Experts Only: Unmarked Obstacles

Four wheel drive vehicles only from this point on. We may be close to Salt Lake City, but this escalates quickly. And there's nothing to eat there.

I slid over a few exposed rocks and heard a bone-chilling scrape. It’s probably nothing, I thought with an expert’s confidence and novice’s ignorance. A few turns later, I howled as I dodged a tree only to find a rather stiff branch hiding behind it. It forced me to stop in my tracks and take stock of the situation.

Standing momentarily still, I felt like I did six months before, treading water in a lake of unknown depth. I was holding my position, but I could tumble downwards at any moment. A pole thrust into the snow showed it too deep to walk out. The only way forward was down.

Countless times a winter day, people find themselves in this situation at mountains across the U.S. We get scared, struggle to catch our breath at 8000 feet, and begin to wonder why we jauntily slid past signs adorned with everything but a Nuclear Hazard logo. Experts only! Cliffs! Unmarked obstacles! No re-entry! Foul language and light drug use!

“I’m an expert! I’ve skied my whole life!” we think, as we risk life and limb to impress our ability on our buddies.

We wind up where I stood. We either find a way to side-slide down the whole slope, letting dignity slip out of an unzipped pocket on the way, or we call ski patrol and forfeit varying quantities of treasure in exchange for a lift off a desert island.

Either way, we thrash sleeplessly through fever dreams in the bed we have made ourselves, cursing the term “expert” and the hubris that led us to this precipice.

Luckily, the threat of returning to work on Monday has helped me outgrow my fear of skiing too fast into a tree. With the promise of a warm cubicle at the bottom of the hill, I found new confidence in my ability to ski with control, get out of the way, and make it home safe.

I shot down through the trees, turning around stumps and rocks with what felt like grace, keeping my pockets zipped and treasure to myself. Breathlessly collapsed at the bottom, I felt a warm satisfaction of survival replace the adrenaline. I had become, by the standards of the place, an expert.

For the rest of the day, I felt cool as a cucumber as I slid still more nonchalantly past signs warning of extreme danger. Experts only, they cautioned. Please, I scoffed.

Only at the bottom would we remember just how many experts there were besides ourselves. Though nothing compared to the photos we had seen of the lift lines at a few Colorado mountains that weekend, heaving masses pushed towards the lifts.

There is no good without evil, and there are no experts without laypeople. At least a third of the people at Solitude and Snowbird showed up at or before dawn, with their own food and equipment, keen to be on the first lift. Elbows out, these same people would more than willingly take a short hike or a long traverse to find the coveted first tracks on ever-steeper slopes. None seemed deterred by warning signs. Most would call themselves experts.

One in six people along a traverse would say “this is a bad place for you to stop” to those about to drop in. Such warnings projected savvy without improving safety. These same vigilantes complicated my efforts to turn right out of the left lane and drop into the bowl below. Once my blind spots cleared, I swerved sharply then sped straight away from the masses, trying to project the illusion of control. Wind whipping my face, I carried enough speed to launch off a lip and feel free.

Until I landed and got back into the lift line at the bottom. 19 or more minutes later, I sat down on the lift and chatted with ski patrol about the dangers of other idiot experts. Back at the top, throngs of experts pontificated on when a roped-off area would be avalanche-free enough to open.

One guy rolled a chunk of snow down the slope and divined from the tea leaves of its path that the snow “wasn’t even that sick.” This is a guy worth listening to, I thought.

Riding the singles line saved Ben and me time, prevented us from growing tired of each other, and gave us an eye into the how variously in-the-know all these double-black-diamond skiers were.

One group of dare-I-say middle aged women spoke of a special spot at Alta where one of them had stashed a bottle of hooch and a couple folding chairs in an electrical box. This struck me as an expert move despite their self-avowed terror of the winding Little Cottonwood Canyon Road.

Two snowboarders talked a big game about hiking to some special place but kissed my feet when I produced an unopened yogurt. “I can’t believe that didn’t explode in your jacket! You’re a braver man than me!” one declared. “I’ll take any risk to save $7,” I sighed.

I wear cargo pants whenever a hotel has free breakfast, I told them.

A demographic crisis lurks behind the hordes of winter sports enthusiasts who are perfectly self assured until they’re not. Anecdotally, my friend Ben was one of about 20% of serious skiers not on some type of multi-day or season pass. A day at Solitude or Snowbird was comparatively reasonable, but the posher Deer Valleys and Vails charge north of $200 for a single day’s skiing. Avoid being hungry, too.

The remaining 80% of people I encountered used a bulk deal or season pass of some sort. An older gentleman I rode with had purchased both the scrappy Ikon Pass and its corporate, publicly owned high school classmate, the Epic. Much like college, prices are going up, accessibility is shrinking, yet fewer seem to pay actual daily face value.

For dedicated skiers with foresight, some deals do exist. An early-season soft $400ish for the Mountain Collective offers two days apiece at a dozen renown mountains including Alta, Big Sky, and Mammoth. A hard $799 offers unlimited access to a similar group of mountains to the Mountain Collective, with the condition of holiday blackouts (no, the other kind) and a cap of 5 days at certain spots. Those who care could reasonably net out below $75 for daily ticket equivalents. Still steep, but hardly $200.

Alternatively, the Epic pass offers pricing schemes more complex than the derivatives traded by the Arc’teryx-clad hedge fund mogul who will cut you off in the Back Bowls. These passes project  better deals the same way that Walmart offers better prices than the now-defunct family-owned butcher in town. The same butcher that lasted 98 years but couldn’t quite make it to 100.

I had purchased the Mountain Collective because I had never heard of it and figured that meant it was cool. Modern resort skiing has never been cheap, and the price of stamps never goes down. Nothing here is surprising, but the effect is to weed out everybody not falling into one or two groups.

The first group remaining are those families willing to turn the other cheek to gouging for the sake of quality time. Their children tend to, oblivious to their parents’ forfeited arm-and-leg, throw tantrums about how uncomfortable the whole operation is. The boots don’t get better and they’re either too warm or too cold, but sometimes these kids grow up enough to be somewhat grateful members of the second group, like me.

The second, more worrisome demographic is the overconfident young professionals and their foils, the ski-bums. Down-trodden during the week, these types blossom into self-anointed kings at the mountain. Scattered within this group are also the smattering of life-long skiers who are now younger retirees. Both are dedicated enough to this absurd pastime of going repeatedly up and down a hill, somehow freezing and sunburnt both, that they willingly risk the alphabet soup of knee ligaments for the dual reward of adrenaline and a season pass’s money’s worth. I fall into this group, too.

These people overrun the joint while complaining that crowds have taken over. We blame the same passes that enable our presence for compromising our experience.

Certain experts told me that the number of distinct skiers has declined slightly while the average days per skier has skyrocketed. The unanticipated consequences of this may reach a boiling point analogous to those approached by over-tourism in Hawaii or on Everest.

Friday, authorities closed Little Cottonwood Canyon Road due to a series of induced and natural avalanches. As a result, everybody who knew anything tried to use their passes at Brighton or Solitude and headed towards the open Big Cottonwood Canyon Road. Gridlock ensued. A car slid off the road. A bus slid off the road. The parking lots at Brighton filled up. People sat in cars for hours. Nobody enjoyed themselves. We turned around and drove an hour and a half to another mountain, not on any of the passes, where freezing rain closed the lifts the minute we rolled up.

Sunday, the wait at the bottom of Snowbird’s Mineral Basin allowed more than enough time to gaze up at the top of the bowl above. No fewer than 30 snowsports enthusiasts waited at the very edge of in-bounds as ski patrollers fired off avalanche cannons some 100 feet away from them. Convinced they had proven their expertise by traversing to this extreme point, these prophets put themselves into a situation that could have been neither comfortable nor safe. At least four of them, too, were likely not quite good enough to handle the slope, but they were unwilling to admit so to their friends.

For our last run of the weekend, Ben and I took a short yet endless hike up to some side-country terrain that promised greatness. Trudging upwards, I tried not to acknowledge the contradiction in seeking untouched snow at the end of a well-trodden path. The trek was well worth it, and every now and then I paused to catch my breath and mumble “shit, that’s really steep.”

As I gathered the strength to finish my last few turns, a stranger in a pseudo-retro jumpsuit whizzed past me a bit too close for comfort.

As he passed, we sized each other up in a split second, each deeming the other a moron: I sat around melting the snow, and he barreled ahead with a recklessness I envied. Both figured the other would have been dissuaded by the hike. Despite our shared position on a nuclear hazard double black diamond, neither considered the other an expert.

At the bottom, I collapsed into the trunk of our car, too tired and satisfied to want to be an expert. I opened a Coors Banquet, looked up at the mountain, wiggled my toes in the sun, and chided myself for buying everything the chairlift intellectuals claimed hook-line-and-sinker. Expertise, I decided, was for those who don’t know what they’re talking about.