CAMP HALE — Desperate times, as they say, call for desperate measures. And man, there’s nothing quite like Presidents Day weekend to make a skier feel desperate.
“Restricted,” that’s the word they use at Vail Resorts for those overbooked holiday weekend windows around Christmas and this past Presidents Day when they slap the shackles on most season ski passes not held by employees, and the locals are left to find something else to do with their time.
Fortunately, we’ve got the Daytona 500.
I find it only mildly ironic that Daytona is referred to as “restrictor-plate racing,” given the mad dash up Vail Pass by gas-powered ski-jourers during the recent overlapping restriction weekend. Resolution Creek Road and the bowl skiing near its south summit were as tracked up as Victory Lane after the doughnut crew was through Sunday afternoon. Evidently, some other snowmobiling skier-types had the same idea around restrictions as I did.
Of course, I’m not sure how well I qualify as a snowmobile-skier. And that’s not just because I decided to go snowmobile-snowboarding instead. Mostly it’s because I don’t actually own a snowmobile, and I can’t see myself buying one before I move to Leadville, Alma or some similarly elevated area that sees snow on the streets some six months a year.
But I certainly can see myself borrowing one from an out-of- town friend every now and again, especially if it means lapping untracked powder stashes with the ease of your own personal high- speed lift.
Problem is, it’s never as easy as it looks.
Like anything else in the snowsports world, there’s a learning curve that must be mastered before a snowmo-boarding adventure can be considered a success. For me, that starts with getting over the guilt of blasting through the national forest on a gas-guzzling 800cc Polaris when I could be using my weekend to learn how to kite-ski or simply earning my turns the old-fashioned way.
Fortunately, we have the Bassmasters model to rationalize that silly little notion away: the bigger the engine, the faster you get to the fish. And as evidenced by a sled to ski-skin ratio of roughly 50:1 on Resolution Road (not counting snowcats), there’s a whole mess of bass-fishing fans out in them there woods.
In some ways, the borrowed snowmobile actually is a lot like a borrowed boat. And it’s real easy to get stranded in a sea of snow until you figure out the tides and your vessel’s particular set of quirks. But instead of drowning, it adds an element to your adventure I like to call, “wallowing,” or, given the tone of the day, “wallerin’.”
I like to think of wallerin’ as the byproduct of an accelerated education in snow science, a sort of algebraic “x” factor reached by adding your body weight to an 800-pound sled and multiplying by sun crust over depth hoar. As long as the slope angle is mellow enough, it’s not so bad, so long as you don’t mind shoveling.
Since most of us don’t particularly enjoy digging, it’s important to select partners who do. But between bad backs, new babies, lack of backcountry experience and a plain disdain for snowmobiles, sometimes said partners can be hard to find. Fortunately, there’s Forrest.
Forrest is an affiliate of a group of local transplants sometimes referred to for no particular reason as the “Alabama Mafia,” and he’s up for just about anything. As fate would have it, so is his dad, Dave, and their buddy, Billy, who happened to have a few rental sleds reserved for an afternoon of unrestricted, guilt- free wallerin’ on the very day I called. Good ol’ Forrest.
Between the four of us, we managed to make it up the hill and even got a few rides back down on the aforementioned powder snow before breaking out the shovels and getting up close and personal with the aforementioned depth hoar. We rolled a sled or two, buried another and generally waller’d the day away in what I’ve come to learn is a fairly typical experience for inexperienced snowmobilers from Alabama and elsewhere.
We rode relatively conservatively, staying close to the trails with all the necessary safety gear and had fun breaking just enough sweat to call it exercise.
So, yeah, I’d call it a success. But next year I might just go ahead and buy that ticket to Daytona.
