died in this one. That makes it the kind of museum whose exhibits reveal themselves like a wound that never fully closes.
The park gates are shut, so we pull into the gravel lot of the Custer Battlefield Trading Post, where rows of white tipis rise beside the interstate. Across the road lies the battlefield itself: craggy bluffs and dissected uplands folding toward the Little Bighorn River. Here, in June 1876, Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho forces defeated the 7th Cavalry.
The story still hangs over the West like a billboard advertising unfinished history. One version survives in trading posts and roadside museums, in Marlboro ads and old books written in heroic tones: doomed cavalrymen making a noble last stand against impossible odds.
But the land remembers differently.
The battle was part of a larger war over expansion, broken treaties, and the seizure of Indigenous land. What became mythologized as “Custer’s Last Stand” was also a decisive Indigenous victory against an advancing empire.
We climb from the truck and wander the closed property. Behind the gift shop, beside racks of toy tomahawks and Custer keychains, sits a mound of buffalo skulls whitening in the sun, their hollow triangles echoing the tipis nearby. Sasha sniffs at the pile of bones and reaches for a horn with her teeth. I pull her away.
The last light clings to the ridge while headlights drift along the interstate below like ghosts moving through the basin. As in places like Gettysburg, after the battles come the highways: shipping lanes, frontage roads, housing developments. The traditional American habit of building forward over the dead.
In the morning, we push on from Billings. This last stretch of America is a land of long trains sliding beneath denim skies.
Road without ending—
belief flattens into miles
beneath prairie sky.
White crosses sprout beside the highway like weeds. The Wolf has figured out how to get Starlink running on his laptop. The bones of the Battle of the Little Bighorn are behind us now, and he seems satisfied he has seen all the Montana he needs to see.
But there are older graves here.
Last year, a rancher near Hell Creek uncovered what may prove to be the largest Tyrannosaurus rex ever found, its teeth nearly fifteen inches long. Leviathans layered beneath leviathans. Cavalry beneath interstate. Dinosaur beneath cavalry. The land keeps burying and revealing itself in turns.
Tyrants under ranch—
Each age leaves its skeleton
inside the next one.
The farther we get from cities, the better the baked goods become.
Boarded-up towns with Main Streets wide enough for wagons reveal local bakeries like pearls tucked inside rough shells. Cinnamon rolls beneath flickering neon. Out here, sweetness survives where almost nothing else does.
Long skirts, lemon steam.
Better than downtown cafés
beside diesel pumps.
We continue north toward the Sweetgrass Port of Entry, where Interstate 15 becomes Alberta Highway 4. The truck rolls forward in silence. We pass the Duty Free shop—with its decent liquor prices and fluctuating hours—without stopping. For now, we have had enough of American history.
An eagle crouches on a frozen deer carcass, tearing into winter’s remains alongside the Icefields Parkway.
This 232-kilometer stretch through Alberta links Lake Louise in Banff National Park to the town of Jasper. The route cuts through high alpine passes, waterfalls tangled in ice, and turquoise glacial lakes.
Before leaving, we did the math twice to make sure we had enough gas to get from one end to the other. The fuel gauge holds it breath.
Near Jasper, a husky stands alone on a frozen lake, its grey-blue coat almost stitched into the ice. I scan for the owner, assuming someone must be ice fishing nearby. But there is no owner, because that is no dog.
“Wolf!” I yell. “Grey wolf!”
By the time the Wolf and Sasha turn to look, it is already gone. The lone predator vanishes back into the spruce-rimmed ice.
We turn off onto a dirt road toward the gas station in Nordegg, where fuel is prepaid in liters and the numbers spin too fast for me to translate.
Antlers over Shell—
sun pools in the roadside mud
like spilled copper light.
A sign for Sunchild First Nation slips past the windshield. Up here, the history of the land’s original peoples feels less entombed than it does back home—not battlefields sealed behind museum gates, but living communities patchworked into the contemporary landscape. Here, there are bridges over roads for wildlife to safely roam.
Deer ricochet wild
through twilight on the Range Road—
tails strike like matches.
Nearly every truck carries Starlink on the dashboard now: white squares tilted toward the heavens, harvesting signal from the open sky. They tether the isolation of rural Alberta to invisible constellations of machinery overhead.
Somewhere beyond them drifts Artemis II, carrying human beings farther into space than anyone has traveled in half a century. Another last frontier. The news says the toilet onboard isn’t working.
Oil wakes early—
breakfast starts before daylight
for the gasfield men.
The Days Inn in Drayton Valley feels like one of those hotels where it is always nighttime: labyrinthine hallways, no windows, doors opening onto nowhere.
I am starving, so I fill a Styrofoam bowl with Froot Loops from the breakfast buffet, which has already been carefully laid out, and quietly steal tomorrow morning’s milk. It is nearly midnight. A stuffed dinosaur and a scattering of Hot Wheels lie abandoned on the ancient carpet, its pattern faded by decades of boots and winter salt. The man at the front desk wears a turban and speaks with a kindness that makes the whole strange place feel briefly less lonely.
A laminated note in the bathroom politely asks guests not to wipe soiled hands on the white towels.
In the morning we take the truck to Young’s Garage to check the engine light that flicked on somewhere in BC. Nothing serious. Still, the Wolf asks the mechanic about the shocks—his pet obsession for the last thousand miles, the thing I’d started to think he was harping on just to needle me. But he’s right. The shocks had been installed backward in Denver and one had rubbed a small hole into the driver’s side wheel well. I stand there feeling vaguely indicted while a gentle mechanic with a husky mix pads around the shop floor. An hour later, the shocks are set properly and we are back on the road again. The Wolf grins.
Oil and natural gas country is vast—the overlooked middle of things. These are the places no one photographs: logging roads disappearing into spruce, mining towns held together by diesel and shift work. In Dawson Creek, the sign marking the start of the Alaska Highway sits awkwardly inside a roundabout. We circle twice so the Wolf can lean out the window and snap a photo.
The Peace Region stretches north in long industrial corridors. Heavy machinery rusts beside gravel lots. A frozen lake with a single bench faces the ice as though someone once intended to stay awhile. At the roadside café in Pink Mountain, Wi-Fi costs two dollars.
A heavyset man opens his laptop with the resignation of someone settling in for the entire afternoon. The Wolf buys a “Feces of the Wild” sweatshirt for his fourteen-year-old nephew back home in New York.
Billboards for Jesus reappear for the first time since Montana. We fill the truck from freestanding fuel tanks on the honor system: two Canadian dollars a liter. Somewhere far away, the war in Iran grinds on. Up here, the pumps click slowly beneath a white northern sky.
Gas plants in spruce woods—
no stations for miles around,
only extraction.
This is a land that gives more than it keeps: oil, gas, timber hauled south in endless quantities while the towns themselves remain sparse, provisional, half-lit at the edges of the boreal.
More darkness. More oil and gas plants. The horizon collapses into plowed snowbanks and the double yellow line. Headlights appear ahead, bright enough that I dim my beams. I’m going nearly seventy, so they must be too. I wait for them to pass. The lights neither brighten nor approach. Minutes seem to stretch. Distance itself feels distorted by the dark.
Frozen rivers wait—
beneath the ice, water breaks
through paused movement’s skin.
Sometime after eleven, I pass an oil tanker. He doesn’t like that. The truck swings into the left lane and accelerates uphill, but I keep my foot steady and hold my line. Eventually he drops back behind me. The small contest sharpens my attention while the Wolf sleeps beside Sasha, whose curled like a comma, in the passenger seat. I put on early ’00s alternative, inch the volume louder, and sing softly to myself. They don’t stir.
Finally, Fort Nelson appears on the horizon blazing like New York City. The lights are shockingly invasive. Until now, we were the light pollution.
The next morning, a woman smoking outside a gas station near the Yukon border comes over to explain the pumps. Inside, the shop feels preserved from another decade: boots drying beside a woodstove, a cast-iron skillet blackened with use, the air thick with cigarette smoke. Five-dollar stickers of bears and Klondike men curl for sale on dusty shelves beside ancient bags of chips.
On the television, Artemis II bobs in the Pacific off San Diego, the capsule bright against the water like a red-capped mushroom. The woman says through cigarette smoke:
“Back safe from the moon—”
(Walter Cronkite through static)
“Thank goodness for that.”
Warnings about bears line the boardwalk at Liard River Hot Springs Provincial Park: electric fences, stories of an infamous mauling, repeated reminders not to linger alone. For the first time on the trip, I carry bear spray on my hip.
The Wolf does not bathe. He stays behind to walk Sasha, perform burpees against a picnic table, and talk with a young man living out of his truck with a whitewater kayak strapped to the roof. He is heading north to guide in Seward. “It’s the season for migration,” the Wolf says later. “For salmon and guides.”
The water is impossibly soft and clear. White stones feathered by sulphur mark the mouth of the spring—the seat of the kami.
Floating there, I feel more Japanese than usual. I think:
Heaven is onsen—
everyone I love drifts
beneath rising steam
Clouds pass overhead while I listen to my heartbeat moving through the water, through my body, into the pool itself. Snowmelt rinses through my hair. I never want to leave.
Google often enough mistakes the entrances of unmarked oil and gas plants for commercial gas stations.
We turn into one at dusk, just after nine. The pavement gives way to a kind of lunar mud tundra, and the truck lurches forward with a grey Ford pickup close behind us. Ahead, a row of industrial cylinders points toward the sunset like rockets on a launchpad. Across from them stands a line of prefab grey double-wides: workforce housing at the edge of the world. Outside each unit sits a pickup nearly identical to mine.
The Wolf says:
“We could be them too—
same truck in the parking lot,
same mud on the doors.”
I reply:
“No, we barely pass.
They wake up here every day.
That’s the difference.”
Another wolf just outside Teslin, just before the hill leading down to the grated bridge over the endless lake:
Wolf beside the road—
sunset holds it one moment,
then forest takes it.
In Teslin, a chain-smoking Irish woman in a nightgown, pink fleece vest, and pink rain boots stands outside the motel office, already upset about Sasha barking.
“The guy who stayed in your room last night went out,” she says. “His dog barked and barked. I cannot do it again.”
All night, Sasha is quiet but semis idle outside the shabby motel beneath a flickering neon Bigfoot sign. Eventually the engines flatten into white noise, as steady as surf.
By morning, we are hungry again. Another heartland breakfast: eggs for me, eggs and sausage for the Wolf. Overpriced, perfect.
Whitehorse at last. A northern metropolis with almost no visible trace of the gold rush except in the names preserved by those who still care to remember it. The city feels unexpectedly modern and streamlined: one broad main street lined with gift shops, outfitter windows, and a kayak store overlooking the frozen Yukon River.
Rainbow flags hang soft—
espresso and pastries glow
under yellow lights.
Something in the Wolf brightens here the same way it did back in Montana at the sight of Custer’s battlefield. The old mythology catches him again—only this time it is less about cowboys and cavalry than the North itself: stampeders, bush pilots, river men, adventure novels with cracked spines and maps tucked into the front matter.
“Adventure novels start here,” he says, grinning like a little boy.
He wants photos with the murals and the prospector-and-dog statue, eager to gather evidence that we have crossed into the territory of legend. The bust of Jack London, though, he can do without.
From Haines Junction we turn onto the Haines Highway, a road driven like a wedge through white into blue.
Mountains cup the truck—
small toy beneath avalanche,
held in icy palms.
At Chilkat Pass, men sit in camping chairs beside their grandsons while fathers launch snowmobiles directly into the slide paths. Black labs roam loose across the parking lot, greeting Sasha with the casual confidence of locals: Where are you from?
Then comes the descent into treeline. The U.S. border crossing. The ICE agent waves us through with barely a glance. Suddenly the speed limits are in miles again instead of kilometers. The pavement roughens. Potholes bloom in the road. Public trash cans disappear. Signs begin appearing for the eagle preserve and rafting companies.
Whales somewhere offshore.
Juneau ferry docks at dusk.
Totem greets us: Haines.
A Visit To Lost Winter
Detour to Banff.
―
In Banff, the mountains are so big they could swallow Colorado. Canada is winter’s prodigal daughter.
The road from Alberta climbs out of sweet grass flats. Here, on Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, the gas is prepaid in liters. The pass narrows into twilight. Ahh! There’s the lost snowpack. Winter’s deep roots never died, they were just north of the border, buried on the other side of the Omega Block.
Alive snow shifts on the strange, humongous faces. Wind cries with the wolves, stiffening the pack. Sky-splitting peaks with their unfamiliar aspects pierce my heart and make me weep tears of snow.
We check into an AirBnB in Cranmore. The old cabin layered of lacquered logs sits 45 degrees to the road. The woodstove is big as a gondola but there’s no need to use it because forced air blows like a tropical wind through the house.
I find a ramen place for dinner and slot into the booths beneath murals of ski-themed manga. The broth slides steamy down the throat. For dessert, there’s mochi.
Lake Louise has bowls that hold all of you. Bigger than your biggest Super-G turns; they make our Horseshoe Bowl look like a snack. It’s midweek, but the sun’s out and the parking’s free, so the mountain buzzes with enough energy to make it feel like February.
100% terrain open. There’s the boomerang road, that ring of mountain that zips up along out-of-bound ribs before swooshing down toward the ridgeline’s hips. I follow the local kids who dart like sparrows into unmarked trees. They fly me to a rock garden where little boulders offer endless lips to launch off.
I sink into snow
ptarmigan fading from sight—
no one has to know.
Top of the World chair whisks to a realm of rock and snow. Steeps that bind the throat are accessed by Paradise, an old triple fixed grip dangling high over a vast bowl. There’s no footrest, and the lowered bar offers a gap wide enough for a human torso to slip through.
By the third lap, I get used to it.
At 3:25, I ride up with a guy from lift ops. The chair stops over the belly of the bowl. A tendon of rope below wriggles in the wind that wings its way into my belly. This mountain is not part of the mega corporation I belong to, but he’s dressed in black, just like our guys do.
I tell him where I come from and how shitty our season was. The chairlift ninja grins, and replies:
“We all have bad years
winter shits the bed sometimes—
it was just your turn.”
Omega Block
I personify the weather.
―
Easter week. The line at the base of Peak 7 went beyond what was left of the snow, onto dirt. They bootpacked around the mud, some because they couldn’t get refunds; others because they don’t know any better. The concept of winter—what it should look like, and when it should end—is subjectively relative.
Up the chair, things were not much better. The trees teemed with porcupines and bears waking up too soon.
Some locals in t-shirts glanced up at Peak 6, gashed with rocks and portending wet slides. They shook their heads.
“It’s the fucking end, man. They should have called it weeks ago.”
Artificial snow
covers dirt we try to hide—
then melts us open.
Colorado’s worst ski season in recorded history unfolded like a toxic relationship. November love-bombed with snow-making. The hardpack was expertly, hastily laid, while the resorts rushed to open with promises of a solid foundation. But stoke alone is not enough to conjure the real stuff needed to make a base stick. Mother Nature doubled-down on avoidance. She withheld precipitation with a stubbornness easily anthropomorphized. Meteorologists have a name for this pathology: Omega Block.
“It is one of the many types of weather patterns that can set up and be stubborn to move…Sometimes they bring us great weather, sometimes not” (NOAA).
Like most patterns, the Omega Block’s roots are in the sky, about 15-18,000ft up—atmospheric superego. It takes its name from the final letter of the Greek alphabet (whose shape the system resembles when it parks over a landmass), and is synonymous with eschatological speak for THE END. An Omega Block bookends two low pressure zones with one high trapped in between. Not unlike the seesaw of doomed love, depending on which side you fall, you get one of two extremes: deluge or drought.
For us here in the High Rockies, it was drought all the way. The snow stonewalled. No amount of spoons under pillows or shot-skis could coax it out. What little did fall stuck just enough to the rocks to give the illusion of softness for a couple of bluebird days. Breadcrumbing, I think the therapists are calling it now.
Ignoring the evidence and being led by emotion, skiers slid hopefully into the variability. Rocks greeted bases like backhanded comments over breakfast. Core shots accrued, but stubbornness is met with stubbornness, particularly where desire is concerned, so out came the P-Tex and diamond stones.
The weeks frittered away, and idealized images of what winter should look slowly lowered thresholds for what’s considered “good.” What was promised never arrived. What little we had, was gradually lost.
How do you know when it’s the fucking end, man?
War broke out in the Middle East. Gas prices ascended alongside lift tickets. A federal antitrust class action law suit was filed against the megapasses alleging unlawfully inflated prices. Apocalyptic feelings abounded, exacerbated by an unprecedented heat dome over the western United States. Ninety-degree days on the Front Range. Ninety.
Peak by peak, the mountain shut down. The patches of see-through snow widened from windows into abysses so deep that grass began to reach through them. One of the mountain’s co-founders, Trygve Berge, died early in April. He was 93. The first green run where we take our beginners after the magic carpet is named after him.
The Omega Block lifted, just in time for Gaper Day. Forecasters in Denver crowed about a mid-week storm, but it was too late: the gaps are too big to be filled in now.
Operational Update
As discussed around the mountain.
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As discussed around the mountain:
Records
Shallow snowpack fades
Tourists vanish with the lake
Locals hit food pantries.
Hibernation
Mama and two cubs
Race across Trygve’s open face
Too early to wake.
Terrain Status
Patrol ropes go up
Peak by peak, Breckenridge sleeps
Runs close like old books.
Closing Day
“Hey team,” Broomfield writes,
“Things are dynamic out there—
Stand by for updates.”