A Thanksgiving Skiing Story

Last year my wife and I decided to snag a midweek opening at the crown

jewel of the 10th Mountain Hut System, the Fowler Hilliard Hut. Most

people reserve these huts months in advance, but we’re not that

organized.

Fortunately, we don’t have to be. As retail workers at a local ski

shop, we work weekends because that’s when most people shop. As such,

we get two or three days off in the middle of the week. This is a huge

perk for ski bums like us – the roads and slopes are empty, and

reservations for backcountry huts are easy to come by on short notice.

This particular time we hit jackpot. The Fowler-Hilliard Hut is

situated in a dream location for any skier. It’s on top of a long

ridgeline, and directly below it are acres of open terrain, perfectly

angled for supreme powder skiing. It’s ringed by the highest mountains

in the country, Elbert and Massive to the south, Holy Cross to the

west, Quandary and Democrat to the east and the magical Gore Range to

the north.

The original Fowler-Hilliard Hut had been around for a few decades,

but in 2009 it got struck by lightning and burned to the ground. The

10th Mountain folks scrambled to erect a temporary yurt, and in the

summer of 2010 they built a new, palatial version of this hut. It’s

the perfect ski lodge: you can literally ski out the front door and

make some of the best turns of your life.

My wife, Elaine, and I took a little gamble that there would be enough

snow and booked the hut for late November – right around Thanksgiving.

As it turned out, La Nina was more than kind to us, and we were graced

with amazing powder.

Getting to these huts is no easy chore. This particular one required a

3,500-foot climb up a steep jeep “road.”  We were a little nervous for

the skin up there. Elaine had been away from skiing for a few years,

though not by her own accord.

She has always been a passionate skier, learning the sport as a little

kid. She spent many years in various racing programs, but racing

really wasn’t her thing, not because she didn’t have the skill, but

because skiing on hard packed ice between red and blue gates didn’t do

much to satisfy her creative interests, her sense of adventure or her

independence. Turns out her favorite place to go was the bumps, steeps

and trees where she could challenge herself, far from the crowds, on

her own terms.

For Elaine, like a lot of us, skiing was more than just fun. It was a

place to find peace from the everyday challenges of life. Around 2007,

however, her health took a turn for the worse and skiing became

something that she was able to do less and less. Hospital stays and

medications replaced high-speed runs down Salto Glades, and after

three years that trade-off in lifestyle took its toll. This story has

a happy ending though: she got better, and at the beginning of the

2010-11 ski season was given a clean bill of health.

It was a tentative return though. Three years away from the sport had

an impact. The skins seemed steeper than before, and there was a day

last early-November at Loveland where there was some definite

frustration for her because her ability to ski bumps was not where she

wanted it. Her email moniker as a kid used to be “Bump Star”:

obviously there was a little pride involved when it came to skiing the

moguls.

As the Fowler-Hilliard hut trip approached, we skied more and more,

but a 3,000-plus foot climb with heavy packs is the real deal. You

can’t fake it and it was definitely a jump from the little skin and

ski sessions we’d been doing out our backyard.

We arrived at the trailhead and I tried to give her a little

advice...pace yourself and eat…it’s a long way to the top. Elaine is a

darn good skier, but mellow pacing on uphills isn’t particularly her

forte. Some people approach life with caution, and some people charge

it full gusto. Elaine falls in the latter category and I love her for

it. That said, it can lead to some interesting consequences on a long

uphill skin.

Her pace the first couple miles was akin to a Norwegian cross-country

ski racer injected with a half-dozen Full Throttle energy drinks.  It

was break-neck. I figured to myself, as I was trying to catch my

breath while struggling to follow her, that we’d be up at the hut with

plenty of time to settle in, build a fire, make some hot cocoa and

take an evening sunset run before a cold darkness settled in.

And then the bonk hit her. Medically speaking, a bonk is when your

glycogen stores are depleted. Most endurance athletes are quite

familiar with them – your suddenly swift pace is reduced to a crawl or

a full-on stop. Basically, you feel like garbage.

The only way to make the situation better is to eat food, preferably

chocolate or other such sugary delicacies. The problem is, once you

bonk you don’t quite get back to the same energy level until a few

days and hefty meals later. The temperature was plummeting into the

single-digits, the sun was dropping down along the horizon and we were

only about halfway up the mountain. We needed to keep moving.

The thing is, in comparison to the three-year pile of dung that Elaine

had been through, climbing another 1,500 feet was simple. A steep skin

track with a heavy pack is a lot less debilitating than endless

hospital visits and powerful yet debilitating medications. We took our

time, ate lots of chocolate and downed two thermoses of hot cocoa. As

we neared the ridgeline where the hut sat, we had one of those

magical, beautiful moments in life that only a skier can experience.

The sun had just dropped below the 14,009-foot Mount of the Holy Cross

and the sky was on fire. The fresh snow around us erupted in a

sparkling glitter. We stopped at a set of tracks – those of the

elusive lynx. We’d just climbed 3,500 feet and it was like nature was

rewarding us for our effort.

I looked over at my wife and saw the biggest smile I’d ever seen on

her face. As the sun set behind her, she put her hands in the air, in

what can only be described as a sign of victory. Victory over that

day’s long uphill, but more than that too. You see, even though she

had overcome her ailments from the previous three years, you could

still see in her eyes a certain fear that the problems could come

back. It wasn’t until that ski and that climb last November that I saw

that fear evaporate for the last time.

I’ve heard people mock skiing as a silly activity. A high school

teacher of mine once said to me, in front of the whole class as I was

heading off to ski practice, “There goes Dan…the world’s going

downhill and so is he.” That teacher didn’t get it, because he didn’t

ski.

I’ve seen skiing change lives and not just because it’s fun. It offers

a sense of freedom and adventure that simply doesn’t exist in many

elements of our world today. When my parents dropped me off at the ski

resort, I was free – for the first time in my life - to explore the

mountain and that world without supervision until they picked me up

when the lifts stopped turning.  That’s what skiing does for most

mountain people I know, and that’s why I think skiers are a little

more independent, adventurous and free than most.

Skiing in the woods and in the mountains makes you a better person. It

enlightens you and it makes you strong. But more than that: it heals.

As my wife will attest, being in the mountains, climbing them on a

cold winters day and sliding back down them did more for her health

and sense of self than any doctor or medication. Elaine was healthy

before that ski last November, but it took that magical moment on the

top of the ridgeline by the lynx tracks for her to truly feel alive

again. And after a whole winter of skiing and summer of training,

today she’s the healthiest of her entire life. When people ask me what

I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving, that truth is my answer.

Happy Thanksgiving to the Nederland skiing and snowboarding family.

May you have a great day with loved ones, friends, family, delicious

food, health and of course, awesome turns in silky powder snow.