Almost Paradise - Part II
Boy Meets Mountain
And mountain meets boy.
Post Introduction:
When I complete a Substack post, I go to my newsfeeds to search for the next topic of interest. As my readers and subscribers have come to expect, my topics vary widely from business and politics to religion and philosophy. If the topic captures my imagination enough to warrant 1500 words, I develop it into a future post. Recently, I stumbled upon an article talking about the "suicide belt" of the American Rocky Mountains. Specifically, the article described how suicide rates had quadrupled in America's mountain towns. My research on this topic led me to a recent documentary titled The Paradise Paradox produced by Podium Pictures and Hall of Fame skier Bode Miller. It is available on Amazon Prime for a nominal fee.
As a lifelong skier, visitor to many of those resort towns in the "suicide belt" and a recovering alcoholic, I relate to the mental health struggles that many in America's resort towns experience. I feel compelled to share my recovery journey, not because it is ever pleasant recounting the low dark crevices of my past, but in the hopes that my story may help someone who is struggling with depression, anxiety or addiction find hope and recovery. My work on this topic will span multiple posts. If you connect with any part of my story, please sign up for a free or paid subscription. Moreover, if my story compels you into further action, consider donating to one of the mountain town organizations working to expand mental health services and stem the tide of suicides.
I was the first one to take up skiing in my family. I got into the sport around the age of ten. As I started connecting with other kids that skied, I found mutual friends of my parents that were into the sport as well. After a year or so, my mother, father and sister followed me into the downhill skiing world. Along with other skiing families, we began taking long weekend trips to various local ski resorts. We skied Quadna, Sugar Hills, Spirit Mountain, and the granddaddy of all ski resorts in Minnesota, Lutsen on Lake Superior's pristine North Shore. Those were some of the best weekends of my youth. Skiing with my buddies all day; swimming pools, hot tubs, and boardgames all night. It's a weird thing, the friends you make skiing seem to be the friends you keep for life.
Although ski tracks across northern Minnesota offered a wider variety of skiing options than my local little hill, they still were not the blue sky, high elevation, or deep powder mountains I longed for. The chance to finally experience that arrived when I turned 16. I convinced my father to tag along with one of those skiing families on a spring break trip to Bozeman Montana. Our target mountain was Bridger Bowl.
I will never forget it. The night we arrived in Bozeman, it snowed 18 inches. We awoke early the next morning for breakfast and after a half-hour trek up Bridger Canyon Drive, we reached our destination. The drive took us from Bozeman at 4800 feet above sea level to the base of Bridger Bowl ski area at 6,100 feet. As we wound about the twists and turns on that mountain road, the accumulated evening snow, as well as our unbridled enthusiasm, was piled ever higher on the sides of the roads and our individual psyches. My excitement to finally ski a real mountain could barely be contained.
I was awestruck looking at the mountain, jagged rocks and pine trees protruding from what framed the longest ski runs I had ever experienced. With wonderment, I witnessed the blue skies of Montana juxtapose against untracked white capped mountain peaks of Bridger Bowl. I was like nothing I had previously experienced. I was finally getting a shot to enter the skiing world that, until that time, was a mere figment of my imagination.
That day on a real mountain was the first day I tasted real mountain powder. My friends and I strapped on skis and headed for the trails. Skiing powder, as it turned out, was not as easy as it looked in the movies. Learning the proper balance of weight on skis and taking slower more methodical turns took some time to master. Since I was traveling with people that skied in these conditions before, they guided me in the basic powder skiing fundamentals. After a few low altitude trails, they ushered me to the very top of the mountain where we proceeded to ski tracks that were yet untouched. At the top of Bridger Bowl, the powder was hip deep and skiing through it was simply magical. Skiing the "Cold Smoke" taught me that the steepness and Black Diamond degree of difficulty could be offset by the number of inches of fresh snow that had fallen. We spent the first three days skiing those 18 inches of snow ever looking for terrain that had been yet touched by a skier. As the days progressed, we pushed farther into the trees and back areas to find the yet untracked powder.
That first trip out to the real mountain in 1982 is forever etched in my mind. I convinced my father to join this family on their annual spring break trip to Bozeman for the next two of my high school years. In those subsequent years, we had decent skiing conditions, but not snow conditions like that first. That is the thing about firsts, first kisses, first loves and first powders - we spend our days chasing them but ultimately never feel them with the same intensity as their initial memories are etched in our minds.
Back home, I had become a ski patrol. At the age of 16, I qualified through a series of first-aid trainings, skiing trials, and endurance tests. The head ski patrol was a drill sergeant. We were timed on how fast we could ski downhill, come to a complete stop, kick off our skis, run back uphill in our ski boots and attend to a pretend injured skier. We also performed multiple back brace procedures and ski sled maneuvers to earn qualifications to become a ski patrol. I received no pay for this service, but I skied free and received a five-dollar meal voucher each day I patrolled. But it was never about the money, patrolling had me on the hill every Saturday and Sunday mid-December through mid-March. In my high school years, our ski season culminated with the final crescendo, the spring break trip back to Bozeman Montana. There, to paraphrase the late Robin Leach, to seek “champagne power and canyon-like dreams!”
Bridger Bowl, back in the 80s prior to opening the vast tracts in the ungroomed area known as Schlasmans, had the area at the top of the mountain called "The Ridge." It was the top portion of the mountain that was not serviced by any lifts, save a rope tow which was only available to the ski patrol and other mountain employees. If one wanted to hike the ridge to ski ever more untouched powder, they needed to be certified as having the skill level, rent an avalanche beeper, and hike the 300-yard face of the mountain carrying skis, poles and whatever survival supplies deemed nessessary. It was my dream to qualify to make that run.
That day came on my third trip to Bridger Bowl when I was 18 years old. I and three other bodies made the grueling march up to the top of the mountain just after lunch. Our ski guide that day was a hometown boy named Barry who, 10 years earlier, followed his dream to leave the Midwest and live and ski in the mountains. Barry was a ski patrol as well, but he was a real one, he had real EMT training and unmatched skiing skills. Though I was set to head off to university in 6 months’ time, Barry's life seemed to me to be the dream. He and his wife, also a ski patrol, lived in a trailer in nearby Livingston, MT. They skied the Bowl all winter and work for the park service in the summer. That life, combined with healthier doses of weed and booze, seemed far more appealing to me than an upcoming four-year liberal arts degree I was about to pursue. And that was before I realized my Midwest private school was on the precipice of its own communist revolution.
Barry took us across the top of the mountain way beyond where most other skiers had gone. We ski down between cracks and crevices and mountain face and finished in the area known as “The Fingers.” For the first time in my life, I skied the chest deep powder that looked like those posters I hung on my bedroom wall. I'm sure if one could've captured a photo of my face skiing The Ridge that day, it would've had that same expression of utter exhilaration as well. That trek up to The Ridge and across the top of the mountain and back down to the base Lodge took the remainder of that exhilarating skiing afternoon.
We concluded that Ridge day of skiing at the St. Bernard Bar where I tasted my first glass of Coors beer. Now that was not my first beer mind you, but it was my first Coors. And as everyone knew back in the early 80s thanks to the documentary "Smokey and the Bandit", Coors beer was not distributed east of the Mississippi River, so it was unavailable in my home state of Minnesota. To this day, that entrée of skiing The Ridge, finished with a dessert of ice-cold Coors beer, was the best ski memory of my life. It was like a first kiss, so magical, so heart pounding and so thrilling. I spent many a year after that trying to duplicate that sensation. But like many firsts, we can get better with more practice, but we never quite capture the magic of that initial experience.
But here's what really happened that day. The day I skied The Ridge at Bridger Bowl was the day I combined the two things that would plague me for the next 25 years of my life. I had combined my restful discontent of anywhere but here with my unquenchable thirst for alcohol. I had taken my youthful desire to travel, explore and experience new and exciting adventures and mixed it with my newfound love of alcohol. And, although I would go on to earn my four-year degree at my Midwest liberal liberal arts University, my mind was ever on how I could land myself permanently back in the mountains. For this is not really a story about a boy meeting a mountain but a tale of an addiction. The mountain in this story is a mere backdrop, the convenient prop and excuse for why the world in front of me was not good enough. The snow, as I presumed, was always deeper on the other side of the range.
These early experiences, skiing the mountains of Montana, triggered a romance inside of me that determined that somewhere else, somewhere exotic, somewhere where all the “cool” people hung out was always better than the somewhere I currently was. As this series unfolds, you will read how this somewhere else sensation combined with an ever-growing addiction became my toxic combination.
My next installment will address how this fantasy began in my own backyard.