Photos, Sponsorship, and Text-Messaging

Well, with no real job, a pulled groin muscle, and therefore lots of free time, I decided to play with some photos. What you see below is the result of hours and hours of time spent in the darkroom, constantly readjusting hues and saturation, exposure times, and filters to get everything just right. Actually, I just photoshopped a lot of it. Thanks Adobe. You guys are great. You should sponsor me or something.

Meanwhile, while I've been playing with photos, it's been dumping. Down low in the valley we've had about 8 inches, which is approximately god only knows what in centimeters. 20 centimeters? Sounds about right. In any case, it was a fat, wet snow, the kind that drapes itself over the landscape in a sopping white blanket. We went up on the hill the other day to check it out, but with zero visibility, a good layer of hardpacked ice underneath the wet bumps, and more Brits on vacation than you would even want to shake a stick at, it wasn't worth staying too long. I also managed, somehow, to pull a groin muscle. I wish I could say it was something extreme but I think it happened when I was running up some stairs to get breakfast a couple of mornings ago. So tele-skiing's out for the moment and the board is in. Which is fine with me, as I think the snow up high will be pretty grabby and probably pretty deep in places. This storm also fell straight down with virtually no wind, directly on to a surface hoar layer which had formed over the past few days and cold nights. For those of you who don't really get into discussions of avalanches and snow conditions beyond "Snow is cold and white," surface hoar looks like little tiny feathers of frost that grow up from the surface of the snow when the nights are cold and windless. It looks really pretty, twinkling in the sun and sounds neat when you ski through it, like thousands of little crystals falling over themselves down the mountain. They're also pretty dangerous because when new snow falls on them, it usually tends to sit on top of all the little pretty crystals, if the wind hasn't knocked them down, and forms a nice little layer that will collapse if enough force is applied to it. And when they collapse, whatever is on top of them soon finds itself hurtling down the hill in an avalanche. Hmmm...surface hoar sucks. So the next few days will be a little cautious as we see how this storm adds itself to the current snowpack.

Meanwhile, we're waiting for Russ and Michela and Adam and Hannah, who are currently on a grand tour of Italy, to come back to Courmayeur so that we can ski with reckless abandon. It was during this tour of Italy that Louise and I discovered that Russ has somehow made a deal with Ullr, the Norwegian god of snow, and Nale, the boozy Middlebury College Ski Patrol invented goddess of snow that works in the opposite fashion of what you might expect. It seems that the farther away from the mountains he goes, the more snow they get. Case in point: Russ and Michela went to London to visit a friend. While they were away, it snowed about two and half feet, which is a lot even in metric units! While he was here, nothing happened in terms of snow. As Russ prepared to leave, reports started coming in of a possible storm system headed our way. Even MeteoFrance, a known bastion of socialist meteorologists, predicted this. Sure enough, it started snowing the day after he left. The farther away he got, the harder it snowed. I know this because we text-messaged each other throughout the duration. The messages were something like this:

dana: we talked to jean-lucca today he said 60 cm possible by sun night

russ: that would be absurd. i am seeing only light snow tomorrow and sunday. keep me posted.

dana: ill check meteo france for mont blanc and keep you up to date

dana: meteo france says only a little but its dumping right now hard

russ: am i far enough away yet? i hate u guys...

dana: its still snowing hard

russ: i'm about as far away as i will get, give me a report. by the way, the tower is still leaning.

dana: damn italian tower architects. yes, it is still snowing...hard

(By the way, until this trip, I never used text messaging so it took me approximately ten minutes to find the period symbol on my phone.)

I haven't heard anything from Russ yet, but I'm assuming that he's getting closer to Courmayeur as the snow has stopped for the moment.

The next few days will be interesting as we ski this storm, most likely by ourselves in the trees and open slopes. The weather forecast is predicting clouds, which rules out 95% of Italians, the British holidays are over, which rules out 99% of the Brits, and the Maestri di Sci won't ski it unless they are with a guide, wearing a harness with a single 22 cm ice screw dangling from the gear loop, which seems to be the preferred method of anchoring one's self to snow around here. Good luck, fellas. You're gonna need it.

I'll work for Backcountry, too

These are the rest of the pictures. I'm apparently a techno-jackass.

Weeze, about to make some turns on the lower Youla bowl. Notice the Salomon logo? Yep, sponsor her too...

This is the Fauteuil des Allemands. That means "German Couch" in Anglo-talk. Why they call it that, I don't know. Not even beer-swilling Bavarians are that big.

I forget what this peak is called, but it's big and pretty. The trees show that I am artistic as well.

Powder Magazine, give me a job.

These are the first photos in this series, 'cause I can't seem to post more than four at a time...hmmm.

Touring up into the Val Veny with the Pyramide Calcaire in the background. The shaded slope is a future project...

This Russ, coming out of the first gully in the Youla bowl. He's skiing on K2 skis with Garmont boots, in a Mountain Hardwear jacket and North Face pants. Reps, want to sponsor him? Anyone?

Russ, dropping the knee and getting 'er done.

Coming in for a landing. You can't see it here, but his poles are pink.

My life is a big cliche

Weeze and I live in Italy. At least temporarily, that is. So what else would you do with some free time than make your own pasta? That's a rhetorical question, so don't think too hard trying to answer it. Please.

Anyway, Russ told us that it was easy to do. I think that one of the reasons it was easy to do is because of the measuring system. Italians use this crazy system called 'metric' which is based on something logical, like the distance light can travel in a void in some absurdly small amount of time, instead of the size of Prince So-and-So's thumb at the time of his entrance into adulthood, or whatever the American system is based on. And then, using this logical (and repeatable!) basis, they divide it into tens, and permutations thereof which was about the only division problem I could solve until 5th grade or so.What do we Americans divide things into? 12, 4, 5,218, etc. Perfectly easy to remember. 5 points for anyone who can tell me what a furlong is. 10 for anyone who can tell me what an acre is based on. Click comment on the bottom of this blog entry to enter the contest. The reward and recognition will be worth it by far. In any case, pasta is absurdly easy to make. Just remember that you use one egg to every 100 grams of flour. For every three eggs, use one half eggshell of water (or oil, depending on which Italian grandmother is giving you the recipe). Then mix it up till it gets good and doughy and roll it out with a pasta roller or a rolling pin, fold it over itself a few times, and then cut it into whatever shapes you want. Simple, if you have a nice little scale in grams, which in America only exists in high school science labs, waiting to be stolen by the local pot dealer so he can accurately measure the amount of weed he stole from your friend's father's crop...okay, maybe only in my high school. But most of us don't have the luxury of one of these scales, so we have to rely on Google to convert grams to cups, or ounces. And by this time, booting up the computer, going to Google, entering all those numbers, well...you could probably just buy some Buitoni and not worry about it at all. Damn metric system, anyway.

But our pasta was good, by first-time American standards. I was going to make an analogy to losing your virginity and first-times and quality, which you can probably fill in from here, but this is a family blog, dammit. Suffice to say, we liked it, but were glad at the same time that Michela and Russ, who are both really good at cooking Italian food, weren't there to witness the entire process. It probably looked a lot like people from the Midwest trying to eat a Maine lobster, or me trying to eat an armadillo, which I've heard is possible.

After the post-dinner food coma sunk in, we decided to watch Gladiator, a quality film that plays fast and loose with such things as 'facts,' 'history,' and 'melodrama.' But it's about Italy, sort of, and so it's appropriate to talk about, I guess. Really, I have very little else to say, but I didn't want to disappoint you, 'cause chances are good you're at your job, pretending to work by G-Mail chatting with someone, and this blog is a pretty good diversion that your boss might not be able to distinguish from real work. Brief tangent aside, Gladiator got me to thinking. Italy, or at least the Romans, built a super impressive civilization, committed some major atrocities, gave us a pretty good model of governance, at least in theory, and built some of the greatest architectural wonders the world will ever see. And then the whole she-bang collapsed on itself for reasons that have inspired thousands of Ph.D theses and Italy, as we know it now, is a sort of anomaly in Europe. They've got all the outward trappings of the other countries in the EU, like trains, social welfare, and excessively good pastries, but none of the attitude, the holier-than-thou, our-system-will-kick-your-system's-ass mentality. They take the time to enjoy the day, smoke a cigarette, drink a coffee, buy some really high leather boots, what have you. They're fun. They're like you're friend who doesn't have a job, who just skis all the time, doesn't have prospects, etc. No wonder I feel at home here.

It make me wonder if any other former empire nations will becomg like the Italians in a few years. I'd love to see the Brits take themselves less seriously, relax, develop a better cuisine, take the entire month of August off to go to the beach. Or maybe, in a long, long time, us Americans will stop being afraid of everything, stop selling guns to people who then shoot the people we're trying to protect, and just calm down, take a deep breath, and step back. If only we hadn't outlawed lead plumbing and incest, I'm sure the whole process would be sped along nicely.

Well, from pasta to cultural politics, that got involved. Meanwhile, Louise and I ski pretty much all day, everyday. It's ten days since the last storm ended and we're still getting lift-accessed fresh tracks, with more snow on the way in the next few days, says local freeride guru Jean-Lucca. Somewhere around 60 centimeters. Quick, how many feet is that?

By the way, this is how we get Wi-Fi access. We wander around Entreves or Courmayeur until we find a nice little spot, like this, and then we steal all the time we can. No one's yelled at us. Yet.

The Pics that got away...

Russ, schralping the back bowl with style.

This is the Canalone di Dolonne with our line in black. Pretty much the easiest to get to. The upper drainage is accessed from the highest lift and looks like a lot of fun. Only about a dozen tracks coming out of it. Gotta get a guide, man, before you go "fuori piste."

Apres-ski, Courmayeur style. Machiatto, chocolate crepes, and Fanta. Life is rough.

Some Nice Mountain Pictures

This is the back bowl, you can see the second highest lift building in the middle of the photo. All the chutes you can see will go with another storm. We've skied the first two big ones, the four smaller ones on the left are a bit wind-scoured.

This looks really extreme, but it's actually prett low in the Val Veny. We toured up to check out the "Zona Vietata," or Forbidden Zone. They only say you'll be arrested if you go there, but not why, so we had to find out why. Not many lines will go safely, so we'll leave it alone.

Runout of the back bowl...a week after the storm. Looking good...

Schussing with style, on a belly full of tartiflette.

An Opportunity Missed?

The grapevine tells me that Vermont, and pretty much the entire East Coast, got pounded with a lot of snow. Sources say two to five feet. That's pretty great. When I first heard the news I wondered if maybe I was cursed and that I should have stayed in the States a few more days to get the goods. Maybe. But then I thought about the past few days, skiing with Russ and Louise. The night we arrived, it was snowing really hard. Russ told us that when he left a week prior that there was no snow on the ground at all. In our yard there was at least two feet, almost three. But we arrived on a Wednesday and it had been snowing since Monday. It would be tracked out, bumped up, pretty much done. Nonetheless, we decided to get up early, buy our season passes, and salvage what we could of what must have been an epic storm. The passes were pretty easy to get accomplished as Silvia, and her twin counterpart Eleanora, both with matching modified Italian mullet haircuts, was very good with us as we stumbled our way through Italian, French, and English to get a red season pass, good for about a dozen resorts and only 800 Euros.

The tram ride up looked pretty promising with good snow cover on the steep chutes that lead down to Entreves. As it was our first day, we let Russ lead the way down to the Zerotta lift, staying on the pistes and ducking off at the very end when there was a wide open field that had a shocking number of tracks given that the real storm had occurred three days ago. Knee deep pow cushioned us as we made lazy arcs down to the lift. Even the life ride up revealed that under the chairlift, with a number of wide-open, easily-scoped lines were completely untracked. Completely untouched. I started to get worried. Maybe there was reason that there were no tracks. A cliff? Maybe some other hidden danger that we, as newbie American ski bums, didn’t know about. Russ didn’t know, and neither did Jean-Lucca, our new Italian friend, a self-described “free-rider.” Well, whatever. We’d find out soon enough. At the top of Zerotta, we took a winding piste choked with Brits snowplowing, Italian Maestri di Sci leading their tiny charges in a piste-border to piste-border S curve of death until we finally got a look at what we were dealing with. Courmayeur, at least that part that most people ski, is a massive alpine meadow, tipped up at about 25 to 30 degrees, south to southwest facing. About a zillion lifts service essentially the same pistes, so our prediction that it would be tracked out should have been right. Strangely enough, there were wide open areas that had no tracks on them, in plain view of the lifts, surround on all sides by hordes of vacationing Italians and Brits, determined to ski the ridges off the corduroy as fast as possible.

This was, by far, the greatest moment of culture shock in all my life.

For the rest of day we skied the most obvious lines that were covered in two to three feet of light Alpine blower. We tracked up the main meadow as much as we wanted, moving to another lift only as soon as it started to get heavy in the noon sun. Avalanche bombs boomed off the Mont Blanc massif as ski patrol prepped the upper mountain for opening. We moved off the main Checrouit face and over to the north facing Val Veny, skiing absurdly open trees with small cliff bands all day. On a whim, we decided to drop into the woods above the Zerotta lift and found four perfect chutes, tipped up at about 40 degrees and choked with blower. We though about hiding our tracks to the entrance but on our return run, we could see that no one had gone into them at all. In fact we had been skiing alone all day. And we hadn’t done anything that couldn’t be skied directly off a lift, with easy traverses or pistes directly back to the bottom. No hiking. No effort.

No way this could last.

The next day we set off early, aching slightly from all the skiing the day before. Skiing the icy groomers of Stowe all season hadn’t really prepared us for this. Patrol had finally opened the upper mountain, but the line was super long and we decided to head to the Gabba lift, another north facing area in the Val Veny. Our first run down was just as incredible as the day before, wide open trees with untouched powder all over the place. Riding up the lift, the same thing happened as the day before: we saw no tracks, no one skiing the trees, and we were far from the first ones on the lift. We skied the Gabba all day, stopping for lunch on a sunny terrace where we took off our hats, gloves, and jackets and sat down to a steaming hot lunch of tartiflette and beer, for 8 Euros. That’s about the price of a dry muffin and two hot chocolates at Stowe.

After lunch it was more of the same. And the next days we mined the same woods, only finding them slightly more tracked. Feeling adventurous, we took the second highest lift up, expecting to see the tracks from the hordes that had been lined up the day before. Not so. Apparently there was a well-battered (groomed) piste running down from the top, a solid intermediate cruiser run and not worth the half-hour wait in line anywhere else. Here, apparently, it was something special and had been skied into oblivion. However, the huge Alpine bowl just past the fence line, where the ski resort boundary ends, was pretty much untouched. We checked our beacons, dug a quick pit, and dropped in, taking a pretty conservative line, not knowing where we would end up if we went farther into the bowl. I know this is getting boring, but what the hell. I’ll tell you anyway. There was more powder. And it was easy to find first tracks. And the damn thing ended on a trail that we could ski down to the bottom of a lift. And it was really easy to ski another run. No hiking.

In the past week, we’ve skied only the most obvious lines we could find. We spent a day scouting some other lines farther up the Val Veny, lines that descend a beautiful Alpine bowl down into wide-open trees and end up on a road that goes right back to a lift where you can do it all again. Yesterday we skied the Dolonne drainage, which is lift-accessed, but is only skied with guides and their clients. The hardest part about the Dolonne drainage is picking a line. It’s only about the size of Mad River Glen, with a little more vert if skied from the very top. Oh, and the snowpack is also really, really good. No weak layers and about three solid feet of well-bonded powder, on top of a consolidated mass of hard snow. So maybe I’m not cursed after all.

Things that are Great.

There are some things in life that are great. Muhammed Ali was great at boxing. Great. Burt Bacharat was great at singing in the 1970s. Great. Mario Andretti, an Italian, was a great race car driver. I think that his success was not due to any special skill he developed on his own, but rather to an innnate ability of all Italians to do things very fast in cars. This, for an individual Italian, is great. The ability to get from point A to point B in the fastest manner possible, while absolutely thrilling any passengers, is great. For groups of Italians, all in cars or on scooters, or the occasional foreigner who happen to throw themselves into the fray, this is maybe not so great. Being 'thrilled' on a second-to-second basis is nerve-wracking. Unless you're a Chihuahua, and then you're life is one thrill after another, until you die of a heart attack. Because you never see old Chihuahuas. Just nervous ones. The topic of thrills is not really the point of this blog, though, but greatness. Which brings me handily to my point; the things that are great about Italian skiing.

1) Trails, or 'pistes', are groomed, or 'battered', every night. Coming from America, this is not so different, or amazing. The difference seems to be that in America, going off the trail usually results in a collision with a tree, unless you meant to do it. In Italy, the grooming ends wherever the cat driver felt like making it end. There are no trees, really. So, to an American skier, there’s really nothing to keep you on the piste. For an Italian, there seem to be a lot of things. The heaviness of one’s skis has been cited. The ‘danger’ inherent in going off-piste seems to be another, despite the total lack of crevasse or avalanche danger in the majority of the slopes. Perhaps the Italian feel that if they do go off-piste, they’re the ones that’ll get battered. In any case, this leads to one of the greatest things I have ever experience in my entire skiing life: fresh powder with no hiking, no face whipping branches, and no competitors for fresh tracks four days after a storm. What, you might say, this can’t be. Are you working for the mountain, doing PR? That answer would be no, as that is illegal with my visa. I’m just telling the truth. And the truth is beautiful.

2) Ski bunnies. Take the world’s most fashionable country. Put them on sunny slopes, where no one, even the guys wearing them, need down coats. Add ready access to black and white stretch pants. More bunnies that you could shake a stick at. Does it matter that none of them can ski well? That given a powder day, they would complain that they’re jackets were getting wet and that their tan was fading? No. This does not matter. More fresh tracks for the Americani, who, by the way, should have guides. Even to ski the woods under the chairlift.

3) Sweating while riding the lift. Yep, that’s right. As an East Coaster, I’ve been taught over the years to dress for the conditions and that usually means t-shirt, long-underwear, light coat, and a shell coat. And I’m usually still cold. This year at Stowe, so cold that I would ride in the gondola every run to stay warm, even though the skiing under the gondy is pretty boring. Here, I sweat. All the time. I can feel my feet all day, which isn’t actually as nice as you’d think. My goggles fog. I actually considered buying the Captain Uber-Dork model with the fan inside the lenses to eliminate the problem. It takes some getting used to, but I’m trying hard. It’s especially hard when we stop for lunch at one of the approximately eighteen on-mountain restaurants (and by on-mountain, I don’t mean at the bottom, I mean mid-slope), and you have to de-layer to t-shirt and ski pants in order to comfortably sit outside and drink a beer, eat some tartiflette (look it up Google and drool), and watch the clouds roll over the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey. If there are any clouds.

4) Euro-Spin. I know that it sounds like a horrible stationary bike based exercise for Euros, but it’s actually the Italian equivalent of Costco, minus the shitty, preservative stuffed American food. Granted, Italians don’t regard it as the highest quality and the expiration dates are often past-due, but the food is good and stocking the house for five or six days at time costs less than 50 Euros. We are currently trying to gain sponsorship from them, as being sponsored by a ski company is great and all for ski equipment, but you can’t eat skis. And you can definitely eat everything at Euro-Spin.

There are many more things that are great about Italian skiing. I could go on for a long time about them. But the message that you should take away from this is simple: Italian skiing sucks. Stay out West. Remain faithful to the ice bumps of the East. There’s nothing to ski here, folks. Nothing to ski here. The food is awful and the skiers are way too rabid, ski everything off in a matter of hours. Can’t wait to get back to the States.

Prelude

Did you ever watch Doogie Howser, MD? That show with Neil Patrick Harris when he was real young and supposedly a genius, hence his MD status at the age of 16 or so? Wasn't he precocious? Anyway, I feel like him, plus 10 years, minus 100 IQ points, because he wrote in his diary every night on a pretty sweet blue screened computer with white letters, the height of computing technology in the 80s. So this blog could be just like that, Doogie's Diary, only my computer is way more advanced.

That's about the best introduction this blog will get. I could go on about the reasons for wanting to go and live in Italy and why I haven't started chasing down careers and doing something called "building equity," which as far as I can fathom has nothing to do with building anything really and will never put you on an equal footing with anyone else. What I have done is held doggedly, dogmatically, to a promise made to myself as a wee exchange student, fresh out of high school and not yet in college, that dictated that I should never miss out on any experience I thought that I would regret later. Well, I figured that I would regret not taking my friend Michela up on her offer to live in her family's house in the Italian Alps. A lot. So here I go.

This blog will be about my life there, or maybe my life in general. As such, it'll be self-involved drivel about the minutiae of my quotidien life.

The only reason for that last sentence was an intense desire to showcase my fancy education. I hope it worked. That said, if you're looking for profundity and clarity, well...I'll probably talk about skiing and climbing a lot.


And so before departing I'm doing the usual pre-trip things, packing, unpacking, wondering how all my gear will fit into two bags weighing less that 51 pounds, wondering if I can really just put my foot under the duffle bag when it goes on the scale to buy a few extra pounds. Bet I can. In just a week's time I'll be over the Atlantic, on my way to Milan, via London. A few days in Milan with my friend's family, the Ronzanis, and then on to Courmayeur and their house there, where they're letting me and my girlfriend stay for the next few months to ski and climb.

Doogie's Diary, entry one, finished.