The pure rush of skinny skis

IT WAS 4 A.M., THE tiny hours of New Year’s Eve, when I woke with a strange clarity I hadn’t felt in years. Outside the soaking rains splattered, and snow kept piling up in the San Gabriels, the fourth or fifth day running.

It wasn’t an idea or a vision that had taken hold of me so much as an old hunger, a memory. For 10 years, I had been a snowboard-or-die convert, a former ski patroller turned monoboard worshipper. But suddenly my faith was shattered -- without any crisis whatsoever.

I got up and dug around in the closet for skis, the old skis, not the new spatulas but the long and skinny 190-centimeter black K2 Extremes I’d bought in 1990 and the old Lange boots in full ‘80s lavender. No p-tex. No wax. No lecture from a zitty kid about how the bindings are too old to service.

Hours later at Mountain High, it was a blizzard, nearly a whiteout, with six inches on the ground and new snow accumulating at a rate of two inches an hour. With powder like this, I was one of the first in line for the chair. The place would sell out later that day with the holiday crowd surging up from San Bernardino, but few would make it above the lower mountain.

The air swarmed with horizontally driven snow that clawed the face and made it hard to breathe, herding beginners into the lodge to watch TV and wait an hour and a half in line to buy goggles at the tiny sport shop.

Sitting on the chair, head down, watching snow pile up in my lap, the soul skier reemerged. This wasn’t the kind of waist-deep snow to go trudging through with a snowboard. It was snow perfect for ridge-to-ridge telemark traverses, for skinning up and running down.

This was the kind of snow you dream about for a three- or four-day backcountry quest on skis -- looking for pre-cached boxes of food and whiskey, making a winter camp and digging avalanche pits with a ski-tail.

It was snow that pulled you out there, and you needed skis to conquer it, to reach the point obscured by cold smoke just over the saddle of the mountain, the cosmic journey to a place you had to get to by gliding quietly under your own power -- something snowboards can’t do.

On the chair to Inferno Ridge, a fellow skier peered out of the tunnel of his hood at my gear and chuckled, “I have those same ones at home. Great skis.” He was sporting about $2,000 of the newest gear, but I detected a whiff of regret. I knew why.

Skating off the chair, I pumped up and down the backbone of the ridge, gathering speed in the hiss of snow with just enough visibility, and hucked off a lip to drop maybe 30 feet onto Backdraft, an open powderfield dotted with trees. Two boarders standing below the lip whipped around, one of them crying, startled, “Whoa!”

The big ponderosa pines bent toward me. The skis were light and easy to follow. The slope was filled only with a white howling wind. It wasn’t Mammoth’s Chair 23. It wasn’t backcountry in the Sawtooths. It was only good ol’ Mountain High, but this felt good. Real good.

The mountain felt contiguous with every mountain there was, as though it didn’t end, it just ran on and on wherever skis could slide, up or down.

Suddenly I remembered all the places I didn’t go anymore, the ski treks I’d abandoned a decade ago. The door to out there was kicked wide open, and one soul skier blew right through it, back the way he came.

Dean Kuipers is an editor at Los Angeles CityBeat and grew up skiing in Michigan.