Ode to Books

Mark my word: I’m anti-e-readers. I hope I never own an iPad or a Kindle (I also said this about cell phones until, of course, I finally got one). But books are different. I like pages you can turn with your fingertips and hardback covers. I like sitting in my chaise lounge, the world’s ugliest but most comfortable chair ever, and reading a real, tangible book that doesn’t need to be plugged in. And one day, I hope to write a book. Or 10. With any luck, that one day might actually be soon…

But for now, I’m a reader. Which is why I especially appreciated this blog written by Rosemarie Urquico called “Date a Girl Who Reads.” It was written in response to this story: “You Should Date An Illiterate Girl" by Charles Warnke. Definitely worth reading if you’ve got the time.

Stories Worth Reading

[Photo from Theatlantic.com]

Figured I’d keep sharing stories that I’ve read recently that I really enjoyed. Here are two new pieces from this week that are well worth your time.

My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant, by Jose Antonio Vargas; New York Times Magazine: Vargas is a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. He’s also an undocumented immigrant, who was born in the Philippines and moved to the U.S. when he was 12. His story is raw and honest and beautifully written.

The Confessions of a Professional Ghost Tweeter, by Amanda Alampi; The Atlantic: Amanda, a Catholic Italian white girl, tells of her experience doing social media for the Islamic Center at NYU, where she Tweeted as if she were a Pakistani-American imam. It’s also just a good look at the current (crazy) state of social media that we’re currently living with. 

Also, check out Byliner.com, a new site that collects great writing from all over the web in one place.

Volcanic eruptions

[Photos from The Atlantic: In Focus]

Chile’s Puyehue Volcano started erupting on Saturday, sending ash over the Andes into Argentina, which could delay the start of the southern hemisphere ski season at resorts around Bariloche, Argentina. I am totally in awe of the images and video (thanks to the Adventure Journal) that have surfaced of the eruption.

It might be because I have a weird thing for volcanoes. Twice now, I’ve planned a ski trip to a place that happened to coincide with a massive volcanic eruption that shut down airports, roads and definitely made skiing in that place a little trickier. I was trying to get to Alaska in the spring of 2009 when Mt. Redoubt exploded—it took me two days of delayed flights to finally land in Anchorage, where mountains were covered in a thin, grey dust. And I was in Iceland in the spring of 2010 when Eyjafjallajokul (which I still don’t know how to pronounce) blew its lid, shutting down airports in all of northern Europe.

Now I live in Seattle. So here’s hoping that Mt. Rainier sits tight for the next few years…

A few stories worth reading

(Photo by Chris Korbulic, from Outside Magazine)

I know, I know. It’s hard to make time to read long stories nowadays. Most people get their news in bite-size bits of information passed to them from Facebook, Twitter, or that scrolling bar across the bottom of the TV news station. But I still love sitting down, with a magazine (or my computer) and really diving into a piece of writing. A few stories I’ve read recently in publications and online that I was moved by enough that I’d like to share them here.

Ryan D’Agostino’s The Survivor, Esquire, June 2011
This is a tough story to read, so consider yourself warned. It’s about Dr. William Petit, who survived a brutal attack on his home that left his wife and two daughters murdered. But the story is really about how a man like Dr. Petit survives something like, how he goes on living. His story is a remarkable one, and D’Agostino’s portrait of him is riveting.

Grayson Schaffer’s Consumed, Outside, March 2011
The editors at Outside were first interested in the death of whitewater kayaker Hendrik Coetzee, who was eaten by an alligator on the White Nile in Africa, when they assigned the piece to Grayson to write. But once Grayson started looking into the story, he realized that Coetzee’s life was even more intriguing than his death.

Susan Dominus’ Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?, New York Times Magazine, May 2011 
You simply must read this story about four-year-old twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan, who are joined at the brain. Doctors and neuroscientists are of course studying the girls, but most importantly, their family is simply trying to give the girls as normal a life as they can. The video accompanying the story is also well worth watching.

North Cascades Highway

A few friends and I recently went on a trip to Washington’s North Cascades. The highway that runs across the mountain passes from east to west normally opens in early May but due to the massive La Nina winter that hit the Pacific Northwest this year, the highway opening was pushed back to allow the Washington Department of Transportation to continue clearing the road and doing avalanche control work.

So how do you access skiable terrain reached by a road that’s not yet open to cars? You bike. We strapped skis to our bikes, and rode about 2,000-vertical feet and five miles up the road and skinned from there. Here are some photos I took from the trip.

South America

Ski season is just getting started in South America, and here’s some inspiration from my friends over at Sweetgrass Productions, who are working on a two-year project filmed entirely in South America called Solitaire. The filming and narration are, simply put, art. I recently interviewed Sweetgrass’ Nick Waggoner for ESPN Freeskiing. You can find that interview here.

On the Road with Solitaire Episode IV: Low Tide from Sweetgrass Productions on Vimeo.

Oh, Canada

I made it to Whistler last weekend during the resort’s World Ski and Snowboard Festival. Due to the festival, the mountain was crowded (a first-time skier actually collided into me while I was standing still) and there was a rumor that the village was going to run out of beer, but the snow was soft and the backcountry was relatively empty. Whistler local Holly Walker and my friend from Fernie Martha Burley  showed me around the mountain. I also covered the AFP World Championships that were taking place (video interview from the contest here). Here are a few photos from my trip.

Martha dropping a knee off Disease Ridge.

Holly bootpacking off the Blackcomb glacier.

Dan Abrams testing jackets.

Bootpacking in tank-tops.

Sherry McConkey

Last winter,  I visited Sherry McConkey, the wife of the late Shane McConkey, at her Squaw Valley home. I had met Shane only casually, but his death in a ski-BASE accident in Italy in 2009 hit me like it did most skiers: profoundly.

So meeting and interviewing Shane’s widow (and meeting his adorable daughter, Ayla), needless to say, was both an incredible privilege and completely nerve-wracking. Before the interview, I asked my own mother - who has dealt with more than her fair share of tragedy - what kinds of questions I should ask Sherry. I was worried Sherry wouldn’t want to open up to a total stranger or she’d feel bothered by the personal nature of the questions I wanted to ask, questions about life with Shane and life without him.

But that wasn’t the case at all. Sherry welcomed me into her home with a sense of utter warmth, and we spoke for more than an hour over cups of tea. She was graceful and strong, and she spoke candidly and emotionally about the husband she loved and lost. The interview just ran on ESPN’s Freeskiing site. You can find it here. For more about Shane or to donate to Shane McConkey Foundation, click here.

Oregon Yurt Trip

I just returned from a four-day yurt trip in eastern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. When most people think of eastern Oregon, steep lines and deep powder probably aren’t the first things that come to mind (potatoes and flat plains, perhaps?). But, picture this: 35 inches of snow in four days, a forest of perfectly-spaced burnt trees, and a two-story yurt that sleeps 10 comfortably in bunks around a wood-burning stove.

The first day, we got a six-mile snowmobile tow in from the trailhead, then skinned the remaining two miles and 2,000 vertical feet up to the yurt in Norway Basin. The teepee-like structure was buried in a marshmallow of snow when we got there and the flakes just kept falling. Low visibility and avy danger limited us to mainly lower-angle tree stashes, but the snow was deep enough to keep us entertained.

On our last morning, the clouds parted to reveal the high-alpine terrain that towers above the yurt, steep, varied peaks that rise from the basin floor and shoot into the sky. Here are a few shots from the trip.

The hardest day

Most days, I love my job — how could you not love writing about skiing? But there are some days — like today, March 1 — when I wish I were an accountant, a hair dresser, anything but this. Today, a fellow skier died. And I was tasked with the heinous job of reporting on his death.

I didn’t know Ryan Hawks personally, but we shared many mutual friends. And like me, he’s a skier. He was a Vermont native who followed the powder train west to Utah and spent his winters chasing storms and freeskiing competitions. From what I’ve heard, Ryan was an amazing person as well — fun-loving and compassionate, adventurous and kind.

But when you’re writing a news story on someone’s death, what matters most is the facts. Especially in this era, when everyone has access to a blog, a Facebook account and a Twitter feed — it becomes that much more important for journalists to do their job, and do it right. Get the facts, report the truth. And do your best to leave your personal bias and emotions out of it.

This was really hard for me. I was there at Kirkwood on Sunday when Ryan crashed and was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Reno. The same hospital, mind you, where my older brother Miles was taken by life-flight in 2005, after he hit a tree skiing at Mammoth and suffered severe head trauma. Ryan was transferred to the same Intensive Care Unit that by brother spent several weeks in and like my brother, Ryan had a head injury, a broken pelvis and he was put into a medically-induced coma. Monday night in Reno, I sat in the parking area of the hospital while Dan, whose company, Flylow, sponsored Ryan, dropped in to check on Ryan’s condition — I couldn’t bear to go inside and see the place my brother had been, a place where so many painful memories reside.

But here’s where the stories differ: My brother survived and is leading a normal, healthy life today. Ryan wasn’t so lucky. I can’t imagine the pain his friends and family are going through right now and I’m sending them all my thoughts and prayers.

Various news sources have picked up the story on Ryan’s death, and naturally a lot of the mainstream media have offered up the sensational headlines that I feared they would: “Hawks Dead after Extreme Skiing Accident.” There is truth in that — the Freeskiing World Tour is an extreme skiing competition and what Ryan did — throw a backflip off a massive cliff — could definitely be categorized as “extreme.”

But there’s a reason the word extreme faded from skiers’ vocabulary years ago and to imply that Ryan was reckless couldn’t be farther from the truth. These athletes know the risks involved in their sport and they take calculated efforts to minimize the risks, examining take-offs and landings and determining speed and snow quality. They’re not just flinging themselves off cliffs. There’s something about this line in a story about Ryan’s death on GrindTV.com that really irks me. “[Hawks was] a rising star in the sometimes dangerous sport of big-mountain freeskiing.” Driving to the grocery store is “sometimes dangerous.”

The story on Ryan’s death on The Ski Channel (which they later fixed after I whined about it on Twitter) bugs me too. Here’s how it read initially: “Although he had traumatic injuries, it just didn’t seem like the kind of fall that would end up the way it did.  It wasn’t like he fell down a rocky face or something similar.  Watching on the live feed i came away with the impression he would be sore from it, that’s all,” says the writer.  Readers need facts, not the writer’s half-baked opinion. To all the journalists out there, let’s not pass judgment or make implications, especially involving someone’s life and death.

Ryan was living a life most people only dream about. I’m just sorry he only got 25 years to enjoy it.

Double Chairs

Maybe it’s the quality one-on-one time you get with your fellow passenger. Or maybe it’s the fact that six seater chairs just lack personality. Or maybe it’s because in many cases, a ski area’s best terrain is still accessed by a double chair (case in point: Snowbird’s Little Cloud lift, Stevens Pass’ Seventh Heaven chair). But there’s something I love about double chairlifts - especially center-bar double chairs like Crystal Mountain’s Chair 6 (above, in a photo I took yesterday) and Alpental’s Chair 2 (from opening day in December).

Trailer Wars

It didn’t take long after my older sister and her husband heard about my new vintage trailer that they went and bought one for themselves. Theirs is a 1957, and looks similar to my Canned Ham-style one, only theirs was decorated with cowboy motif when they got it. Anyway, here are photos of my sister’s new vintage trailer. And below those, shots of my trailer again, which now has some fresh coats of paint and a few other restorations.

The outside of theirs looks really similar to ours. And yes, that cowgirl and horse painting is mounted on a wall inside the trailer.

Their dinette area is in a lot better shape than ours.

I wouldn’t have picked these lampshades out myself, but hey, they do fit the decor.

OK, now, what you’ve all been waiting for, I know. Images of the trailer I bought a couple of months ago, which was in great shape for being built in 1952. Here is what the trailer looked like when we bought it. And here are some ideas for how I wanted to fix it up.

Of course it has a Flylow logo. But more importantly, it now has a sweet turquoise stripe. 

And better yet, sweet turquoise hubcaps.

The trailer had drab white curtains before. So I picked out the material for new curtains, which should also help keep the heat in — after all, this is a ski trailer.

In the sleeping area, I painted the side walls white to give it more light, and added the same turquoise on the back wall. We got a new mattress and built this small shelf above the bed for storing ski gear and clothing while we’re parked.

Some fridge art that I found on etsy.

It’s amazing what a coat of paint and some new cabinet pulls will do.

In a House by the River

I’d mentioned a few months ago that I was working on my first feature story for Outside Magazine. It’s a story about the death of my stepdad, Jerry, who was killed 16 years ago at a remote kayak lodge on California’s Salmon River. Jerry got into a fight with the caretaker of the lodge, who shot Jerry in an act the court later determined was self defense. I reported the story last June, and finally, today, the story is out, in the February issue of Outside. You can get it on newsstands or read it online here. I’m not going to say much more about it – I’d rather you just read the piece. But there is one person I want to thank most of all for making this whole process possible for me: my mom. This story is really her story, she’s the one who lived through it, she’s the one who taught me everything I know about making it through the keeper hole, surviving the tough times, and seeing the light at the end of it all. So, mom, thank you. I know you’re the only one who reads this blog anyway.

Also, since I’m such a huge fan of NPR’s This American Life, I decided to try to create my own podcast to accompany the story. Editing audio is a lot harder than I thought, so please forgive the amateur sound quality and editing. The podcast is of my interview with JD, the man who killed Jerry. You can find it online here.

Powder Magazine Video Awards

When I was 23 and just out of college, I worked as a newspaper reporter in Tahoe City. The best assignment I had all year (not that covering city council meetings wasn’t a learning experience…) was a piece on female pro skiers who called Tahoe home. I spent the day at Squaw Valley, trying to keep up with Ingrid Backstrom, Michelle Parker, Jamie Burge and Jenn Berg. The story I wrote after was nothing to write home about, but I do remember at that moment that I felt like I had discovered what I wanted to do in life: I wanted to write about skiing. I also was completely in awe of the girls I skied with that day. Anyway, all of this is to say that on Thursday, when I found out I was nominated for a Powder Magazine Video Award for best female performance for my part in Powderwhore Productions’ TeleVision (the segment is above) — alongside Ingrid Backstrom, Grete Eliassen, and Elyse Saugstad, all incredible athletes who I’ve covered with amazement for the past few years — I was completely stunned. The reality of it — that a telemark skier with a desk job is nominated for such an award — probably speaks most to the lack of female presence in ski movies these days (honestly, were there only four women in a ski movie this year?). But I’ll take the nomination for what it is: a great honor. Just like I was when I was 23, I’m still in awe in women like Ingrid, Elyse and Grete and to be included in the same breath as them is completely mind blowing to me.  This year’s awards are happening in Aspen on Jan. 28, which is during the X Games. I’ll be there with ESPN reporting on the X Games, so hopefully I can sneak out of work in time to go to the show.

Telemark Skier Photo Annual

Telemark Skier magazine’s Photo Annual recently came out and in addition to a number of articles (check out my Clips page to read those), I got my first spread photo published. This is a shot I took last April of telemark skier Paul Kimbrough skiing off Thompson Pass, Alaska. This line was one of the most scary lines I’ve watched someone ski in person - it had a double fall line, serious no-fall exposure and some massive sluff that would have been catastrophic had it taken Paul out. But, he skied it with complete grace and composure. You can read about Paul here or watch him ski this line in the latest movie from Powderwhore Productions, TeleVision.