The trail and the damage done

The Tilly Jane trail goes from the Cooper Spur Ski Area parking lot to the Saddle Camp, on Mt. Hood's north side.  It can be a casual 3 hour walk or ski up or an arduous hump with a full pack and new snow to push.  I can still remember my first trip up that trail when I was about 13 years old.  Army surplus skins on wood skis was the transport but it was a beautiful day with light snow and diamonds shining on the top.

Lately, I've been transcribing some Crag Rat oral history.  The late Crag Rat, Wilson Appelgren, was interviewed in 2001, and said that in the early 1930’s, Percy Bucklin and Harold Wells blazed (cutting axe bites into trees) the Tilly Jane trail.  “They figured out where the trail should go and they blazed it on the way down from Cloud Cap.  The CCC came in later and cut it out."  The trail has change drastically, in appearance but not slope, since the Gnarl Ridge fire of 2008.

For an excellent story about the Sept. 2008 fire check Katy Muldoon’s Oregon Live entry here: http://www.oregonlive.com/O/index.ssf/2008/11/fire_on_the_mountain_history_i.html

 

Moonlight night ski

Tilly's Bowls

We were blessed with some sub-20F snow last weekend, uncharacteristically, falling lightly, straight down.  Above the old Cloud Cap Inn, on  Mt. Hood's north side, are some gentle bowls that tilt into Tilly Jane Creek.  We had the good fortune to ski, what I describe as, the Tilly bowls.

Tilly Jane creek is named for Tilly Jane Ladd.  William M. Ladd was a wealthy, Portland banker and Cloud Cap Inn developer and his wife Tilly was a free-spirit, by turn-of-the-century standards.  She supervised the work camp while Cloud Cap Inn was being built in 1889 and the creek, trail and campground were named after her.  She was a woman I would have enjoyed meeting.  I'm researching her life and there will be more about her later.

Oldie but goodie

I was talking about this video, coincidently, while on a chair lift ride last week.  My ski buddy hadn't seen it and I think it should be viewed and enjoyed every season, for it's ski bum profundity. "I love these skis"

Gold Rush

Yesterday, at the Meadows, there was an honest 12" of new. Heather canyon lift was turning by 9:30 am and they dropped the rope into the canyon before 10. The consistent bottleneck on powder days, now, is the lift line at the Heather chair. It's an old two seater and the line of powder hounds stretches out a quarter mile. First tracks down Half Moon bowl were delicious but the lift wait is a buzz kill. I guess I could stop bitching and start climbing for my turns but I like pointing out the obvious.

Chair for one

A friend showed me some slides, she bought at a yard sale, the other day. They are from the late 40's or early 50's. I scanned a couple. This is spring at Timberline on Mt. Hood. Sweater and sunglasses.

Any Day Any Way

Someone left the cake out in the rain...

Yesterday morning yielded some knee-deep shots in Heather Canyon and Hood River Meadows. The powder hounds were out in force. All 10% of Oregon's un or under-employed were there to get some of the best turns of the season, so far. But people had also seen the extended forecast and it's a rainy weekend ahead.

Never a good sign

The description of the conditions on Mt Hood Meadows web site and the water drops on the camera lens tell two different stories, me thinks.

Euro-dudes

(originally published in Off-Piste Magazine - Issue #48 Jan. 2011)

THE EURO DUDES

The Role Model

I was introduced to my archetypal Euro-dude when my parents ponyed-up for race team, on Mt. Hood, OR, in 1969. My earliest memories were of Dad, as a volunteer ski patroller, at the little hill of Cooper Spur, where he, and later my brother and I, learned to slide those pointy tips left and right. Dad moved his big white cross to the big hill of Mt. Hood Meadows, when it opened in 1968. Banging into bamboo sticks soon turned from a pastime to our full-time obsession. School classes, when attended in the winter, were rest days. We traveled the junior race circuit, on weekends, around the Cascade Mountains. Forty bucks covered the entry fee, gas, a crowded motel room with wax shavings on the floor and fast food. Our sun-weathered coaches were Canadians, South Americas and local stoners. But, the guy that stuck-out and shined was a beat-up, ex-downhiller, from Chamiox, France, named Lionel Wibault.

Lionel was a certifiable, nut-job talent, recruited by the ski director. He apparently was up for a ski-about in the States. In his 20’s, Lionel was here to both coach ski racing and sow his wild French oats. The French accent probably didn’t hurt either pursuit. Why he left that beautiful alpine valley, for the relative squalor of the local RV park/store/gas station ghetto and our quaint “resort”, left questions in my teenage mind. Lionel had a pirate-looking, scared face and a limp, from a big DH digger, but he had a ski turn that was a hot knife in warm butter. He was fun on a road trip too. We nicknamed him Rufus, after the podunk Columbia River town on I-84, because of his love of rural gas n’ piss stops, honkytonks and the female company there in.

At the top of the new Riblet chairlift, Lionel would proclaim, “you must skee zee treezs, bacuzz zay du nut muve”. I could see my brother’s rolling eyes, behind his goggles, saying “no shit, Frenchie”. But that winter, as we followed his smooth, bouncy turns, through tight firs we didn’t realize that we were become more French, all the time. We spent fruit picking money on stiff, 210cm Dynamic VR17s’ or Rossignol 102s’ skis. We had a ski poster of Jean Claude Killy, winning an Olympic medal, on our bedroom wall. We waxed skis almost every night. I even made a downhill suit, in home-ec class, in French national team colors. There is nothing quite like a good clean, teenage, obsession.

Instead of skiing Chamonix’s Valle Blanche with Lionel, we skied White River canyon off Mt. Hood’s east flank. There were no out-of-bound signs, liability concerns, parent-release bullshit or second thoughts. We climbed until someone got scared (and nobody wanted to be that guy) then we put Grand Prix bindings on Lange or Nordica heels and followed wherever his tracks led. It was different that running gates. It was racing without gates; chasing this skinny, wack-job to the bottom of the canyon, to the road where a car full of cheerful skiers would take us back up to the main lodge. Burning turns in that steep, spring corn was better than anything I’d ever experienced. I didn’t realize, until much later in life, the imprint of those days.

Chamonix Baptism

After college, I lit-out for a round-the-world climbing trip with, my buddy, Jeff. We circumnavigated westerly, working crappy jobs enough to travel to the next climbing hotspot (New Zealand/Nepal/the Alps), climb until broke and then repeated. We followed the pilgrim’s trail to Chamonix and on our first night in town I saw a poster announcing a slideshow by Sylvain Sudan. Yep, the Swiss "skier of the impossible" was in town to make some money and spread the good word. I knew of Sudan because he had skied the Newton-Clark headwall, on Mt. Hood, back in 1971. Although he rode a helicopter to the summit, he did ski a 45-50 degree face in deep powder and fine style. I sat in the garlic and b.o. fragrant room and watched slides of an old hero but couldn’t translate much of the French narrative. I wanted to approach him after the show and asked about his Mt. Hood ski but was too intimidated.

Chamonix to a logger looking, Cascade mountaineer, is a scary and intimidating town. It’s not just those big faces and famous routes; it’s also the legends in flesh and blood. I stood in bars with Patrick Vallencent in one corner and Anselme Baud (who was a ski instructor at Timberline, OR in the 70’s) in the other. It is said that Chamonix is a meritocracy, where you are only as good as your last adventure. These guys were doing big lines, every other day and breathing the same air as they, was humbling. Vallencent and Baud’s first ski descent of the north face of the Col de Peuterey can be viewed on youtube.com and watching it still makes me clinch-up. Their flamboyance and confidence wasn’t a pose but a posture necessary to fulfilling their ambition. For them it wasn’t “you fall, you die” but “if you think you’ll fall, you will”. Plus, they were French and the arrogance couldn’t be helped.

I looked-up Lionel, after settling into the campground by the babbling L’Arve river. He was older, married and much more subdued. He procured me a job at the Montevar alpine zoo, above the Mer deCouloir, on the Aiguille de Blaitiere and checked-out the face that Sudan and, later, Vallencent had skied.  Scary but reasonable was what I remember thinking, as I climbed down.

Back Home

After I returned to the States, in the early 80’s, I worked at a climbing and skiing shop that stocked the best magazines of the genres. The Euro dudes, in neon colors, were everywhere, in the mags. Any VHS tape, with European extreme skiing, was replayed, at the shop, till it wore-out. Greg Stump’s classic, 1987 movie “Blizzard of Ahhs” showed American skiers dropping big faces in Chamonix and it stoked the minds of my friends and I and opened the backdoor to possibilities in our backyard. We wore brighter colors, white sunglass frames and the occasional scarf, Hendrix-style, around our heads. The “bicycle turn” was practiced, with our ever-evolving telemark gear, until steeper and steeper slopes could be descended without slipping. In spring, we took to the Cascade Mountains with new enthusiasm. Every old climbing route now was over-laid with the possibility of a ski descent.

I waited for the Cooper Spur route, on Mt. Hood, to ripen into perfect corn snow in May of 1986 and popped jump turns down its elegant shoulder with my partner, Jimmy Katz. He and I center-punched Early Morning Couloir, on North Sister, OR, that spring too. Jimmy had a sketchy but successful descent of Liberty Ridge, on Mt. Rainer. I skied Denali’s Messner Couloir on a windless, 40 below day. We traveled together to the Andes and the Himalayas to ski beautiful peaks and awful snow in the name of “adventure skiing”. It was a good run, back then, and I have been lucky enough to tell this tale but some good friends and acquaintances haven’t been as lucky. Mark Obenhaus’, who directed a 2007 documentary film called “Steep” said, in an NPR interview, “ I think people have an appetite for adventure and it takes many forms and extreme skiing is just one of those forms. I don’t think it’s an aborational activity or that these people are suicidal. I don’t think there is some grand psychological profile that can be applied to them.” That maybe true but my easy answer is: blame it on the Euro-dudes.

Fini

Lowell Skoog

Note: This article was published in the Oct. 2010 issue of Off-Piste magazine (http://www.offpistemag.com/). Since my interview with Lowell, he has published on-line chapters to his book http://written-in-the-snows.net/

Lowell Skoog: Painting a picture of the History of Pacific Northwest Skiing

The best things in a man's life are often his hobbies, and if he will not take his hobbies seriously, life will lose half its charm. And mountaineering is something more than a hobby... And so I make no apology for this attempt to trace the history of our noble sport. --Arnold Lunn, History of Skiing

Lowell Skoog is a thorough and meticulous guy. It’s what you need in a preservationist. Getting the details right is a required historical imperative. But he is also a passionate and poetic guy when he writes about his love of ski mountaineering in the Cascade Mountains. As he says, “Skiing isn’t just about the turns, but about the people who make them.” At this time, in Lowell’s life, he is attempting to meld his two sides.

About ten years ago, Lowell started two big projects: building a database structure that would become the Alpenglow Ski Mountaineering History Project (ASMHP), and writing the book Written in the Snows, a book dedicated to the history of skiing in the Pacific Northwest. In a recent telephone interview, he said, “I describe this project like painting [a picture of] a house - only the thing is before you can paint it, you have to build it from scratch, one brick at a time. The bricks being the sources that you find and gradually, as you’re putting together chronologies and grouping things into subjects and finding different references to people and grouping them together, which is what the indexes are that I have on my site, you get a structure of what happened over a hundred years.” And after the house is built? Lowell says, “You stand back with a brush, canvas and easel, and render it into a story, something readable.”

Born in Seattle to skiing, Swedish parents, Lowell and his brothers, Gordy and Carl, grew-up hot-dogging at Ski Acres and Crystal Mountain, learned to mountain climb in college and began venturing into the “American Alps” of the North Cascades. A degree itter hot Springsin electrical engineering at the University of Washington, landed Lowell a job designing computer software, but he used his free time and new climbing skills to explore ever deeper into the Cascade range. Around 2001, he was laid-off from his job during the dotcom bust, and he and his wife, Stephanie, decided he should take 6 to 10 months to work on the history project. Later, working as an engineering consultant, Lowell was able to devote time to his ski research, a growing number of related projects, and additionally raise a son. His historical enthusiasm is also a way for him to connect to his father, who passed away when Lowell was 20 years old, and the old Scandinavian ski jumpers from his past.

On his vast Web site, Alpenglow.org, you can see that Lowell has been busy over the years, not only compiling his historical database, but also ticking off Cascade ski tours with his brothers and other ski partners. Many of the tours would, 25 years later, become the chain links for a ski route stretching, 362 miles, from Mt. Baker to Mt. Rainer called “Skiing the Cascade Crest.” The route is dedicated to his late brother, Carl, who died in a steep skiing fall in Argentina in 2005. The Cascade Crest is a poignant memorial to Carl Skoog, who was an accomplished skier and photographer and Lowell’s most consistent partner on countless trips. Carl’s beautiful imagery can be viewed on Alpenglow.org.

The seed that launched Written in the Snows was sown by Fred Beckey (the prodigious northwest climber, original dirt bag and guidebook author). Beckey mentioned to Lowell that Dwight Watson was the “key guy” in northwest ski mountaineering, and that his adventures dated back to the1930’s. There are references to Watson’s ski ascents and descents sprinkled around Beckey’s Cascade climbing guides. Watson, born in 1900, was the first to ski Eldorado Peak, North Star Mountain and Glacier Peak. Lowell says, “I think his tour de force, in 1939, was the ski traverse of Mt. Baker from the Kulshan cabin to [what is now] the Mt. Baker ski area, which I started calling Watson’s Traverse. So, Watson was the kernel that got me started on the whole project.” After Lowell read Dwight Watson’s obituary in the Seattle Times in 1996, he contacted the Seattle Mountaineers history committee and asked for information about Watson. He was given some of Watson’s old movies to look at and that was it, he was hooked.

Lowell eventually became a member of the Mountaineers history committee, allowing him access to more information and, importantly, the film archives. He refers to these old ski movies as “historical crack [cocaine] because the more you see, the more you want.” He is currently the chairman of the committee (like he needs one more thing to do) and uses some of their budget to digitally transfer these “dusty old films dating back to 1928.” He has also gained access to private film sources, like the Bob and Ira Spring collection. The digital video copies are archived at www.mountaineers.org/history/cat/movies-film.html.

Around 2002, the Mountaineers history committee wanted to revive the club annuals (journals documenting significant mountain related accomplishments and people), but after three years of trying, couldn’t seem to get it done. Around this time, climbing and skiing forums like cascadeclimbers.com were sprouting-up on the Internet. Lowell and some other like-minded climbers and skiers decided to produce an on-line annual of northwest ski mountaineering that was flexible and fresh. The Northwest Mountaineering Journal (NWMJ) was launched in 2004 to provide an edited, permanent, annual record of mountaineering in the Pacific Northwest. For seven years, Lowell edited and contributed to the Web site. The NWMJ publishes feature articles and short trip reports documenting new routes in the region. This visually stuning and informative on-line resource was “a very satisfying project” according to Lowell, “I liked to see all the routes the young hotshots were doing next to profiles of guys that are 70 years old and recalling their glory days.” He says, “It was bridging the generations and a very cool thing to be a part of, but very hard and time consuming, too.”

Lowell’s last issue, as editor, of the NWMJ was its seventh and was published last summer. The journal was stealing time from his book project, and he felt like, “his ski history stuff was getting starved”, so he resigned and hopes that someone will take it over. He also felt the need to go back to an engineering job, full-time. But he is obviously clearing the way to finish the book. He says, “I feel like this long drawn-out journey will be better for it. It [the book] remains this unifying goal that I have, this huge mountain that I have to climb, and I’m getting to the point where I have all these pieces that I’m weaving together, and I don’t have any obstacles in my way.”

Last fall and winter, Lowell realized that he needed more photography for his book. He says, “I spent a lot of time chasing down pictures at the University of Washington. Fortunately, because of my relationship through the [Mountaineers] history committee, I’ve got a really good relationship with the curators down there, and there is a big Mountaineers collection so anything that is Mountaineers related, I’ve got free access. They just let me go down there with my camera and make copies of old photos.” However, this endeavor also landed him another task and another distraction - archiving Bob and Ira Springs entire photo collection. For those unfamiliar with the Spring twins, they started a photography partnership in 1946 and the two set to photograph Washington State as it had never been photographed before and will never be again. Lowell has another daunting task ahead of him.

With book queries getting a luke-warm reception from publishers like The Mountaineers Books and Sasquatch Books, the publishing process frustrated Lowell. “The book that I have in my brain, would anybody publish it?” He wonders. He says that most publishers responded that the market for his book is too small. Most likely, he will not be publishing Written in the Snows on paper, but instead as an on-line document. I objected that some of us would like his book on our shelves alongside the other beloved tomes of outdoor reference and that he should get paid for all his time and effort. Without hesitation, Lowell says he prefers a living, editable document, more Wikipedia than coffee table book.

During our conversation, I mentioned that he has some classic Pacific Northwest ski descents featured in Chris Davenport’s Fifty Classic Ski Descents in North America, an up-coming, slick book of ski pornography to be published in November. I suggested he should do something similar for the Cascades, but he laughed and said he didn’t think his entries we extreme enough for the Colorado guys, “I didn’t put first descents in because how can those be classics? Classics should be routes that everyone wants to do. I mean, [first] descents are important, but that is only half the trip.”

Shifting our conversation toward Lowell’s vast personal ski experience, I asked him to name his best trip suggestion for a sunny, spring weekend in the North Cascades. He said, “Anything on the North Cascades Highway can be your personal cache of discovery. You can never go wrong.” When asked to name his worst bushwhacking “suffer fest” of all time he replied, “Carl and I were camped in the col by Mt. Logan, and it was raining and snowing. We gave up the climb and thrashed our way out Fischer Creek…it was soul crushing.”

Otto Lange, founder of the Mt Rainer Ski School, writer, filmmaker and all-around stylish Austrian, said before he died in 2006 that “ It doesn’t matter how long it takes you to write a book, it only matters how good it is.” Like the Italian guy that took four years to paint a ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, Lowell Skoog has taken his time writing the definitive history of northwest ski mountaineering, but when he is finished with his “painting”, I’m sure the details will be correct.