Adventure Sports Journal

In the early spring, when warm days melt snow crystals into a fine paste and frigid nights freeze them to a crust, Mother Nature extends an invite to skate skiers to stray from the confines of machine-packed trails onto an open canvas of boundless gliding and backcountry exploration — no groomed tracks, no trail passes, no limitations.

When the freeze-thaw cycle persists and the snowpack settles into a dense and supportive surface resembling frozen cheesecake, skate skiing provides the swiftest means of traversing a snowy landscape under one’s own power, allowing for speedy forays deep into Sierra canyons and across open meadows and frozen high-country lakes.

Though best suited to flat and rolling terrain, the gliding efficiency of a capable skier on lightweight skate gear can make a backcountry skier shuffling along on skins look like a gear-laden tortoise next to Apolo Ohno. Most backcountry skate skiers don’t seek out high-angle terrain, but when conditions are just right — a firm base with a sun-warmed top of buttery corn — moderately steep slopes are not beyond limits of fearless skinny-ski descenders.

Some adventurous skate skiers have been known to knock out multi-day backcountry tours of 30, 40, even 50 miles in a day; trans-Sierra tours like Mammoth to Yosemite and crest traverses such as Donner Summit to Echo Summit.

Neophytes, of course, are urged to start with something a little less ambitious and closer to civilization — for as I found out, there are lessons to learn.

The first time I tried skate skiing on a glossy crust of frozen snow, my husband, Doug, and I were in the Martis Valley next to Truckee. Before dawn he’d nudged me awake saying, “Let’s go skate on a meadow. Conditions are perfect.”

Perfect? The outdoor thermometer read 25 degrees F.; sunrise was an hour away. Nevertheless, into the car we went, wrapped in thick hats, gloves and extra sweaters.

At Martis Meadows, located between the Truckee airport and Northstar-at-Tahoe, the snow was a pre-dawn shade of cool blue, and beneath the plastic grooves of my cross-country boots it crunched slightly.
Quite different from classic cross-country skiing, which employs a scissors-like kick-and-glide movement, skate skiing has a side-to-side momentum that mimics ice skating or in-line skating. The ultra-light skating skis are treated with glide wax from tip to tail, which makes them ultra fast. My first push off onto the smooth snow sent me into a whizzing glide that felt incredibly light and free.

However, my enjoyment was diminished by the icy chill of the air, because even though I had lots of warm clothes with me, I didn’t have exactly the right clothes.

Lesson #1: A wind jacket isn’t enough for these early morning jaunts. Wind pants are key so your legs don’t go numb.

Despite the frigid dawns, I became a meadow skiing junkie. One spring when we heard Lake Almanor was having warm days and freezing nights, Doug booked a motel room in Chester. Chester! I exclaimed. Couldn’t we go somewhere more dramatic — down the Sierra’s Eastside, for instance? But Doug had an inkling that Chester would be good, and so we went.

As we got started the next morning a cloak of fog snuffed out all the scenic features — the fluffy green trees, the big lake, the mountains — so we stayed close to the lakeshore. Slowly, the fog shriveled into curly threads that hugged the streams. We cruised up one creek into a nearby meadow. Sunshine lit up the sky, revealing a landscape awash in snow crystals. But the best reward was the long vista once everything cleared: In the distance, snow-domed Mt. Lassen boomed up from the forest like a kingdom from the Lord of the Rings.

Lesson #2: Don’t let the fog deter you.

One night a friend called to say she’d heard Anton Meadows above Tahoe City had a frozen crust. To reach Anton the next morning, we used the groomed trails of Tahoe Cross Country ski area, where we had season passes. Most cross-country centers contain a couple of flat open places that freeze and thaw in the springtime: Tahoe Donner has the Euer Valley, Kirkwood has Kirkwood Meadow, and the Tamarack Cross-Country Ski Center in Mammoth has snow-covered lakes.

On this particular morning, the slender shards of hoar frost sparkled across the surface as if someone had sprinkled a million diamonds there. Once we left the trails, we could ski wherever we wanted to go. I swooped between willows, scampered up hillsides, circled creek holes, and inspected rabbit tracks.

Lesson #3: Check out the meadows next to groomed ski center trails.

Doug and I bought a small camper, and now we travel often on Highway 395 to where the glacier-scooped valleys of the Eastern Sierra provide endless meadows for long days of skate skiing. On one early excursion into a canyon below Mt. Emma near Sonora Pass, Doug asked if I wanted to take a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my fanny pack. I said no. I had plenty of Gu’s, those 100-calorie packets of gooey carbs laced with caffeine.
It was a spectacular tour. We skated up the canyon, following an open creek, dodging willow bushes and peering at transparent ice lips growing out of the snow banks above the rushing creek. We climbed a glacial moraine and scooted through an aspen grove. A couple of hours passed and I swallowed one Gu after another. We crested a knoll to see another irresistible glistening valley ahead of us. We flew into it, hooting with excitement and feeling free as eagles. Then, bonk. My energy drained away as if someone had pulled a plug. I had eaten all my Gu’s. I found Doug ahead sitting on a stump, nibbling his sandwich. He kindly shared it. Refueled, I zoomed back to the camper, where I took a nap.

Lesson #4: Always take the PB&J.
Backcountry skate skiing can test all of your limits. Sun comes from all sides, so wear a good sunscreen, big hat and a long-sleeve lightweight wind-shirt. Carry extra water and don’t wear dark-colored, heat-absorbing clothes.

And then there are the survival issues: Travel with a friend, know your terrain, and leave a note on your car describing your route and when you’ll be back.

Lesson #5: Be prepared for anything.

The sweetest aspect of spring skate skiing is that it can be done anywhere. The snowpack simply needs to be gathering lots of sunshiny warmth during the day, and freezing hard at night. My favorite finds include a couple of meadows on Highway 89 between Truckee and Sierra Valley, any snow-covered alkali flat in Nevada, anyplace at all in magical Hope Valley off Carson Pass, and meadows around Tioga Pass and Crowley Lake, near Mammoth.

Lesson #6: Skate skiing is a great way to get deep into the backcountry quickly and with ease.

The day after Thanksgiving, I hiked near Carson Pass alongside a young woman soon to graduate from Stanford with a degree in English and creative writing. We were hiking at around 7,500 feet elevation through old snow on a treeless ridge when a blizzard crept in. Through the freezing wind the senior described her difficulties writing the volumes her teacher required for class: “I’m behind on meeting the total semester word count,” she said. “It’s an average of 1,000 words a day.” I think she said she’d already written 60,000 words, an amount I can rattle out in two to three weeks if I don’t eat or shower, although those words would stink as much as my armpits do when they marinate on deadline in caffeinated sweat. Writing 1,000 good words in a couple of hours can be easy for me now, but I remember the college-aged agony I felt when my words sludged onto the page one by one, inhibited by the molasses of my self-doubt. I said to the senior: “Writing is not an act of punishment. If you find yourself holding a self-lashing whip, throw it out.” The wind was too much for our early winter clothes, and our snow-crusted boots were damp. We about-faced and, fingers stuffed into armpits, chins tucked to chests, scampered down the slope toward the car. In the downhill chase, irritation and discomfort glummed up my thoughts. But I didn’t want this hike to go to waste, and so I coached myself into a new frame of mind: “I’ll be proud and happy when I’m done,” I whispered, and snapped free the mental tie-downs of negativity. I noticed how the powdery snow shaped new abstract designs on the granite boulders. The snow ghosted the chunky trees and frosted the grasses at our feet. The howling slope became suddenly magical – bitter cold enough to numb my lips, but also lovely. I turned to the young woman to add one more thought about our craft: “Writing is not worth the effort if it’s just an excuse for self-loathing; the best writing is done as an act of self-love.”

….Even before the menus were handed out, you could see what sort of a place this was. Order the pork and it might resemble a rough-hewn raft, stranded by tides on a narrow beach of polenta. Fish might come with shredded turnips or a pabulum of coddled fruit. The younger an ingredient, the more highly it was valued, thus the baby chicken, the baby spinach, the newborn asparagus, each pale stalk as slender as a fang….

— from “Laugh, Kookaburra” by David Sedaris in the New Yorker, August, 24, 2009

“…a huge amount of writing takes place in your subconscious mind. It is being formed by your inner thoughts before you become aware of it. … Your subconscious mind is toying with it and it will come to you – like a forgotten name or the clue to a crossword puzzle – when you cease thinking about it.” — Dermot Bolger in the Irish Times, Aug. 21, 2009

Irish writer Dermot Bolger should know. He’s published at least six novels, nine plays, six books of poetry, and more than a dozen things listed as “other.” (See bio at biography.jrank.org/pages/4160/Bolger-Dermot.html.)

Does our subconscious – or “under-mind,” as I call it – tackle work projects when we’re not at work? Wouldn’t it rather trip on fun things like swimming in the lake with the dog, throwing a birthday party for your spouse, hiking into wildflower canyons with your friends, traveling to Ireland, riding your bike.… Then again, if creating stories is so exciting, it makes sense the subconscious would compulsively chew on that when the “front mind” is otherwise busy. (Here’s a twist: If writing is so fun, why is it good friends with that nasty habit procrastination? That’s a left brain/right brain conundrum.)

I ask my mind to tackle some writing questions at night. I read my draft before falling asleep with the hope that a miracle will occur this side of the pillow. Sometimes it does. I have found, too, that when the writing gets tough, I close the door and leave. Best thing is to go for a bike-ride – after chugging some caffeine, which excites my imagination into a pedal-frenzy of brilliant riffs.

Lately I’ve fretted about how many hours, days, word-dense weeks it takes me to refine a story. I’d rather like to dash off wonderful things quickly, breezily, with a lightness of being that elevates the rest of my day. Dermot Bolger has given me a key. If I’m writing when I’m not writing, and if that non-writing time is when the “aha’s” bloom from the void, then I need to spend less time in front of the screen and more time in real life. More time as an anti-writer. Right.

Last year I volunteered for the first time to campaign in a presidential election. My assignment for the Obama team was in Carson City, Nevada, forty miles from my home in northern California. Was I nervous? Very. Any disturbed occupant might wing open a door and argue me and my canvassing partner speechless. Lucky for me, most who answered just wanted more collectible campaign buttons. No one accosted me; no loose dogs attacked.

On Nov. 4, I went out for the last sweep, this time alone. My job was to make sure Obama supporters made it to the polls. If they needed help getting there, I would arrange it. My address packet directed me to a neighborhood abutting Carson City’s downtown commercial core, a row of new and historical buildings punctuated now and again by glittery casinos. Most folks who opened their doors had already voted, but a half-dozen said they would have forgotten to if I hadn’t knocked. A few lost souls hadn’t remembered it was Election Day.

My last stop was at a group of tired out one-room cabins huddled on a dusty dead-end road. It seemed these were once part of a little motel, probably built in the 1940s when people vacationed up and down the eastern Sierra in their new automobiles. At cabin number 15 a grizzle-faced old man cracked open the door. “I voted,” he whispered before I could speak.

“Oh,” I said, awkwardness stealing my own voice. He wore a bathrobe and thick socks, and his legs were bare. It felt a violation of privacy even to gaze at his face, pinched as it was between the door and frame. “Thank you very much.” I said. I thought I smelled burned rice. As I pivoted to leave, instead of closing the door, he stepped outside, his socks scuffing the stoop. I was already crossing the dirt yard, keys in hand reaching for the car door. My four-year-old Subaru looked especially shiny and big next to these worn-out huts. I wondered if maybe this old man had to walk everywhere, or take the bus, carrying his weekly plastic sack of groceries home by hand. The man strained to project his thin voice: “It’s good, what you’re doing,” he said.

My outstretched key hand dropped to my side. I turned, facing him fully. “Thank you,” I said. “It’s good you voted.”

I expected him to shrink back into shyness, but instead he pressed on. “I want to tell you that in the place where they vote at midnight, that small town where just a few people vote, they all went for Obama. I wanted to tell you that.” He scratched his chin. His gaze shifted to the ground.

 “That’s great news,” I said. “Thank you so much for telling me.” I didn’t rush off then, but paused, taking my own survey of the ground where my boots were mustached in dirt. I shrugged. “This is a good day.”

Driving away, I considered that a brief moment had suddenly stretched big and wide into something much larger than just a pinpoint of time. I wondered if this kind of face-to-face exchange is what we’re all seeking, if in fact it may be the true motivation behind our restless motion and debate: We want, simply, to connect.

From Thomas Swick’s book of essays, A Way to See the World

In his wonderful opening biographical essay, Swick expresses the yearning he felt during a post-college stint at a language school in Provence:

“There was something about the landscape, too, so lauded by others, that depressed me. The earth was harsh and dry and lacking in shade; it seemed to produce an equally brittle and tearless people. I longed for a large, many-limbed oak, and the soothing sight of cows grazing.”

He finds cows eventually, and later he discovers love.

Last fall, in a quest to run across America in record time, Marshall Ulrich covered  the equivalent of two marathons plus a 10-kilometer run — every day for 52.5 days. Lying in motel beds at night, his sore feet nested in ice packs, he would doze off past midnight. Waking five hours later, he’d squeeze into another pair of shoes, gulp a liquid mix of carbs, and pad on rubber soles out the door. Ahead lay the long asphalt roads of America, 3,063 miles of blacktop coursing through the country’s archetypical terrain.

No stranger to endurance, the 57-year-old Ulrich is the only person in the world to complete the Triple Crown of Extreme Sports: He’s a world-class ultra runner, a record-setting adventure racer, and a Seven Summits mountaineer. His average of 58+ miles per day across America placed him as the top Master runner (over 40) and the top Grand Master (over 50), breaking both records. After wearing out 30 pairs of shoes, on November 4 when he finished in New York City, Ulrich admitted this was his most difficult quest ever. But in the final stretches, he didn’t dwell on that; he yearned for a simple normal meal — this time sitting down at a dining room table in civility.

LR: You mentioned Running America was your hardest endeavor. What was your second most difficult?

Running America was like doing a Mt. Everest summit day every day for 52 days. I was out there up to eighteen hours a day, dealing with sleep deprivation, injuries, and other factors. There’s a danger aspect to summiting Mt. Everest. Running across America, the danger was different. I almost got hit by cars a couple of times, and in Ohio someone shot a gun at me. For me, Ohio is not the buckeye state; it’s the buckshot state.

LR: Does the country seem bigger or smaller to you now? Immensely bigger. I realize now how much of America is basically empty. In Utah and Nevada, we could run 100 miles and not even pass a town.

LR: Did you ever worry you couldn’t go on?

Daily. Sometimes, taking a break at noon I’d walk into the support RV and think, “How am I ever going to keep going today?” I tried to think about just getting a foot out the door. On several mornings, I’d sob in my wife’s arms. She’d say, “You can do this.”

LR: That’s some major uncertainty.

It’s all about uncertainty. I questioned myself every day, but in the back of my mind I knew I could overcome everything if I wanted to. To add to that, injuries would flare up. My recovery isn’t as quick as it used to be. Normally I’m an understated person, but running across America was torture. I thought my body would adjust, and the aches and pains would fall to the wayside. During the last few weeks it felt like my body was breaking.

LR: So, you do these things for fun?

I do this because running is part of my very fiber, part of my roots. Everything I do extends from adventure racing. I always have something to look forward to, another event. It’s invigorating.

LR: What’s the highest altitude in which you’ve run?

I did an adventure race at 17,000 feet. We were trying to run some of that time, but it’s almost impossible to do that. It’s cold, and you have a lot of gear.

LR: What’s the hottest?

The Badwater 146 ultramarathon in Death Valley, when the temperature was 136. That was in the shade – it’s not an exaggeration. I had a good crew with me. They sprayed me down, kept me cooled off, put ice in my hat. (That year, Ulrich won that race for the fourth time.)

LR: Do you think of your body as something like a machine, or rather a spiritual being?

It’s a thing of wonder. It’s capable of much more than people would ever imagine it is. For example, it has the ability to heal itself while you’re on the move. I find that things heal twice as quickly as normal during a long event. I’ve also noticed the body sort of shunts some of the proteins for muscle building. My hair and fingernail growth nearly stopped.

LR: Do you worry about a day when your body says: “Hang up the shoes, buddy.”

No, not really. If that were ever to come, something else would keep me going. Could be one of my big things will be doing for other people, the fundraising I do, for example.

LR: I’ve heard you mention that visualization is key to surviving the toughest moments. How do you use it?

I do most of my visualizing at night when I sleep. My wife will wake me up and say, “You’re running again.” I try to imagine having a good experience, so when I’m out having a difficult time, I can put myself into a place where I’m comfortable, where I feel effortless, like I’m slicing through wind.

Behind the chain-link fence the jaguar prowled, his tail whipping back and forth, his lips parting to expose long ivory teeth. On the viewing bench, Blake and I leaned into each other. So far today everything had gone well: this morning the bus left on time from San Ignacio, it dropped us off at the proper stop, the zoo was only a short walk down a dirt road, and the rain storms were clearing. Now the sun pushed aside the black and blue clouds that had hung low for a week over Belize. Its heat flooded our backs and necks.

A man wearing a khaki baseball cap sat down. “Will you go inside the cage?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“For $50 U.S. I can take you in there.”

These guys’ll say anything for money, I thought. “That’s too much money,” I said. I craned forward to examine his face. It was round, wide-cheeked, pool-eyed. A logo stitched into his shirt said “Belize Zoo.” He opened a plastic container he held on his lap to reveal chunks of meat, pink and moist. He pawed out a hunk and tossed it through the fence. The jaguar pounced.

“You’ll be inside a cage in there, safe,” the man said. “You can pet the jaguar. You can feed him.”

Blake is my nephew, trusted to me for a week by my sister so we could travel, just the two of us, into a tropical country to see animals. Thirteen years old, he still loved animals as much as he did when he was 6, when his own zoo of Beanie Baby toys overwhelmed their footlocker pen. I pondered the likelihood that in this cage we’d get sliced by a claw or punctured by a tooth.

Three young women arrived, speaking Spanish. I converse well enough in Spanish, but this proposition needed words I did not have. “This guy works for the zoo,” I said. “For $50 he’ll take us all inside a small cage behind this fence. We could split the cost.” One woman spoke English, and after deliberating, they agreed.

We followed the path skirting the jaguar pen. By zoo terms, the pen was large, not a fully fake reconstruction, but a living slice of jungle – tree canopies, murky pools, ripples of sun and shade. It resembled the real habitat Blake and I had seen elsewhere in Belize. We left the public path for a narrow trail along the cat’s fence. At the back of the pen stood a wooden shed built like a chicken coop with a cantilevering door.  “How long have you worked here?” I asked our guide.

“Ten years. I grew up in the south. I came here because I needed a job.”

“What is your job, exactly?”

He turned, lifting his chest. “I am a zookeeper.”

Another zoo worker arrived, signaled the jaguar into the shed, and slammed the door shut from the outside. Our guide opened a gate. “Now run to the cage.” We sprinted through the jaguar’s shady world and crawled into a cage the size of a big doghouse. Three boards on the ground functioned as seats. Blake squatted next to the cage barrier. The three girls hunkered near him. I stood. All eyes were on the shed. The zookeeper whispered into his radio.  When the door swung open, the cat burst out and dashed to us. It leapt onto the cage roof, its fat paw pads landing just inches from my head. A rush of air stirred my hair. I lurched to the ground, picturing how useless a shield my paper-thin scalp would be under the swipe of a claw. What the jaguar couldn’t achieve with his paw, though, he affected with his gaze as he stared, unblinking, into my face. He was my superior.

The zookeeper pushed raw chicken legs through the side of the cage.  The cat jumped from the roof. It became clear the zookeeper had done this many times. The show seemed carefully rehearsed, a theatrical play. The zookeeper handed a slimy leg to Blake. Blake poked the small bone through the fence. The cat snapped it away. “Pet him,” the zookeeper said, smiling. Eyeing the cat’s teeth, Blake extended three fingers and stroked its pelt. The spotted fur looked silky and taut.

In a sunny spot outside the jaguar’s pen, another scene was unfolding; a crowd had filled a wooden viewing platform to witness our little drama. Their coos and oohs drowned out our screeches of delight. Finished with his snack, the cat crawled again onto the roof, whirled in a somersault, gnawed viciously at the metal fence wiring. Then, the zookeeper asked his accomplice to signal the cat back inside the coop. how to search a domain name . Our $50 face-to-face time was over. Moments later, the curious audience greeted us outside: “Were you scared? How did you get to do that? How much did it cost?”

The zookeeper raised his voice to make sure everyone could hear: “I’ll take you in. It’s a very special experience.” The five of us previous cell-mates, still a little breathless, nodded vigorously in agreement. In the end, though, the onlookers wandered away, muttering things about high cost or not enough time. None believed the cage visit was special enough. Meanwhile, behind the fencing, the jaguar prowled.

Belize Zoo Ticket price $10

www.belizezoo.org