Eleven Seasons

I've skied the Wasatch for eleven seasons — call it thirty-five days a year, spread across these canyons and never enough at any one of them. I'm not bragging; thirty-five days a year is a number that embarrasses me in both directions, too many to explain to people who don't ski and nowhere near enough to impress the ones who do. But it's relevant, because on a Saturday late last season I found a line off High Rustler I had never skied before. Eleven seasons in. That's what I want to talk about.

Here is what eleven seasons buys you. It does not buy you mastery. Nobody masters a mountain; the mountain doesn't take students. What it buys you is calibration. You learn what the snow is doing by the sound it makes under the chair. You learn which storms ski better than they report and which report better than they ski. You learn where not to be — which matters more than where to be, and takes about ten times longer to learn.

And then, after all of it, the mountain hands you something new. A chute I'd skied past more times than I can count because the entrance looks wrong from above. It wasn't wrong. I just hadn't earned the angle yet.

That's what this blog is. Field notes from somebody the mountain is still teaching. Storm days, lift conversations, the drive up, the drive down, the years the lake gives us and the years it doesn't.

What it isn't: top-ten lists. Gear unboxings. Drone footage with a music budget. Conditions reports — you can get those better and faster from the Utah Avalanche Center and the snow stake, and you should, every morning, before you read anything else, including this.

One post when there's something worth saying. None when there isn't. The bar is the same one we use for the shirts: would the guy on the Collins lift actually say this.

We'll see you up there. We're the ones not filming.