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Outside Magazine February 2003

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Bumming on the Powder Hound (Cont.)

ANY WAY THE WIND BLOWS. I could have gone south to L.A. and missed Tahoe and good skiing. I couldn't go through Denver—too many days on the bus. If I'd bought the 30-day I could have made it, but I was running out of money and calendar days. So I headed for Nevada, one big-ass state away from home.

I changed buses in Sacramento. Super Bowl Sunday. There was a snowboarder and a young lady with a boot bag headed for South Lake Tahoe. A man who looked like he'd stepped out of a seventies-era Camel ad with a burly mud-colored dog. Everyone else seemed Reno-bound. We dropped off of Donner Pass, doglegged past Truckee, and it's the lights of Reno, baby! You're either a Vegas or a Reno fan, but you can't be both. I love Reno for what it isn't: Vegas. Reno is the bastard calf of Nevada gambling towns, a secret ski town with breakfast buffets and showgirls. The Mount Rose shuttle picks skiers up at the Sands, and I ate eggs across from two hookers getting off the graveyard shift.

I found out, talking on the pay phone under the Western Union sign in the Reno bus depot, that I was going to be a father. I missed my wife, my dog, even Opie, the cat. An altercation broke out in the middle of the depot—Camel guy from Sacramento and the swing-shift security guard, Leon, taking it outside. "Gotta go, sweetheart. Call ya back. Love you, bye." Five minutes later Leon waddled back in, gesturing, it would seem, to everyone in the depot. "Tell you somethin': Blind, my ass. And that ain't no guide dog!"

Next stop, Ogden, where I'd started. I stayed on till Logan and hitched up Logan Canyon to Beaver Mountain—the Beave, my favorite little area in all of Utah, the best ski state in the country. The manager, a guy named Travis, loaned me his Salomons mounted up with pin bindings. I bought a ticket—$25—and jumped Harry's Dream, the antique double. Harry's is electric now; they sold the original diesel motor to a potato farmer—keep the french fries coming.

It hadn't snowed in several days, and I had a hoot making high-speed turns on the vacant groomers, talking flies and fish with Nick, the chief liftie, who works summers in Alaska. Nate, the snowcat mechanic, gave me a ride over the pass to the Chevron in Garden City in his ancient Ford, its hefty exhaust leak filling the cab with fumes. I stood outside in the minus-10-degree cold and caught another ride, this time from my friend Karla, headed for home. I was back to where my world is small. Heater on high, Barenaked Ladies on the stereo.

If they're on the road, the other Greyhound powder bums, I did not cross paths with them. Neither had any of the drivers I talked with. But the bus is a frontier, like the early days of telemarking, and the route map is the only limit. Perhaps mine was something of a first ascent with the Hound, I don't know. It doesn't matter. What's important to me is that it's possible, even practical, to ski the big white elephant from the Hound. And that a mountainous infrastructure is ready and waiting for a developing powder nation dieseling through the night.

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