Steeped in spirits
The camera cannot capture steeps
Most skiers can identify with watching a Warren Miller film. They sit there slack-jawed, salivating as someone rips endless pillows at a sixty degree pitch on some heli-skiing dream run. The crisp air twinkles off the sapphire sky and they cannot help themselves from thinking I could do that...
But it's a movie shot five thousand miles away at 120 frames per second. Miller can speed it up, slow it down, pull away on a helicopter, or zoom in on the spray of snow ejecting off piston driving knees and it's a pro skier born with a genetic defect omitting fear, who probably already bled through three knee surgeries and some rehab stints. We definitely cannot do that.
And.
Cameras cannot seize steeps. Look below. Can you see them? I can't. But I know they are there.
Flash
Like your life before your eyes as your speed tops out the moment you must thread the needle of maples below.
Windridge
It practically looks up hill despite descent to the valley.
Northline
The longest straght descent at Ridges.
Northview
You can barely perceive the dropoff ahead.
Steeps are ghosts, ephemeral chills meant only for experience, never recorded.
Join me at Ridges. Let your skis crown a crest. Lean over the ledge. Attune your ear to the spirit of steeps whose sibilance whispers only on the wind of that moment. Pins on the back of the neck, snowmelt watery knees, and the small chatter of teeth do not show in the photos, but they will live in your memory. The sensations that make you shudder, invisible to the shutter, remind that here, you can live deliberately.
