Telemark Bootleg
When I was 21 I lived in Leadville, Colorado. The highest town in North America; just
under 2600 residents. It was a fine place to live. I didn’t pick it randomly. I chose to live there because Colorado Mountain College had a campus there that I wanted to attend.
College credit for things I already enjoyed was a way for me to push off the responsibility of growing up, a scheme I cooked up when I realized that many people go to college with a desire to work in a specific field. Others go to appease their parents’ wishes for their children to have stability and options.
My goal was somewhere in between. I was sorting through mixed messages about life and hadn’t quite charted my own trajectory forward at that time.
Truthfully, I only think of that period of my life occasionally. I have flashbacks now and then when I am skiing or getting my gear ready to camp, two things I did a lot of in the year that I lived in Leadville.
Recently, I was listening to a song from David Byrne’s 2008 album “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.” This album was still two years away from being released when I lived in Leadville. Even so, a memory came flooding back to me when I heard David Byrne's voice- its familiar poignance steeped in twenty years of lived experience.
I took a course called Intro to Telemark Skiing aka “Tele Block” and aside from multiple on-mountain days of tele skiing instruction, it culminated in a five-day backcountry course wherein we stayed in an off-grid cabin outside of Crested Butte…Snodgrass trail to those who know the area.
That season, I was really not fit to go out off-piste on skis. The instruction days were mostly in-bounds and we had Avi 1 as a prerequisite. No issues there, it’s just that most of my on-piste experience up until that point was on a snowboard and while I was a solid black diamond knuckle dragger, taking teles into the backcountry was a bit rich for me at the time.
Still, I was allowed on the course, showed good progression and promise during the on-piste checkouts and was feeling pretty good about the trip ahead.
A week or so before leaving, I was practicing on the teles at Copper Mountain where I had a season pass through working at the resort.
I had a great little slightly out-of-bounds line that I loved on my board where you got to hop down a staircase (about four little three-foot boulder drops) before coming right back in bounds. I had done the line hundreds of times but this was going to be my first time on skis.
Add to that, my early twenties bravado and shortsightedness. I was not weighing all factors like conditions or my late-in-the-day judgment cloud. I based my decision to attempt purely on stoke. I was having a good day, connecting solid tele turns, blues and easy blacks, let's go…
I dropped in casually and a moment too late, I realized the conditions were just horrible for this line. We'd had a few sunny days with sufficient melt and then only a 2-3” dusting over the previous evening (dust-on-crust!)
This left a lot of the boulders just inches below fresh, dry, Colorado powder. A shark tooth in an otherwise placid sea. I carved right over the first rock and it bit into the core of my skis hard. It yanked me down and sent me over the next two drops like a hay bale falling from a flatbed in farm country.
I howled in pain as my left outer thigh came down on a pointy chunk of granite. Hematoma.
I made it down with alpine turns, my leg throbbing all the way. I crammed a giant handful of snow into a grocery bag I had in my truck and held it onto my swelling leg as I drove the thirty minutes home.
When I got home, I disrobed and found a six inch diameter goose egg. With a little less than a week until our foray onto the Snodgrass trail, I would need to visit the kooky town doctor. He told me I was made of good wood, a line I will never forget, and he cleared me to go on the trip.
On the day of departure, we skied in and settled into our log cabin. It slept ten in an upper level, lofted room. It had a giant table downstairs, a woodstove and kitchen area, a lean-to annex off the back with lots of firewood, tools, and a splitting stump, and a tiny outhouse with heaps of lime about 30 paces off to one side.
Propane gas lamps connected by copper tubing were hung about the place, a sepia photo of a stoic Navajo chief hung near the sink and water came from a well with a pump that ran on battery in the root cellar, recharged by solar panels on the south side of the structure that needed to constantly be kept clear of snow.
Skiing in the backcountry is different from skiing on packed resort snow. Snow in the backcountry is untracked and variable, consisting of a range of conditions from light powder to heavy, dangerous, ready-to-slide fields, sheets of wind-exposed ice, or blankets of crust over cottony fluff.
The point-and-rip resort skier is in for a lesson in strategic turning, navigating buried rocks, trees, and other hazards, and managing avalanche risk, in other words, always thinking, weighing, deciding - no iPods on full blast here, one needs full engagement of their senses to come home safely.
On about the second or third day, when everyone was hitting their stride, I took a sweeping left turn to avoid a narrow outcropping of rocks downhill and to my right. When I did, I toppled over, comically glissading down about 30 yards on a sheet of ice and crust on my still-tender left hip.
It didn’t hurt or really make an impression aside from awakening my inner Benny Hill, but the recent trauma, my still-healing hematoma was agitated and the swelling returned. At the end of the day, the leader of our group, Alan, could see that I was limping slightly, wincing when I shifted weight and sneaking bags of snow onto the injured area.
“Charlie, let me see your leg,” he demanded the next morning, after breakfast. I complied and my left thigh resembled an eggplant in color with multiple burst capillaries (contusions) around the edges. “I am afraid I can’t let you ski today,” he said, “you’ll need to hang back here and get some rest.” I was a bit deflated but knew his call was final and that it was the right play. As still-tender tissue that was re-injured, I knew the familiar feeling, that dull ache and brain fog as the systemic inflammation response does its thing.
Pete Foote was my buddy on the trip and probably the closest thing Leadville had to a frat boy. The house he lived in was known for shenanigans and great parties. I knew Pete brought some weed and a one-hitter. He loaned me his stash for the day and as soon as the group was off on their morning ascent, I partook.
I had a blast all by myself. I alternated periods of rest and ice with frontier chores like splitting wood and stoking the fire, boiling water for breakfast clean up, sweeping the cabin and shaking out the rugs…
Sometime over the course of my morning, I discovered a tape player tucked away in a dusty bookshelf. Like most people in a remote cabin for the first time, I took for granted its power source, which turned out to be four C batteries. In retrospect, I am sure this radio/tape combo was sparingly used to tune into weather reports, given the cabin’s primary role as a launch pad for skiing and hiking.
I snooped around a little bit and found a shoebox full of cassettes- mostly boring hymns and self help garbage but I discovered a bootleg recording of “Talking Heads, Live in Tokyo 1978” and I must have listened to it four times over the course of the morning, stopping occasionally to flip the tape over. I only considered the power source when the music wound down to an abrupt halt. I realized I had drained the batteries.
Adjusting to the newfound quiet, I went outside and enjoyed the stillness and the rustle of the breeze in lodgepole pines. To my surprise, I was seeing the world around me through new eyes.
Chipmunks scurried across the cabin’s rooftop. I fed camp robbers a pack of stale graham crackers of unknown vintage I found in the food bin of the cabin.
I listened to the rhythmic dripping of icicles melting and basked in the warmth of the afternoon Colorado sun. As a lifelong musician, songs continue to play in my head with uncanny clarity hours after they have finished. I heard “Psycho Killer” and “Once in a Lifetime" on repeat as I read books and played solitaire all afternoon.
Just when my brain began to look for new ideas and ask, “Now what?” I saw the group crest a ridge on the horizon, making their way back. I went inside to put on the kettle.
I reveled in those last moments of quiet before the group returned.
I exhausted those batteries chasing sound. What stayed with me was everything I heard after it went quiet.