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| .....first of May, 1997. Finally. For three years I had worked for pauper's wages in an outdoor store, struggled to pay the rent AND buy the gear I needed to follow the dreams I had found, struggled to learn the skills I needed while holding down a second job and picking up odd work guiding and rigging ( strung banners off the side of Legion Field stadium for the '96 Olympic soccer games) and all the while watched other folks go and return glowing from THEIR adventures. Finally I got my chance. I scrounged a ticket to Denver, ordered esoteric gear (climbing skins for my skis, a probe pole) that my boss didn't even recognize, and called my old climbing buddy Karen in Ft. Collins. " I don't really believe you're finally coming out!?", she told me. " I don't really believe Colorado exists", I told her. " This land of mountains and snow where everbody speaks mountainese- knows what randonee means. I think it's just an illusion concocted by the editors of Outside magazine to torture me and make me spend my money on weird toys". Denver International Airport materialized as did the Rockies, shimmering in the distance from 30,000 feet like some floating white Nirvana, and so did Karen in her sweetly familiar Jeep Cherokee. Ft. Collins sparkled verdantly in newfound spring, yet two hours up Poudre Canyon we were greeted by flurries and graupel and the remains of the winter snow pack- all 5 feet of it! Can you imagine what this felt like to a wannabee ski mountaineer from Alabama- to be breaking trail for four days in May in snow so deep that I never struck ground even when digging down to set up my Megamid?! Snow deeper than my 185cm skis were long. I wound my way up the drainage of a small creek to a tarn called Blue Lake that nestled at timberline beneath Clark Peak. Snow fell with varying intensity continuously those four days. On the third morning I left camp hoping to ascend the open bowl above the lake and follow the summit ridge of Clark Peak. The snow often settled with a "whumph!" under my skis and it was snowing more furiously than ever, loading the evergreens and, ominously, the open 35 degree slopes above with fresh powder. On my own with no one to dig after my avalanche beacon, and equipped with only book knowledge of slab avalanches and fracture lines, I was going to be just another yahoo from back east who got in literally over his head if I continued.Spanked, but happily, proudly so, I retreated to a day of taking my first lesson in surfing powder on the relatively benign terminal moraine below Blue Lake. I broke camp and skied out and down. In a small glade the sun made her first appearance yet and lead me indelibly in hymn: Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now can see. |