Category Archives: Ski History

CEREBRATING TRUMP (An essay)

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There are events in every person’s life that remain in the mind (and, therefore, the heart and spirit) like sign posts on the (so far) endless road to which one can return when necessary for guidance ahead or to see how far one has traveled. Some, like the birth of a child, are filled with mystery, wonder and the joy of life; others are reminders of the inscrutable danger, misery and vile creatures, people and circumstances that each of us inescapably experiences and really hopes to avoid in the future.
In the latter category, two events from my life often come to mind: I was in a starless hotel in a country of poverty when I contracted a serious case of food poisoning. For 24 hours I alternately and at times all at the same time (truly) vomited, shat, shivered and sweated and, after cleaning myself up, returned to bed feeling as sick and exhausted as I have ever felt. When an another expulsion event seemed to be arriving I went to the bathroom with the hole in the concrete floor toilet and took my best aim from whichever orifice was cocked and loaded, cleaned up and went back to bed. One time I was kneeling on the floor vomiting into the hole in the concrete floor and I passed out. I don’t know how long I was out (it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes) but when I woke I was looking into the opening (about 3 by 3 inches wide) from which flowed the water that drained into and cleaned out the shit and vomit in the hole in the floor toilet. My understandably wretched feelings and thoughts were overlaid by the monstrous and bizarre when a small albino toad appeared out of the hole which provided the small stream of water carrying shit and vomit to someplace I hope never to see. The albino toad and I contemplated each other for an indeterminate time before it (I lacked the knowledge to determine its gender) turned and vanished back into the hole in the wall. I assume the repugnance I felt towards the albino toad was mutual, and its presence symbolized my feelings, thoughts and physical state at that moment. How could it not?
The second event took place a few years later about as far removed from the first as, say, poverty and a shit hole albino toad are from the White House, at least so I used to think. At Christmas 1989 I was Director of the Aspen Mountain Ski School in Aspen, Colorado, a great job at what I considered to be the best ski school in America. Christmas in Aspen, as in most ski resorts, is busy. For obvious reasons, the Aspen Mountain Ski School has a higher percentage of the famous, wealthy, privileged and powerful among its clientele than most American areas. The majority of these ‘high end’ customers were and are happy and grateful to be skiing, gracious, friendly, accommodating and relatively easy to interact with for ski school personnel who make their livings off tips and repeat clients. After all, going skiing, even at a Christmas maximum busy resort, is for most people not like a visit to the dentist or proctologist, but, as is the case with every demographic and every walk of life, there are those few whose personal mental/spiritual/psychic/physical suffering is so deep and unaddressed from within that their response is to project their inner root canal/rectal nightmares on the people and larger world before them. The ski school desk, like every restaurant, coffee shop, ski shop, bar, grocery store, taxi service, massage parlor and other business in town, was jamming. I don’t recall if I was called out of my office to the front desk or if I just went there to check and see how things were going, but I arrived to find the normal lines of people waiting to arrange ski lessons, including a man who stood out from the crowd for several reasons and who I will, unfortunately, never forget.
This large man was topped with an impressive pile of blondish hair that looked like a wig requiring a great deal of time and effort to put and maintain in place. He was haranguing the desk staff in a loud voice that left no decibels for others about a ski lesson he wanted and had the money to pay for and was tired of waiting in endless lines to get. The most polite words I can use to describe my first impression of Donald Trump are ‘he was really offensive.’ I had no idea who he was and, as it turned out over the years, the more I learned the less I cared for him, a dangerous, insidious dynamic. Dealing with a few difficult, distasteful people is part of any job in the service industry, and the ski school desk staff quickly connected Trump with a suitable instructor and got them out of the office and off to the hill, much to the relief of staff and the other customers waiting patiently to arrange ski lessons and get on with their day.
It took Donald Trump only a few minutes to leave an indelible impression on me personally, as well as the ski school desk staff (and, I feel safe in presuming, the other customers) as being the most repugnant, self-centered, rudest human being any of us had ever encountered. And loud. Yes, LOUD. After that morning, any ski school customer who behaved in an uncooperative, arrogant or imperious manner was usually compared with Donald Trump on the asshole scale. None came close to his score.
The one bright aspect of Trump’s visit for me is that Ivana Trump, Donald’s wife of 13 years at the time, and her friend and fellow Czech, the great author, Jerzy Kosinski, who also lived in New York City, requested an instructor for the day. Every ski instructor was working, so I spent most of the day skiing with Ivana and Jerzy. (I wish I could remember if Donald was involved in the request and transaction, but I don’t.) Neither Ivana nor Jerzy needed instruction, but as is common in Aspen and elsewhere for those who can afford it, a ski instructor is handy for cutting lift lines and as tour guide knowing the terrain and snow conditions. Ivana, an ex- ski racer, was an excellent skier, unlike her husband who was not, and Jerzy was very good which meant that skiing with them was really fun. In addition, they were both intelligent, engaged, good conversationalists and easy to be with. As a writer it was an honor to ski with Kosinski and I enjoyed telling him how much I admired his work and seeing his pleasure in such recognition. I was saddened when less than a year and a half later he committed suicide. It was none of my business, so I made a point of not dwelling on the relationship between a charming Ivana and her repulsive mate.
A few days later some of the private details of that relationship went public and became an integral part of Aspen lore regarding the rich and famous.
Donald was on vacation in Aspen not only with his wife but with his mistress as well, and it seems he was as discrete about his double life as he was soft spoken about whatever was on his mind. Her name was Marla Maples and within the year she would become Donald’s next wife. Ivana was unaware that Donald had a mistress or that he had brought her to Aspen for the family vacation. Ivana had never even heard the name Marla Maples. Then, on December 30, 1989 it all came out in a most public venue after Ivana overheard her husband on the telephone refer to someone named Marla, though, according to broadcast journalist Barbara Walters who interviewed Ivana in 1991, Ivana’s Czech accent reported the name as ‘Moola.’
According to the Chicago Tribune, a Chicago decorator on vacation recognized Donald walking down the main street of Aspen with his arm around a blond and assumed it was Ivana. The designer told the Tribune, “Same size, same hair. I walked around to look, but it wasn’t her.” A day or so later the designer was present on December 30 when Ivana and Marla met for the first time at Bonnie’s, a restaurant described by the Tribune as, “…where everyone goes for lunch, the most public spot in Aspen, the equivalent of, oh, say, the lobby of Trump Tower. Then, Donald and Ivana put on a show for the holiday skiers. ‘They walked out of the restuarant together,’ says the decorator. ‘She was talking and he was trying to shush her. Then they both stopped to put on their skis. She was a little behind him and she was being kind of playful, bumping into him. But then they stopped about 50 feet away from the sundeck. She was facing us and he had his back to us and it`s now clear that they’re fighting. She’s waving her hands and yelling at him. And now everybody decides, ‘This is interesting’ and we all go over to the railing. It goes on for 25 minutes. It went on forever! Every now and then she tried to make up and put her arms around him, but he pulled back, he wouldn’t respond. He finally skied off, and everyone started clapping and cheering. She smiled and waved to the crowd and skied away in his direction. But I saw them near the next lift, and they were still going at it.’”
The Aspen Sojurner provided a somewhat different take on the day: “When Ivana Trump and Marla Maples encountered each other on Aspen Mountain during the Christmas holidays of 1989, the story went around the world in at least three or four different versions, one of which made the front page of the next day’s New York Post. What is known for sure is that both women were in Aspen, with The Donald, at the same time. And only one of them, Ivana, was married to him. The rest of the details varied considerably.
“Some claim Ivana approached Marla in Bonnie’s restaurant and demanded, “You bitch, leave my husband alone!” Others say the confrontation occurred on the ski slope at the bottom of Little Nell, where they threw snowballs and hissed at each other. Ivana has said, “She came to me on the mountain and told me she was in love with my husband and they were having an affair. It was extremely painful.” Still others insist that the real source of the contretemps was that both were wearing identical expensive ski suits, possibly purchased by Trump for each of them. Whatever really happened, the result was divorce court.”
So…..almost 30 years ago Donald Trump impressed a hard to impress Christmas Colorado ski town as an infantile, duplicitous narcissist whose care and concern for the world began and ended at his own skin. I never forgot him, though, to me at the time he was just a New York City real estate tycoon who gave his profession and home town bad names while relaxing on vacation. Hard to imagine what he might do or be when he was working at it. I didn’t know it, but by that time his name was on a New York Times bestselling book, “The Art of the Deal,” though, in reality, he hired a ghost writer to actually do the writing, something he subsequently did with a hundred more books listing Donald Trump as author. I’ve long been amused and informed that I’d never heard of Trump who had achieved a certain standard of value in our society by his book being on the NYT best seller list in company with Kosinski, among others, whose work I deeply value. To think about Trump is to think about a lack of integrity and other core values. I can’t truly say that I ever ‘met’ Trump (I doubt many have), but I did ‘encounter’ him, and to encounter Trump is to encounter a vacuum of integrity in which a deal is in the art of charlatans rather than in words of integrity and value.
A couple of years later I left Aspen and don’t remember ever thinking about Trump for more than 10 years until I read news reports (I don’t own a TV) of Donald Trump hosting a TV show called “The Apprentice.” Wow! My weak interest in watching TV lost some of its strength but I considered a show starring Trump a disturbing anomaly not worth the time to watch. The disturbance was not Trump, for there have always been people lacking redeeming qualities, but, rather, that enough people to support a national TV show actually were interested in watching him publicly humiliate people. Had I (and many others) paid more attention to that dynamic and its significance we would not have been so taken off guard a few years later when he became a candidate for President of the United States and, later, when he lost the democratic popular election by three million votes and was nevertheless named President.
It is worth noting, three weeks before democratically losing the 2016 election which gerrymandered him into the White House, Trump said, “Remember, we are competing in a rigged election. They even want to try and rig the election at the polling booths, where so many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is all too common.” That statement is ironic, funny or chilling, depending, but whatever the implications to American democracy of him calling the election ‘rigged’ and losing by three million votes while still becoming Commander in Chief of the most powerful military on earth, 60 million American citizens voted for Donald Trump. Though the majority of racist Americans do not admit their racism, some of those 60 million votes were in response to Barack Obama having served as President. (I have a Trump supporter friend who, during a political conversation, brought up The Bell Curve as justification for his dislike of Obama. When I pointed out that The Bell Curve is a thoroughly debunked racist polemic, he responded that he didn’t realize it was racist or based on fraudulent scientific research and that since he wasn’t a racist he wouldn’t bring up The Bell Curve in any more ‘political’ conversations. I was reminded more of the hole from which emerged the albino toad than the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland.) Though a majority of sexist Americans do not admit to their sexism, some of those 60 million voters simply could not accept a female in the White House. (I have another Trump supporter friend who told me he couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she was ‘dishonest.’ When I pointed out the humor in choosing ‘dishonesty’ as a reason for supporting Trump over Clinton he quit communicating with me.) Despite the white-washed image of equality America has always preached and presented to the world and itself, racism and sexism are endemic to American society.
They have been from the beginning. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were, after all, slave owners. Jefferson fathered children with his slaves. Washington made his living buying and selling slaves. This from the timeline of the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection Home Page on the Library of Congress website: “Abigail Adams writes to her husband, John, who is attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, asking that he and the other men who were at work on the Declaration of Independence ‘Remember the Ladies.’ John responds with humor. ‘The Declaration’s wording specifies that “all men are created equal.”’ It is worth noting here that the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” (The first draft of the Declaration was worded “…all free men are created equal…”, but Jefferson, the primary writer of the Constitution, cut out the word ‘free.’
That is, throughout America’s history people of color and females have not legally or practically enjoyed certain unalienable rights of equality granted to the white males of America. Nor do they or those whose private sexual preferences, personal religious beliefs or birth in the ‘wrong’ country put them in the category of ‘other’ enjoy them today. Trump’s support comes from those citizens who want to keep it that way.
And there is this:
We are all complicit in allowing those inequalities to persevere and, thereby, helping to propel Donald Trump into the White House, each of us in our own way.
This is one of mine: In 1988, the Christmas before Trump appeared at the ski school desk in Aspen, I was sitting at The Sundeck, the restaurant at the top of Aspen Mountain taking a break from the busyness of Christmas with a cup of coffee. Two months earlier I had undergone major back surgery and was not at optimum physical, mental or emotional form. My table was close to The Sundeck ski school desk which was staffed that day by a woman who was a highly regarded long-time employee of the ski company and a friend. A middle-aged, well-groomed man approached the desk and inquired about a lesson he had reserved for that day. He was told that the instructor that had been assigned to him had phoned in sick and that there were no available instructors. She apologized for the inconvenience and offered to re-schedule his lesson for the next day. The man immediately began haranguing her in a loud voice, insulting her personally and the ski school as a business and coming a bit unglued. On a Trump scale of 10 he was only about a 5, but offensive enough that I intervened. I introduced myself as the Ski School Director and apologized for the disruption in his plans, pointed out that an employee who comes down sick is beyond the control of the ski school, and told him that if he would apologize to our desk employee for his unwarranted behavior I would see what could be done about accommodating him that day. He ramped up to about a 6 on the scale and made it clear he was not interested in an apology, the ski school or anyone connected to it and left huffing in a huff. Good riddance, except that losing customers is not in the best interests of any business, and I gave a lot of thought to how the situation might have been handled differently. I never arrived at an answer that placed human rights and decency on an equal footing with economics.
A year later when I encountered Trump I don’t remember this incident entering my mind, but it surely had an effect on my own and the ski school’s response to Trump’s behavior of giving him what he wanted in order to take his money and get him out of the way so other customers could pay their money in a more civilized environment. The civically/socially/morally responsible action to have taken when Trump threw his tantrum at the ski school desk would have been to call security (or, if necessary, the police) and have him escorted out of the building. That never crossed my mind, but in retrospect I feel I failed my country by not doing that. I wish I had.
You see, there is this, then and now: It is reasonable to posit that if a large black male sporting an outsized, well-coifed Afro or Long-Plaited Dreadlocks, or any female flaunting any hair style, had behaved like Donald Trump at the ski school desk, police would have been immediately summoned and he/she would be, at the least, ejected from the building and told not to return.
That is America, and Donald Trump embodies it.
Don’t you think?
And what are you doing about IT?

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.

BACK TO THE BASICS IN THE BACKCOUNTRY

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The number of skiers and snowboarders who climb up on their own power in order to slide down snow covered backcountry slopes has grown significantly in recent years. Many of these climbing skiers/boarders also ride ski lifts and slide down groomed runs some of the time and others haven’t ridden a lift in years. A few have never been on a lift. This cultural/athletic phenomenon is as evident in the Wood River Valley as in the rest of the skiing world, and the reasons for this are varied and personal. One oft quoted explication came from Pepi Stiegler, Olympic gold and silver medal winner in alpine skiing who directed the Jackson Hole alpine ski school for many years. When asked why he and other alpine skiers are spending more and more time in the backcountry, he replied, “It’s like it was in the beginning. It’s pure. Skiing in the backcountry is like going home.”
Other motivations include economic (lift tickets are expensive), a search for solitude or at least quietude, the physical benefits of a good workout and the mental/emotional profits of a day away from the madding crowd(s) in a pristine environment. Going home, at least to those for whom skiing has been a foundation for rich, rewarding, healthful lives, is a return to the basics in much the same spirit as eating the fare from your own home grown organic garden. It costs less money and more effort to grow, but the results are healthier for body and mind than the less arduous and more expensive alternatives.
For several reasons beyond the scope of this writing there is more terrain easily accessible to Idaho’s Wood River Valley backcountry skiers/boarders and fewer people using it than in any other major ski area in western America. As a result the local backcountry skiing/board scene is relatively quiet, both in the hills and in the bars. In contrast, on a busy weekend the backcountry chaos on Teton Pass between Victor, Idaho and Wilson, Wyoming will see hundreds of people, feuds and dented fenders over the limited parking, lines of climbers on the way up and few lines left after 10 a.m. on the way down and recognizable as home only to those from very large families. Even the social media obsession of the Go Pro/Facebook generation has not (so far) brought such attention and congestion to the vast backcountry terrain surrounding the Wood River Valley.
Some (not all) zealous purists among local backcountry regulars can be tight-lipped about their favorite lines and peaks and how to get there, considering those of a more communicative nature déclassé. Such zealous purity inspires words not usually printed here to describe those who use helicopters to access their favorite backcountry lines, though, in truth, some of those same puritans have been known to use snowmobiles to cross the long, arduous and monotonous flats to approach those same lines.
Still, the word gets out about the best, most easily accessed backcountry areas, and anyone with enough interest in local backcountry pursuits to acquire the proper equipment, attire, attitude and energy to return to the basics will quickly discover enough skiing/boarding in the Wood River Valley to last a lifetime.
After all, it’s like going home and is where I live in winter.
 

NOTES OF AN OLD SKI BUM

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 Bum
Noun
1. A person who avoids work and sponges on others; loafer; idler.
2. A tramp, hobo, or derelict.
3.Informal. An enthusiast of a specific sport or recreational activity, especially one who gives it priority over work, family life, etc.: a ski bum; a tennis bum.

“When you are enthusiastic about what you do, you feel this positive energy. It’s very simple.”
Paulo Coelho

Informal is an apt description of most people I would consider ski bums. Their lives, at least while on skis and in many but not all cases off, are filled with enthusiasm, simplicity and positive energy. Except for a few fortunate trust-fund recipients, all the ski bums I know or know of work at least as much as their more formal, mainstream non-or even anti-ski bum brethren who do not ski as often as they might like. No ski bum is accurately portrayed with the more derogatory (formal?) definition of ‘bum’.
Au contraire.
The life of a ski bum both on the mountain and off is filled with effort and there is neither time nor space for loafing, idling or hopping trains, though in truth there are a few derelicts in the ranks. While the term ‘ski bum’ is of recent origin, it is inconceivable that the enthusiast who gave skiing priority over many other aspects of life has not existed since the invention of the ski sometime around 5000 BC. In modern ski culture there seems to be a perception that the ski bum is a recent phenomenon, but this is not true. In North America the first high profile ski bum was Snowshoe Thompson (1827-1876), though there were surely others. From 1856 to 1876 Thompson carried mail across the snowbound Sierra Nevada in winter on his homemade 10 foot long 25 pound oak skis. He made the 90 miles from Placerville, California to Genoa (then called Mormon Station), Nevada in 3 days and the return in 2 days. He made the journey 2 to 4 times a month for 20 years and was never paid for his efforts. Every ski bum reading this can relate to Snowshoe’s enthusiasm, positive energy and the simplicity of his solitary life in the mountains between Placerville and Genoa.
So, by the time I was old enough to determine my own priorities the lifestyle of the ski bum was a well established if unacknowledged tradition in North American skiing, and so it remains. In 1957 Ron Funk, Tony Perry and I lived together in one small room of a residential home in Aspen while we trained for alpine ski racing. I don’t remember the rent, but somehow $25 a month each sounds right. One of our (and others) money saving strategies involved daily lift tickets which cost around $10. At that time in Aspen lift tickets were attached to the ski pant zipper by a small, metal, detachable keychain. One of our group would buy a ticket each morning, attach it to the pant zipper, get on the lift, detach the ticket, insert it in a spare glove tucked inside the parka and drop the glove to a waiting fellow ski racer at the first lift tower who would then repeat the process. And repeat. It required a lot of effort, attention to detail, inconvenience and imagination to be a ski racing ski bum in the 1950s. We traveled together in full cars to share gas expenses and sometimes drove all night between races to save the cost of a bed. As I wrote in “Night Driving” about a 1959 (when gasoline sold for 25 cents a gallon) nonstop trip from upstate New York to Reno with Don Brooks, Redmond Wilcox, Gardner Smith and Renee Cox (later Gorsuch): “At around two in the morning we pulled up to the back entrance of my parents’ tiny Reno apartment. We had been on the road for sixty-five hours. We unloaded about twenty pairs of skis from the rack and stored them in a corner of the living room. My fellow passengers immediately crashed on the floor in sleeping bags, but my fatigue wouldn’t let me sleep. I showered, put on clean clothes and took a refreshing walk along the Truckee River. When I got back, I joined my mates on the floor, and I slept the sleep of colored dreams. In the morning I loaned Brooks enough money for a bus ride to Portland and saw him off. A week later he returned my money, paying me from his first check. Gardner hung around a couple of days, and when Reno made him nervous, he moved on down the line. Red stayed a bit longer and then just disappeared one day, driving off into the Northwest (I think) in his trusty black Oldsmobile. I got a job on a newspaper in Fallon, commuting 120 miles a day six days a week. Richard Nixon was going to try for the presidency in a year. It was a long summer.”
By the early 1960s Sun Valley had become my ski bum home. At that time Sun Valley was still owned by Union Pacific Railroad and many jobs within the company included room, board, a lift pass, some money for partying and other necessities and time to ski several hours a day. As a ski racer with friends in management I had the good fortune of some advantages, and I was able to work as a bus boy, pizza cook and bartender, prioritized according to training and ski racing schedules. One of my roommates in the Sun Valley dorms was the irrepressible Bobbie Burns who was in the process of revolutionizing freestyle skiing with his flamboyance, enthusiasm, energy and unbelievable skiing skills. Another year I lived for free with Funk in the small Ketchum home he owned in those days. One year Mike Brunetto and I rented a two bedroom basement apartment in Ketchum, though we both worked for Sun Valley, so we could have more personal space, privacy and comfort than the dorms allowed in those times between skiing and working. Mike later became one of the most respected ski designers and manufacturers (as did Burns) in the business. He worked for Head, Dura-Fiber, Lynx, The Ski and K2 before starting his own ski companies, RD and then Wolf Ski which were made in Sun Valley. Wolf Ski business hours were 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and from 2:30 p.m. until whenever the day’s work was done in order that the staff, including Brunetto, could ski.
In 1963 I took a job in La Parva, Chile as a ski instructor (and which taught me to teach skiing), included round trip transportation from the U.S., a few dollars and time off to train and join Funk and C.B.Vaughan for the speed runs in Portillo.
In 1964 I had the opportunity, which included a free plane ticket, to go to Europe and race for a month. I took it and at the end of the month decided I wanted to stay in Europe. I cashed in the return portion of the plane ticket and spent more than a year skiing and racing in Europe, working in the Kneissl ski factory in Austria, working for a spedition (moving company) in Germany and teaching skiing on my own in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.
When ski racing ended for me in 1965 I returned to America and took my first real job as a ski coach in Heavenly. For most of the next 30 years I earned much of my living coaching and teaching skiing (and writing about it, of course). My enthusiasm for skiing has never waned and I still manage between 100 and 140 days a year on skis, some of them in the backcountry. The purpose of my priorities was always to stay on skis. That’s what ski bums do, stay on their skis.
It’s very simple.

 

AMIE ENGERBRETSON: More than a pretty face

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Like every avid (addicted?) skier past a certain age, I am impressed, awed, mind-boggled, inspired, sometimes alarmed and always intrigued by the exploits, standards of skill and commitment and thin lines of error in the lives of today’s best skiers. (Note: not the best ski racers, a separate category.) Their lifestyle has evolved into a media savvy/GoPro/self-promotion culture whose members ski outrageous lines down unskiable mountain faces with a few unbelievable inverted aerials thrown (sic) in to keep the incomprehensible interesting. I don’t speak for all skiers past a certain age, but evolution of a lifestyle is fascinating—even if you not entirely facetiously refer to yourself within that culture as a dinosaur.

Last week this old ski dinosaur had the pleasure of coffee and conversation with one of today’s high profile professional skiers with sufficient sponsors to support her passion for skiing and its traveling demands in comfortable style. Amie Engerbretson is 28, began skiing at 3 in Squaw Valley and is pretty with a smile to melt glaciers. Her intelligence and demeanor of satisfaction and joy in the life she has chosen are obvious. We had never met, but I coached Amie’s mother, Nancy O’Connell, when she was a young ski racer in Squaw more than 35 years ago and knew Amie as one of those inspiring, mind-boggling skier/athletes who has made visible the continuous evolution of skiing and, thereby, skiers.

An hour with Amie eased my alarm and increased my respect and appreciation of the modern culture that skis so well along those thin lines of error. What we see in magazines and film is the edited version of considered thought, the judgment of experience, the skill of training and the on-going process of learning from mistakes. I’ve long maintained that skiing is a metaphor for life, and Amie was a reminder that life both on skis and off is a continuum. It is worth contemplating that the under 30 generation is expanding the limits of the possible, nourishing the culture with vision, hope and passion and are the group of eligible voters least likely to vote for Dinosaur Don the Trumpster.

On her website amieski.com she writes in a blog post titled ‘Free Spirit or Homeless…, “My only master is Mother Nature and I am free to make moves completely at the whim of the NOAA forecast.” In another, ‘Blind Spot,’ she and an entire film crew overlooked the obvious and she was completely buried in an avalanche that could have easily killed her. “I knew that the accident report was going to be one that if I had read it about someone else I would have thought, ‘Wow. Those guys were idiots.’… I realized that I had just been a primary witness to the most dangerous aspect of backcountry travel—the human factor… I have always thought I was too smart to make that mistake, but I did. At some point we all have. I am truly grateful that the situation was not worse. Most importantly, I am grateful that this can be a wake up and a lesson in humility for me, and everyone like me, to stay smart, not forget to use our brains and to always check our blind spots.

The first words on her website are: “Amie Engerbretson is more than a pretty face.”

THINKING OF DOUG

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Two months ago my friend of nearly 50 years, Doug Tompkins, died of hypothermia after his kayak capsized in a very cold lake in southern Chile during the last adventure of an audacious existence. His well-reported death ended a life lived large, deep and meaningfully. He experienced and accomplished as much in life as anyone and cared about and gave to this world even more. He will be remembered for his environmental legacy in South America, as is only fitting, an inheritance that will persist beyond the memory of man.
The loss of a cherished friend is a different matter than the loss of a public figure, no matter how justly admired and honored, even when the two are the same person. Anyone curious about Doug and/or the environment of Earth can Google his name, Deep Ecology, Conservacion Patagonica or Tompkins Conservation and find enough information, inspiration and urgency to make the most devout capitalist understand and perhaps embrace the values and integrity that led this self-made (Doug never graduated from high school) multi-millionaire co-founder of The North Face and Esprit to abandon the comforts of bourgeoisie materialism for the challenges of environmental activism.
As a friend, Doug had a huge affect on my life, starting with the first of many long, deep conversations about knowing one’s self and living according to that knowledge rather than by an imposed expectation, cultural norm or material standard. In the winter of 1967, after a full day of skiing on Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain, we had an early dinner and drove through the night of that first conversation to Reno, where I lived. He dropped me off before continuing to San Francisco to his family and fledgling business, The North Face in North Beach down the street from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. North Beach at that time was a central meeting ground for, among other things, those individuals and social forces that would become the 1967 Summer of Love. The morning after that all night conversation I began the process of removing myself from graduate school. By the Summer of Love I was living in Berkeley and working in San Francisco before heading back to the mountains where I belong and have remained, and Doug’s friendship was instrumental in those organic, healthy changes.
There were many other drives, conversations, adventures, challenges, lessons and camaraderie shared with Doug over the years. For the past two months I’ve been revisiting some of them, thinking of Doug. There are books to be written about the life and times and legacy of Doug Tompkins, but part of it comes down to this: Doug was a relentless advocate for Deep Ecology, particularly the first plank of its platform: “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.” He lived by these values and had a grand life and a great time in the process, and all his friends and the Earth itself are better off for his presence. We should all heed those values and have a great time in the process.

A SPEED SKIING HISTORY

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The first recorded speed skiing record was in 1867 in La Porte, California by a woman with the provocative name of Lottie Joy, who traveled 48.9 mph/79.003 kph. The length of her run and the method of timing are unknown, making hers one of several unofficial but significant world speed skiing records. The second was also in La Porte by Tommy Todd who traveled down a 1230 foot track in an average speed of 87.7 mph/141.001kph in 1874. If Todd’s timing was anywhere near accurate, it is not unreasonable to speculate that he was traveling near 100 mph during that last part of his run. Joy and Todd were part of sizeable ski crowd in northern California in the 19th century, many of them Norwegian gold miners who introduced skiing to the area and who passed the long Sierra winters organizing social and competitive events around skiing. They used hand crafted wooden skis up to 12 feet long and one long pole for balance. Each racer’s secret formula for wax in these races was closely guarded, but persistent reports indicated that human sperm was a key ingredient of the best recipes. These concoctions were called “dope.”
It needs mentioning that while Joy was the first speed queen and Todd the first speed king, they are only the first we know about. People have been skiing for thousands of years, and it is inconceivable that they have not always pursued pure speed for the sake of the speed. It is in the nature of man to do so, and that we do not have speed skiing records prior to 1867 only indicates the relative and incomplete scope of recorded history itself. It is not too much to imagine that buried in some obscure ancient Scandinavian piece of writing is a description of skiers schussing the steepest, longest hill hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago, just to see how fast they could go; their ‘time’ perhaps measured by some method we have forgotten.
As it is, the first official speed skiing record was set by Gustav Lantschner in 1930 in St. Moritz. He was timed at 65.588 mph/105.675 kph. The following year Leo Gasperl moved the speed up considerably by going 84.692 mph/136.600 kph also in St. Moritz. Gasperl accomplished this by attaching hay hooks to the front of his skis which he held onto with his hands and having a rudimentary aerodynamic cone strapped to his butt.
Gasperl’s record held until 1947 when the great Italian skier, Zeno Colo, who would be World and Olympic champion in the next few years, went 98.761 mph/159.292 kph in Cervinia. This record maintained until 1959 when Edoardo Agraiter went 99.307 mph/160.174 kph in Sestriere.
In between these two records, a significant and seminal and extremely bold speed skiing event took place in Portillo, Chile. Under the guidance of Emile Allais, and with the participation of American racers Ron Funk (who fell at nearly 100 mph with bear trap bindings and long thongs and was seriously injured), Bud Werner and Marvin Melville, the American Ralph Miller went 108.7 mph/175.402 in Portillo. Miller was timed by Allais over 50 meters with a hand held stop watch. At 100 mph a tenth of a second difference over 50 meters is about 18 mph, and anyone who has ever used a hand stop watch knows that two timers timing the same thing will always have a tenth of a second or more difference. For that reason Miller’s run is considered unofficial. He may have only gone 99 mph, but it is just as likely he went 112 mph. People who have raced on the Portillo track and know where he started tend to believe Miller was the first to go over 100 mph.
But officially that distinction goes to Luigi DiMarco who in 1960 traveled 101.224 mph/163.265 kph in Cervinia. DiMarco, the dominant speedster of the early ‘60s, set another record of 108.349 mph/174.757 kph in 1964, also in Cervinia. In between, however, in July 1963 Alfred Plangger went 104.298 mph/168.224 kph in Cervinia, and two months later Americans C.B.Vaughan and Dick Dorworth tied for a record of 106.520 mph/171.428 kph in Portillo in an event organized by Ron Funk.
The ‘60s saw the first real technological breaks (and breakthroughs) from those of traditional downhill skiing, starting an evolution of speed skiing technology and techniques that continues to this day. Some of these found their way back into traditional ski racing. The first bent ski poles designed to fit around the body of a skier in a tuck were bent to form in a Cervinia blacksmith shop. The first non-porous speed suits were developed; these suits are now made of polyurethane coated polypropylene, a long way from Lottie Joy’s woolen skirts. The first silver dollar size ski pole baskets and the first low profile, flat tip skis were made. Cervinia’s annual Kilometro Lanciato was the premier speed event in the world from which came most of the world records from the early ’60 until the late ’70 when it was discontinued because it was held on a glacier on the Plateau Rosa and its crevasses grew too large to safely bridge.
Eighty nine years after Lottie Joy raced in California, the first official women’s record was set by Emanuel Spreafico in 1963 in Cervinia at 78.82 mph/127.138 kph. The following year Kristl Staffner pushed it up to 88.802 mph/143.230 kph, also in Cervinia.
Japan’s first speed skier, Yuichiro Miura, competed in the KL in 1964. He had trained for the event on Mt. Fuji, using a parachute to slow down in place of the run out Mt. Fuji lacks. Though he never held the speed record, Miura finished seventh with 172.084 kph, more than respectable. He fell eight times that week while traveling over 100 mph and walked away from every fall, bruised but unbowed. The experience inspired him to go to Mt. Everest a few years later to take advantage of less air resistance at higher altitudes and attempt a world speed record on the tallest mountain on earth. Though finding terrain and building a track on Mt. Everest suitable for skiing over 100 mph is unreasonable and the actual skiing he accomplished there was minimal, Miura did make a name for himself as “The Man Who Skied Down Everest,” and the documentary film of that expedition won an Academy Award. In 2002 Miura, at the age of 70, became the oldest man to climb Mt. Everest. He accomplished this in the company of his son, the first father/son team to climb the tallest peak. He climbed Everest again when he was 75 and then again in 2013 at the age of 80 but says he won’t try again.
On a more somber note, the first (but not the last) speed skiing death occurred in 1965 when Walter Mussner skied off the Cervinia track at 105 mph. The helmets of that time were the same ones used by downhillers, and the most aerodynamic position using them was to put the head down and essentially to ski almost blind. One element in Mussner’s fatal accident was that he had put his head down and was unaware his line was taking him off the prepared track.
Within a few years a big revolution in helmets, poles, fairings, speed suits and skis was occurring in the world of speed skiing. Helmets were both more aerodynamic and allowed better visibility. The ski equipment manufacturing companies, working with the best speed skiers, began developing drastically new and better equipment. Tuck positions and equipment were tested and adapted in wind tunnels used by automobile and airplane manufacturers. In time, a few racers (notably Sean Cridland, Kalevi Hakkinen and Kirsten Culver) mounted their skis on the tops of cars and practiced their tuck positions at over 150 mph on the roads of Finland and the Salt Flats of Utah. Techniques improved and racers’ expectations of themselves and of the boundaries of the possible continued to expand. By 1970 speed skiing was ready to begin a rapid push into velocities that would have been unimaginable only a few years earlier.
In 1970 the Japanese skier Morishita Masaru broke DiMarco’s six year old record by a hefty margin, traveling 113.703 mph/183.392 kph in Cervinia on a pair of Yamaha skis and beginning a remarkable decade in speed skiing history. Cathy Breyton became the first woman to ski over 100 mph when she went 103.300 mph/165.000 kph in Portillo in 1978. That decade was dominated by the American Steve McKinney who set four world speed records on three different tracks (Cervinia, Portillo and Les Arcs) and was the first skier to travel over 200 kph. McKinney was the leader of an era of speed skiing and was instrumental in several significant changes in the sport. One of them was the formation of International Speed Skiing (ISS) the organizing body of the first professional speed skiing circuit which for a few years in the early 1980s staged professional races all over North America. The most significant of these races were in Silverton, Colorado where in 1982 and 1983 Franz Weber set two records, the latter at 129.017 mph/208.029 kph, and Marti Martin-Kuntz set a woman’s record of 111.114 mph/179.104 kph.By the late ‘80s the professional circuit had come unraveled and the FIS was sanctioning speed races in preparation for speed skiing to be a demo event at the 1992 Olympics in France. That event was a huge success, with Michel Prufer setting a record of 142.165 mph/229.299 kph for men and Torja Mulari going 135.931 mph/219.245 for a women’s record. However, a Swiss speed skier was killed the morning of the final race while warming up. He was free skiing and was not on the track when he collided with a snow machine and died. This tragedy which was not connected to speed skiing contributed to the IOC’s decision to not include speed skiing in the Olympics.
Whether or not speed skiing is included in the Olympics, it continues to evolve and grow in response to the natural human curiosity about the question every skier asks: “How fast can I go?” A modern speed skier needs some special equipment the normal recreation skier does not have. In addition to a polyurethane coated suit, racers use aerodynamic helmets that look like something from a Star Wars film, 240 cm skis, the narrowest boots available and foam fairings to fit them, bent poles filled with lead, gloves that are leather on the inside and rubber on the outside, and a fire retardant high density foam back protector to cut down on burn injuries in a 140 mph fall. Also, speed tracks are groomed to near perfection by winch cats guided by lasers to make a nearly impeccably smooth surface.
At this writing (April 2014) the fastest skiers in history are an Italian man and a Swedish woman. Simone Origone has gone 156.8 mph/252.450 kph, and Sanna Tidstrand has traveled 150.74 mph/242.590 kph. Michael Milton of Australia holds the record for one-legged skiers at 132.76 mph/213.650 kph. While these speeds seem to be close to the limits of the possible, that is how it has seemed since the days of Lottie Joy and Tommy Todd. More than 300 skiers have traveled faster than 200 kph. It is impossible (and thankless) to predict the limits of the possible in skiing, but one thing Tidstrand’s speed makes clear is that women are closing the gap on men in the world of speed skiing.

THE GOD OF SKIING

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The God of Skiing by Peter Kray is a reverent, ribald, realistic mixture of fact, fiction and fantasy about what some refer to as the sport of skiing but which high priests and devoted acolytes alike know as a way of life. Peter Kray is a beautiful, insightful and devoted writer, and what I can’t resist thinking of as The Book of Kray is among the very best books about the spirit and practice of skiing as a way of life ever written.
At this writing, just days after two U.S.S.A. developmental team members were killed in an avalanche in Soelden, Austria it struck me that Kray wrote the introduction to the book in Soelden in 2013 and concludes it thus: “In order to tell what’s true, I made up a couple of things. But only to balance out what I’m still afraid of telling. And I present the events as much by year as I do by season, which means you can call it a novel if that makes it easier to understand. Or a documentary. Or skiing’s double album. It is the celebration of a sport made of cold and clouds and the anticipation that the white water will come to wash us clean again. It’s the explanation of why Tack Strau told the reporter in Alaska, “Skiing is made of gravity and speed. It’s dying all the time.”
Yes, and being born all the time in many forms, including literature as good as “The God of Skiing.” Those of a certain age and familiar with a certain time and place of skiing who know about Fritz Stammberger will be drawn to the book simply because a photo of Fritz is on the cover. Those who don’t know of Stammberger will stop to look because the photo and the title fit together as perfectly as the line only you can see through the trees on the best powder day of the season.
Yes, skiing is a way of life made of the freedoms to be found in gravity and speed and the skills acquired playing with them in the snow and cold and mountains in which we live. Kray’s book includes his time in Jackson Hole at the base of the Grand Tetons (which in French means big nipples but in the vernacular describes what they are attached to). In that time he met Bill Briggs, the first to ski from the summit of the Grand Teton, about which he writes, “Once you have seen those peaks, the photographic evidence of Bill Briggs’ epic ski descent down the face of the Grand Teton in 1971 looks like a nude, a weather bleached church on a moon-bathed hill. His thin ski tracks down the peak are the black and white prototype of something bare and yet to be seen, as stark and unimaginable as a lunar landing, as if they were the footprints in the sand of a man trying to sprint off the edge of the world.”
But even the most hard ass skier can only ski 5 or 6 hours a day and “The God of Skiing” does not leave out the remaining 18 or 19 hours. For instance, of “The Stewardess” he writes, “In the morning I could watch her perfect round ass in the lightbulb above the loft like a poor man’s mirror. Everything was beautiful and round about her—her blonde bangs, brown eyes and perfect boobs—like Bambi in the fields with the sweet smell of flowers. Like I was a big Texas cowboy drilling for oil.”
In the section titled “The Grievous Angel,” Kray writes, ‘Gravity’s the only thing that matters,’ Tack said…….’The sky is all in your mind…..It’s just an illusion to create a feeling of distance—an imaginary barrier.’
“After the third joint it didn’t matter. My hands finally stopped shaking and I could marvel at the energy and electricity and how his blue eyes burned like twin planets seen from space, ablaze and unexplored.”
That gives you an idea. “The God of Skiing” is a must read for all skiers. You can find it here for $13.95: http://www.mirabooksmart.com/The-God-of-Skiing_p_584.html

DAVE McCOY: A Man For All Seasons

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When Dave McCoy first saw the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California he said, “I’d never seen anything like it. I loved the snow: I started dreaming about it. I said, ‘This is where I am going to spend my life.’”
Many people reading this understand that experience and subsequent path.
That same year McCoy received the foundation of what he called ‘…the best possible education.’ He told Leigh Buchanan: “When I was in the eighth grade my folks separated. It was during the Depression, and so my mom and I got on a Greyhound bus and went to meet my father’s parents in Wilkeson, Washington. We got acquainted, and she left me there. I stuck around for two and a half months, but I didn’t like the rain, so I took my knapsack and headed back to California. I rode with the bums on the trains, ate at their campfires at night, and listened to their stories. It was the best possible education.”
At the time Dave was 13 years old. His formal education ended with high school, but with that best possible informal education, his love for snow and mountains, hard work and fun he built Mammoth Mountain Ski Area from a rope tow on the side of hill to one of the largest and best ski areas in North America. Many people reading this already know it but for those who don’t Dave’s influence on skiing and skiers is incalculable, and that story is best told in Robin Morning’s fine book “Tracks of Passion.” Dave, who I’ve known since 1953, will be 100 years old in August. I hadn’t seen him since his 90th birthday party but a few weeks ago I had the privilege and pleasure of spending a few hours in conversation with him.
That talk illuminated and reiterated why I am among many, many people who consider Dave McCoy among the most remarkable, decent, genuinely good human beings we have ever known, a great man by any measure. That is, his successes, accomplishments and positive impact on the community of Mammoth, the larger world of skiing and thereby the world at large did not make him a great man, but rather, the other way around. We reminisced about several people, events and dynamics of the life and lives we know and consistent perspectives and themes kept surfacing in Dave’s narrative:
“Most people are essentially good,” he said, “and if you give them the right chances they will show you that goodness.”
“All of us make mistakes. That’s part of learning. The thing is to learn from them and to move on and not repeat that one and don’t be afraid of making a different one.”
And there is this as told to Leigh Buchanan: “In 1991, we had to lay off 150 people, because we had six years of very light snow. Instead of keeping all the best people, I looked at the people that were really able to take care of themselves and let them go first. It worked out, because they ended up doing greater things than they had been doing. It may not have been wise, but that’s the way it is with me.”
Thanks, Dave.

Me and Ed: Remembering a man I never met but felt I knew

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In late January 1963 I was in Sun Valley, Idaho. A recent college graduate, I was a 24 year old ski racer who didn’t seem to quite fit into mainstream America. Through a friendship with Ron Funk, who cared even less about the fit than me, I found myself committed to one of the more audacious ski adventures of my life, running the Diamond Sun down Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain. As I wrote in The Straight Course, “The Diamond Sun may be the most difficult standard race in the world. It is the fastest I know of and starts on top of Bald Mountain and finishes at the Wood River 2 3/5 miles below. The route is any way possible down Ridge, Rock Garden, Canyon and River Run.” The Diamond Sun had been run only twice since WWII and is fast, dangerous and scary, and I was appropriately cognizant of this reality.
I mean, the night before the race I was scared shitless, filled with doubts about myself and whether I had what it takes and, more, whether it mattered that I address those personal doubts and questions. In order to relax and take my mind off such heavy toil, my friend Mike Brunetto and I went to the movie showing in Ketchum that night. The film, Lonely Are the Brave with Kirk Douglas and Walter Matthau, is, in my view, the best work Douglas ever did and is one of my all time favorite films. Among other things, it touches on the integrity of personal freedom and the freedom of personal integrity and the price one might pay for them.
At any rate, the film touched and inspired me and added a sliver of resolve to my scared shitless mind and spirit. The next morning we ran the Diamond Sun and everything went flawlessly for me. I set a new record (which still stands as the race hasn’t been run since) of 2:21.0 for the 2 3/5 mile course. A fine memory of a good time, and I always thought of Lonely Are the Brave as an integral part of it. More important, the race gave me the confidence I needed to go to Chile the following summer with the intention of setting a world record for speed on skis.  We went to Chile and set a record and that experience changed my life in myriad ways including better self-knowledge and the doors that open with a world record on the resume that would remain closed without it. The expanded awareness of my own human capabilities helped form much of my life and activities, including the writing, and, more important, the same commitment to writing as a path in life as dangerous and scary as the Diamond Sun, though slower of pace. Some of the doors that opened I probably shouldn’t have walked through, but self-knowledge is a process, not an accomplishment.
A few years later (1971) I began writing for Skier’s Gazette which a year later became Mountain Gazette and which eventually led to my work being published elsewhere. Mountain Gazette was as crucial to my writing as the Diamond Sun had been to my skiing.
By the early ‘70s I had read Desert Solitaire a couple of times and knew that Ed Abbey was a great writer and, in some ways, the spokesman of our times. I read his occasional pieces in MG and was impressed when then editor Mike Moore told me that Abbey sent his contributions in accompanied by a check to help out the struggling publication. Since MG paid me for my work I was grateful to Abbey for more than his fine writing, vision and personal integrity. When MG published my long essay/memoir Night Driving in 1975 it took up most of the issue except for a wonderful Abbey piece about desert driving, and I was thrilled to see my name with his on the cover. Good stuff.
That same year Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang was published. It is a very good novel that resonated with a large segment of America that didn’t quite fit into the mainstream and it nurtured all but the most pesticide sprayed imaginations. After I read it I gave it away as Christmas gifts. I was living between Truckee and Squaw Valley at the time and my neighbors, two New Jersey hippies whose son went to school with my son Jason, were among the recipients. A spacey friend of theirs was visiting from the east coast that winter and one snowstorm morning I went over to my neighbors’ home for a coffee. The spacey friend’s grin wouldn’t leave his face as he thanked me for giving The Monkey Wrench Gang to his hosts, and then he told me about his previous day. He had spent most of the day and into the night reading Abbey’s paean to the purposeful destruction of eyesores and pavement and machines that destroy the earth. He finished the book at 1 a.m. and was inspired to immediate action. Perhaps other, less literary influences were at play as well, but despite the late hour and the storm he hopped on a bicycle with a huge bow saw and rode the 3 or 4 miles to the freeway near Truckee and, under the cover of darkness and the storm, spent a couple of hours dropping a huge, offensive-looking, wood-supported billboard advertising one of the local ski areas. Then he rode the bicycle back home. He had taken Hayduke’s credo to heart (and action): “My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don’t know anything else worth saving.”
The dropping of the eyesore billboard was the first eco-revolutionary act that I knew of in the Tahoe area, and though I was only one of a few who knew who had done it, I was only one of many who were amused, informed and inspired by it. Life went on and I read more Abbey and rightly thought of him as a giant literary and environmental and thereby societal influence of our time.
And then, some 20 years after the Diamond Sun, I was browsing in a book store and came across an Ed Abbey novel I didn’t know about entitled The Brave Cowboy. A quick glance showed that it was the basis of the film Lonely Are the Brave. The novel is really good. I was and am amazed that I hadn’t put the two together, but knowledge, self and otherwise, is a process, not an accomplishment. A bit of research expanded my awareness that Dalton Trumbo had written the screenplay for the film, and if ever a Hollywood writer type could be a soul-brother to Ed Abbey it was Dalton Trumbo.
I was bemused and informed and once again reminded of the ever present connections and influences, known and unknown, that permeate all our lives, and I promptly wrote Abbey a letter of praise and thanks for his contribution to my life. He graciously answered and reiterated the worth and power of the written word and encouraged me to continue writing. We agreed to meet up sometime, somewhere in the southwest desert, but it never happened and so like most of his fans I have the easy privilege of remembering and thinking of him through the greatness of his work, unencumbered by the rough edges of his person and the inevitable objections I have to some of his ideas.
Ed Abbey died in March 1989. As he requested, Abbey was buried illegally in a spot in the Cabeza Prieta desert of Arizona known only to his friends who buried him, Doug Peacock, Jack Loeffler, Tom Cartwright and Steve Prescott. It is reported that a large quantity of beer and hard booze accompanied the burial, some of it poured on the grave to help Ed on his way. In May of that year a public memorial for Abbey was held near Arches National Monument outside Moab, Utah. The day before the service a friend and I climbed Castleton Tower in Castle Valley. It was May 19, my son Jason’s 18th birthday and I sat on top thinking that both Jason and Ed Abbey would have enjoyed the view from there. The next day we attended the memorial which was wonderful, moving and appropriate. Barry Lopez, Ann Zwinger, Doug Peacock and Dave Foreman were among those who gave beautiful eulogizes for Ed that day. Wendell Berry, who never met Abbey, recited a poem, calling him to Berry’s native Kentucky:

The old oak wears new leaves.
It stands for many lives.
Within its veil of green
A singer sings unseen.
Again the living come
To light, and are at home.
And Edward Abbey’s gone…

I think of that dead friend
Here where he never came
Except by thought and name:
I praise the joyous rage
That justified his page
He would have like this place
Where spring returns with solace
Of bloom in a dark time,
Larkspur and columbine.
The flute song of the thrush
Sounds in the underbrush.

But for me the most moving, astonishing speaker at Abbey’s service on May 20, 1989 was a woman whose name I had never heard and whose work I had never read. Her name was Terry Tempest Williams and she spoke of her long hikes and talks with Ed in the Utah desert and of the importance of friendships and connections and the environment. Terry ended her talk by whipping out some post cards and waving them like a baton, intoning “Keep in touch. Keep in touch. Keep in touch. Keep in touch.” With friends, with connections, with the environment. I was so impressed with Terry that I tracked down her work and have kept up on it ever since. As mentioned, knowledge is a process, not an accomplishment. As are awareness, friends, connections, the environment, work, life, the joyous rage, staying in touch. Thanks, Ed, for that and much more.