LIVING ON THE SURFACE OF WINTER

By George Sibley

I had not really thought of the different levels of winter until my partner and I moved to Gothic as the Biological Lab’s winter caretakers, and I realized then how much time, energy and money we spend here in the annual half year of snow, struggling to maintain life at the level of the automobile. How freed up from that we were.

Our most intimate engagement with this struggle is the hours we spend with snow shovels keeping personal paths open to the street. In what we call a good winter, we find ourselves throwing new snow up onto piles of old snow taller than we are, and we start thinking about ‘Ice Age’ stories we’ve heard, snow thousands of feet deep, with the cumulative weight of the light fluffy stuff sufficient to compress the bottom layers to ice capable of breaking rock and grinding it to dust….

It’s the automobile that drives the ground-level culture, of course – that and the trucks essential to our survival here at our fragile terminal of civilization; we have no choice but to maintain life at the level on which they can operate. In addition to the physical burden of the stuff on the shovel, we have the taxpayers’ burden on the fleet of plows, loaders, dumptrucks that the city and the county use to keep the streets and highways down to auto level.

But life at auto level ends where the streets and roads end; beyond that, we move up onto the surface of winter. Skiing happens up on the surface of winter. At ski resorts, that surface is usually packed down somewhat by huge machines that float across the surface of winter at night, smoothing out the moguls and troughs that skiers gouge out during the day.  But go beyond those maintained slopes, and you’ll find yourself up on the real surface of winter, where it no longer matters how deep the snow is, a foot or a glacial mile, so long as you have the equipment for staying on the surface.

I had the privilege of living on the surface of winter for four winters, when my partner and I and our young son were caretakers for the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Gothic, four miles beyond auto-level civilization. Life there was most comparable to living on an island in the middle of a big lake, except you couldn’t really swim in the lake. It was of course possible to get yourself ‘high-centered’ in a situation where you had to do something kind of like desperate swimming. And we won’t talk about falling into tree-wells where it’s possible to drown in snow.

Up on the surface of winter, you realize that skis and snowboards and snowshoes are really like boats for moving around on frozen lakes. Different kinds of boats for different kinds of activities. The skis are canoes, kayaks, adventure vehicles for covering a lot of winter’s surface fairly quickly – but for traveling light too. Every additional pound you put in a pack on your back deepens your track and diminishes the joy of the glide-stride – especially if you fall down on a slope and the pack slides up around your neck and head, pushing your face into the snow.

But for other activities up on the surface of winter, skis are not useful at all. We had some daily chores, like bringing water to the cabin from the springbox 50 yards away, and on a nice day going up into the woods for a couple more dead-standing aspen to supplement the wood supply gathered in the fall. For work like that, snowshoes – ‘webs’ – were essential. Webs are to life on the surface of winter what tractors are to the farmer: work vehicles, good for granny-gear activity, but you wouldn’t want to drive them five miles to town.

Modern snowshoes or webs are great, lightweight aluminum contraptions with teeth on the bottom to prevent slipping. Snowshoes like that weren’t around when we were caretaking in Gothic. Ours came from Tony Mihelich’s Hardware and Conoco: wooden frames with rawhide webbing, all heavily shellacked. ‘Heavy’ pretty well describes those webs, but they were fine for laying out the trail up to the springbox or for maneuvering in the woods.

We also used them to lay the path to the outhouse. For a couple days during and after a storm, it was necessary to use the webs to go to the outhouse – which required some foresight and planning because that also meant putting on boots and getting buckled into the webs. But after a day or two of sun on the paths, it was possible to walk – a little carefully – on the paths with just house shoes. Step off the path, though, and you were in trouble.

Some shoveling did have to be done, at both ends of the paths – shoveling up to the surface of winter from the cabin door, and down to the springbox or door of the outhouse. But that was a lot better than trying to keep the entire paths down to ground level.

For the years we lived in Gothic, the sunny days of March coupled with cold nights created such a crust on the snow that it was possible to walk anywhere under the sun on the surface of winter without falling through – until around 11 o’clock when the crust softened.

But as winter moved toward what passes for springtime in the Rockies, the surface of winter gradually deteriorated and became downright treacherous, especially in the afternoon. The Gothic Road in the townsite turned into an underground stream – a fact I discovered the first winter, skiing home late one afternoon with a full pack (eggs, a head of lettuce and other veggies and fruit, and balanced half-gallons of Carlo Rossi’s finest). A hundred yards from home, I crashed through the entire snowpack, which then caved in on top of my skis, and really cold water was running over and into my boots. I honestly don’t remember exactly how I got out of that mess; some things you just don’t want to remember, even for future reference. You can guess what eventually happened to the outhouse path.

Then there are the even more special days at the surface of winter to remember, when the surface of winter becomes not just a surface but more of a zone, segueing from snow coming down into snow already down, and you are floating through that zone of neither-either in a slow-mo descent, trying not to inhale too much of it and not sure whether you’re down in or up on or even slightly above the surface of winter, with butt, legs, knees, heels and skis working a linked rhythm to slow the descent, make it last as long as possible, forever if possible. …  Life is just better on the surface of winter, especially when it’s still coming down.