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Outside Magazine February 2003

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Bumming on the Powder Hound (Cont.)


	Tunnel vision: Rolling toward Banff, Alberta, on the snowy Trans-Canada Highway (Sian Kennedy)

WHAT I LIKE MOST ABOUT THE BUS is its potential energy. For less than the price of a Goodwill hide-a-bed, I can go whichever way the wind blows, wherever the snow is falling. My own 48,000-pound, 55-seat SUV. Greyhound serves nearly 4,000 destinations in the United States and Canada; one Greyhound bus removes, on average, 17 cars (or SUVs) from the road. Literal miles per gallon, one bus driver told me: seven to ten. Passenger miles per gallon, based on a full bus: 162. Last year the Hound ran nearly eight billion passenger miles. Five thousand of those were mine.

I spent 200 hours on the bus or in bus stations. I tried to line up sofas throughout my figure-eight route, Ogden northwest to Boise, and on to Washington State, then north to British Columbia, east to Alberta, back down to Vancouver, and south to Oregon, California, and Nevada. If conditions—snow—allowed, I figured I'd go all the way to Arizona and New Mexico before rounding the corner home. Alas, I became aware that there are vast voids in North America where I don't know a soul. I got good at sleeping on the Greyhound Motel.

First stop, Boise. We rolled into town and I could see the lights of Bogus Basin shining like a Jetsonesque city in the sky. A friend from high school, Jolyn, picked me up. "You look like you could use a beer," she said. I could. The next day we drove up to Bogus, the road winding below the highland estate of potato magnate J.R. Simplot. J.R.'s biography title says it all: A Billion the Hard Way.

I pored over my old Wal-Mart atlas, the ski areas marked with little Salmon-Hued Schussers: Hoodoo. Mount Lemmon. Places where every liftie know your name and, for a six-pack, they'll let your dog ride the chair.

Bogus Basin is a Gem State jewel. What the little areas lack in high-speed quads and apres swank they make up for with zero attitude and a season pass for 200 bucks. Places where every liftie knows your name and, for a six-pack, they'll let your dog on the chair. There's a place like that called Pine Creek near my home in Wyoming; until last year it still ran a low-speed single chair for the in-bounds runs, and a rope tow to access the backcountry. It's a BYOB scene, which is just fine with the locals.

In Idaho, nine-to-four lift hours are for wimps. By four o'clock, having dropped all 1,800 vertical Bogus feet, we were just getting warmed up for the real start of the day—night skiing. Minivans full of grommets and their parents began stacking up in the parking lot. School's out, work's over, time for an Idaho Friday night. A hundred sixty-five acres of terrain lit up with first-rate mercury vapor lights. People sang and laughed and skied right up to the T-Bar, which was packed with ruddy-cheeked schussers drinking heartily because they didn't have to catch a chair tomorrow until the crack of 1 p.m. If you like, $37 gets you 13 hours of lift-serviced skidding at Bogus. But I needed a few hours of shut-eye before I had to catch the 6:20 a.m. Portland-bound.

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