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There’s a Chill in the Air…

“Hey, can I borrow your car?” I text a friend at three in the afternoon.

I’m in the car by the time he responds. That’s the beauty of close friends; the question is a formality because we both already know the answer. Twenty minutes later, I roll into the ski resort parking lot, grab a soft flask and head up the summer road at a slowwww jog.

It’s a weird feeling. I’m used to this specific place in its winter clothes: soft and draped in white, the air outside cold. Me, sweaty and overdressed. Usually, a skintrack leaps left off the road and wends through a steep section of pines. Now, the hill is chock full of head-high shrubs, and there’s no path in sight. I have to work my way around, following more conventional paths.

An hour later, I drop into a precarious Jenga tower of boulders. Alone, and back to the bushwack-style route-finding I’m used to. An alpine cirque towers overhead in three directions. Chutes cascade down from granite walls, and huge stones stack in an endless waterfall.

I slow my pace from a run to a beacon search procedure and make three zig-zags before I see it. My ski sits balanced on a flat, gray rock almost four feet across, as if waiting for me. I pick it up delicately. All seems as I left it, months ago, minus some minor rust on the edges. Ski in hand, the cirque takes on another dimension, and I sit in reverie for a second, imagining the feet of snow stacking up, hearing the silence and pondering how in the world my ski made it more than a thousand feet from where I last saw it on top of the ridge far above me.

Then, the moment passes. The heat returns, and I’m left wondering when the first taste of winter will return for real.

—Liam

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