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Pope on a Rope TowGoing deep in Poland's Tatra Mountains, where the forests are soulful, the slopes steep, and the trails most holy By Lisa Anne Auerbach
—Pope John Paul II I'm snooping around the pope's old bedroom in Kraków, Poland, checking out the gouges on his skis. I confess: I've been in a lot of bro-dorms, but none nearly as holy. Usually the decor consists of empty beer cans, a PlayStation, and smelly Capilene underwear. But in the tidy one-room pope pad—now part of the Archdiocesan Museum, located near Wawel Royal Cathedral, where Father Karol Wojtyla hung his skullcap from 1952 to 1958—there's a dainty caf table, three chairs, a neat bunk with purple cushions, and an armoire filled with colorful priestly garb. But right now I'm more interested in the two pairs of skis leaning in the corner. One's an old hickory set with spring bindings and pointy tips, the kind you see hanging over bars in ski towns. The others, retired more recently, are 195-centimeter Head Pros with Tyrolia bindings. I can't help myself—I have to touch them. The undersides are grooved with deep cuts and scratches. The skis don't quite qualify as sacred relics, but they do serve notice that when he got away from it all, up in the mountains, Father Wojtyla wasn't just sticking to the corduroy and cruising the green runs, like Gerald Ford at Beaver Creek. No—he skied over rocks! He was out there, off-piste. The man who became pope in 1978 might, in fact, have been a badass. As I clutch the skis, the docent stares, then quietly reminds me not to take a photograph. Pope John Paul II is widely known and revered by millions the world over as the spiritual guide and shepherd of the Roman Catholic Church. What is less well known is his history as a trailblazing two-planker. The Man in White ripped the Polish pow from the time the papacy was just a gleam in his eye until his mature years as the toast of the Vatican. In his younger days, JP2 was known as a megahiker, an avid kayaker, and a camper nonpareil. He preached in the woods, ate watery pudding for sustenance while surfing the backcountry, and repeatedly lost his prayer book in the wild. When asked, "Is it befitting a cardinal to ski?" his reply was, "What is unbefitting a cardinal is to ski badly." One day I heard a tale from a gentleman I met in my neighborhood in Los Angeles. A draftsman who emigrated to the United States during World War II, he insisted he'd once skied with the pontiff back when His Holiness was a seminary student. As evidence, he produced an out-of-focus photo he claimed was him and a grinning Karol Wojtyla. He pointed to a city park on a map of Kraków and mentioned something about reveling in the outdoors. Not being a student of papal extra-curricular activities, this beta came as a shock. Up to this point, my interest in Catholicism had been limited to idle thoughts about sin and the Inquisition, but as a skier I was intrigued by the notion of a sportive pope. So I went to Poland on my own secular quest, to seek the holy trail.
LISA ANNE AUERBACH's Outside article "Pope on a Rope Tow" was included in The Best American Travel Writing 2003.
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