Expedition Here
Less than a mile from home, less than a couple hundred feet from my uphill ski touring partner’s office, we were on an expedition.
In a winter of no less than three springs, a doozy of a storm rolled through on April 1st. Mother Nature’s April Fool’s. Reminding us that winter is capricious and subject to boomerang at any time.
The last several times we’d been uphill skiing in this spot, we’d come close to wearing shorts and had smeared sunscreen across our winter-pale faces. All skin surfaces had been covered by jackets for the last fiveish months and were not ready for such an assault.
Not today. Full gear, extra jackets, so windy that we stopped talking towards the top. Only hearing the crunch of our skis over the ice – any snow landing in that spot being sheared off by the blade of wind coming over the ridge.
We laughed and called it an expedition and said we were going to make the top no matter what. We stopped in the lee of some bushes and sank to our hips when stepping off our skis. My pole disappeared all the way to its hilt when I applied even a minimal amount of weight.
Then we giggled in the powder on the way down, as is standard practice when moving downhill through piles of dry flakes. At the bottom, we hiked to our cars since the drifts piled at the exit.
I’m so glad for all the practice in good conditions which let me make it up then down again safely, even in a heckuva storm.
I wouldn’t have weathered this winter day without the spring ones that came before. And without someone to laugh with, alongside the singing wind.
