By Michael Lanza
Fresh snow from the storm of the past couple of days blankets the ground, padding by inches a white comforter several feet thick. Ponderosa pine boughs sag under the weight of a substance equivalent to an awful lot of very tiny feathers. But that storm has passed like a dream you can’t quite recall. Now, the sun throws operating-room brilliance on every nook and cranny of a mountain I’ve come to know well enough to have a detailed map of its terrain in my head.
It’s the kind of winter day you want to put in a leftovers box, to save some of it for later.
Unfortunately, no one has yet invented a box like that. So two friends and I will cut laborious zigzags uphill and float downhill on our skis until our time limitations—and our legs—inform us it’s time to head home. And in the long stretches of silence, when we’re strung out in a line climbing uphill, or taking turns riding gravity like it was a galloping horse, I’ll find myself contemplating the curious intersection of chance, passion, and geography where we find ourselves falling in love with an obscure spot on the map.
