California Dreaming on Such a Winter's Day

The legal boundary for gambling is the state line between California and Nevada, but for those with a keener sense of risk, the real challenge is the wintertime drive on route 80 as it heads over the mountain pass. Like all bets the drive can look deceptively simple. On a clear day traffic speeds along at times great than seventy miles an hour on two lanes: one that is almost reserved for the 18 wheel trucks and the other for their smaller gas guzzling cousins, suv’s. On those good days the mountains are less than four hours away from San Francisco, and the allure of spending weekday life at sea level and weekend life skiing on Olympic quality resorts has created a Gortex migrant class. Thousands go to the mountains in hopes of a weekend concoction of deep powder, blue skies, private hot tubs, and micro brewed beer. Most weekends this quadriceps indulgent lifestyle can be achieved.

But there are those other weekends when the gamble goes the other way; sometimes it snows. The book, The Perfect Storm, was about a series of weather coincidences that lead to massive waves in the Atlantic and George Clooney to try to speak with a Maine accent. Storms along Donner Pass up this ante; as bad as it got for Clooney he never decided to eat Mark Walberg. The mountain ridge is a jagged comb that clouds from the pacific scrape against as they head west. The week before the Great Ski Race it snowed 18 inches on three consecutive days, and I tried to do my best to make it over the pass.

I had rented a four wheel SUV from Hertz and decided to splurge on the $25 dollars worth of insurance. I was at a friends 40th birthday party and when I woke the next day and realized the combination of margaritas I had the night before wasn’t going to mix very well with trying to hit the slopes I got in the car and headed home. I was waved through a highway check that mad sure all vehicles had either chains or four wheel grip.

They don’t check, however, if the drivers have any understanding of physics because my journey home was filled with answers to high school problems of what would happen if a large mass hit a frictionless surface at a certain velocity. The times I slid were moments of chance. As I headed toward the snow bank on the side of the road there wasn’t much more I could than simply hope that something caught the pavement. I was lucky. Once the wind caught the truck directly ahead of me and pushed it one lane over. Another time with a different truck it sent it diagonally down the road before the truck managed to pull out and just avoid the 18 wheeler coming over the hill.

At least these were the times I could see. There were a couple of instances when the wind was blowing so strong at the drifts on the side of the road that I could not see the truck a few feet ahead of me, a white out. In one of my perhaps dumbest driving moments I tapped on my breaks because I wasn’t sure if the car a few feet behind me could see me either. I don’t know what it is like to drive through smoke at the Dayton 500, but I will admit that I was stupid enough to try to drive blind.

I think this idiocy of trying the pass might be the sieve that makes Easterners think all Californians are kooky. Those from the older states grew up with Snow Days and approach such conditions with the concept of there are times that one should not be out driving. This practical philosophy doesn’t occur to the Golden State where the ability to drive is almost in the state constitution, and the horror of missing a Monday meeting is almost unforgivable. The thing about being snowed in at the East is that everyone is. On the west coast, there is a good chance that your clients aren’t.

I did finally make it home in time for my father’s 71st birthday and was bright eyed enough for my banking job the rest of the week. A little bit of fear still lingered though as I knew I was heading up the next weekend to go once again over a mountain pass. Only this time, I would do it without a car.

The Great Ski Race goes 18 miles from Tahoe to Truckee. In its thirty second year it is a fundraiser for the Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue, an organization that aids those skiers who have made extremely bad turns. It did seem a little strange to have a race that was about helping people get out of the wilderness would send just under two thousand into it, but this is the kind of irony that my brain shutdown in elevation.

Since the route is a point to point, there is a bus that takes those who park at the finish to the start. The weather looked liked it was going to be gorgeous as I waited in the parking lot. I watched slow moving sunrise was a dark shade of amber and then turned around to catch the moon set under the mountains.

With my weather fears slowly dissipating, I quickly found a new source of anxiety: the competition. Someone shouted asked the guy four people back from me whether he was planning on doing Western States, the 100 mile race through the mountains.

“No,” he replied, “not this year,” as if there were other years that he would have thought this was a sensible idea. The guy seated next to me on the bus ride was an ironman triathlete which took him about three minutes for him to mention in the same way that people from Harvard name drop their alma mater. He then talked about how he done really well at a twelve hour adventure race and how great his training was coming along. I do not know why I tend to be the recipient of these types of discussions, but I do think the khaki pants and 49er sweatshirt I wore as an outer shell before the race started didn’t really intimidate enough.

I did discover the one subject that will go on longer than a triathlete discussing his bike: a cross country skier talking about the wax on his skis. The largest example of how I am hack skier is that I really don’t have an opinion about wax; I just go to the ski shop and ask them to put on the race quality stuff. In the race skiing world this is as blasphemous as a Trekkie not having an opinion about who was a better captain between Kirk and Picard. The wax comes in skittle like color schemes suited for precise range of temperatures, moisture content, and snow age. There is usually a base and then a layer on top. The expensive stuff, the high fluorocarbon, needs to be applied in a well ventilated room, and at the Olympic is a closely guarded secret held by teach team’s wax technician, the skiing equivalent of porn’s fluffer. The guy on the bus next to me went on about his diagonal grooving and I was lucky enough to escape of the bus before he started into how he rescrapes his skis.

Standing in the starting coral after dropping off my sweatshirt and pants to be taken to the finish, I was able to get a glimpse of the other competitors and it was the largest collection of big beards I have ever seen in a race. Prospector chic never seemed to left the area, and I wondered how much warmer these mountain men would be in their home element than me.

Still there were a few reassuring moments that even though it was suppose to be a race, the most important part was to have fun. A group of women dressed up in Wizard of Oz costumes and another had a rabbit costume. Right before the third wave started a guy came out wearing only his bib and a Speedo. I began to think that this race was going to be the skiing equivalent of the bay to breakers if it were, of course, twice as long, held at altitude and went over a pass.

As the race waves went off, I had worked to get towards the front of my wave only to discover that I had misread the sign and that my wave was the one right ahead. I quickly jumped the rope and found myself at the back.

The course description is rather simple: you go up for eight miles and then you go down for ten with some rolling bumps to keep you honest. The eight miles is never super steep the way some bike rides throw stuff at you with names like Nasty Grade or the Marshall Wall. But while there are no deep moments of panic, there isn’t much of a break. It is a steady constant push like the opening chords of Led Zepplin’s Kashmir, a constant pounding as if you plugged yourself into a stair master at frappe setting for over an hour. Then after your legs have squeezed every last atp molecule out, you ski down the backside with the same kind of hope I had in the storm crossing with my car, of sliding correctly though not necessary at all stable around the switch back turns.

The good news is that they serve soup on the course, and the view is spectacular.

It was a great day to be outside, and I did my best to push myself up the slope. It was the first race that I have actually had skiers near me; on one prior race I was dead last at forty minutes behind the next skier . I have not learned how to ski while avoiding the person next to me polling territory faster than the land grant in Oklahoma and hope I was kind to my fellow racers. Once the starting frenzy had subsided, I was with a polite crowd for most of the day though my main competition wound up being a couple of junior high school girls a third of my age. At the very end of the race is a steep chute and I did a quality face plant before watching those two finish ahead of me. My only consolation was that instead of their red wristband, I got a green one that let me have one of the free beers at the end to help anesthetize my pounding legs.

The Great Ski Race lived up to its name. There was an abundant friendliness in the after party where it seemed everyone knew everyone. I saw the guy who wore a speedo clothed and warm, and the group of Oz characters finished the race with arms linked together like the movie’s Dorothy and Scarecrow. It was nice to bask just a bit in the local scene and the satisfaction that comes from the lunacy of a mountain crossing before I hopped in my car and headed home.