Showing posts with label Vallee Blanche. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vallee Blanche. Show all posts

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Beginning Again—Rediscovering My Ski Roots in the Alps

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
--T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Back on the boards--skiing down the Vallee Blanche in Chamonix.
Skiing set my first roots in the outdoor world. Middle-through-high school Saturdays I'd wake at an ungodly hour for the ski bus trek across Puget Sound to the Cascades. Later, as my ski buddies and I progressed, we'd sometimes tackle a bit of our “backyard backcountry” on the Olympic Peninsula's Hurricane Ridge. Notching things up for an overnight tour, we had a forced shiver-bivvy on the Mt. Tahoma Ski Trail when the hut we'd planned to stay at was either a lot longer away than we thought or we were lost. In the morning we followed our tracks back to the car, with our tails between our ski boots.