Illustration by Alex Nabaum
Before my family left our home in Sun Valley, Idaho for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend the winter in Morocco, my plan for handling a year without skiing seemed simple enough: just don’t think about it.
When fall arrived, I began the mental game of avoiding ski-season stoke. Magazine issues went unread. As the alpine began to turn white, I thought about exotic vistas, Atlantic surf, sand dunes. I bragged about a winter with no shoveling. It wasn’t until a question from my ski partner Hannes that I began to have second thoughts. “When was the last winter,” he asked me, “that you didn’t ski?”
I had to think about it. It was the winter of 1986-87—the winter I turned four. The following year, my mom took me to Mt. Baker where I spent a week sliding down the bunny hill. Since then, I’ve taken for granted that winter meant skiing. Every winter as a kid, I rode the ski bus on Saturdays from the arid side of Washington to the mountains. In high school, I taught skiing to elementary school kids. After college, I returned to ski patrol. These days, I ride in the backcountry, reveling in the simplicity of the climb and uncrowded, delicate descents.
Hannes’s question made me realize that this would have been my 28th consecutive winter on skis. Nevertheless, I decided to stick with the plan: avoid Facebook, unsubscribe from the avalanche advisory, pretend the season never happened.
But four days after we departed, the season did happen. After a series of lackluster early winters, December brought robust storms off the Pacific, driven by a thick wedge of Arctic air. Rooftops across the Rocky Mountain West sagged under a meter of snow. My Facebook feed became a sea of friends indistinguishable in powder clouds. I couldn’t look away. Over the next few weeks, ski lines opened up in places I’d never seen. So much snow fell that our mail carrier wrote a congratulatory note to Hannes for managing to dig out our mailbox. The winter for which I had been waiting had finally arrived, only to find me gone.
I couldn’t take it. I needed to go skiing.
Despite discouraging reports of snow conditions, we embarked on a 12-hour journey from Tangier to Oukaïmeden, tucked into North Africa’s Atlas Mountains at 2,600 meters. We traveled south from Marrakech, bending toward the impressive skyline, purple in the valley haze.
At Oukaïmeden, there was no snow. A frigid wind blasted across a bare, north-facing slope. Chairlifts stood like sentinels on the brown grass. At the base, vendors hawked geodes and donkey rides. It was the end of the line, the last day of a ski season that never started.
I traveled to Morocco for the culture, and that’s what I found. But I left a culture behind, too.
I’ve always hated the term “mountain culture.” As far as I could tell, the only people who actually use it are trying to sell you something—ski condos or khakis or magazines. It seemed like shorthand for independently wealthy, self-satisfied, insanely fit or 15 minutes late. Turns out, I’d been living it for too long to recognize it, or perhaps I’d become too cynical to appreciate it.
The culture that surrounds skiing is sturdy, irreverent, indelible. We shiver in skintracks in the blue-black morning and bump into friends on mountaintops. We share beers at the car. We take the dog. We watch the weather. We shovel.
The phrase inshallah is used in Morocco when talking about the future. It means God willing. It’s more concrete than “hopefully,” but still takes into account the unexpected, the fates. I’ve been thinking about inshallah a lot, lately.
Next winter, my streak will reset, and with it, my appreciation for the sport that I’ve grown up with and my gratitude for a life connected to wild places. Twenty-eight winters of uninterrupted skiing seems like a lot, but I’ve got a whole lifetime left to beat it, as well as a new person to share the sport with. This time next year, my daughter Cecily and I will ski together. I can begin to show her what I’ve taken for granted through fresh eyes, inshallah.
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