Morning Dynamite
The bombs rattled the windows.
I wasn’t in a war zone, or at least not the traditional kind. On the mountain, they were purposely dynamiting some of the slopes to trigger avalanches. This controls when the slide occurs – when no one is around – so it doesn’t fall when there’s a kids group ski lesson out there.
So I finished my morning yogurt with the blasts still resonating in my chest. Then I dressed in all the layers, put my skis and helmet in the car, and headed up to those same slopes for a lesson. After a few runs in the more populated parts of the mountain, our instructor took us to an area that required hiking. There were only a few tracks down the steep powdery face speckled with bushes.
The clouds were low and persistent and we were socked in. It was the kind of snowy day where depth perception was merely a suggestion. Bumps and drop-offs arrived by surprise because distinguishing between sky and slope was an exercise in guess-timation.
“‘Look,’ I said to my group-mates, while pointing up with my pole, ‘that’s where they bombed.’”
Because of the conditions, it took almost of a third of the descent for a strange color on the slope to catch my eye. Even though grey abounded in the landscape, there was an unnaturally dark patch on the surface. I stopped my traverse (a relief, as my legs were burning from maneuvering myself in the deep powder) to inspect the elliptical area of grey dirt speckling the otherwise pristine white surface.
It took a minute but I finally figured it out. “Look,” I said to my group-mates, gesturing with my pole, “that’s where they bombed.” There wasn’t a visible slab of snow downslope so it hadn’t triggered anything big, but it was enough of an aberration that we swiveled our heads to size up the situation. It was disorienting to think that might have been one of the blasts I heard in the morning. Now I was standing in the detonation zone with a peanut butter Clif bar in my pocket and wood planks strapped to my feet.
It was a good reminder that even though there are lodges with hot french fries and diesel-generated chairlifts with complex mechanical parts and snowmobiles that can get you down the mountain in a matter of minutes and high-visibility fencing to indicate where you should not go, this is still a kind of wilderness. Every time there’s a moose threading through the trees or a white, furry ermine running below the lift, it’s another reminder that this is the forest. Yes, it has been altered (sometimes significantly), but to discount the power of the mountains has only been shown to be foolish a few tens of thousands of times.
“It seems somehow appropriate that we have to bring the power of chemical explosives to even have the smallest effect.”
The next few turns were difficult (being new to powder skiing and not very skilled) and I ended up taking another too-long traverse. As I was almost upon it, I realized that I was heading into the center of another dynamite blast. I couldn’t turn fast enough and I couldn’t stop my forward progress, so I went through. I moved as gingerly as I could over the area of aftershock but my skis snagged on the texture.
They hung in the wound on the side of the mountain. The war sounds were a fight against nature and it’s a battle we won’t win for any length of time. It seems appropriate that we have to bring the power of chemical explosives to even have the smallest effect. In Nepal, there is a ceremony before ascending a mountain – a puja - which is a request for the mountain to grant you entry. I wonder what the mountains think about having holes poked in their sides.
It’s not just ski mountains where alterations exist. A hiking trail is a wound too. So are sport-climbing bolts on rocks and boat docks on lakes and cell phone towers (even when they’re made to look like trees) in National Parks.
I knew that blast zone existed to make the environment safer. The dynamite and the hundreds of people working very, very hard to make sure all of us went home safe were the reasons we could be out there. I was and am grateful for their work.
“I can love the floaty feeling of six inches of fresh snow, but I can also wish that it didn’t require so much volatility.”
The morning detonation that I felt through the window glass allowed me to be on the mountain only a few hours later. There was a boom and then there was the silent shifting of my turns through the powder. The two exist at opposite ends of the spectrum but without the former, I wouldn’t have been able to do the latter. I can love the floaty feeling of six inches of fresh snow, but I can also wish that it didn’t require so much volatility.
Inspired by events at Park City Mountain Resort, Utah