November 10, 2000
The Rediscovery
©Aaron Lefohn 2000
The first sound I heard out of Misha's mouth on the other end of the phone this morning was a laugh. It was 7:15 am. I had told he and Alex yesterday that I was not going to ski Alta today, despite it being both the first day of the season and a powder day. I told them I was going to go to work and skip skiing. Misha had not pushed the topic yesterday because, as he admitted this morning, he knew I'd call him in the morning and tell him I was coming. He says that there is never a question in his mind why the phone is ringing at 7 am on a powder day--it is always me.After Misha went back into the house multiple times to get forgotten gear (we all understand that scramble on the first day to try to remember everything we need), we were on our way towards Alex's house on time. This is incredibly rare for an Aaron/Misha adventure.
There was a note on Alex's door in Russian that said he had to leave but would be back soon. It is a pretty safe bet that in Utah, leaving a note in Russian saying that the door is unlocked is not much of a risk. We waited in Alex's apartment for about twenty minutes for his return.
He too struggled to put together his gear list for the first time in the season. It seemed trivial to me this morning, but this was my fifth time out already. I was in even more of a disheveled state trying to prepare for my first time out--I made it all the way to the car before realizing I'd forgotten my Goretex pants.
"Somehow" the music got louder and louder the farther up Little Cottonwood Canyon we got. First the CD was changed from "Cranberries" to "Rusted Root", then the volume was incrementally turned up with the rise in altitude. As we passed Snowbird, we noted that there was nearly no one there but continued up towards Alta. Synchronous explitives were issued by all three of us as we got our first glimpse of the Alta parking lot--it was nearly full at 9 am and Alta only had a third of the mountain open. We followed the orange-vested parking attendant's hand signals to a parking spot at the end of the lot, near the Peruvian Lodge, and assessed the scene. With only one of two lifts ferrying people to the upper mountain, the line of anxious skiers was at least forty-five minutes long. We decided that we'd rather have less terrain at Snowbird and get more runs than get four runs in four hours at Alta.
Snowbird had only two lifts running but the parking lot was not even half full and the lift lines looked to be less than five minutes. We gleefully paid our twenty-five dollars and hopped on the "Mid-Gad" lift. It was snowing lightly but the sun was occasionally breaking through. The snow cannons, however, that were pointed towards "Big Emma" were causing a whiteout on the lower half of the chair.
This was the first time of the season for me on Alpine skis and I had already tried to lift my heal multiple times on the way over to the chairlift. I fumbled a little with my boots at the top of the chair and, shocked by their snugness, left them mostly unbuckled.
We exchanged grins and pushed off down the cat track for our first run. Due to both the over-zealous snow guns and the lack of interesting terrain on "Mid-Gad" lift, we followed Misha over towards the "Wilbere" lift. This lift is normally all but ignored due to its short vertical, but today it was held the best skiable terrain.
While it felt strange to have my heals locked down, things were beginning to come back for all of us. I'd forgotten how damn strong Misha is on skis. The guy simple powers through whatever terrain he is on in the same, aggressive but compact style. It is marvelous to watch. This was Alex's first time skiing in Utah, more used to skiing icy race courses in Moscow or the often-hard snow of the Eastern United States. He was, however, skiing superb slalom turns on the soft, groomed run. I was on a "new" pair of skis I'd purchased at the swap and they were making my life very easy. The skis cannot be described as energetic, but they have a very strong edge hold and enough shape to allow me to very easily get round, highly angulated, carved turns--the sensations were beginning to return.
On our second run on the "Wilbere" lift , we dropped into some enticing-looking crud. Misha dropped in ahead of me and immediately heal-released from one of his skis. I brought his ski down to him and he was muttering something about the binding retention spring not being stiff enough for him. Figuring he had it under control from there, I skied down to the bottom of the run through the fun, chopped-up powder. The new skis are fat enough that they float on the soft snow and make it feel much easier than being on traditional, narrow skis.
When I turned around to watch Misha and Alex descend, I saw one of Misha's skis standing straight up in the snow and Misha trying to hike up the hill, fighting the deep snow. Alex had been right behind me and so was now next to me, also watching. Apparently Misha's skis had come off again and he had now lost one. We waited for about five minutes and then yelled up to Misha that we'd ride the lift back up to the top and ski down to help him look.
The three of us, combined with occasional good samaritans, searched for over an hour for the ski. We had all come close to proclaiming the ski as gone. Misha had already said he'd ski the rest of the day on one ski and we'd justified it to him with, "at least they were your rock skis." Alex and I decided to take another lap to restart the search at the top of the slope one last time. I asked the lift operator at the top if he could call the ski patrol to come help find the ski--or if the patrol had a metal detector. A patrol woman skied down to the "site" with us and began helping us search. She suggested that we all take off one ski and use it to "sweep" a path under the snow instead of stabbing isolated points with our poles. Within minutes after she said this, Misha found the missing ski only a few feet from his other ski. He had poked his pole all around the location of the ski many times but had missed it. We thanked her profusely for her sage advice, and after almost an hour and a half of searching in the snow, Misha once again clicked his boots into two skis. We did readjust his bindings while waiting in the lift line, but the bindings he is using on his rock skis are simply not strong enough to hold in a two hundred pound Russian at thirty miles per hour.
The rest of the day got better with each and every run as our brains dredged up and reactivated the autonomous programs for skiing that had been stashed deep away for the summer and Alex warmed up to the idea of skiing in the snow rather than on it--a radical change to make for a slalom racer. Despite the fact that the energy was building amongst us more and more on each run, we finally conceeded to leave and go to work at 1:30 pm and returned to a partially clearing, but beautifully cloaked in white, Salt Lake valley.
