Wolf Creek: The Face (short)

I finally remembered the search string to find this in google! It's a short I read a year or so ago which I really enjoyed. A week later I couldn't find it anymore and I've been trying off and on ever since. The original is at the "Mountain Gazette" web site here:

http://www.mountaingazette.com/art.p...20Wolf%20Creek

I'll post the whole thing here so I can have it close at hand whenever I'm in for a Hemingway-esque story with a skiing twist. Hope you like it. If not, it'll just fade into oblivion, so don't worry about it :)

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By Wayne Sheldrake


Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

— Henry David Thoreau



Skiers recognize many types of snow, but have few words for describing them ...

— James C. Halfpenny & Roy Douglas Ozanne



I’d always thought the massive winter storms that slammed Wolf Creek collected in Canada and then funneled down the continent. Then someone told me, no, the really big systems get knocked up somewhere over Manchuria, gestate as they arch the Aleutians and hit the San Juans full-term. I believed it — full-term and head first. One late-January dump heaved eighty-eight inches in thirty-six hours, closed the pass for four days, and buried my Subaru like a peanut in a quart of Rocky Road. Before that a set of seven bulging systems that stretched from the Bugaboos to Baja ran one up the back of the other and piled on the San Juans like a train wreck. It snowed ten days non-stop. Even at the base of the pass, the after-skiff of the range shadow buried horses up to their bellies. Early February was sunny, but more storms over China fed on a streaming Arctic rotation that threw off long boomerang-shaped columns of cold air, each phalanx vacuuming up phlegm as it crossed the Pacific.

Through the first week of March, the fronts came charging, rolling over the Rockies like tank columns over barbed wire. Ten inches. Six inches. Thirteen inches. More snow than a few ski patrolmen and a dozen ski instructors could ski off. Then a whumph of twenty-eight inches dropped overnight. Gale-swept, another eighteen frothed in by noon. Flags outside the lodge thrashed like salmon tails flithering in spillway roar. I was napping under a table in the balcony of the lodge after a night of drinking Wyomings, a half-gnawed Saran-wrapped roast beef sandwich for a pillow. (What’s a Wyoming, you ask? It’s Skier Cross’s version of a Margarita: Snort a line of salt, headbutt the lime, take a shot of Jose, then get your Hulk hands on and growl, "WYOMING! DRINK IT!" Oh, and keep some Kleenex handy.)

I’d watched the storm through the vertical slit of one eye. The snow seemed to explode into existence as if a white fire driven by its own wind generated the combustion. Blasting ground blizzards zipped up coils of snow that gathered RPMs as they drilled into the branches of thrashing spruce. Fat, squatty twisters spun open like blooming lopsided pots on an accelerating wheel. The storm had the crush of uninterrupted surf, snow slamming incessantly upon beachheads of snow. Everything in its path seemed to turn to whipping, white lentils. The wind kicked at the double doors of the lodge until they were locked shut. Incongruent with the storm’s sheer, the snow stacked on the sun deck, burying the railing. In the night, picnic tables had disappeared under mounds of shredded coconut.

I was ready to wonder if anyone was skiing this howl when a couple of green-weenies, my fellow-instructors, slogged in off Treasure Flats, moustaches sagging like dish rags. Their green coats came off sweaty and dropped like saddles on chair backs.

"What’d you do?" I mumbled. "Snowshoe through a carwash?"

"Unskiable," they said. "You can’t turn in that stuff. Too deep. Even on The Face. We had to dig out every turn. It took 45 minutes to break trail from the bottom out."

Out the great window behind them I saw the big Thiekol snowcat churn under the upper chair and directly up the streambed where they had emerged from behind a high snow bank. The machine disappeared into a white abyss, packing behind it a smooth drive-way two king-sized mattresses wide. I watched one empty chair after another circle the bow-wheel, rise silently and disappear into the blur of the storm.

Can't turn? I thought. Too deep? Maybe … if you ski like a friggin’ real estate agent.

The storm was desolate. In the time it took me to boot up and button down, not one skier appeared out of the confluence of runs from the upper mountain. I still had the sting of citrus in one eye and my blood sugar was in the basement, but somebody had to ski this storm — for Ur, for Wolf Creek, for Wyomings. I backed out into the wind like a diver dropping into the wake of a speeding boat. Five minutes up into the gullet of the storm I realized the heat in my feet was 3/4 of the way into its half life. It was too cold to be wet, too wet to be cold — and ruthlessly both. The snow came like dump trucks of Slurpies chucked into a merry-go-round of jet turbines. My coat took on water like a sponge. I could only hope that the material would act as a wet suit and the water soaking through would warm a little as it coated my skin. On the crest of the Divide, 11,700 feet, I was moments from true suffering. The walk around the ramp was like snowshoeing through a carwash.

Down in the white hole of the valley, I heard the climbing diesel growl of the Thiekol. I knew I'd be all right if I could get to the flats and its track. Once on the groom I’d be to the lodge in two minutes or less. If I didn’t get to the cat track, I’d be hypothermic soon.

Looking off the crown of the slope, what I could see of it in the plaster whiteness, I considered that the real estate agents might have been right. I’d been off The Face when the snow was too heavy and too deep to ski, when a run straight down the fall line was like drag racing an escalator. When the snow got this deep it could be — pun intended — frigid, devoid of response even when penetrated. It had stacked up to my chest like white mud.

Straight back down the lift line would be fastest. It was steep, maybe 40 degrees off over the brow. I’d need all the momentum I could get if I wanted to avoid bogging down and tunneling out from the upturn of a knoll toward the bottom.

I aimed right of the first lift tower. The skis — 208cm Nishizawa GS planks — picked up speed, but they didn’t float. I sank in to my knees. Then the Nishis dove, as if I were backing down a ladder and missed a rung. Then another rung was gone, and another. I was up to my neck in the undertow and the only way to resist the suck was to dive headfirst into the wave. I held my breath as the snow splashed on my goggles and washed up over my back.

As I burrowed in, the deck fell out, like I was standing on a middle level of a collapsing building and traveling for the ground at my own speed while the crumbling floors picked up velocity. For a moment, I was sure the whole hillside had broken away. Avalanche. Then I felt lift. No — not lift, suspension. The sensation was aerodynamic. I kept punching with my arms and my legs reached in and the flow of the snow corrected the yaw and pitch of my descent. A large stabilizing hug wrapped around my chest. Two more hugs wrapped my thighs. This wasn’t a slide. It was a freefall. A chute had opened in front of me and I was descending face first into a wrapping of white silk. I forced my boots and skis into the fall, to maintain equilibrium, to keep the skis from auguring deeper into the surge and propelling out of control.

Panicked and submerged, I gasped for air and gulped down a fist of carbon dioxide enriched Upsik. I choked. Immediately I wondered about my speed, because I wasn't sure I could hold my breath long enough to make the bottom. I'd heard of skiing Utah with snorkels. I’d heard of skiers drowning upside-down in collapsed tree wells. Was it possible to drown right side-up? Without the aspiration of breathing to distract me, I was oddly aware of the snow’s hiss as it moved up the front of my coat and passed over my shoulders. I stared out my goggles. Downy swarms sprayed the lenses and peeled away from the bridge of the plastic. Visibility: one inch.

I made no effort to turn, but my feet moved under me. The skis had come alive with their own pendulous consciousness. They veered with the flow, their noses perceptively sniffing out the horizon and incline of the slope, nuances I had no hope of seeing. My legs were tugged along. I stretched for the surface, but the buoyancy the skis had found was a compromise.

At first the resistance of the snow was shaped by the push of my body wrestling through it, but as the mountain steepened, a corridor of the snow released and gained velocity amidst itself. The snow harnessing my shoulders descended at the same speed as the snow enveloping my feet. It was like base-jumping into an elevator shaft of packing material. I was ensconced in the cleaving. As the snow gathered speed, it channeled as if pouring down a steep viaduct. The snow banked urgently up one side of a trough of itself and up the other side, sloshing like cement pouring out of a mixer. Off the steep pitch, the snow plunged, pushing me. I plunged. Then the snow thickened and threatened to spin. I stalled. I backpaddled with my arms and poles. It felt like I’d dropped into a tight, soupy eddy. Instinctively, I breast-stroked forward, feeling for a doorway in the torque. The momentum of the turbulence released. The snow plunged again. I plunged again.

These accelerations and decelerations repeated. They were predictable, and I almost forgot my asphyxiation as I sluiced face first through the rapids. It wasn’t necessary to turn. It was only necessary to keep the skis pointed downhill.

This is where the real estate agents back at the lodge had gone wrong. When they tried to turn, the skis were flushed into the turbulence, like spoons sucked into the swirl of a draining sink. The skis were yanked out of the current into the hole of the vortex. When the snow lost momentum and collapsed, they were buried up to their sopped moustaches. In the final analysis, their Supranivean instincts had betrayed them. They wanted to see. They wanted to breathe. They wanted the skis to float.

As the run lost slope, the deposition of the snow became shallower and my goggles finally broke the surface. A moment later I dropped out of a wall of snow carved from the hairpin of the Thiekol track. My blow-hole raled for air. The near white-out of the storm raled back. Under the bottomless powder, I had escaped the massive thrumb and howl of the front. In the calm, I’d forgotten my numb feet. I’d forgotten I was wet to the bone. Under the snow, the temperature was relatively warm, the wind nonexistent. Oddly, my extremities had felt flushed with warmth, perhaps the rush of newly oxygenated blood compensating for its temporary starvation. The return to the draw and quarter of the air was a shock. But I realized I had to stay out in this snow. I craved the calm and the insulation of the powder. Against my better judgment, which told me my toes were headed for frostbite, I knew I was going to stay out. The only way to survive the storm was to keep skiing, to get back into the womb of the bottomless snow. Still gasping, I tucked for the chair, following the faintly shadowed sidewalls of the cat track.

When the chair reached the climb over The Face, I scanned the shroud of the slope for tracks. There were none, none of those crescent incisions you expect in powder anyway. The snow where I’d skied was turned like a vole tunnel. My submerged body had hoed a brief wake that collapsed back on itself. There was nothing you would call a turn. The shallow furrow sketched a freehand line a random drip might follow down a page of watercolor paper. Toward the top, where I estimated the storm was dropping a new inch every 13 minutes (every lap) and the winds were blowing fifty miles an hour, there was nothing but an opaque scar of the feint sulcus. I’d never seen this before.

Maybe that’s why I kept going back up into the maw. Alone, I felt sure I was doing something that hadn’t been done before — at least not here, not today, not in this storm. Even when I knew my metabolism had dropped dangerously — my breathing short, my heart slow, my body temperature dipping — I kept going back up. I felt sure that this storm, these conditions, would never come again, or if the storm did come again, it would return like an old half-forgotten comet, to indicate the end and death, when all I could do with my thin will and thinner bones was watch it pass in the distance.

At the top of each successive run, I hyperventilated myself, gulping the abrasive wind as if I were preparing to swim the length of an Olympic sized swimming pool underwater. Each descent I laid out face-first across the silky parachute-whiteness and watched snow peel like ant farm sand across the lenses of my goggles.

Finally the storm got too wild and too warm. The snow succumbed to its own weight, packed down in stratified layers. The wind pounded a crust across the top. The snow cat trail drifted in. The flat light went convex, impossible to interpret. After ten identical runs, the window on this storm had closed.


I slogged into the lodge and threw my coat down like a saddle. Apparently, the real estate agents had been sipping cocoa and watching me do my laps. With sadistic satisfaction, they asked, "How was it?"

"You were right," I said. "You can't turn in that stuff."

They grinned, their brushed mustaches tipped with whipped cream.

I finished my roast beef sandwich and went back to sleep under my table in the balcony. But I didn’t sleep. I watched the storm through the vertical slit of one eye. Empty chairs descended from the wooly crawl of the storm, about-faced and then climbed back into the squall.



Wayne Sheldrake teaches creative writing at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colorado. He lives in Creede, Colorado, where he is busy as a beaver working on a book, “Fence Is A Verb,” the first chapter of which, Muskrat Season, appeared in MG #92.

©Mountain Gazette Publishing 12/01/2003