Sanctuary

Perhaps it was something about the quality of light and the way it played with depth perception. In summer, looking up from the floor of the Salt Lake Valley, the parched air gave a one-dimensional quality to the mountains, as if I were looking at a landscape painting. But in winter, there was a whole different depth of field, and the individual canyons and ridgelines took on their own dimensions and stood out from one another.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be up in those mountains in winter. At age 8, I convinced my mother to sign me up for the Deseret News Ski School, a free, four-week learn-to-ski program sponsored by the local newspaper and hosted by Alta Ski Resort.

Being free, the Deseret News Ski School brought in a rag-tag horde of kids like me, kids whose families didn’t ski and who had no idea what kind of clothing or equipment would be required to learn this new-fangled pastime. Alta, in a wise move to protect their paying customers, held the D-News Ski School on a rope tow separated from the rest of the resort. Young trainee instructors, each with a dozen or more students in their charge, and each, I’m sure, with a look of sheer terror in their goggled eyes, would stand at the bottom of the rope tow, point their students’ skis uphill and yell, “Grab the cable, grab the cable, hang on!” For those four Saturdays, Alta’s rope tow became like a single living organism, a drunken centipede, a writhing, pulsing mass of skis and poles and arms and legs and bodies tangled together and lurching in starts and fits up the mountain. Somehow I emerged from the jumble and first felt the sensation of sliding on snow. It was magic. From then on, if you asked me who or what I was, my first response would be, “I’m a skier.”

Through the next summer I saved my allowance and lawn-mowing money and in the fall, asked my dad to drive me to Jerry’s Sporting Goods, a now long-defunct local shop, to buy my own skis. The skis I could afford were the used-up equipment that no longer met even rental standards. Ah, but they were beautiful. Forty years later I still see them clearly. A pearlescent top surface scratched and marred from numerous crashes; an off-set black and maroon race stripe — the same pattern you’d see on a Mustang fastback of that era; the brand, Victor, scrolled across the tips in cursive script; bright yellow bottoms with screw-on metal edges; and Cubco bindings with exposed steel springs. Used ankle-high double-lace leather boots and poles already bent and re-straightened dozens of times completed the set-up. The whole package cost less than $10.

Jack on snow with my new used skis, I progressed from a feeling of sliding to controlled sliding, pushing my abilities on ever steeper slopes. I felt freer than I could have imagined. A couple of winters later, my world took another quantum leap as I began to venture off trail and discovered the sensation of moving through, not just on top of, what seemed like bottomless powder snow. Powder, and the pursuit of it, became an obsession.

In those days, hitchhiking was a common practice for skiers without cars or too young to drive. On a regular basis I’d cut school, walk to the end of my street with my skis on my shoulder, stick my thumb out and be at one of the local resorts in less than 30 minutes. I’d joke with my parents that I was simply expanding my education with intensive, scientific study of snow. As long as my grades stayed on track, they turned a mostly-blind eye to my truancy. Instead of moving away for college, I attended the University of Utah because I couldn’t fathom living anywhere but next to the Wasatch Mountains. After college I moved from Salt Lake City to Park City to be even closer to the mountains and, just as importantly, to find work in the ski industry where I could spend at least part of my working days on snow.

Over several decades and hundreds of ski days, my enthusiasm for and loyalty to Park City’s resorts has never waned. At the same time, as my devotion to the Wasatch and its dry, light powder deepened and expanded, I couldn’t help but look longingly at the pristine snow beyond the ski lifts and resort boundaries. I took avalanche classes and a wilderness first responder course and began exploring the Wasatch backcountry. And that was when I discovered what it means, at least for me, to recreate. I mean the very root meaning of the word. As “Webster’s” defines it, Recreate: Create over again. Restore to a good or normal physical condition from a state of weakness or exhaustion; reinvigorate.

I am not a religious person, but when I try to talk about a good day in the winter backcountry I invariably reach for religious terms. A good day in the backcountry is a spiritual experience: a re-creation experience. Under your own power and responsible for your own survival out in that big, cold, all-encompassing silence, there’s a silence so profound you can hear your heart thump or your skis slice through an uncut blanket of crystalline magic we call powder snow. Your sense of aliveness is pared down to the absolute essentials.

I think that’s it: I never feel more completely present, more alive, than when I am in the mountains in winter. And then you add the sensation of dropping into a steep chute or an open slope when everything is just right, where at each turn the whole surrounding snow surface moves with you, and you are forced to let go of your natural inclination to lean into the mountain and instead lean out, trusting the fall line, letting go of conscious thought and simply allowing the practiced movements and muscle memory to take over. The slow, methodical up is as important as the fast, exhilarating down. The sensation of climbing through that huge wintry silence, when heart and lungs and blood and muscle settle into a rhythmic pace and my usual jittery thought patterns are reduced to inhale, exhale, left ski, right ski, is a spiritual practice. At least it’s my spiritual practice.

There are other ways, of course, to enjoy the winter backcountry. As I was growing up, my family had snowmobiles. My parents didn’t ski, and so snowmobiling was their way of getting our family out in winter. I have fond memories of those outings. Those old snowmobiles were temperamental and not much use if you got off the packed trail. I learned a useful and colorful vocabulary as I listened to my usually mild mannered and soft-spoken father spew expletives at a stubborn vapor-locked machine that refused to start.

As an adult, I, along with my wife and our two young children, lived for three years at a cabin at 9,200 feet on the Park City side of Guardsman Pass. In winter we were four miles and a couple thousand vertical feet away from the nearest plowed road, so for six or seven months of the year, we commuted on snowmobiles. We were using the machines for a more utilitarian purpose — transportation — but I’ll admit to indulging in the guilty pleasure of squeezing hard on the throttle whenever I could just to feel that surge of power and speed. Snowmobile technology has come a long way since the old blue SnowJets my family and I rode in the early ’70s. The new “powder sleds” are truly impressive machines that do amazing things.

A skilled rider can summit in minutes the same mountain peak that takes me hours to climb on skis. Snowmobiling is fun. There, I said it. The machines have their place, but it isn’t every place. I am biased, but to me, the noise, fumes and tracks of snowmobiles are antithetical to the silence, the sense of solitude, the self-reliance, the recreation experience that I, and a growing number of backcountry skiers, snowboarders and snowshoers, seek.

I consider anyone who enjoys the Wasatch winter, no matter their means of accessing it, a kindred spirit. I am not interested in dictating how others enjoy the outdoors. I am passionately interested, however, in protecting these mountains and winter landscapes for the restorative, reinvigorating qualities they offer. These mountains are sanctuary, and I believe we should treat them as such.

To enjoy winter in all its ruggedness requires big, quiet and accessible terrain, the kind of terrain we in Park City are lucky enough to be surrounded by. Development and motorized use may be appropriate in some of our surrounding landscape, but certainly not in all of it. Preserving our skiing heritage and our recreational future will take cooperation on the part of all of us who love winter, as well as forethought and planning by community leaders and public officials. As we move through the second century of skiing in Park City, I hope we are smart enough and disciplined enough to preserve the core of our backcountry lands as sanctuary for soul-replenishing recreation in the truest sense of the word.

A long-time contributor to Park City Magazine, Mark Menlove has worked in several capacities in Park City’s ski industry, including stints as communications director for Park City Mountain Resort, president of Ski Utah, and guide for the Interconnect Adventure Tour. He currently works as executive director for Winter Wildlands Alliance, a national non-profit organization working to protect winter ecosystems.