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Outside Magazine January 2003

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The Hard Way
Learning Curves
The process is the point. But just try telling that to your younger, untutored, world-conquering self.

By Mark Jenkins


	(Illustration by Tim Bower)

I GLIDE THROUGH THE FOREST. As I sink into each turn, the powder rolls up my thighs. My skis carve crescents through the open firs, neither fast nor slow but with ease, like a looping stroke of calligraphy.

This is my third ski tour in Yellowstone. Today I skied from base camp up to Heart Lake and back, traversing a couple of small passes, navigating by compass through two snow squalls, and fording a river. Now it is dusk, and so cold that my beard has frozen into a thicket of ice bristles.

I slide into a broad meadow and cut silently over the drifts. My wax, a blue kicker over buffed green, is splendid. I'm practically levitating. Kicking, floating on one ski balanced like an ice skater, then kicking with the other leg. It's a rhythm so natural and elegant that once you've mastered it, the movement—instead of the speed or the distance covered or the day's destination—becomes an end in itself. Kick, glide...kick, glide...kick, glide...Through this motion, this mantra of muscle, I slip into a state of grace. Everything fits. The darkling sky mirrored in the violet snow. The snow feeding the trees and the hidden creek. The creek cutting the mountains. The mountains and me. We all dovetail together.

The tent comes into view, an orange speck set inside sentries of thin-limbed aspen. I stop. I'm drawn to the tent, but also reluctant. I don't want this long day, so smooth and solid, to end.

My mind goes on ahead. Not far from the tent, steam is rising into the frigid air. Ah, the thermal pools, the deep warmth of summer in the dead of winter. Dan Moe and Keith Spenser, my companions, will already be there. Long johns hung on upended skis, heads back against a mossy log, white bodies sunk up to their sunburned necks in the gorgeous hot water.

Soon I'll join them. In an hour it will be night and minus 20 and dark as only distant mountains can be. Soaking, we'll lean back and stare up at the crystalline stars. Dan will name the constellations: Gemini with Castor and Pollux, Canis Major, Ursa Major, Boštes the Herdsman. An hour later, like a resurrection, the moon will rise and the snow will sparkle and we'll still be luxuriating in the delicious pools. After all but dissolving, we'll climb up the five-foot rim of snow, dash naked to the tent, dry off, and dive into our sleeping bags.

I see myself safely cocooned in down, my toes curled around a hot-water bottle, writing in my journal and plotting the day's travel on the topo. When the coyotes begin to sing, the call and response bounding over the luminous snow like the nimble animals themselves, I'll switch off the headlamp and listen, more at home than I am at home.

Standing on my skis and leaning on the poles, I turn and look back. I can just make out the faint line of my tracks scalloping down the last steep slope, then running straight to me, as if bringing a secret message. This simple line, disappearing backward, gives me a profound sense of satisfaction.

It occurs to me, as I push off and begin again to kick and glide, that I almost know what I'm doing. The next thing that comes to mind is Woody Jensen.

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