Trackless

I don’t understand those who won’t Nordic ski unless tracks are set. Obviously, if you’re a skate skier, you need groomed trails. For us old fashioned folks who like to diagonal stride, I think a solitary spring afternoon in the forest beats a $45 trail pass and the lycra parade, hands down.

If you’re lucky enough to live in the Sierra, there are all kinds of adventures to be had next to almost any old roadside parking spot. Here in Mammoth Lakes we have an auto escape route (for when the volcano blows, spilling lava on to the main highway?) called the Scenic Loop. This road was just widened to make room for a bike lane and parked cars. The route cuts through a Jeffrey Pine forest with soft undulating hills which open up here and there to spectacular vistas of Mammoth Mountain and the San Joaquin Ridge. With slide-y, set-up spring snow, it’s cross-country heaven, and yet I’ve never seen another soul out there on skis, except at the Inyo Craters trailhead area.

Lucky for me. Setting out around noon with Sigur Ros and Broken Social Scene loaded into my cassette Walkman (as old school as my diagonal stride, touring skis and gaiters) I set out over familiar terrain with a plan to follow my instincts into a new quadrant.

The beauty of off-piste skiing on a cloudless spring day is that it’s impossible to get lost. Your tracks always lead back to your car in a more reliable way than Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs. So I can explore with abandon, trying to bushwhack through some firs, heading up over an unfamiliar hill or following what looks like a creek bed. Today, there’s lots of gliding through the forest of pine sentinels – Jeffreys so evenly rigid that they give the appearance of a plantation

There’s always a payoff. Usually a sunny spot sheltered from the breeze, with an awesome view of peaks, sparkly snow and the deep green of pine boughs against an azure sky. Here I stop, make a seating platform of my skis and a rolled up fleece and pull the apple and tattered copy of John Muir from my pack. I turn to a page from “My First Summer in the Sierra” where he describes the rattling whoop-de-doos made by a grasshopper on a July day: “grasshopper, crisp, electric spark of joy enlivening the massy sublimity of the mountains like the laugh of a child.”

And like a child, I have the pleasure of knowing that this is the spot I found. No blue diamond markers or manicured grooves led me here. I discovered this place on my own and for this afternoon, it’s mine. Thanks to those of you at the Nordic ski-center, I guess, who let me have this peaceful glade all to myself.