Bumming on the Powder Hound

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Outside Magazine February 2003

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Bumming on the Powder Hound
He's got a three-week Greyhound Discovery Pass, a map of mom-and-pop ski hills, and a yen to see the west from the vantage of a pungent window seat. From Utah's Beaver Mountain to Idaho's Bogus Basin, our telemark-toting reporter logs 5,000 miles in search of the answer to the immortal question: where's the fresh?

By Jon Billman


	Greyhound driver Al Douglas calls the shots from Calgary to the U.S. boarder. (Sian Kennedy)

THE DEVIL BEAT HIS WIFE FOR 20 MINUTES as we passed through sugar-beet fields a handful of highway miles east of Bliss, Idaho. That's bus parlance for a sun shower, frosted flakes of snow flitting through a sunbeam as we dieseled northward, away from Utah's icing rain. All right, folks, this is Bliss. We'll be taking a half-hour dinner break here. If you're not back on the bus in half an hour, make sure you have enough money in your pocket for breakfast. "Piss in Bliss," say the Hound-hardened. We filed off the bus, and I did.

I'd started this trip in Ogden, Utah, the Peoria of the West, a dinged-edge ski town, the finest city in Utah, and, not incidentally, a quintessential Greyhound town. My wife, Hilary, and dog, Daisy, kissed me good-bye. Daisy hates bus stations, as they tend to steal me away for weeks at a time; Hilary's more used to them. Loaded for a three-week-long journey that could be harder than the hubs of hell, I'd fortified myself with coffee and a dog-eared paperback of On the Road. On page 24, Mississippi Gene tells Sal Paradise this about Ogden: "'It's the place where most of the boys pass thu and always meet there; you're liable to see anybody there.'" This day, there was only a doughy guy in a flannel shirt and mussed hair, sprawled facedown across a hard sectional bench, a little pool of drool on the floor underneath his face.

"Hey, you can't sleep here!" the desk clerk hollered from behind her computer monitor. "This is a place of business." He started, springing sort of upright. "I ain't sleepin'," he said.

"Well, you can't," she said. "What is that?" she asked as she handed me a baggage tag.



	The depot in Roseburg, Oregon. (Sian Kennedy)

Skis, I told her.

"I thought so."

This was as thorough as the security check got; I may've had a pair of 200-cm bazookas in there. She trusted me. Or didn't care. Didn't even ask my name. "Just show your pass to the driver."

I was armed with a $324 Domestic Westcoast Can-Am Discovery Pass and a pair of telemark boards—Evolution U-2s, 200's, as long and heavy and American as the Dog itself. For weeks I had pored over the Greyhound route map and my old Wal-Mart atlas that showed ski areas marked with little salmon-hued schussers and tiny letters: Hoodoo Ski Area. Marmot Basin. Mount Lemmon. Not resorts, with their après scenes and shiny airport shuttles, but their Greyhound equivalents. I wanted to see the West from the window of the bus, not in a light of desperation, but rather as a ticket to some of the best hidden skiing in North America.

Keep this in mind: Rock stars take the bus. Country music stars do for sure. Think Willie Nelson and "On the Road Again." Greyhound was born in 1914 in Hibbing, Minnesota, hometown to one Bobby Zimmerman—a.k.a. Bob Dylan. Still, a stigma hounds the bus, and an unfair one at that. I know extreme skiers who huck cliffs and sleep in a tent for days in winter who cringe at the Hound; I know war correspondents who refuse to go Greyhound. Like many people, I used to associate the bus with low points in my life. Once, as a kid, I looked up from watching Dragnet on one of those dime-fed fuzzy televisions in the downtown St. Louis depot and saw a police officer shoot a man in the hand. But today, at the onset of the 21st century, the bus is refreshing when compared with the strictures of air travel: No one with a little dog sewn on his chest will pat you down or make you take off your shoes—they just ask that you smoke 100 feet away from the diesel tank while they refuel.

The Portland-bound nooner, coach number 6022, wheeled into Ogden with a hiss of air brakes 27 minutes late. "What is this?" the driver asked. Discovery Pass, I said. "Is that what this is? I only see these in summer." The Portland-bound smelled of people who've slept in the same clothes for days and longer. Folks living on truck-stop hash and 7-Eleven burritos. Make it me: I am part of this great unwashed.

I found a seat, stowed my daypack full of licorice and sandwiches, fixed my Gore-Tex shell against the mystery stains and communal detritus, then looked through the smoked glass at the parking lot. Hilary stood waving me off in the rain.

It confused my ski friends that I was going Greyhound. It confused my Greyhound friends that I was going skiing.

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