Day Twenty-Two – 11/7/07 – Living the Dream

The two longest constants in my life besides my family have been Camp Becket and snowboarding. I first went to Camp Becket when I was nine and I first went snowboarding when I was ten. I consider them my first and second loves, each giving me blissful respite from the unavoidable drudgery of the school year and allowing me to be a kid. I pretty much spent every fall drooling over snowboard magazines and watching snowboard videos, procrastinating on my homework, pretending my skateboard was a snowboard, daydreaming of that momentary silent weightlessness promised by the coming winter. After the snow had melted, I tuned out my teachers while visions of windsurfing on Rudd Pond, cabin chats, and playing Escape From Becket danced in my head. Long before I’d heard anything about Zen or the benefits of “living in the moment,” I experienced that first hand through snowboarding and the Becket Way. It’s really hard to be concerned about the past or future when careening toward a jump or trying not to get tossed off of your kay-board into the frigid lake by your counselors and cabin mates. My M.O. hasn’t changed much over the years, I still love snowboarding and Becket, though my impending adulthood has threatened my commitment to both; I still like to do what makes me feel good and brings me a little closer to my own mortality:

Fast forward to now…Only in my wildest dreams would I have thought that I would be in Alaska with three other Becket guys about to go backcountry snowboarding in the Chugach Range. I’d been hearing about these mountains for years and I couldn’t believe I was actually there. I also couldn’t believe that my punk-ass bunkmate from Cabin Mohawk (summer of ’94) who made fun of my girlfriend and tried to get me kicked out of camp was there with me.

Que ridiculo es esa?!?

I could hardly sleep the night before, I was so excited. That made it easy to wake up at 7am (when it’s still completely dark) and head to the grocery store for cereal, milk, coffee, and OJ. It was bizarre to see the local grocery store full of people before there was even a hint of light in the sky. I got back to the house, woke the boys up, and soon enough we were on our way down the Seward Highway to Turnagain Pass, about an hour south of Anchorage.

We had been turned on to Turnagain Pass by Eli, a lanky Oregon transplant who worked at the local ski store where Gordon and I rented our gear (Bryan and Brad opted to go with snowshoes, which we already had, thanks Dad!). Our original plan was to head north of Anchorage and do a similar sort of adventure in the Talkeetna Range, but Eli convinced us that Turnagain would have more snow, be safer, and easier to hike up. So we were sold.

There were about four other cars full of people getting ready to go when we got there. The advantages of backcountry riding are readily apparent: no paying for tickets, no $10 hamburgers, no crowds, no rich white kids pretending to be gangstas, and the guarantee of fresh tracks even days after the last snowfall. So you have to earn your turns by hiking, it’s worth it. We began our hike toward the summit at 10:45am. Though it was overcast, we could see the top of the peak we were about to climb.

It was a balmy 35 degrees Fahrenheit. We soon realized just how much we had overdressed and shed some layers. The track to the top was well-packed from previous traffic, making it relatively easy for us to navigate through the knee-deep snow. We had been in Alaska for over a week at this point, and we were tired of looking at the mountains through the car windows. This was our opportunity to get into some real Alaskan wilderness and experience it first-hand.

The hike got gradually steeper and the air thinner. Bryan, Brad, and Le Baguette turned around about half way up and Gordon and I resolved to get to the top of that mofo.

One of the things I love about the wilderness, mountains especially, is that one seems to naturally shed their trivial day-to-day B.S. when in such a remote environment. Gordon and I got above the treeline and had a great conversation about college, knowledge, and the looming question of “where do we go from here?” We seem to have had opposite and complementary experiences in college, so we both gained some insight from our time up on Turnagain. We kept a good pace up to the top, even though it was getting harder and harder to breathe.

We ended up arriving at the summit at 1:15pm, the same time as four other guys. They were really nice. They dug us some snow benches and we sat around chatting for a while. One guy, called “Crazy Craig” was from Vermont, so we had a little east coast connection. Crazy Craig, donning one of those perfectly round, grey Bollé helmets from the late nineties, was obviously the ring leader of the crew. He was talking about front-flipping off of the cornice, to which one of his winded, less-daring companions replied “Yeah, if you do a frontflip, I might do a method…maybe.” Another guy, who I’ll call “Pudgy Pete,” pulled out a plastic bag in which he had moose meat in the form of a large slim-jim. He began to munch on it gleefully as he extolled the supremacy of moose meat in the kingdom of tastiness. Gordon and I ate our frozen vegan Clif Bars amidst talk of hunting using one’s car as a weapon…yeah. We admitted that it was our first time in the backcountry and that the visible avalanche-remnants and holes in the mountain had us slightly nervous for the way down. The guys offered to ride down with us in a big group, but they were rearing to go, so I told them to go ahead because we wanted to savor the ride down after the two and a half hours it took us to hike up. They told us to follow their tracks, assuring us that if there was an avalanche waiting to be set off, they would surely trigger it before we did. They disappeared over the ridge amongst hoots and hollers, and I could not help but feel envious of these guys, for whom this was only the first of many fresh Alaskan tracks to come this winter.

Gordon and I readied ourselves, put on the layers we had shed earlier, and devised a sort of strategy for making our way down without losing one another. A wrong turn out there can mean spending the cold night with the bears, so we were very careful not to get lost. I cleaned the snow from my goggles. The clouds had rolled in during the short time we were up top and the snow was beginning to pile up as the visibility steadily decreased. We remarkably had cell phone service up there, so I called Alex Soroken, the friend who got me into snowboarding and sold me my first board, to let him know that the dream hatched in the backyard during 5^th grade was coming true.

I headed down first, trying to get a feel for my rental board before I hit the steep stuff. Those first few turns felt so good, I arched my triumph all over that thing and though there were no trees and I couldn’t really see anything, I spotted a little cliff and decided to fly off of it as fast as I could. I straight-lined it and jumped off of that fucker as hard as I could, letting out a rebel yell that would make Billy Idol proud…this is the stuff I live for. The snow was so soft and deep and the slope so steep that I couldn’t even tell when I’d landed. I flew over a few more mounds that I couldn’t see at all and managed to stay on my feet, it was absolutely exhilarating. I reached the next ridge and waved Gordon on. Gordon took a couple turns, went over the handlebars, and yard-saled the contents of his still-opened backpack all over the mountain. Then he gathered his belongings, put his skis back on, took a couple turns, and did it again.

As I watched Gordon’s boot tumble down the slope in front of him, I noticed the snow starting to fall harder and felt my quads starting to seize up from the cold and lack of motion. I began to worry, thinking to myself, “I’ve skied with Gordon before, as I recall he’s pretty good, why is he not staying on his feet? We’re the only ones up here, this could be bad.” I yelled out things like “lean back!,” “trust yourself,” and “it’s just like any other place you’ve skied.” To be fair, the guys at the rental shop should have given Gordon some wider skis, ones capable of floating in powder. Instead he got some ice coast slalom skis which cut through the snow like a hot knife through butter, not what you want in Alaska. Gordon soon adjusted and rocked the bottom half of the uppermost face. I breathed a sigh of relief once he got down to me and cited the awkwardness of the backpack and the inability to see anything as the reasons for his pokiness.

We continued on, section by section, trying to follow Crazy Craig & Company’s tracks so as not to get lost. We came across two guys who had built a jump and kindly directed us towards it. This was an unexpected treat. It was pretty small, but it had a nice lip on it and an ever-so-soft landing. I hiked it a couple times even though my legs were begging me not to. I spun off it and fell both times, but the landing was nice and fluffy so it didn’t hurt. Gordon took some pictures of it:

We wound our way down through the trees as the snow turned to rain, the snow on the ground got slushier, and the visibility increased. We kept going with the strategy of me guinea-pigging everything, jumping over the rocks and riverbeds, and then directing Gordon around such obstacles as he followed me down. In keeping with the dinosaur theme, we found a frozen brontosaurus on the way down.

It took us about an hour and a half to get down and hike back out to where the car was. We were wet on the inside from our sweat and wet on the outside from the snow/rain. We smelled…bad, but it was a glorious and triumphant odor. We found Brad and Bryan in the car, dry and comfortable. After slapping some five and shedding all of our wet clothing, we mixed small doses of ibuprofen and Jameson to give ourselves a remote chance of not being horrendously sore in the morning (kids don’t try this at home, desperate times call for desperate measures). Given that this expedition was preceded by three whole weeks of road trip sloth in which the farthest we walked was from the car to the gas station, our bodies held up remarkably well.

So we drove back to Anchorage, narrowly avoiding running out of gas, and decided on a celebratory dinner at our old haunt, the Bear’s Tooth. Given that we were in Anchorage for less than a week in total, it is absurd how many times we went to this place, it was beginning to feel like home. The food and drinks were delicious, our waiter was a ninja with a pepper-shaker, and there was no better way to end our magical time in Anchorage.