For skiers, trees are shelter in the storm. For the snow that finds its way into them, they’re both filter and natural preservatives, minimizing the effects of wind, sun and freeze-thaw. Here’s the thing: high-speed groomers may be fun, dropping into couloirs pretty rad and bouncing down pillow lines divine, but what I love most about skiing is being in the trees in winter.
Whether it’s Japan’s beech forests, Europe’s larch, Norway’s dwarf birch, British Columbia’s giant hemlock and cedar, or Aspen’s… well, aspens… skiing in the trees offers a different aesthetic than skiing open areas with natural features like bowls and chutes. And skiing through the hardwoods of eastern North America, Scandinavia and Japan—lacking the fuzzy warmth and cathedral spires of conifer forests—is different altogether.
I spent a lot of time in the trees, whether on my downhill skis or cross-country boards. In addition to being a way of enjoying the simple beauty of a winter day, I was communing with the forest at what seemed its most elemental: just the trees, please—forget the cacophony and botanical pageantry of summer. I’ll admit that the hardwoods weren’t for everyone: they were more like the rough bouncers at an exclusive club, ready to repel anyone who didn’t belong—and a girded honor-guard to welcome those who did. But if you liked powder at all, it was a club worth joining—just ask the skiers at places like Sutton, Jay Peak, Mad River Glen or Stowe.
Though skiing hardwoods felt like moving through a state of suspended animation, there was plenty going on around you—stories being spun in the wood of hibernating critters and burrowing insects, of hormones coursing through roots ready to send sap racing upward at the first hint of warmth. And yet, save for an occasional creaking in the wind, all of this industry is carried out in silence. Moving among trees in winter is like entering a realm populated by beings whose sentinel nature is their very allure—as if they both conjure experience and bear witness to it. Perhaps they do.
I’m fond of reminding people that the human genome contains some 20,000 genes, while a poplar tree boasts 45,000. What does it mean when the complexity of the human brain is governed by fewer genes than a block of wood? Perhaps only that when it comes to DNA, the traits of wisdom, stoicism and vigilance may be more hard-won than mobility; as it turns out, scientific research is now showing us that trees can learn and communicate through their roots via underground fungal networks—and not only with trees of their own species. Since the root-fungus connections function much like the neural networks of animals, skiing trees is like navigating through something akin to a large-scale communal brain.
In British Columbia, where I now live, not only do I still love skiing trees, but I also enjoy the myriad forms they take—from hunched snow ghosts to towering alabaster arrows of improbable symmetry. It would be easy to view such statuesque embodiments as living things that have simply checked out of daily existence for a bit, their weighted encasements of snow a measure of the force of winter. Certainly, the celebrated sauthor Lewis Carrol must have thought so when he wrote: I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.
For skiers, trees are shelter in the storm; for the snow that finds its way into them, they are both fragrant filter and natural preservative, minimizing the effects of wind, sun and freeze-thaw. Microclimates also help: a mountain that spends a lot of quality time in the cloud deck, with its peak perpetually shrouded, tends to pull down significantly more snow than neighboring peaks. Where such places are found—and I’d count my home of Whistler among them—it’s the fluffy turns beneath the branches that rule the mountain’s personality.
Hitting tree line as you descend from the alpine is an interesting introduction to the forest. You start by zigzagging around a welcome mat of krumholtz and other tightly packed miniatures, but as you move downslope and larger trees prevail, things open up—though never enough to make the next move completely obvious. And this is where the “game” takes over. Even where you can see around them, tree skiing is still all decisions, discovery and endless permutation: make a turn around one, a new line comes into view and suddenly everything looks different; your next turn repeats the trick; then it happens again, much like a high-speed video game testing both your physical reflexes and mental processing powers. All the while the slope uncoils over the natural contours of the mountain, connected by lines that follow the logic of topography and water—a logic, you learn, that the trees follow as well.
For many years I was guilty of what I’ve alluded to above: simply skiing through these snowclad trees, looking for lines and paying little attention to what I dismissed as a silent plight for spring. But a few years ago, some more reading on tree biology delivered me a different impression.
The statuesque nature of our mountain trees, it turns out, is less about our current weather than millions of years of evolution and the selective power of Ice Ages. You see, the west coast’s firs and spruce and cedar—even mighty redwoods and sequoia—are snow trees, exquisitely designed by nature in form and function to deal with and make use of the white stuff. With a heavy load, their apical symmetry sheds just enough to allow the branches to bend but not break; in cold weather they’ll hold enough snow to protect their buds; and the melting snow from branches drips in a circle, feeding roots that require a steady moisture supply over winter. Indeed, the entire story of a snow tree’s spring, summer and fall is being written as you ski by them in winter.
In a sense then, I realized, many of the trees I spend time with have evolved to “like” snow. And if that can’t make a skier love them even more, nothing can.
