SPECIAL SKI ISSUE : CROSS COUNTRY : GRAND CANYON

In summer, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River can be a slice of hell. Not because of the heat, although it’s plenty hot in the high desert. The canyon takes on a hellish aspect thanks to grinding tour-bus transmissions, honking horns, low-flying aircraft and the oohs and ahs and say cheeses of about 5 million tourists jamming into northern Arizona for a glimpse of eternity.

But in the wintertime, when piercing cold settles in the high country, the Grand Canyon takes on a different aspect. The leaves change and the tourists begin to disappear. By the first snowfall the place is still. The snow keeps coming and coming until it nearly seals off the canyon--especially the 8,000-foot-high North Rim--from the rest of the world. Only then does the Big Ditch, as locals call it, get a break from the crowds.

All that snow means plenty of cross-country skiing on the Kaibab Plateau that borders the North Rim. The rugged Kaibab, crisscrossed by steep escarpments, deep-cut valleys and dense stands of tall ponderosa pines, is covered by a powdery snowpack that exceeds 100 inches most winters. The plateau is more than a mile above the sinuous Colorado River, and Kaibab means, fittingly, in the language of the Paiute, “mountain lying down.”

The plateau has but a single winter destination: the North Rim Nordic Center, eight miles from the entrance to Grand Canyon National Park, and 26 miles south of Jacob Lake (which is about 36 miles south of the Utah border). Stuffed to the rafters with guests from May to October, when the park’s North Rim is open for business, the center’s year-round lodge can accommodate only 60 winter guests at a time.

Those 60 guests may seem a crowd inside the alpine-style lodge, but not when they’re spread over the Nordic Center’s 50 miles of groomed trails and 21.7 miles of marked back country trails, let alone the 1.5-million-acre Kaibab National Forest that envelops it.

Cross-country enthusiasts, tired of dodging snowboarders and hot doggers on the nation’s crammed slopes, will find this just the place for solitude.

The North Rim Nordic Center boasts the largest groomed-trail wilderness skiing system in the United States. The key word here is wilderness, which by federal definition means a roadless area. All roads to the center are closed in the wintertime. The only way in is by SnoVan, a Rube Goldberg contraption made up of the battered shell of a Dodge van perched atop an ungainly halftrack fitted with skis where the front tires should be.

The center’s trails offer plenty of challenges. To name just two, the 8.7-mile Tater Ridge Trail and the appropriately named Adrenaline Alley, a mile-long screamer that gauges one’s talent for dodging trees. Another test is the Point Imperial guided tour, which leads for several miles across unmarked open country and over steep hills to the very edge of the Grand Canyon.

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Veteran cross-country skiers are not the North Rim’s sole clientele, however. The intensive, individualized instruction for beginners is the best I’ve seen for any outdoor sport. Judging by my experience as a coordination-challenged outdoorsman, Nordic director Ken Walters can teach just about anyone to ski. In fact, he’s licensed to teach other cross-country skiing instructors their craft.

If you go through your paces with him, you’ll understand at the end of a bone-weary day why cross-country skiing is widely held to be the most comprehensive form of full-body aerobic exercise there is.

The dense ponderosa thickets swallow up landmarks the minute you enter them, but well-marked trails make it nearly impossible to get lost. The length of those trails, which range from one to 10.8 miles, is more challenging for beginners than their steepness. Even the shorter trails are plenty rigorous, and good warm-up for some of the more grueling ones. “Killers,” Walters calls the latter.

If, like me, you take time to acquire snow legs, the center’s glide clinic can help. It focuses on techniques for letting your skis get you around with minimal exertion. You may feel a little silly practicing the hip-wagging sashay technique (Walters called it the “hi, sailor” walk until last season, when a champion of political correctness protested), but even veterans say it considerably improves your cross-country skills.

More daring skiers may want to take the center’s courses in telemark, a weird amalgam of downhill and cross-country skiing with some improbable spine-twisting. The point, as I understand it, is to stop on a dime while hurtling downhill and then change direction in an instant--useful knowledge, I suppose, should you ever tear down the Grand Canyon’s brink while being chased by a black bear (of which the Kaibab Plateau boasts a small but attentive population).

Instruction can only go so far (God knows the poor instructors did their best with me). The real test is, on a paralyzingly cold dawn, getting out into open country where other skiers are but tiny dots against a vast landscape of dense forests and broad clearings, and occasional herds of deer and elk.

Self-testing is the truest part of the wilderness experience. After a couple of days of flying full tilt into trees and snowbanks (“Rescuers’ll be able to find you by your ponytail,” my wife, Melissa, assured me), the instructors’ patient prodding (“Not like that, Greg! Swing your hips! Watch out!”) finally took hold.

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When I finally maneuvered myself across the Kaibab Plateau the 10 miles or so from the lodge to the edge of the Grand Canyon it was a magical moment.

There, in the mouth of eternity, facing two billion years of evolution, comes another well-earned lesson: humility. Standing at the edge, in the presence of so overwhelming a place, it’s difficult not to feel insignificant. But I also felt a strange exhilaration in that ego-containing, cold, stark landscape, a sensation that I imagine is something like what Zen folks call satori.

I’ve learned other lessons in humility at the North Rim. One occurred when Melissa, who had never been on skis before, sailed effortlessly across the snow, while I, who have merrily coursed my blithe way down Rocky Mountain and Bavarian Alp, struggled endlessly.

Another was when chief instructor Ken Walters’ mother, who had long since celebrated her 75th birthday, handily out-skied me and practically every other visitor to the center on the daylong Point Imperial tour, a test of endurance even for those in top shape. She demonstrated with good cheer that skiing is not the province of the young, and inspired everyone there to try a little bit harder.

On the Point Imperial tour, one instructor performed the single strangest act of bravado I have ever seen. As we stood and chatted on a jagged spit of land jutting out a few dozen yards from the canyon wall, he hoisted himself off the ground with his poles and disappeared over the side.

I looked over the edge to witness what I thought was a sudden suicide, only to find him schussing across a small bowl of snow that hung between two tall columns of rock 50 feet or so below the edge. In summer, there would be nothing but air in that bowl, a fact he shrugged off when I pointed it out to him after he climbed back up to rejoin me.

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Part of the pleasure of a North Rim trip, like that of a good train ride, is being cast into unexpected company. This fall, on my most recent visit to the center, I met a party of Sierra Club skiers from Los Angeles, most of them health workers, and all of them intent on putting as many miles under their skis as they could pack into a weekend.

Among the other visitors were a British academic, a Belgian artist, an undercover federal narcotics agent from Washington, a pair of self-professed ski bums from New Zealand, a Phoenix-based photographer and a Hollywood actor.

The singer-songwriter James Taylor is an annual visitor to the center. On his first trip here he was told, space being at a premium in the SnoVan from Jacob Lake, that he would have to leave his guitar behind.

When the lodge staff heard about this affront, they dispatched the unfortunate SnoVan driver back on a cold, lonely snowmobile to ponder the error of his ways and retrieve Taylor’s ax. That night the assembled guests were treated to a free concert beside the lodge’s great stone fireplace.

Breaking bread with that mixed crew is another pleasure. You won’t find the familiar outdoor regime of greasy stew and freeze-dried eggs here. This may be wilderness, but the center prides itself on good food cooked well.

The fare ranges from steaks and freshwater fish to vegetarian dishes and salads, all served in ample portions for carb- and protein-starved outdoorspeople. Breakfast and lunch is offered buffet-style and a la carte, with a sack lunch available for those who cannot tear themselves away from the outdoors. Each supper offers three entrees, and the last night of each package features a gourmet buffet of groaning-board proportions.

I’ve come away from my visits to the North Rim a better skier, and certainly a more humble one, lessons that have served me well in the less trying cross-country venues that dot the Southwest.

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GUIDEBOOK: On the Edge of the Canyon

Getting there: Jacob Lake, the take-in point to the North Rim Nordic Center, lies at the junction of U.S. 89A and Arizona 67, about 10 hours by car from Los Angeles and five hours from Las Vegas. The most convenient airport is in Flagstaff. America West flies from LAX, with connecting service through Phoenix; restricted advance-purchase fares start at $118 round trip.

Where to stay: North Rim Nordic Center opens its 1995-’96 season on Christmas weekend and closes at the end of March. Two-, three- and four-day packages are available for most weekends of the season; for a private cabin the rates are $350, $495 and $560 respectively (plus 5.5% room tax), double occupancy. A bed in the communal Mongolian-style yurt, which houses eight people, runs $280, $390 and $480. (The yurt does not have showers.) This year the center offers a special five-day, four-night package for Christmas week for $600.

All rates include round-trip SnoVan or SnoBus transportation from Jacob Lake, three meals daily, lodging, lessons and some guided ski tours. Alcoholic beverages and ski-equipment rentals not included. Rental ski package, $12 per day; snowshoes, $10. The center offers an overnight wilderness skiing and camping package in the Saddle Mountain Wilderness, on the canyon’s little-visited East Rim, for an additional $30 per person.

A combined SnoVan-snowshoe tour of Saxophone Point, a towering promontory that also lies on the East Rim somewhat closer to the lodge, costs $25. This year all the center’s groomed trails have a lane for the newly imported sport of ski skating.

The North Rim Nordic Center is operated by Canyoneers Inc., P.O. Box 2997, Flagstaff, AZ 86003. Because of the limited facilities, Canyoneers encourages visitors to book as far in advance as possible. For information/reservations, telephone (800) 525-0924.

Because the Nordic Center SnoVans depart from the Jacob Lake Lodge at 7:30 a.m. on take-in days, you might want to spend the night there. Winter rates at the lodge are $42 per person, double occupancy. Reservations, telephone (520) 643-7232.

The nearest other facilities are at Kanab, Utah, about 50 miles north of Jacob Lake. A shuttle van to Jacob Lake leaves from the Shilo Inn in Kanab at 6 a.m. on take-in days.

--G.M.