Category Archives: Mountains

A PAPER THIN ENVIRONMENT

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“Waste is worse than loss. The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly. The scope of thrift is limitless.”
Thomas Edison

First, full disclosure: I, too, just like you, am a paper consumer. Among other things I buy, keep, and stack on shelves and in boxes as many or more books, magazines, newspapers and catalogues made of paper as any other American. More, my writing appears in some of these paper products and (I hope) contributes to their raison d’être and that you read them. When colds or allergies strike I go through tissue paper with abandon, though I remember as a boy carrying a handkerchief and blowing my nose into it until even a young boy’s sensitivities were offended and it was washed and reused. For reasons of convenience that practice has been abandoned.
Like most Americans I consume a certain share of paper cups, plates, envelopes, cardboard containers, calendars, notebooks, paper towels and toilet paper. Like most Americans, each week I receive in the mail in the form of catalogues, promotions, advertisements and the like far more bulk paper that I discard (recycle if possible) than mail that is actually part of my life. That paper and all the energy and labor and pollution and, most importantly, trees that contributed to its production are completely wasted. William Monson said, “Waste is not grandeur.”
America is the most wasteful phenomenon in earth’s history, and we are all complicit in its abundant poverty of spirit and care for the earth’s paper thin environment.
The average American uses 300 kilograms (660 lbs) of paper a year. In India it is 4 kilos. The U.N. estimates that 30 to 40 kilos will meet basic literacy and communication needs for each person on earth. Paper was first invented (by Ts’ai Lun in China nearly 2000 years ago from rags, discarded fishing nets, hemp and grass—no trees) as a communication tool. The Gutenberg Bible, the first two drafts of the U.S. Constitution and Mark Twain’s original works were all printed on hemp based paper without a single fiber of a single tree. While there is about as much chance of America restoring its once thriving hemp industry to make paper as there is of its current government abiding by the tenets of its Constitution or respecting its mandated separation of powers, to do so would benefit the social, democratic, cultural, psychological and biological environment of the world.
About 40% of the municipal solid waste of the world is paper. More than 90% of paper comes from trees. A fifth of the world’s timber harvest is for producing paper, and while the paper industry refers to trees as a “renewable resource” that is disingenuous at best. There are such things as “tree farms” where trees are grown somewhat the same way chickens and hogs are grown as product, not living organism, but they are destructive to the environment, not an integral part of it. A tree farm is not a forest. Trees from both forest and farm supply about 55 percent of the paper of the world. Thirty-eight percent comes from re-cycled paper, and 7 percent is from non-tree sources. Three tons of trees are required to produce one ton of paper, and the pulp and paper industry, the fifth largest industrial energy consumer, uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry. About 12,000 square miles of forest are consumed each year by U.S. pulp mills.
Recycled paper production creates 74 percent less air pollution and 38 percent less water pollution than paper created from “virgin fiber.” There are different levels and standards of recycled paper. That is, some recycled paper product is more recycled than others. In our world, which is the only world we have or ever will have, the environment on which all life depends is as thin as a sheet of paper, and it is being torn apart by the excesses of man. One factoid illustrates a larger reality: The group Environmental Defense estimates that if the entire U.S. catalog industry switched its publications to just 10-percent recycled content paper, the savings in wood alone would be enough to stretch a 1.8-meter-high fence across the United States seven times. With a few enlightened exceptions—Patagonia is the leader in this endeavor (check here https://www.patagonia.com/on/demandware.static/Sites-patagonia-us-Site/Library-Sites-PatagoniaShared/en_US/PDF-US/Paper_Procurement_Policy_EN_051116.pdf) ¬¬¬¬—they will not do so unless their customers (consumers) demand it.
Who in their right mind would want to stretch a 1.8 meter high fence across the United States seven times, or a 30 foot high wall across the border with Mexico once? But paying for either of these absurdities by catalogue companies switching to using recycled paper makes far more sense than shutting down the government for a paper thin emergency by a President who is the antithesis of paper thin except in his claim to ability.

RUMINATIONS ON THE WRITING OF NIGHT DRIVING

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Night Driving was written in an unrelenting, focused burst of energy in three months at the end of 1974. Writing, like skiing and climbing, has always helped keep me on track, particularly in times when the track is icy, rough and hard to see. 1974 was a particularly unsettling, unsettled, difficult, confusing and, at the same time, joyous and satisfying time living in Bear Valley, Squaw Valley, Jackson Hole, San Carlos de Bariloche, Yosemite and points in between. Some of those peripatetic times were spent living and traveling around western America in my 1938 Chevrolet pickup with the redwood camper on the back in the company of my three year old son, Jason.
Both of us needed a bit more stability, routine, creature comforts and space than life in the old Chevy allowed, so that fall we left the road and moved into a small cabin on Montreal Road between Truckee and Squaw Valley in the Tahoe Sierra where we would live for the next five years. Getting off the road and removing one’s hands from the steering wheel opens up a great deal more time, energy and creativity (and hands) for the solitary road of writing. I started out the dynamics of daily (and nightly) life on Montreal Road by writing Night Driving, most of it, appropriately enough, written at night. The first draft was written in longhand in a spiral bound 8 ½ by 11 inch notebook. Then I rewrote it in another notebook and finally transferred it to the typewritten page via my Royal portable typewriter given to me by my father for my 15th birthday and which I used for nearly 40 years until its spirit was broken by the invasion of the computer which banished it to the closet reservation where it passed away of old age.
All writing, particularly the memoir, is or should be at least as mentally, spiritually and emotionally nutritious to the author as it is to the reader. The process of writing Night Driving forced me to delve into events and aspects of my life and times that were richer and more significant than they might appear on the surface. The work of the story teller helps light up the road of life, including long nights of racing from one crisis to another, from one war to another and from one ideology to the next. Telling stories encourages every driver to take it easy and pay attention to the present moment because it contains all the past and determines all the future and is the only moment we really have.
When I had a 100 page manuscript ready I sent it to Mike Moore, the good editor of Mountain Gazette, in hopes that he might see fit to publish it in three or four installments, as most submissions were in the 10 to 20 page range. Mike chose to devote most of the February 1975 issue to Night Driving, with a shorter, sterling piece by Ed Abbey, Desert Driving, filling up the rest. It was thrilling to have my name on that Bob Chamberlain cover photograph along with one of my literary (and cultural) heroes, Ed Abbey.
Since then Night Driving has taken on a life of its own, which is all one can ask of any story ever told by every man, woman and child attempting to light up and stay on the road of civilization and discover what sort of human we are, and why, and how.

AROUND THE WORLD ON SUN VALLEY’S BALD MOUNTAIN WITH DANO

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Dan ‘Dano’ Hawley has skied at least 25,000 vertical miles on Baldy since he first visited Sun Valley in the mid-1950s. He has most likely skied more, and he’s only 69. The circumference of Earth is 24,901 miles and is still spinning and so is he.
Dano is a true Idahoan, born to ski Sun Valley. His great-grandfather, James H. Hawley, was the ninth Governor of Idaho from 1911 to 1913 and Mayor of Boise from 1903 to 1905. Both his father and mother (though they hadn’t yet met) and their siblings skied Sun Valley in 1936. Dano has a photo of his mother skiing on Lolo Pass in 1929. His father was working as a physician in Hailey where he planned to stay when WWII began, but when the war ended Dr. Hawley returned to Boise where Dano was born, raised and schooled. The Hawley family often visited Sun Valley and introduced Dano to skiing Dollar Mt. when he was 5. Within a year the boy was on Baldy.
After high school Dano attended the College of Idaho in Caldwell where he earned a BA in Economics. Skiing interrupted education when he took one year off college to move to France to ski, which he considers a ‘great experience.’ He graduated in 1972 and immediately moved to Ketchum where he has lived ever since. He makes his living plowing snow in winter (Hawley Snow Removal) and working as a river guide for Solitude River Trips on the Middle fork of the Salmon River in summer and Barker River Trips on the Jarbridge, Bruneau and Owyhee Rivers in spring. He is quoted on the Solitude website as saying, “I love seeing little kids grow up and come back with their own kids.” He worked as a heli-ski guide for 25 years and as a ski coach for the Hailey Ski Team for 12 years. He is an avid mountain biker between ski seasons and rides his bike most days when he’s not on the river. He says that in the late 60s, before there were mountain bikes, “I would ride my French road racing bike through the backcountry to all the high mountain lakes.”
Physical activity and personal interaction with others are intrinsic to Dano’s life. A typical winter day when it has snowed begins at 2 a.m. when he goes to work plowing until about 8 a.m. After that he shovels out the iconic Irving’s Red Hots hot dog stand on Picabo Street across from the Warm Springs Lodge. He has completed this chore for owner Jill Rubin for the 40 years her landmark business has operated. According to Dano, 150 winter mornings he walks a quarter mile to the Warm Springs lift by 8:30 a.m. where he socializes, is on one of the early chairs (never—except on certain powder days—competing for the first chair) and begins his Baldy day of skiing. Dano says of his passion for skiing, “Each time I go skiing I have more fun that the time before.”
Dano skis at least 10 runs every day, sometimes more, often with friends and periodically alone, interspersed with tea and social time at Lookout Lodge on top of Baldy. For Dano, “It’s home. There’s a lack of crowds. It’s our own private Idaho.” He skis the bowls, the groomers, the bumps and the cat tracks with an inimitable style and relaxed demeanor, and he is a reliable source of finding the best skiing of the day on Baldy. After all, few know it better.

THINKING LIKE ARNE NAESS

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One of the great thinkers and philosophers of the 20th century, the Norwegian Arne Naess, died a few years ago at the age of 96. His passing was noted in some mainstream media, but, unfortunately, few in the mainstream know of the man or, more important, his ideas. In 1995 he described himself as a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. “I am, to the astonishment of certain journalists, an optimist,” he said. “But then I add I am an optimist about the 22nd century. And they say: ‘Oh, you mean the 21st?’ No, 22nd century! I think that in the 21st century, we have to go through very bad times and it will hurt even rich countries. Now it is all sailing smoothly—but it will hurt the rich.”
That seems a prescient observation. It looks like very bad times ahead for rich and poor alike in this century, though, as always, poor countries will suffer more than the rich. It seems to me that Arne Naess’ ideas, which were influenced by Buddhism, Spinoza, Gandhi and Rachael Carson’s seminal book “Silent Spring,” are a sort of template for long-range optimism during short-range hard times.
Naess is best known for coining the phrase “deep ecology,” which gives a theoretical foundation for the radical (to some) idea that mankind must drastically change its relationship with nature. He viewed deep ecology as different but not necessarily incompatible or at odds with what he termed “the shallow ecology movement.” The principles of deep ecology involve the purpose of human life within nature and the human values at work in environmental conflicts. Shallow ecology stops short of questioning or changing the basic tenets of consumer driven materialism and modern industrial economics, instead promoting as good environmentalism technological solutions like recycling, energy efficiency, green building standards, solar and wind power and the like, all of which are commendable and useful but do not address what Naess viewed as the root causes of, among other things, the 21st century’s bad times.
Naess’ ideas, careers as a philosopher, teacher (the youngest at 27 to ever become a professor at the University of Oslo), one of Norway’s leading mountaineers and environmental/social activists are too deep (sic) for a small column, but just these four of the eight points of the deep ecology platform are worth contemplating: 1) The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth; intrinsic value; inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes… 4) Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening… 6) Policies must therefore be changed. The changes in policies affect basic economic, technological and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present… 7) The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent worth) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.
There are several good books and plenty of information readily available about Deep Ecology and Arne Naess for those who are interested in, for instance, the personal, social and environmental ramifications of humans “…appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent worth) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living.”
Most people reading this know many people who do adhere to an increasingly higher standard of living while not dwelling in situations of inherent worth, perhaps, in some cases, the reader included. And most people on earth are aware at some level that “Present human interference in the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.” Far too many people do not know, or accept, or want to believe that “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves…independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.” But who among us could object to “…a profound awareness of the difference between big and great?”
Arne Naess was often misunderstood and attacked by people threatened by his ideas, sometimes called things like “eco-fascist.” But Naess always insisted that widening compassion towards non-humans did not imply diminishing compassion towards humans. He said, “We don’t say that every living being has the same value as a human, but that it has an intrinsic value which is not quantifiable. It is not equal or unequal. It has a right to live and blossom. I may kill a mosquito if it is on the face of my baby but I will never say I have a higher right to life than a mosquito.”
The world lost one of the great men of the past hundred years when Naess died, but if there is cause for optimism about humanity and planet Earth in the 22nd century it is in some significant part because he lived and the ideas he left behind.
Check them out. We need all the causes for optimism we can find.

THE FUTURE OF ICE

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A glacier is an exotic phenomenon of nature. It is born with a snowflake and dies when its last bit of ice turns to moisture and sinks into the earth, rises into the atmosphere or runs back home to the sea. Most people have never seen a glacier except, perhaps, at a distance. Few have actually stood, walked or climbed on one and seen and felt its majesty and menace, life and movement, beauty and connections to one’s own existence. Those who do are most often adventurers or natives of the far reaches of the earth whose subsistence is tied to knowledge of ice. Fewer still, most of them scientists in esoteric fields, have any intellectual understanding of the value of glaciers and the larger world of natural ice near the poles and their relationship to deserts, starvation in Africa, agriculture in South America, survival of the polar bear and, perhaps, mankind itself.
The ice of glaciers is, among other things, a repository of the natural history of earth, and most of its glaciers are retreating and vanishing and no one knows exactly what that might mean or what is to be done about it. Every mountaineer I know has seen it. Every person knowledgeable and concerned about global warming, the expanding desertification of earth, the compounding rate of species extinctions, the multitudes of people who are starving to death as these words are read, and the “totality of all life” given form and expression through the intricate connections between all things, like the toxic pollution of an oil refinery in Texas and the death of the last polar bear in the arctic, knows that global warming is melting the glaciers and the polar ice. Scientists have measured the decline of ice, as many with less formal training have noted it, but no one knows what it portends or what might be its consequences to the earth, its wildlife and oceans and to the heart and soul and future of man. No sane, honest person thinks it is good.
All too many people, especially those in the most polluting corporate industries and their pals in the halls of power in Washington whose parochial worldview is narrow and cramped and hardly a millimeter above the bottom line, don’t care. Who cares if a few glaciers vanish? With all the ice in the arctic and Antarctic, what does it matter if some of it melts? Even if the atmosphere is warming up a few degrees, it’s not very much and isn’t it just part of nature’s eternal cycles? But in the real world of reality, the real melting of glaciers is the result of man’s greed and carelessness, and it is only an illusion that he is superior to nature and that commerce and economic matters are his purpose on earth.
In her beautiful book, “The Future of Ice,” American writer Gretel Ehrlich carves out her own answers to such questions, and she inspires the reader to examine why they need to be asked in the first place. The book relates her travels in glacier/polar landscapes over the course of a year from Tierra del Fuego in the south to Spitsbergen, east of Greenland, in the north in search to the answer to this question: “…what would happen if we became ‘deseasoned,’ if winter disappeared as a result of global warming.” Ehrlich’s work is not easily categorized, but she has few peers in creating evocative prose about the landscape through which she moves and her own personal inner landscape which moves her. That the two worlds are not separate, that they are in reality impermeable and part of the same setting is a central message of “The Future of Ice.” She calls it “…both ode and lament, a wild time song and elegy, and a cry for help—not for me, but for the tern, the ice cap, the polar bear, and the lenga forest; for the river of weather and the ways it chooses to be born.”
In just one paragraph of the introduction Ehrlich touches on vulnerability, the heart, the mind, illusions and how they affect the future of ice on earth and much more. She writes: “We’re spoiled because we’ve been living in an interglacial paradise for twenty thousand years. Now we’re losing it. Climate stability, not to mention human superiority and economic viability, are illusions we must give up. Our can-do American optimism and our head-in-the-sand approach to economics when it takes into mind only profit and not the biological health of the planet—has left us one-sided. Too few of us remember how to be heartbroken. Or why we should be. We don’t look because heartbreak might imply failure. But the opposite is true. A broken heart is an open heart, like a flower unfolding from its calyx, the one nourishing the other.”
She is right. Whether or not we look, and whether we look in time to break our hearts, will determine the future of ice.

THE INTEGRITY OF THE PLANET

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“If we were truly moved by the beauty of the world about us, we would honor the earth in a profound way. We would understand immediately and turn away with a certain horror from all those activities that violate the integrity of the planet.
“That we have not done so reveals that a disturbance exists at a more basic level of consciousness and on a greater order of magnitude than we dare admit to ourselves or even think about.”
Thomas Berry

To the extent that each of us is truly moved by the world’s beauty, we are conscious of its rapidly deteriorating environment. As Berry indicates, that we do not turn away with a certain horror from all that violate the planet’s integrity reveals a basic failure of consciousness.
It is an admirable politeness to say that violating the integrity of the planet, destroying the systems that maintain its environment, poisoning the home and source of all life as we know it is a disturbance of consciousness. A more ungracious if colloquial term is craziness.
Is man crazy?
Some would say Berry and others who view the state of the earth’s environment as a threat to all life are alarmist Chicken Little fantasists. Is Berry just assigning moral values to the dirty practicalities of human survival? What is the moral value of integrity, planetary or personal? What are the true costs of integrity? What are the costs of its unraveling and are some of them moral costs? Where on a list of man’s priorities falls the environmental health of the planet? We hear arguments that many people cannot be concerned about the environment because their energies are occupied with finding a job and making a living. The underlying message in this argument is that environmentalism, turning in horror from all those activities that violate the integrity of the planet, is an effete, elitist pastime for those who do not understand and perhaps do not need to deal with the dirty physical constraints of the real economic machinery of the world.
This argument reveals a disturbance of consciousness worthy of Nero or, currently, Trump. It hovers above the current and future consequences of the polluted practicalities of the real economic machinery of the world being modeled on unlimited growth on a finite planet. It avoids what is clear to basic consciousness, disturbed as well as integral: all economics, no matter what the model, are completely dependent upon and sustained by the integrity of planet earth. One turns in horror from that which violates the integrity of the planet, as one would turn in horror from an ax murderer, a poisoner of the community well, or those who sell children to sex traffickers or separate them from their parents.
To ignore or deny the evidence of the unraveling of the earth’s environmental integrity is both a basic failure of consciousness and a violation of personal integrity. Donald Trump personifies both failure and violation in just two of his many moronic quips about human caused climate change: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” And “When will our country stop wasting money on global warming and so many other truly “STUPID” things and begin to focus on lower taxes.” Everything is connected, the personal with the universal, the individual with the water he drinks, the air he breathes, the soil from which he garners food, as well as all the chemicals and compounds in that water, air and soil. At a level so basic that even the most disturbed consciousness is present, everything (and everybody) living on earth is composed of the same earth, water and air and all their disturbances, additives, pollutants, synthetic compounds, radiated cells, mutations and genetic manipulations that daily compound and unquestionably violate the integrity of the planet.
Environmentalists and others who care more about Earth and its inhabitants than the standard of living (not to be confused with quality of life) that can be wrested from them, must continue to address the practical issues of which industries, practices, chemicals and land uses are destructive, and what are better ways of living on the earth. The disturbance at a more basic level of consciousness to which Berry refers needs addressing. This disturbance needs discussion, exploration and the light of day on a planet with integrity Why are we so reluctant to admit to ourselves or think about that disturbance?
A good place to start seeking answers and subsequent action is to ask. “Am I truly moved by the beauty of the world? Do I honor the earth in a profound way?
If the answer is ‘yes’ your actions will be motivated by beauty and guided by honor.
If the answer is ‘no’ there are no words, no action, no integrity.

THINKING OF AN OLD TEACHER

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I think of the landscape of western America as varied, beautiful, wild and damaged, bountiful and poisoned as any on earth. As an inhabitant of western America, I view its landscape—mountains, deserts, rivers, lakes, streams, forests, rock walls, glaciers, canyons, meadows, ocean and bays—as a priceless gift of indescribable beauty and significance to the lives of all its inhabitants.
Wolf, bear, cougar, coyote, marmot, eagle, hawk, rabbit, snake, lizard, tortoise, frog, fish, beetle, elk, fox, human, moose, bison, deer, owl, mouse antelope and ptarmigan are of and formed by and conscious of the landscape in which they live and die.
As are you.
As am I.
Of and formed by and conscious of the landscape in which we live and die.
What we do to the landscape we do to ourselves.
What we make of the landscape we make of ourselves.
Think of that.
We are what we eat, as the old teaching has it. More, we are also what we do in order to eat as well as what we do to the landscape in order to eat. And we are what we see and do not see in the landscape around us.
The landscape is our oldest, best, most reliable teacher. Look around: the longer, closer and more carefully you contemplate the landscape the more it will tell you—about its current state and about yourself.
I grew up with the Sierra Nevada and the great open desert to the east as my boyhood playground, but I don’t remember contemplating any of it as anything other than a backdrop and field for my personal endeavors until I was in college. That seems strange in some ways, but, like many people of that age and time, I was immature beyond my years and barely conscious if that of many things that constituted and formed my life. It was a great time and I enjoyed it, but consciousness of the world (the landscape) and personal pleasure and endeavor are quite different matters. The reader may know others who could be so described. It need not be a terminal state.
Though, like all learning, it was multi-faceted and more complex than a single teacher and class, a freshman art appreciation class at the University of Nevada helped me learn to appreciate more than art. At that time I was not at all interested in art and took electives according to the time of day they were offered so that I could ski in the afternoons. It was my good fortune that Craig Sheppard’s art appreciation class fit my ski time aspirations. Sheppard, a fine, well-known western artist, was the kind of person and teacher that inspired attention. I liked him in part because it was clear he knew things about his subject and about life that other teachers did not, or at least were not able to communicate to me. Sheppard showed me (us?) that art could be a door of perception, a tool of understanding and a connection to the world as perceived and expressed by the artist.
Art Appreciation 101 covered the history of art, but Sheppard himself painted landscapes of Nevada, among other things. His work touched and moved me more than, say, reproductions of Botticelli, Rubens or even DaVinci, and I never viewed the landscape of Nevada quite the same after my initial exposure to Craig Sheppard. I was of that landscape, as was Sheppard the artist, and I responded to the way he expressed and honored that connection. It would be years before I could put words to that response and connection. A few years later I spent several days walking around the countryside near Arles in southern France and realized that I would not have seen the landscape the way I did without knowing the work of Van Gogh. I would not have been interested in landscape or Van Gogh had I not taken a basic art appreciation class from Sheppard and been introduced to his own work.
These days I favor the lovely lithographs and oils of Russell Chatham. I never tire of them and I often see Chathams in many places in the western landscape in which I live and through which I move.
Sheppard died in 1978. Since then the western landscape has shrunk. It has suffered abundant destruction and indignities, too obvious and numerous to need mentioning. I wonder what Sheppard would think and how he would paint today’s western landscape that we are all of and formed by and at least at some primordial level conscious of?

REMEMBERING WARREN MILLER

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Warren Miller, who died on January 24 at the age of 93, needs no introduction. His influence on the post WWII explosive growth of American skiing and his legacy on younger generations of skiers are unmatched. Every American skier of a certain age grew up with Warren’s personally narrated films as a highlight of the year and nutrition for the spirit and mind seeking in mountains for what he once described as, “It’s our search for freedom. It’s what it’s all about -man’s instinctive search for freedom.”
In his autobiography he writes, “People remember their first day on skis because it comes as such a mental rush. When you come down the mountain from your first time on skis, you are a different person. I had just now experienced that feeling, if only for half a minute; it was step one in the direction I would follow the rest of my life.” He was following that direction when WWII interfered and enrolled in the officer’s training program with the Navy.
When the war ended Warren returned to America, bought an 8 mm Bell and Howell camera and spent the next few winters with his friend Ward Baker living a quintessential dirt bag ski bum life out of a tiny trailer in the parking lots of Sun Valley, Alta. Jackson, Aspen, Mammoth and Yosemite. He learned how to make ski films, as he put it, “…by blundering along.” Several ski clubs turned down his first film because they determined he needed a ‘professional’ narrator. Finally, the Ski Club Alpine of southern California agreed to a showing at which he later recalled, “The audience laughed at my stories, not just polite laughs, but amazingly loud belly-laughs. The film really worked, even though I had no script other than the one that was lodged in my brain.”
That brain changed the world of American skiing and ski films. When I was a boy in the early ‘50s in Reno, Nevada the annual Warren Miller ski film was a milestone of the year and, like everyone, I loved it. As I became a young adult ski racer and, later, ski instructor/coach/writer Warren and I became friends and I grew to love him as a person and more deeply appreciate his influence on American skiing and skiers and on my own life.
In the fall of 1972 I was adrift, skiing but not working in the ski world as I had been doing and more counter to the dominant culture than ever. A letter from Warren, who I had not seen in a couple of years, caught up to me asking if I’d like to join him and a crew on a several week trip to Europe to ski for his camera. The trip included money, expenses, good company and, of course, the best powder snow in the Alps. I replied that I would love to go but that there might be a problem. I hadn’t shaved or cut my hair in awhile and had a beard to the middle of my chest and hair below my shoulders and intended to keep it that way. I knew that Warren, to put it mildly, did not approve of what that represented in the early 1970s, and when he didn’t immediately reply I assumed the invitation was off. A few weeks later a letter arrived saying, “Let’s go.”
And we did.
We did some really good skiing for Warren’s camera at the finest ski resorts in Switzerland and France for more than a month, including some of the most memorable powder of my life. Warren used that footage in at least two films and it was well received and is still fun to watch. The trip remains in memory as some of my best time with Warren and crew and some of the best skiing of my life. But what I remember best of all was included in the delayed “let’s go” letter in which he wrote, “I’ve always maintained that what’s in a man’s head is more important than whatever is on it.”
That is, Warren Miller believed in people even when he disagreed with them, and, if they were honest, he supported them. He helped me understand that there is as much social/cultural/ideological freedom for the person who holds that belief as there is a different kind of freedom in the mountains and snowfields of the world.
Thanks, Warren.

TIBET, THE ENVIRONMENT, THE (AMERICAN) WEST

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Every native of western America to visit Tibet is struck by the geographic, environmental and ‘Big Sky’ scenic similarities between the two different locales of our earth. To be sure, Tibet is higher above sea level, having the loftiest, most spectacular and loveliest mountains in the world, but except for the thin oxygen of the earth’s highest and largest plateau the western traveler to Tibet can easily imagine Nevada, Idaho, parts of Washington, Wyoming and Montana, Arizona, Utah, California, Colorado and New Mexico in the fragile Himalayan landscape.
Tibet is like western America in other ways as well. People are much the same everywhere in the world, and though many appear to not recognize it we all live from the same interlocking ecology. Tibet is Asia’s principal watershed the source of Asia’s great rivers, as the west is the source of many of America’s great rivers. Before the invasion/occupation/colonization of Tibet by Communist China in 1949 the waters leaving Tibet to become the Yellow River, the Brahmaputra, Yangtze and Indus were among the purest of any on the planet. These waters irrigate land where 47 percent of the earth’s human population lives, and today those waters are among the most heavily silted, polluted and prone to flood rivers in the world. What happens to the environment and people of Tibet does not stop at the Tibetan border.
Even more than the indigenous peoples of western America, the indigenous people of Tibet traditionally evolved successful and sustainable environmental practices into their cultural and political value systems as part of their Buddhist teachings. The Buddhist precept of Right Livelihood stresses contentment and discourages over-consumption and over-exploitation of natural resources because they harm other living beings and destroy habitat. In 1642 the Fifth Dalai Lama issued a Decree for the Protection of Animals and the Environment, and each succeeding Dalai Lama has annually issued a similar decree.
But the thirteenth Dalai Lama and the Government of Tibet in Exile do not determine what happens to the environment of today’s Tibet. China does. The most succinct description of China’s effect on the environment of Tibet is “ecocide.” (As the most succinct description of China’s effect on the people of Tibet is “genocide,” but that is another and equally ignored by most of the world matter.)
Ecocide is an ugly word. It indicates a far reaching and even uglier reality. Grasslands dominate the Tibetan landscape and formed the backbone of its traditional animal husbandry, agrarian economy. The staple agricultural crop was barley with other cereals and legumes, but China’s need to feed its ever expanding military and civil personnel and the enormous numbers of Chinese settlers seeking lebensraum in Tibet have devastated vast areas of once productive land. It has also extended farming onto marginal and steep terrain, and, as has happened throughout America, hybrid seeds, pesticides and chemical fertilizers have been indiscriminately spread upon the land and washed into the rivers and to wherever those rivers flow. The on-going degradation and desertification of the Tibetan Plateau during the past 50 years has very likely affected the atmospheric circulation and jet stream wind patterns over Asia, and may be one element of the destabilization of weather patterns in the northern hemisphere. The world is one environment with one interconnected ecological system, and the dynamics and problems of one part of that system and another, say Tibet and western America, are not all that different and each part affects the whole.
In 1949 the ancient forest of Tibet covered 221,800 square kilometers. Less than half that remains today. The rest is a casualty to China’s deforestation of huge areas of Tibet through clear cutting, much of it on steep slopes. Tibet is not alone in this. In 1998, after centuries of turning its own forests into denuded deserts through heedless logging, China banned logging within its borders. As a result, not only Tibet but Burma and other Southeast Asian nations and parts of Africa and Siberia are being clear cut to feed China’s demand for wood.
There are an estimated 90 nuclear warheads stationed in Tibet by China, and, as in Nevada, Idaho and Washington, the respective Communist and capitalist agencies responsible for public and environmental safety have performed their duties with equally cavalier and reckless deception. One report on nuclear waste in Tibet reads: “Waste disposal methods were reported to be casual in the extreme. Initially, waste was put in shallow, unlined landfills…disposed of in a roughshod and haphazard manner…Nuclear waste would have taken a variety of forms—liquid slurry, as well as solid and gaseous waste. Liquid or solid waste would have been in adjacent land or water sites.” Eerily similar descriptions have been written of the nuclear waste management practices at the nuclear facilities at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in Idaho and Hanford in Washington. (An aside worth noting: INL was once INEEL—Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and before that something else, and before that something else, but a nuclear environmental laboratory is the punch line from one of Frankenstein’s favorite jokes about putting an apple laced with Plutonium-238 in the Garden of Eden to see what might happen. INL is more politically correct if not environmentally sensitive.)
As mentioned, Tibet and western America have many more similarities than differences and have much to teach and learn from each other.

ANOTHER WINTER

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Another winter within the mountains and upon the mountain is upon us, and not a day too soon, thanks Ullr. The mountain of winter’s choice depends on the person, but for those of us whose lives in one way or another revolve around the practice of skiing in the small though growing mountain towns of western America November is the beginning of the best time of the year. Snow and cold temperatures and white upon those peaks gladdens the heart and quickens the pulse of those who ski and snowboard and snowshoe and skate and, truth be told, the even larger numbers of those who in some actively uninvolved way have an economic or sentimental interest in how glad are those hearts, how quick those pulses.
Not for us are the frigid, unaffectionate words of Victor Hugo: “Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.” One imagines poor old Victor, hunched like a glowering gargoyle over some small desk in a dank, chill Left Bank apartment with one tiny window looking out upon Notre Dame, contemplating his own considerable tragedies and the general sufferings of mankind, completely missing that air temperature is not responsible for turning the heart to stone and that when water is transformed to ice you are not required to cower upon the river’s bank waiting for spring to unthaw your heart of stone. Instead, you can put on a warm layer of clothes and get outside and breathe some cold, clean, invigorating air and learn the joys of sliding upon frozen water. In Hugo’s case, it would have been French, 19th century winter’s version of putting into action the pop wisdom adage, “If you are given a lemon, make lemonade.” Victor would have been better off getting out of the city with its famous, Gothic, man-made cathedral and taking a trip to Chamonix to cast his eyes upon nature’s own cathedrals, the Aiguille du Midi and Mont Blanc, among others, and walking up to Argentiere and checking out the Mer De Glace, the sight of which will thaw the stoniest heart. His spirits would surely have been raised if he had consulted Ullr instead of the deformed and definitely downer if good hearted Quasimodo and taken a walk in the Alps and breathed some clean, fresh, frigid air rather than holing up in Paris contemplating the dour, gargoylesque spirits spouting water off the flying buttresses of Notre Dame.
No, Victor Hugo’s dark view of winter is not for us who live in mountain town western America not by accident but by choice. We are more in tune with and the spirit of one of the most extraordinary skiers in the history of snow, Fridtjof Nansen. Indeed, Nansen, explorer, skier, scientist, statesman and humanitarian, was among the most amazing humans in the history of man, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for his part in saving the lives of some 400,000 prisoners of war after World War I. Nansen exemplified the spirit of what Dick Munn, an adult skiing friend of my childhood who loved to ski and who had seen war and wanted nothing more to do with it, once said to me: “If everyone in the world skied, there would be no more wars.” Whether he was right or not in his idealism, I have always remembered it and the fact that Munn was inspired to think of it by the activity and place and season of skiing. Like Nansen, Dick Munn was warmed and made contemplative by skiing, the mountains and winter. A man for all seasons, Nansen wrote with a skier’s heart of skiing in the Arctic, “Tuesday, November 13. Thermometer –38 degrees C. (-36.4 degrees F)…..A delightful snowshoe (ski) run in the light of the full moon. Is life a vale of tears? Is it such a deplorable fate to dash off like the wind….through a night like this, in the fresh, crackling frost, while the snowshoes glide over the smooth surface, so that you scarcely know you are touching the earth, and the stars hang high in the blue vault above? This is more, indeed, than one has any right to expect of life; it is a fairy tale from another world, from a life to come.”
Yea, Fridtjof.
Yea, winter is here with its short days and long nights and brisk air that waken the body at first inhalation, putting it on full alert that this is the time to give complete attention to the smallest details of survival. It is a time to take note of those patches of ice on the sidewalk, the road, the ski hill and in the thoughts and hearts and intentions of those whose actions and decisions might make a difference in your life—the driver with cell phone at the ear coming around a glazed corner with an equally glazed look in the eye, the chattering of skis or snowboard coming up behind you with the sound of imperfect control, or someone who spins the truth with such icy determination that believing them could, indeed, turn the water of heaven and the heart of man into stone.