Call of the Wild

Winter scene: There is a slight crust of ice on the snow, which lies tight against the meadow. My skis make the sound of a zipper closing as I approach the mineral springs at Yellowstone. The superheated water throws off plumes of steam. Buffalo move, or don't move, as they see fit. Their hides are covered with mica chips of snow and ice. They look like mint-condition nickels set into blue-velvet air. I look around. There are no tourists, no crowds, no cameras. Only this memory.

Winter scene: We ski for an hour, straight into the eye of a mountain bowl. A thousand vertical feet of blue-edged snow bends around us like a fun-house mirror or Zonker's tanning aid. I am skiing behind Nancy Burke, head of Copper Mountain's cross-country school and runner-up in the annual spring bikini contest. Breaking trail is a professional mountaineer named Gordon Wiltsie, who started the day by telling a story about a friend who once sawed a pair of skis in half with a Swiss army knife in the middle of the Himalayas to make two pairs of very short skis after an avalanche had claimed his companion's skis. (The same avalanche broke Gordon's back.) It must, at times like that, be reassuring to know a man who has used a Swiss army knife for something other than slicing cheese, opening bottles wine or clipping his toenails in a hotel room. We work our way up the slope toward an old cabin, the relic of a mining town called New Boston. The cabin is blown apart; logs are thick and strewn about, as though a child's tantrum has destroyed a toy. Actually, the slow movement of snow over 100 winters has undone the work of man. We stop and unpack lunch--an apple, some cheese. We pass the water bottle. A black-and-silver camp robber alights on a corner of the building, our skis, stuck in the snow, then hops across the snow to take bits of bread from the hand of our guide. We are having some fun. We are having a typical day in the back country.

It's the latest craze in skiing; it's the oldest craze in skiing. Back-country skiing (concluded on page 132)Call of the Wild(continued from base 102) is anything that takes you on the beaten track, away from the carnival atmosphere of lift-serviced resorts. Alpine skiing has been taken over by the cash elite, people who can afford a week at Aspen, a designer jump suit. Back country is the first resort of the fitness elite, the locals who have moved beyond the boundaries of skiing to rediscover some of the primal wonder of the sport. This is a return to the roots of skiing. You can choose from light touring skis or heavier mountaineering skis with metal edges. Both use free-heel bindings to allow for easy traversing. You take day trips, picnic lunches, overnights, expeditions. The sport has taken off and now has its own catalog. Yvon Chouinard, the Yosemite climber who started Patagonia clothing, has a special back-country catalog that goes out to 75,000 people each winter. (Contact Great Pacific Iron Works, P.O. Box 90, 245 West Santa Clara Street, Ventura, California 93002.) The sport has its own book, Backcountry Skiing, from the Sierra Club. Lito Tejada-Flores writes:

The essence of back-country skiing is skiing on your own. You and winter. Your skis and untracked, unprepared snow. It is definitely a state of mind you put on, much as you put on your skis and boots. It's a state of mind composed of audacity and prudence, a love of winter and of effort, of graceful movement and of exploration. In this overexplored world of ours, the winter back country is always fresh and unexplored because it's always changing; each storm, each shift in temperature creates new terrain. The back country--mountains, forests, high plateaus--has been renewing itself every winter beyond all memory. And as long as I can remember, skiers, too, have been renewing themselves in this challenging white environment.

Winter scene: You have to check in with the ranger at Badger Pass before he'll letyou go into the back country at Yosemite. His first question: "What is the name of your best friend?" Good question, why does he want to know? "If we have to send out an aerial search party, we want to know what color clothes you are wearing. We figure your friends will know. OK, next question: What equipment are you carrying?" Another good question, designed, apparently, to test your knowledge of back-country needs. It also provides incentive for search parties. "Well, let's see--we're carrying a CD player, two pounds of Krugerrands, tickets for Bruce Springsteen at the Roxy, the keys to a Porsche...."

I am spending New Year's Eve in the mountains with my wife and two friends, Dick Penniman and Peggy Ricketts. We are heading for a cabin at Ostrander Lake, high in the Sierras. For three hours, we ski down a fire road, staring at a range of mountains in the distance. Plumes of snow billow and curl from each peak, forming streamers 12 miles long. The mountains look like battleships steaming across the horizon. This was the sight that greeted John Muir in his first winter in Yosemite. We turn off the road and begin to climb. I've borrowed a pack and, five hours into the tour, I feel my body being pulled apart by the slow weight of bad planning. Each move produces an involuntary whimper. I am having some fun. I wonder about athletic events that require half a day. I cannot walk off the field. I cannot leave the court, sit on a curb or call a taxi. I am moving across alien terrain, trusting that I have gauged my energy budget correctly. We stop for dinner. On the trail, beside a log, is the print of a bear paw. I recall the words of an arctic explorer: Adrenaline--or joy--is coming upon the track of a bear when you are 200 yards ahead of the pack and 1,000,000 miles from home. I wonder what he said next.

A few moments before the sun sets, I watch the heat rise from my body, turn to snow and fall back against the black wool of my sweater. I am my own weather system. Night falls. I continually underestimate the power of starlight as it edges between 400-year-old redwoods. The snow looks like a soft white Navy blanket that someone has shaved smooth.

This is the point of back country--the careful assessment of energy, heat, danger, preparation. What it does is cause you to determine your exact carrying power. Tonight, the equation works. We find the hut, unroll sleeping bags and fall into a sleep as deep and as wide as the silence outside.

The next morning, we awake to play in paradise. The sky is cut by jet streams, the passage of people from city to city, encased in technology. The snow is cut by our tracks, the sibilant whisper of fresh snow, the passage of people from turn to turn. We are having some fun.