Adventuring

Our group must have looked quite the spectacle from the tram cars: a gaggle of the littlest ski racers making their way down the mountain’s toughest trail. A few of our crew ripped right down D.J.’s Tramline, not the least bit phased by the rock drops and snowy bumps as high as the skiers who were maneuvering around them. Others struggled – more with their own nerves than with the technicality of the skiing. These are, after all, Cannon kids; they’ll ski just about anything.

After the descent, as we stood between the tram car docks waiting for a ride back to the summit, I had the kids look up at the trail they’d just skied: strewn with boulders and exceedingly steep in some areas. Whether they’d been the anxious ones or the confident skiers moments before, they all seemed to puff up just a little bit gazing back up the mountain.

That was my first time down Tramline, too, and it was, until Saturday, the only trail on the mountain I hadn’t skied. At least the only one on the trail map.

That trail map has changed a good bit since the days when I was one of the littlest ski racers here. Maybe it’s because I lived (and skied) away during college and for several years after that, or because I’ve been exploring the mountain with my own kids as they have grown and progressed in their skiing prowess, or because I coach with a guy who knows every nook and cranny here – on the trail map and off – whatever the reason, I find joy in this adventuring.

Last Wednesday my kids had a rare snow day from school, and we spent a good chunk of it at Cannon, arriving to find snow so deep it was hard to open the car doors (and we later had to dig said car out of the unplowed spot we’d parked in early that morning). We made one run down a wide-open trail before the kids dragged me into the woods, and we spent the rest of the day exploring.

I grew up skiing this mountain, although we were weekend commuters, so too far away to make it on a snow day from school. Back then, there were no glades. Sure, there were a few secret stashes off the saddle between Cannon and Mittersill, and once the latter area closed and the forest grew back up around trails and lift lines, there were some hidden spots there, too. But certainly nothing on the trail map.

Now Cannon lists 22 glades on its trail map, ranging from short, beginner woods runs to long, tight, tricky tree skiing. Wednesday we headed to the top to ski the glades there, then over to Mittersill to ski more glades, and finally ended the day on the old Tuckerbrook trail, cut back in the 1930s and maintained, often clandestinely, in the decades since.

This is the one off-piste trail I remember from my own childhood. Skiing it is a rite of passage. Tuckerbrook is not a particularly hard trail, but it is an adventure. You have to hike to reach the entrance, it’s not groomed, and there’s a long traverse out at the bottom. You also need to line up a lift back to the base area, as the trail spits skiers onto a dead end back road a couple of miles from any ski lift.

Although a few others had been in there by the time we reached Tuckerbrook Wednesday, it was some of the best skiing we had all day. As grateful as I am for the manmade snow that allows some consistency to ski season, there is nothing like the real stuff – and that’s what you find on Tuckerbrook and in the glades.

So it was fun to continue the adventuring last weekend, both for my kids and their ski groups and for the young skiers I help to coach. My youngest daughter took another trip down Tuckerbrook. My oldest skied a different unmapped trail. Our group snuck through woods so tight branches smacked our legs and cheeks as we made our way to hidden glades, turning around trees and rocks, finding soft snow everywhere we went.

I don’t know about the kids, but I ended the weekend tired – and fulfilled. And grateful that, on a mountain with as many secret stashes as there are named trails, there are plenty more adventures to chase.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the March 23, 2018 issue of the Littleton Record.

Dance of the Groomers

I can see them when I sit at the living room window on winter evenings, or when I go out to take one last peek at the sky before bedtime, checking the stars, sniffing hopefully for the scent of snow about to fall, looking to the mountain for the groomers in their nighttime dance.

We've come a long way since this old Tucker Sno-Cat!

Sometimes there is only one on our side of the mountain, a solitary light moving slowly along. Often we can see two or three, and on rare occasions all four snowcats, working their different parts of the mountain, moving along trails disguised by night’s darkness. The bright lights seem synchronized in their slow up-and-down, to-and-fro motions, although surely the snowcat drivers can’t see each other as they work, cleaning up the day’s mess of bumps and ruts and uncovered ice, planting neat rows of corduroy as they go.  

A couple weekends ago, as I drove back up Three Mile Hill toward the mountain for an evening function, I watched one cat crawl up Middle Ravine (perhaps) and another down what I figured to be Skyline on Mittersill. I smiled at the glow of cat lights moving on the mountain I know, have known for as long as I have known anything, but only by day.

What do the trails look like in the dark, bereft of the skiers who congregate there for their daily bread, their freedom, a few hours of joy – all during daylight hours? The groomers know. They know a landscape apart from the one so familiar to so many: the same contours from a different perspective.

In mountains, as in life, perspective is critical – and constantly shifting. Have you ever looked at a familiar mountain from a different angle and not been able to name it? Or climbed to the top to see it up close, rather from the distance of town? Or considered a problem from a different potential solution, a sentence with a different twist, an opinion from someone else’s point-of-view?

Fluid and quiet from afar, I know the snowcats are noisy when close, that the hard blades of their tracks churn through the snow and ice as they move. Leaving well-swept snow in their wake, they are a juxtaposition of power and grace.

A couple of Sunday mornings ago, the temperature dropped after the trails had been groomed, creating a solid, slippery, and unsafe surface. Back up the mountain the groomers went to refurbish the trails. From below, the little ski racers I coach on weekends watched wide-eyed as the cats moved along familiar trails, fixing them up just for us.

Some evenings, my own children look for the snowcats during dinner, gazing from the dining room table, out through the early dark of winter, toward a light or two or three moving along the mountain. In the mornings, when the sky is pre-dawn slate, just lightening to peach along the mountains’ silhouette, we can usually spot a groomer putting on the finishing touches, making one last pass before the skiers arrive.

The cats leave the snow ready for edges to carve, for skiers to find their Zen moments – in short, quick turns or fast, sweeping ones across the fall line. A day’s worth of skiers marks the once-smooth canvas into countless cuts and divots, slices and ruts, leaving it muddled and choppy. And as night falls, the groomers take to the mountain again, and we watch their dance from afar.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the February 9, 2018 issue of the Littleton Record.

The Other Side of the Saddle

In honor of this week's publication of my book, A History of Cannon Mountain: Trails, Tales and Skiing Legends… I’m posting an essay I wrote several years ago, before Mittersill was officially reopened as part of Cannon Mountain.

   The swath of gray clouds pours over and around Cannon Mountain, exposing glimpses of winter sunshine, bursts of warmth onto the snowy ribbons of ski trails, as we look back at the summit from the top of the saddle between Cannon and Mount Jackson, catching our breath after a short climb.

   Fifteen minutes earlier we’d been in the fog at the top of Cannon, contemplating the hike over the saddle. Now, standing in an island of light, a donut hole of blue sky above us, it seems we made a good choice. 

   Unlike many ski areas in North America, Cannon has not been bastardized by a glut of humongous second homes and row upon row of condos built at its base and encroaching its slopes. The view from here includes more houses than it did when I was a child, but that is true of many places, and here they still only dot the landscape, without ruin. The climb seemed longer then, the skis heavier for my small body to carry. But standing on the saddle, that bridge between familiarity and adventure, groomed and ungroomed, has always inspired in me anticipation of the sweet turns to come.

   Behind us lies the boot-packed trail we just climbed, leading gradually up from Cannon, whose ski trails reach like icy appendages toward the valley. Most of the trails from the summit are nearly as old as skiing in America. The one we just descended, Taft Slalom, is part of the oldest mountain trail cut specifically for skiing in this part of the world, back in 1932 and ’33. The others were added beginning in 1938, when Cannon Mountain became home to the continent’s first passenger aerial tramway – and Cannon became one of America’s first ski areas.

   On the saddle’s other side, through spruce trees stunted to midget form by decades of ice storms and wicked wind, lies the promise of an adventure down trails forgotten by many, but still revered by Cannon old timers and more recent locals. There are runs nearly overgrown in places, where legends were once made of daredevilish racers who were willing to launch their bodies down steep, icy, narrow passages through forests logged then regrown. And there are newer, hidden runs, cut clandestinely by more modern thrill seekers.

   On days when there is new snow, a thin, steady line of hikers winds up the saddle, and visitors to Cannon wonder where the line leads. Little do they know the joy on the other side, the exhilaration of the turns earned with a short hike, a few beads of sweat. But on this day of weird weather and no new snow, we are the only two here.

   On the saddle, skiers pause to ponder the view and their imminent run. A tangle of runs – some well-traveled, many tucked secretly into the forest – winds down from the saddle. Skiers might head down the Tucker Brook Trail, built by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in 1934. The trail’s entrance is hidden now in the brush, and its series of 13 quick, steep turns has been legendary among area skiers for generations. Or they may choose the less intimidating Baron’s Run, named after the charismatic Austrian Baron who established the now defunct Mittersill ski area on the opposite side of the saddle from Cannon. The Baron’s village of chalets remains nestled into the nooks of the mountain, below the old ski trails and rusting chair lift towers.

   Today we head through the first narrow trail with no specific route in mind. A few turns down the concave path of uneven moguls is all it takes to get breathing hard again, and we stop to catch our breath and look through the woods, wondering if we should bushwhack in search of a clearing we’ve seen hidden somewhere along that ledge.

   We decide to keep on the way we were headed and soon funnel out at the top of the expired chairlift, where a labyrinth of overgrown runs waits for us. We point our skis down the old lift line, dodging poplar shoots and small fir trees. At junctions we change direction with little conversation, creeping lower and lower, as the trees grow taller and the rooftops of the Baron’s village come into sight. The snow is not deep, but it is smooth, and we glide turn to turn, finding a rhythm, then losing it, and finding it again.

   Eventually we turn sharply to the right, on a narrow path through a forest of white birch that leads to Cannon’s base area. The trail rolls from slight mound to small divot, and we push with our poles, projecting our bodies between the trees. Soon we can hear the steady electric hum of a chairlift bullwheel and the voices of skiers calling to each other.

   We pop out onto one of the lower trails, a wide, flat beginner run so opposite of the pitch we just skied. We glide to the lift line, smile, and join the sparse crowd of skiers who remain oblivious to the secrets of the saddle’s other side.