home..........untitled..........east..........treeplant..........skiography



Freedom in the Trees

It started at Sutton. Runs with names that went from Sous-Bois I to Sous-Bois IV literally translated to Under the Woods. Here was a hill that did not believe in McSkiing. Trees were not clear-cut to make way for homogenous boulevards. They were embraced. They were made to be part of skiing.

This isn't to say that all the runs were fully gladed. More like the designers of the pistes opted to leave a few reminders throughout the fall line. Plenty of room to move, but tangible reminders that this was once a forest.

The Sous-Bois runs in question were steep, twisting affairs that merged and split up with such regularity that you soon lost track whether you were on I, V or something all together different. Perhaps Reaction or Emotion. Moguls and natural features combined to give us a sneak preview of the terrain parks which were still a few years in the future. Creek walls were ramped up, fallen trees were ducked under, and all rocks were aired over.

My buddies from Southern Ontario were still visiting me every winter, as they would for about 4 years. Each spring break would find them crashing in my parents unfinished basement (I'd usually join them) by night and following me around my new stomping grounds by day. It became evident that I was benefiting from my new surroundings and that skiing was slowly slipping out of their lives. But they were always game to step it up, if only for one week out of the year.

Into the trees of Sutton they went and it wasn't long before we began foraging for even tighter spaces. Our first taste of significant hors-piste came when we found a couple of unofficial glades between standard runs. It was obvious that these had been cut, but their exclusion from the trail map kept the traffic low. As did the hidden entrance and bobsled like terrain features. Barely wider than a ski length in many places, the technique often consisted of Hail Mary straight lines to emergency schmears in the clearing you hoped would appear. Many spills, hang-ups, and awkward positions were had. And of course, many laughs.

The laughs constituted as much of the ski day as the actual skiing. Skiing bumps in front of, let's call him Bruce, one couldn't help but smile at the constant streams of "oomphs" and "argghhs" coming from behind. Ears would be finely tuned for the frequent "aiiii-eeee," as this suggested that Bruce was either in the air, on the ground, or about to be a combination of the two. One always stopped to look behind at the first sound of an "aiiii-eeee."

Ah, Bruce. There seems to be one in every crowd. The guy that, through little fault of his own, everything seems to happen to. When Ed threw everyone's sneakers over the waterfall, Bruce is the only one who didn't recover the full pair. When we tried kayaking for first time, Bruce is the only one who tipped and lost his sunglasses. And when we all took turns jumping out of the woods and onto the ski trail, Bruce is the only one who ran into a gaper. Despite my father standing guard and giving the all clear sign, Bruce managed to time it perfectly so that the tip of his skis made contact with the surprised cruiser at approximately mid-boot. They both went sprawling and M. le Cruiser was none too pleased about the incident. My father, bless his heart, hurried up to take responsibility and was able to suppress his laughter until the offended party was well out of earshot.

I'll never forget those early days of skiing when responsibility and consequence were foreign concepts. When every jump seemed like the biggest ever. When every tree was missed by that much. When every terrain feature was exploited to maximal potential whether it was a run intersection, a 2-foot rock, a banked corner, or a contoured creek bed. When everything was made into an adventure no matter how trivial it may have been.

Technique didn't matter, style hadn't entered our conscience, and our world was relatively small. All that mattered was making it done a given run with a huge smile on your face. And if your hat was snow covered from the fall, if the gnarly air was a three foot ollie over a tree branch, and if your tracks coming out of the woods were far from perfect; it didn't diminish your smile one bit.


Moving On

Eventually my buddies stopped coming to visit me in the winter. The feeling wasn't able to last for them and they drifted to other things. Bruce still gave it a game effort and I've managed a few days with him in the past couple of years, but the gang as a ski gang ceased to exist sometime in the early 90s.

I, however, was still powering forward and the 93-94 season saw things falling in place, as they too seldom do. During the last year of High School I became aware that others beside me enjoyed this thing called skiing, and in the first year of college I hooked up with two of these like minded souls. We shared classes, we shared rides to school and we shared Friday afternoons at local hills. A bond was establishing. A plan was formulating.

Preparation for the second year of college was intense. Courses were scanned, sacrifices were made, schedules devised and phone lines tied up as we set out with one goal in mind: no classes on Friday. Not an easy feat for people enrolled in the Pure and Applied Sciences. Our Tuesdays and Thursdays were stacked with math, chemistry and physics and I took one for the team by enrolling in a Monday morning Animal Poetry class, but the toil was worth it. Fridays were ours. And, as a well-earned bonus, we managed to fit into a telemarking class to fulfill our phys-ed requirement.

Wednesday nights we'd crowd into a school bus and time would reverse as the big yellow brought me to the modest ski hill. The people were older, but the feeling was the same.

The telemark skis the school provided were long and narrow and barely a baby step above cross-country skis. It was humbling to be a beginner again, but we forged on and by the end of the season were flailing through the bumps and managing respectable tele turns on the groomed (in one direction anyhow).

But the real star of the 93-94 season was Jay Peak. We started off sampling various hills on our Fridays off. A day at Tremblant, followed by Sutton, perhaps a little Mont Blanc if we were feeling cheap. But soon enough Jay Peak took hold and dominated our schedule.

Whereas Sutton gave us a glimpse of the forest and the skiing to be had within, Jay Peak threw us right into the dark belly of the beast. At the time, their network of gladed trails did not amount to more than a handful, but their "Woods Skiing Policy" seduced us into finding our own. The woods here were not open or closed, they just were. We were free to explore as long as we did so at our own risk and did not enter or exit on to closed runs. A sense of freedom pervaded this isolated mountain hunkered down in the bitter climate of northern Vermont.

Soul is a much ballyhooed word and a slippery concept to grab hold of. The more you search for it or try to define it, the more elusive it can become. Soul does not always stand up to analytical reasoning. Soul is not always where you'd expect it. Maybe it exists, maybe it doesn't. But something about this place, from the cranky red tram to the bouncing green double; from the rudimentary snowmaking to the solid wood chalet; from the bitter cold January winds to the bitter cold February winds; from the glaring ice on some trails to the light powder on others; something about this place was right.




The Jay Cloud

More than anything else, Jay Peak gave us snow. There are various theories involving weather patterns and barn yard animals and containing words like "orographic lift" and "swollen ankle bones", but to be honest, I know little about the process. All I know is the result. The winter of '94 introduced us to the 2 for 1 ratio: for every inch of snow that fell in Montreal and the Eastern Townships, you could be sure that Jay Peak received double.

Up until then we were primarily bumps skiing hooligans, looking for air, punishing our knees, and only occasionally sampling a dusting of fresh snow when we darted off the trails or flirted with the sides. We had tasted the thrill of being first to touch a given trail, we had admired our tracks etched into the 2 inches of the otherwise untouched forest, and we had appreciated the silence that came with a turn executed on something other than hard pack. But over the boot, over the knee, around the waist, light fluffy powder flying all around you in euphoric explosions? No, we were not awake to this aspect of a sport we thought we knew.

I remember my first face shot. It happened in Timbuktu and it scared the shit out of me (in an addictively thrilling way). We'd hit the parking lot early, as we did every Friday, and marveled at the drifts that dwarfed anything we'd seen on the way up. Excitement was clearly building. The Bonaventure chair was closed so we skated over to the Jet and headed into a cloudy day. Ten minutes later and we were at the top of one of Jay's newest glades, staring at a canvas of white with less than a handful of tracks through it. Smiling with only a hint of what waited for us, we dropped in.

I sank past my knees and did not hear a sound. I felt no edges and only a subtle resistance against my legs. I popped up for a turn and snow exploded all around me. Holy shit, it was swirling around my chest. Sound stopped, feeling took over. Down again and into a trough, the snow felt waist deep. Picking up speed, I came up in another explosion and suddenly I was blind. The trees in front of me, the line I'd visualized, my friends beside me - all gone. Replaced by shades of grey and black and white. I opened my mouth in surprise. I swallowed snow. Now I was blind and choking and not sure if the trees I'd last seen were 20 feet, 10 feet, or 5 feet in front of me. I freaked out and pulled out the well worn emergency schmear turn.














When the cold smoke cleared I was sitting in a pit of my own making, covered in powder from toque to ski boot. And I was thrilled. I looked around me and saw my friends in similar positions. Wonder gave way to giddiness and soon we were laughing our asses off at our good fortune.

New facets were being revealed to us on a weekly basis it sometimes seems. From jumps, to bumps, to glades, to powder. Everything was a revelation that somehow built on the one before. The glades were no longer just for added obstacles and a sense of off-the-beaten-path adventure. No, no, at Jay Peak we discovered that the glades are where the snow hides. And now their liberal Woods Policy was really going to pay off.

We harvested everything we could from that first day early in the season. Each run ending in whoops and hollers and ridiculous shit-eating grins. And we carried it over into every day that would follow. We were blessed with a Thursday storm cycle and every Friday yielded low crowd fresh tracks everywhere on the mountain. A routine developed wherein we'd hit the powder bumps of U.N. or Can Am in the morning while they were fresh, then move into the official glades where we knew the snow would still be waiting for us. Afternoons were spent alternating between marked glades and exploring on our own. We dubbed our first find Bark Eater for reasons that were apparent to anyone who followed. Bushwhacking and trailblazing often resulted in lengthy slogs through dense underbrush and winding creek beds - sometimes we found the goods, sometimes we didn't, but we were never bored. And we were always eager for more.






Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8


email