Spring Season: High Water
Posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
Jackson Hole Mountain Resort ran its final tram of the season Sunday, Grand Teton National Park has been plowing park roads for cyclists and Cloudveil has released its spring clothing line.
As a welcome to this sunny season, and a treat to those who don’t have the glossy pages in hand, we’ll run the Cloudveil catalog essays as blog posts this week, hoping to inspire people to keep the skis out and/or tune the bike up.
The first comes from Peter Kray, the editorial director of The Mountain Gazette, and U.S. editorial director of Ski Press World.
HIGH WATER
There were two-story windows that faced the Tetons in the house on Sylvester Lane. All winter they rattled from the snow control. On clear nights the peaks would press against the glass, like great granite tsunamis bearing down from a sea of stars. And we gathered there on our island, around the woodstove in the living room, slowly accruing more ski bums, more sleeping bags on the floor, and a burgeoning pack of young shaggy dogs.
“When the snowpack shrinks to a circle, that’s when the rivers are running at their highest water,” Paul Huser said when the spring finally came, standing out on the other side of the windows on our deck, pointing at the shrinking white oval of winter still left on Rendezvous Bowl.
To be honest, I hadn’t really thought past that first ski season. I hadn’t thought past each passing day, wondering only where to ski, how and then what to eat, and where to get teh cheapest beer. And when the lifts had stopped, it was as if the whole town was wondering what to do –stuck by the deep mud in the roads, and at teh construction and landscape sites, wandering around town with the stunned look of Gore-Tex gerbils suddenly let off the trianing wheel.
Then Huser said, “That means they should be opening Beartooth Pass soon.” And with a start, I felt the world kick back into gear.
Huser wore a knee brace and every morning jumped eight feet out of the loft we’d built onto the couch. He wanted to be a ski star and then an architect. I wanted to be a writer. And when Powder magazine bought my first article, about that couch, they also published a series of photos of him dropping like a helicopter off a cliff in the Expert Chutes taken by Wade McCoy.
I suppose we all felt some sort of sun rising behind our heads – of spring and hope and the sky gone big blue – and that we would reap some sort of eternal if not material reward from the gavity-fed religion that we spent each day praying to. But there were still so many more winters of Saltines and Top Ramen and Pabst to shiver through.
And even if you could have told us then that all of our dreams would come true, I’m not sure if we would have wanted to know. It’s nice now that Sulli, the shop rat from Skinny Skis, started making clothes, and that the Jones boys made movies and that each and every one of us got to marry the most beautiful woman in the world. But knowing that then would have ruined how fun it felt to be so young and scared, driving north to Montana with skis on the roof and the sound of spring blaring in our ears.
During the past 14 months, Peter Kray has published 28 magazines, which equals almost two per month. All the more reason he’d like to be driving north with Paul Huser, with skis on the roof.
