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.
