Up in the Rockies, it was still winter. The slopes were open but the snow was receding. Kids begged their parents for a day off from school for one last boarding run. An Evangelical Christian junior talked her parents into letting her go the day before Mr. D's assembly. Cassie Bernall drove up to Breckenridge with her brother, Chris. Neither one had met Eric or Dylan yet.
--Dave Cullen, from Columbine, 2009
Photo credit
14 March 2011
To celebrate the day I took the morning off of my usual Monday chores and headed to my local haunt for a few turns of the skis, the first time back in the Jura since early December. I knew the snow conditions were dismal and I knew they wouldn't improve much for the year, but it's always worth it for the views and a few hours of solitude. Anyway, the fourteenth day of March only comes around once a year. Best to indulge myself when I can.
The sinkhole at La Dôle with the aviation radar and weather station above:
Up on top the conditions were better suited for grazing than skiing.
Three lines skied at the end of last May:
France or West Virginia?
There was exactly one short couloir to ski that accessed the east (Lake Geneva) side of La Dôle so I did and I found more pretty views on my way down. Not pretty snow, however.
Heaven-Haven: A Nun Takes The Veil
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Innocence Mission: No Storms Come
The White Mountain looking respectably more white:
The Crêt de la Neige, the highest point in the Jura, but not much deeper in snow:
More swishing around, more nice views, up and down exercise, and then back home to resume the day. Like the winter, the day was sort of there before it wasn't again. Unlike the winter, it felt right.
The standard Arlberg technique was used by Alf and Sverre Engen when teaching. I'd seen Sverre use the single dipsy in powder but Alf didn't use it in public because after all he was the head of the ski school! Junior Bounous, now the head of Snowbird's ski school, was an instructor under Alf Engen at Alta at the time we moved there in 1952. Junior refined the dipsy into what became the double dipsy--because the weight is on both skis. But there's still a definite bounce in it. Junior is the finest skier I've ever seen. He skis all techniques with equal facility. The tune he sings in really great powder is the old children's song: The worms crawl in, and the worms crawl out; they crawl right in and out of your snout. It's the perfect rhythm for steep powder.
--Dolores LaChapelle, from Deep Powder Snow: 40 Years of Ecstatic Skiing, Avalanches, and Earth Wisdom, 1993
Photo Credits:
Junior Bounous
Dolores LaChapelle
