“Powder snow skiing is not fun. It is life, fully lived, life lived in a blaze of reality. — Dolores LaChapelle, writer, skier, scholar, mountain-lover.
Randy Glaxson leans his tall frame against the trunk of a spruce tree to catch his breath and looks out across the field of snow, its surface glistening as if it were crusted with diamonds. The effort- and elevation-induced hypoxia has fogged up the vocabulary portion of his brain almost as severely as his breath clouds his eyeglasses, and he can’t find the right word to describe what he’s looking at. “Field” doesn’t cut it. Maybe tilted plane? Anyway, this particular tilted plane is the loading zone for the North Battleship, a sizable avalanche path and, when the conditions are right, an excellent ski run that plummets off of a ridge west of Silverton, Colorado. Glaxson is a snow scientist. That is, he’s a hydrologist whose focus is snow, its composition, structure, dynamics, and, particularly, the ways in which the structure of the snow on a tilted plane like this one can disintegrate catastrophically. He’s an avalanche guy, in other words. And the tiny town of Silverton, which sits at 9,318 feet in elevation, surrounded by mountains that rise up some four-thousand feet higher, that are covered for several months out of the year by a notoriously unstable snowpack, has more snow scientists per capita than anywhere else on the planet. The fifty miles of highway over three mountain passes, with Silverton smack dab in the center, is the most avalanche-riddled in the lower forty-eight. Snow slides once buried miners with frightening regularity, crushed and splintered entire boarding houses, took out mining trams, killed snowplow drivers. On St. Patrick’s Day 1906, two dozen died in the tiny county in a single twenty-four hour period. Back in sixty-three, a reverend and his two daughters and their car were buried so thoroughly that the bodies didn’t emerge until the May thaw. These days, the victims are more likely to be backcountry skiers, ice climbers, or snowmobilers, folks who invariably will be eulogized as having died doing what they loved.
READ THE EXCERPT FROM SNOW SCREEN AT RiverOfLostSouls.com
A couple hours later, the ragged silhouette of Tsé Bit’a’í rose up ahead of Brautigan, obscured by the brown-yellow gauze of smog and dust and wildfire smoke. He turned eastward toward Farmington and followed the San Juan River through the borderland, where the northeastern edge of the Navajo Nation melds with the non-Indian world in an economic and cultural mishmash. Brautigan passed by a little stand selling tamales and kneel down bread, a strip mall with an OmnyEZLoan joint, a pawn shop, and a liquor store, so that folks can meet all their predatory lending and chemical colonialism needs in just one place, a sprawling automobile graveyard, a slaughterhouse selling mutton, a barn with a big sign peddling chickens and Avon products, and a bright pink SEX SUPERSTORE shadowed by a huge billboard warning the superstore patrons: JESUS IS WATCHING YOU. And in the spaces between were junk stores, big and small, from the sprawling salvage yard where Brautigan had once coveted a commercial airliner fuselage, to Hal Fox’s tiny hovel, located just feet from the highway, piled floor to ceiling with hoarded treasures. Malcolm and Peter used to come down here on the weekends to go shopping, Peter for objects to use in his artworks, Malcolm for old bikes that he could fix up and sell at a whopping profit to Durango yuppies. The ritual usually concluded with a visit to Mister Fox, a small, weathered, energetic, overall-wearing man of indeterminate age who specialized in bicycle parts. Invariably Malcolm would try to lowball Mister Fox on a wheel, a sprocket, or a pair of handlebars, and Mister Fox would respond with an indignant tirade: “Golly blarmit! I was on an aircraft carrier in World War Two! If it weren’t for me, you’d all be speaking Deutsch! And you want to give me five dollars for that thing!?” Fox would then threaten to shoot the two young men if they didn’t get off his property, pronto. Despite the hostility, the encounter always ended genially, more or less, with Malcolm giving Mister Fox his asking price and then some. ... READ MORE FROM BEHIND THE SLICKROCK CURTAIN at riveroflostsouls.com
