Month: December 2015

“These guys are good, T.J.”

“Yeah, but they’re not from Detroit.”

–Aspen Extreme, 1993

It’s a great moment at the start of a very bad movie: two buddies are at the top of a steep mogul trail in Aspen, Colorado, waiting for their turn to show what they can do.  If they make it to the bottom in one piece, they have a chance to become ski instructors at Aspen and make lots of money.  Everything about this is absurd, of course.  Like I said, it’s not a great movie.  But then one of the buddies, Dexter, looks over at the other, T.J.  Dexter is clearly intimidated by the great skiers around them: “These guys are good, T.J.” After all, these two guys have probably never skied a trail this steep before.  They’re wearing jeans.  Their home ski area?  Mt. Brighton, Michigan — “200 feet of landfill.” Here at Aspen, they’re out of their league in just about every possible way.

But they do have one ace up their sleeve.  Just as it’s their turn to go, the other buddy, T.J. — the more confident of the two — lowers his goggles.  “Yeah,” he says, “but they’re not from Detroit.” Game on.  They jump over the edge.  Guess who’s ripping down the moguls, passing everyone, and throwing double helicopters like an early 90s Johnny Moseley?  Guess who makes the Aspen Ski School?  The guys from Detroit.

Continue reading “On Being a Connecticut Skier”

“It’s an Asheville winter.”

That’s what my fiancee and I have been telling each other this December.  Usually during the week after Christmas we retreat to the warm temperatures of Asheville, North Carolina to hike the Great Smoky Mountains.  This year we don’t need to: Christmas temperatures in the 50s here in the North Country of New Hampshire felt more like the Smokies than the White Mountains.  So far, the winter of 2015-2016 has been the warmest and the least snowy I can remember.  Normally I ski a lot during my birth month, but this December I’ve skied just once.  Although most of the resorts are managing to stay open, the trails at Wildcat, Waterville Valley, and Cannon are mostly grass.

In lieu of skiing, I’ve taken advantage of the warmer temperatures and lack of snow to continue hiking the White Mountains.  What follows is a list of the best off-season hikes I’ve been doing in the northern White Mountains.

Continue reading “Northern New Hampshire’s Best (Off-Season) Hikes”

Sugarloaf Mountain, located in Dickerson, Maryland, about thirty miles north of Washington, D.C., is not much of a mountain.  At only 1,282 feet above sea level, it’s more of a hill — a small hill.  But set amid the rolling farmland of northern Montgomery County, it doesn’t look small.  In fact, Sugarloaf’s summit is so prominent — and so close to Washington, D.C. — that Franklin Roosevelt considered making Sugarloaf his presidential retreat (before deciding on the nearby Camp David).  It was from Sugarloaf that Union troops first spotted the Confederate Army crossing the Potomac River in 1862.  I first began to notice Sugarloaf in 2009, on one of my frequent trips to the nearby Dickerson whitewater slalom course.  I’d driven past this hill since my first trip to Dickerson years before, but it wasn’t until my fifth year of living in Washington, D.C. that I began to notice it.  That fall, as I drove an hour north out of the city and across the flatlands, Sugarloaf — really the closest mountain you hit when driving out of D.C. in any direction, looked taller and taller — and all of a suddenly, I wanted very badly to be on top.

This was a real change for me.  I spent most of my life looking down — into river gorges — not up.  I wanted to go to the places on the map where the river left the roads and plunged into a canyon so deep that it was like a secret world.  These were gorges you had to bushwhack for thirty minutes just to get down to the river — or else you had to own a kayak, in which case you could see the gorge in its entirety.  I can’t say if I started kayaking because I wanted to explore these places, or if I wanted to explore these places because I started kayaking.  I only know that, when I was 14 years old and had just started boating, every time we drove over the 60-foot bridge on Route 44 bridge near my house in Barkhamsted, Connecticut, I’d look downstream and see two cliffs towering 100 feet over the river and I knew that something about it didn’t look right.  It looked more dramatic than the usual rolling hills of western Connecticut.  Something had happened to the Earth there, some kind of violence.  And I wanted to go down inside and see exactly what it was.

Continue reading “Above the Clouds”