A Great Five Days of Skiing

    Last week I was skiing at Crater Lake National Park with a Sierra Club national outing. Such good company! (Sierra Club outings attract the most interesting people.) Such good food! (Mark Chang, trip leader, was also the trip's cook.) Such good leadership (Scott Mattoon and Jeannie Sivertsen in addition to Mark) and such good accommodations (at Union Creek Resort). As for the skiing, the snow was old and not at Crater Lake's usual depths, but nonetheless—such good skiing!

    This is what it all looked like:

    Day 0 (pre-trip scouting excursion, Scott and me). North entrance, 2 miles, 250-foot elevation gain. Conditions were not ideal. We had to manipulate skis over pick-up-stick tangles of downed logs and around saplings with treacherous hollows in the snow. But, we thought, we could maybe ski alongside the road instead of in the forest for the planned excursion to the north entrance two days later.

Skiing through the pick-up sticks

        This evening was the first official group activity: dinner, introductions, and orientation. 

    Dinner: Stir-fried dried tofu with Thai peanut sauce over rice linguine. 

    Day 1. West Rim Drive. 5 miles, 500-foot elevation gain. We skied past stunning views of Crater Lake and Wizard Island.

Me, Kate, Hope, Debra, Terri

We skied to Watchman, where we sat on the snow for lunch. On the return, four of us detoured onto the Lightning Spring trail, down gorgeous wide slopes with graceful turns. And then the long climb back up. The turns were worth the climb.

    Dinner, Italian: cheese and spinach ravioli with tomato pesto. 

    Day 2. East Rim Drive. 8 miles, 600-foot elevation gain. At a road junction we passed a sign with familiar words: Applegate (my address) and Grayback (the mountain I live on).

When we got to that spot on the way back, some of us turned down that road for another beautiful glide down a snow-covered road, again worth every bit of the climb back up. My good friend Kate Williams, a seasonal ranger at Crater Lake National Park, joined us for dinner and to talk about issues facing the Park (decline in newt populations, warming water temperatures, etc.). Everyone loved Kate.

Bottom row, l-r: Scott, assistant leader; Kate Williams, guest speaker; me
Top row, l-r: Hope, Kate, Peter, Debra, Mark Chang (trip leader), Diane, Terri
Photographer: Jeannie Sivertsen, assistant leader

    Dinner, Japanese: Mabo tofu over brown rice. 

    Day 3. North entrance. 7 miles, 500-foot elevation gain. To avoid the logs and the saplings, we skied alongside the road, which was great,

I'm in front here.

then onto a small rise where we could look down onto the pumice desert,

Me, Hope, Mark, Terri, Kate

then across the road to the Pacific Crest Trail, where we skied through beautiful woods of large hemlocks  and lodgepole pines, rollingly up and down, back to the cars. It was serene and beautiful.

I am skiing behind Kate

        Dinner, Indian: Aloo Gobi (curry potato and cauliflower) over basmati rice. 

    Day 4, phase 1. One and a half miles down the Pacific Crest Trail (Union Peak trail), starting south from Highway 62, descending on icy, bumpy, twig-and-needle-strewn, narrow ski trails until we admitted that it was difficult and not much fun, so we all skied back to the cars, where one group opted to drive up to the rim and ski or snowshoe there (or sit happily and comfortably in the cafe and contemplate the lake). I joined the other group: Scott and two other skiers (by far the best skiers on the trip, which was intimidating, but I thought I could do it) to ski from the road up the Pacific Crest Trail to the Dutton Creek trail and on up to the rim. Therefore:

    Day 4, phase 2. 4 1/2 miles, 800-foot elevation gain. This was OMG skiing. We climbed and descended a bit and climbed some more. We crossed creeks.

Hope, crossing Dutton Creek

We side-stepped up steep hills.

I'm doing the side-stepping here.

We manipulated too-fast, narrow downhills. We skied through big trees, past glimpses of snow-capped peaks, onto small patches of open ground, up knolls and down. We did a lot of trail-finding and not a small amount of trail-losing. It was so beautiful to be there in the quiet beauty of the snowy forest, testing our skills and our stamina, experiencing the oneness with such beauty that only comes with skiing. It was difficult, challenging, and beautiful. When I stepped off the trail onto the West Rim Road, I thought, "By gum, I did it!" 

Kate and Hope approach the rim at last.

Day 4, evening. Two guest speakers from Umpqua Watersheds joined us for dinner and to talk about enrionmental issues they work on. (The Umpqua River, like the Rogue and Klamath rivers, originates in Crater Lake National Park.)

    Dinner, Vietnamese: Pho with sweet chili sauce over salmon (my favorite dinner).

    Day 5. Everyone left for the airport or home or further aventures in Oregon. I drove home to wartm the house, tend to the raw blisters on my heels, and dream, every night for four nights, about skiing. In my dreams, I never fell.

My Latest Reading

     I have bought a new book. 

    Isn't it beautiful?

    

    My sister Sharon told me that when she was in college and had to develop a project for an academic paper, she suggested to her advisor that she read the dictionary.

    What a fabulous project! 

    But, she went on, her advisor frowned on the idea. He wanted a plan. Sharon said, "I want to know what would happen if I read the dictionary. Let's just start the project and see where it goes."

    Just imagine where it would go! Obviously it would lead to an improved vocabulary, even if she remembered only a small fraction of the new words she learned. Think of the many languages she would discover had contributed to English. And the fascinating etymologies she would learn—the vagaries of English pronunciations—the proportion of technical terms to everyday words—the obsolete words that were really too good to have been lost. The beauty of language. How long it would take to read the dictionary. Which letters had the most beautiful or unusual or obsolete words. And no telling what else. That was the beauty of the project.

    He would have none of it. She had to come up with another topic.

    What an opportunity lost. I've half a mind to do it myself. As it is, I've been challenged by a friend to write a poem based on a new word every day. So far the poems aren't very good, but the words elicit a lot of fun. Here is an example.

A Family of Artists

(Daedal: artistic, skillful. From Daedalus, Greek artificer of mythology)

 

My brother is good with wood.

My son is daedal with metal.

My mother was smart with art.

One sister paints like a saint

the power of flowers.

The other, a quainter painter,

is better with letters

adored and adorned.

I am absurd with words.

I make mazes with phrases

that leap or creep

all twisty and cvrispy

or steep into sleep.

But, however clever,

in the end I pen

a verse. Terse.

Bringing in the New Year

   Two days after Christmas I put up a Christmas tree?
  The day after New Year's Eve I have a party?

    Isn't that all kind of late?

    But by now, this being the third year of the event, a New Year's Day party at my house is an annual tradition. This year, I spent Christmas week with my son on Vashon Island, Washington. When I got home and turned my attention to the upcoming party, I realized that the house needed decorating, so I took my bow saw into the woods, cut down a little fir tree I had been keeping my eye on, set it up in the house, and decorated it with all my beloved ornaments. 

 

Then I made cookies.

Stained-glass-window cookies

Date bars

Hazelnut financiers

Eggwhite brownies

   Because eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day is, according to Southern lore, good luck for the coming year, I set two large pots of black-eyed peas on the stove, one vegetarian, one with ham hock.

 I made two double batches of buttermilk cornbread. 

I set two bottles of red wine on the kitchen counter along with a corkscrew. I put white wine, sparkling water, and beer in a cooler nearby. I put every wine glass I had on the counter, along with water glasses.

    It was a drop-in-anytime affair. As guests arrived, I told them to help themselves.

    It was all a great success, because, really, for a good party all you need is good food and drink and great people, which I had in spades. 

    A parlor game might help, too. For this party, I suggested that guests bring three words or phrases for the new year, riffing on T. S. Eliot's lines: 

            For last year's words belong to last year's language

            And next year's words await another voice

            And to make an end is to make a beginning.

We put the words in a bowl, from which everyone drew a paper; then, in turn, we read the words. Sometimes the word wasn't comprehensible until the person who chose it explained it. "Maybe"? Well, yes, Margaret explained. It helps her take a step back and look at possibilities. "Autotelic"? "It means 'complete in itself,'" the guest explained, and comes from a history of Superman. My favorite word to come out of the game was ourobos, the end-in-the-beginning image, as of a snake with its tail in its mouth. (Last year's favorite was orophile, a lover of mountains.)

    My own three phrases played with past, present, future:

            A return to the wintry winters of the past. (Oh, I wish!)

            A future with a dependable democracy.

            All my loves and friendships always present in my life.

    That last phrase was fulfilled this holiday season, from Christmas with my son to a house full of friends on New Year's Day. As for the other two, I can only hope.