The Gimlet tour begins as a bushy-tailed fox bounds up the slope through old tracks to hide in the rocks. With skins affixed to our skis, the synthetic hide enabling our ascent, it occurs to me that the critter is possibly showing off. As we try to determine how to approach the selected slope without offending a private landowner, a caretaker for an exclusive home with a motorized gate at the entrance to the property kindly stops to give us some hints about where not to ski.
Of course, we don't want to spoil anyone's living room view with our squiggles in the snow, but it has been enticing to ski south valley slopes that beckon through the windscreen on the daily commute and are only occasionally skiable.
A little caffeine and an hour and a half cardio workout do wonders to stimulate the gray matter Thirty years of enlightened leadership enables skiers to share backyard suburban slopes with the fox.
Thinking of leaders as I ski, I think about County Commissioner Dennis Wright's extemporaneous comments about the demand for high quality municipal services in the county's rural areas. Wright said at a pubic meeting about preferred scenarios on how the county should grow that it is ironic in a place where people come to get into the mountains away from the hubbub of the city, citizens still want to come home to modern conveniences.
Gimlet roads are nicely plowed for the powder day, and although we are about to climb 2,000 feet up a mountain, we aren't exactly roughing it on a Saturday. I think about jumping in the hot tub after the ski.
As I make a kick step to scissor further up the shadowy side of the slope, my thoughts fly from the politics of the valley floor to what it means to be in the backcountry. Away, exposed, tuning in -- the experience of getting into the mountains in winter brings new levels of connection to place. For instance, climbing Baldy from River Run early season, it is remarkable to climb alone before work as an endless snake of headlights carves the morning commute out of the dark. Then, from the top of the mountain as the sun rises, I am mesmerized by the expanse of untouched mountain peaks coming into view. Chair lifts are humming and I wonder how many people still oozing up the highway are hooked on this groomed resort machine I am enjoying?
Catching a tip in dense powder alongside the up-track on another backcountry tour I flip onto my back stuck upside down like a turtle. I don't realize the silence until I am looking at a sundog lingering in the blue sky. Suddenly, the tintinitis ringing in my ears is louder than ever. I think Lez Zeppelin rocking at Whisky Jacques' finally did me in. How is it that I survived The Dead Kennedys and The Who only to be deafened by a cover band?
Finally, away from industrial music and machines, I think about Annie Dillard's book "Teaching a Stone to Talk." This is all incredibly finite and I am slowly able to hear the voices again that whisper in the mountains.
I snap back to the cities -- as much as Ketchum and Sun Valley are cities. Actually, I am walking in a snowstorm just as night is falling on the slippery sidewalk between the neighboring towns on my way to a screening at The Community School of the documentary film "After Innocence" about the wrongfully imprisoned exonerated by DNA evidence.
Walking in the snow thinking about the challenge of escaping urban rat races, I temper my pessimism by remembering the relative freedom I have enjoyed in my life. I am unable to truly understand the unimaginable state of being locked up for a crime I did not commit.
Then in the haze of streetlights reflecting in the snow, something inexplicable moves in my peripheral vision. Trapped between the scoured walls of the plowed sidewalk and my heavy marching feet is a fat mouse. Where did it come from? The tufted rodent burrows into some loose powder to escape a would-be predator. Under different circumstances, not surrounded by opulent palaces in a wealthy valley, I would be a predator with an instinct to survive like Papillon in solitary confinement or an explorer lost in the Arctic.
I think about skinning through a slot canyon with sleeping giants, potential avalanches lurking above me. I contemplate being locked in a coffin of snow if the slope were to fail and engulf me. Take it easy little mouse, I'm just wandering by. May the mountains give me the same leeway.
Thoughts return to the present as we finish the tour of Gimlet. Unavoidably crossing private property with a vacant villa, we rest and gobble up the glory of our glamorous tracks. From the safety of the plowed cul-de-sac again I see the fox. It emerges at a trot from the exclusive driveway with the motorized gate. Is that someone's glove in its mouth? No, I think he's taken a magpie and headed across the highway.
