Getting in the Wood, con't
Rarely anymore do people rely exclusively on firewood to heat their homes, and fewer still gather their own supply.
Despite the backbreaking labor, however, cutting firewood engenders a sense of accomplishment rooted in a hard day’s work.
Most importantly, though, the task provides grown adults with a legitimate excuse to play with chainsaws!
Working with saws is a source of unadulterated testosterone-based fun. There’s something viscerally satisfying about
ripping through dead trees and getting sawdust encrusted in your shoelaces. Otherwise, no one would put up with the
back pain.
Another fun aspect of cutting firewood is using the jargon, which possesses a rustic, boorish quality. Felling trees, bucking
logs, splitting rounds and stacking quarters: these are the words of the trade and they breathe machismo. If you’re a guy,
the day someone says to you, “finish bucking up that length, shut off your saw, and come grab a beer,” is the day you know
you’re a man!
Saws and lexicon aside, cutting firewood is honest work for a legitimate and noble cause: powder skiing. Indeed, if the
wood is not in at the William’s Peak Yurt, then face-shot-seeking rippers won’t have one of the best locales in the country
for getting their kicks. Of more immediate concern to us, this years work crew, was that if the wood was not finished by the
time we needed to ski out to the trailhead, then the two feet of snow on the ground, more than we could recall in recent
memory, would go un-harvested.
But we had our priorities straight. We understood that the wood was only half the story. So we worked hard and fast and
by noon on Sunday we stacked enough for the season. We walked away from the pile knowing the yurt would stay warm all
winter, and that the slopes above the hut could soon be tested.
“I’m going to stay here and take care of a few details so I’ll meet you guys on the second lap,” said Bachman, which
gave us the official go-ahead that firewood was finished and powder skiing was paramount. We headed out the door of
the hut, slapped on our climbing skins, and began to wallow through the knee-deep snow to the top of a ski run Bachman
calls the Bowling Alley.
In the summertime this terrain consists of grassy hillside studded with sagebrush so we were a little concerned that
our ski tips snagged in the shrubbery, and that some of the shrubbery poked through the snow surface. We wondered
if the conditions were even skiable? Was there enough snow or would we bog down in the baseless pack like jeeps
in the mud?
Stanley-ite Eric Hamm finished the up-track to the forked snag, a dead white-bark pine that marks the top of the ski run.
There were six of us, Mads and I from Hailey, Jake and Travis from Boise, Dean from Garden Valley, and Eric from Stanley.
Flat light, skills rusty from a long summer, and general fatigue added to the low-grade, unspoken anxiety over who would
step up and ski first. We procrastinated by slowly peeling off our skins and by staring attentively down slope, as if carefully
picking our lines.
Finally, Jake put the angst behind him and his tips in front. The rest of us stopped our preparations and watched him ski,
looking for clues about the conditions. His turns were rhythmical and his balance was good but it was still hard to say
what it would be like.
Now there was a nice set of tracks in the snow and I decided to go next. I un-weighted from my parallel stance and let
my skis drift into the fall line. For a flicker of a moment I got back but instinct told me what to do. Adjust forward. I
found my balance point in the next instant and the first turn was already finished. I guess it was just like riding a bike!
The snow was deep but fast. I kept a wide platform to maintain flotation but this prevented me from really pushing
down into the snow. I wanted to get my feet into it so I picked up some more speed, hit it a little harder, and wow…
Snow billowed up around my face and in my mouth. I imagined a wispy wake swirling behind me. It wasn’t the first turn
but it couldn’t have been more than fourth. In the future, with some poetic license, that not-first turn of the year will
become so, and the story will go that it was a face shot!
Back in the hut after our run I’m reminded of a Patagonia clothing catalog. All the requisite images were there: second
string fleece covered in chainsaw gas, rugged outdoor types hunched over trying to repair ill-tempered engines, and
fluffy snow blowing up in the faces of rhapsodic skiers. We were fun hogs at work, in support of our play.
In the end we stacked nearly seven cords for the winter and left seven (as promised Kirk made it up for a lap)
sets of respectable tracks. Not a bad start to the ski season of 2003!
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