The Stanley City Council has given the go-ahead for the annual Winterfest celebration, to be held on February 12-14. It’s a usually hopeful occasion, when Groundhog Day has come and gone, and the sun has started feeling warm again. For people who have made it through November, December, and January, another five weeks of winter is, for the most part, doable.
This Winterfest, Stanley is facing restrictions enforced by an honor code. Facemasks and social distancing will be required, and the pub crawl and all live music will be out-of-doors. Stanley’s mayor is concerned that if the weather is ugly, people will crawl into unlocked restaurants and bars. He’s worried that honor alone won’t be enough to keep them outside, especially if the wind is howling and snowdrifts are making it hard to swing dance in the middle of Ace of Diamonds Street. Also, it could be raining.
The mayor has a point. Winterfest is traditionally a time when the town drunk is a collective noun. Having, in the distant past, attended Winterfests and enthusiastically joined that collective, I have my doubts about anybody’s honor holding up under the strain of copious alcohol, the after-sundown cold and dark, facefuls of wind-whipped sleet, the angry politicization of masks and distance, and the tendency of snowmobilers (right wing) and cross-country skiers (left wing) to form tribes and find defensible structures to cluster in.
Winterfest’s traditional outhouse race is on. So is the traditional drag race, Stanley’s nod to gender diversity, where heterosexual white males get to dress up in the clothes of mothers, wives, and girlfriends and run the length of Ace of Diamonds on snowshoes.
The fat-tired bicycle race is probably on unless the course is too snowy or too soft or is solid see-the-grass-through-it ice. The backcountry figure-eight competition, sometimes held if the conditions are right, probably won’t happen because right now our slopes are covered by an eighteen-inch layer of sugary snow under a two-inch rain crust. We’d need a foot of chilled, fluffy powder to get people to even sign up.
Julie and I won’t be going to Winterfest. We’re too close to having vaccines at the Stanley Clinic, and, as I’ve been explaining to friends, we don’t want to be the last people to die on the morning before the armistice is signed.
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As of this writing, a new, more contagious COVID variant (B117) has spread from the UK to Colorado, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Georgia, Florida, Oregon, and California. According to epidemiologists, its transmissibility ensures that natural selection will make it the most widespread viral variant by March.
Given that some people in those states are skiers, and wealthy enough to vacation or even have a home in Sun Valley, it’s likely that the UK variant is already sixty miles south of us. Somebody carrying it is likely to get bored with groomed slopes and long spread-out lift-lines. They’ll drive up to attend Stanley’s Winterfest.
Even though the vaccines are designed to be effective for all sorts of strains of the virus, I’m worried that easier transmission will mean increased virulence. We’ve been told that initial viral load is a prime factor in the seriousness of a COVID infection, so wouldn’t the virus spread cell-to-cell more easily once it’s contracted, and thereby increase the viral load in vivo? Just asking.
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Julie and I did get a good ski in before it rained last week. We went up the north side of Gold Creek, a long ridge a mile north of us. It’s a good place to backcountry ski because you have to cross a mile of flat before you get to the steep stuff. It’s 2600’ vertical to the top, and unless you like a long slog through giant drifts and twisted trees, hiking around and through windswept piles of rocks, and watching for slab avalanches even in the best of conditions, there are easier places to ski. We like it because it’s a steep and scenic tour interspersed with some nice powder slopes. It’s also isolated and a bit scary when you get all the way up there and see how far you are from your vehicle should anything go wrong.
The route is usually empty of other skiers until we get a track up it, and even then, if we meet somebody, they’re usually smart, deliberate skiers who won’t need rescuing, there to savor the scenery as much as the skiing. You don’t want to be on the same mountain with somebody who takes unnecessary chances. I’ve quit skiing Copper Mountain, the popular backcountry ski hill near Banner Summit, because I’ve seen too many people ski the chutes on its steep north side, and I’ve taken dead skiers down in toboggans before. That was when I was a ski patrolman on Baldy, not free-skiing on Copper. Not that the guys in the sled would have known any difference.
(It’s a problem for ethics class. Q: Do you risk your life to rescue someone who skied down a couloir and got avalanched? A: Of course you do, as long as you’re sitting safe in ethics class.)
Julie and I consider ourselves smart, deliberate backcountry skiers who err on the side of caution, but lots of people who fit that description can still be found on avalanche fatality lists. You can reduce the risks out there, but you can’t reduce them to nothing.
As it was, when we started across the flat from our car, we’d go forty feet and the surface of the snow would drop an inch due to an airy layer of frost about halfway down. We’d go another forty feet and it would drop again. Juno was with us, and if she got off the track her rear legs would spin out in the sugary base layer and we’d have to pull her up on the track again.
“If the snow was any deeper,” I told Julie, “we’d go home and drink tea on the couch.”
“Where you go, I will go,” she said, which has been our private joke ever since she refused to include that promise in her wedding vows. Now when she says it, I can hear the unspoken part of it, which is, “as long as you don’t screw up.”
Fair enough.
We cut a steep track up through the shallow snow of a wind-exposed ridge, for safety’s sake. We didn’t go all the way to the top, because we would have had to cross a slide area on the way, and I wasn’t going to trust the snowpack if it was too deep, at that higher altitude, to be anchored by the sagebrush.
It was a good thing. On the way down, we skied from tree to tree, one and then the other, until we could get on a long hogsback that went all the way to the bottom. We put side-by-side turns down through snow that was soft and deep in spots, wind-crusted in others. Sagebrush kicked our skis around a bit, but we didn’t hit any rocks.
Our tracks looked graceful enough considering the conditions, until Juno came charging down through them, making them look broken and unskilled. It’s a joy for her and for us to have her along, but I wish she’d learn not to contaminate the evidence.
All along our descent, the snow kept breaking and settling. I watched fracture lines jump out from my ski tips and multiply upslope from me, which is never a good sign. Julie stayed at a safe distance until I’d get on the close downside of a big tree trunk, and then she’d catch up. We didn’t start any avalanches, but with deeper snow, we would have been wondering how we were going to get out of there alive.
We kept our tracks on the very top of the hogsback. We avoided terrain traps. We didn’t stick our skis under horizontal logs at speed. We all made it safely back to the car.
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Outside Magazine has lately put out a flurry of cautionary articles about avalanches and backcountry skiing. It has noted that the age of the people who get hurt or die in the backcountry has been going up. The complacency of long experience and the inevitable geriatric erosion of backcountry skills are taking their toll, according to one article, which sounded reasonable until I read that the casualties the writer was talking about were all thirty-five or so.
In any event, the magazine has taken time out from its Ten-Best articles (a noxious sub-variety of journalism that has destroyed more beautiful places than any number of open-pit uranium mines and deep-water oil wells) to emphasize the trouble you can get into in the backcountry and the precautions you need to take to avoid it.
Outside even published an avalanche poem that says that avalanches don’t care who you are or what you dream of doing with your life, but the people who love you do. That seems obvious enough, but upon reading the poem I realized that you could substitute coronavirus for avalanche and it would mean the same thing: it’s a dangerous universe. It doesn’t really care whether you live or die. For the sake of your own life and the happiness of the people who love you, you should do what you can to take care of yourself.
It occurred to me that I could do some work on the poem, translate its message and its metaphors into COVIDese, and send it to the Stanley City Council. I realize they’ve approved Winterfest due to pressure from the local hospitality industry, which long ago designed and implemented the celebration to make money in a traditionally slack season.
But this year’s event is a lot like skiing eighteen inches of fragile windslab on a foot of rotten hoarfrost.
This pandemic has killed far more people than all backcountry avalanches put together. One can imagine the reaction of Outside if 400,000 backcountry skiers were buried by avalanches every year, even if most of them were over thirty-five and going to die soon anyway.
If you’re frightened of avalanches (we are), and you spend a lot of time assessing their risks (we do), and you avoid them when you can (like the plague), shouldn’t you also be frightened of a variant coronavirus superspreader event this winter in Stanley?
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You may think I’ve become a grumpy old fart. Guilty. I’m getting tired of watching people run around without masks in the local grocery stores. I’m tired of seeing people I know in the obituary columns. I’m tired of not seeing good friends because they’re hunkered down just like Julie and I are, waiting for vaccination. I’m tired of having a week of ten-below nights followed by three days of off-and-on rain followed by ten-below nights again. I’m tired of Ten-Best lists, especially ones that mention Idaho, or Sawtooth Valley, or Sprinter Vans.
I’ve only seen one Sprinter Van this month and I’m already sick of Sprinter Vans.
All I can say in my defense is that being a grumpy old fart is an improvement over the person I was when I was skiing the northside chutes of Copper, thoughtlessly endangering myself and anybody who might be foolish enough to try to rescue me.
I don’t do that anymore, and I wear my mask when I go to town. I think of friends and family that I hope to see on the other side of vaccination. When I see happy maskless people walking the streets of Stanley, heading for a bar with an open sign, I only mutter and snarl into my mask a little, and quietly, so I’m the only one who can hear what I’m saying. It’s safer that way.