Don't Call It the White Ribbon of Death, It's The Slope of Hope
It’s always just after Labor Day when I, a self-proclaimed summer girl (I can’t help it, I was born in June), start to think about winter. I’ll mention in conversation the respite of cooler evenings and forced relaxation of a frosty morning. The aspen leaves start to change from green to a shocking hue of yellow. I’ll wear a beanie if the temperature drops below 40 degrees at night, and I’ll start to harvest the last leaves of kale and squash from my garden, methodically pulling the frost-burned sweet peas and poppies from the dirt.
On any given afternoon, if I’m driving towards Teton Pass or down the Moose-Wilson Road to Teton Village, I’ll tentatively say something like: “You know, I am actually kind of looking forward to winter.” Usually, a statement like that is met with nods and grunts of tacit agreement.
This time of year, I also find myself magnetized to Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, as I am moderately addicted to nostalgia. In my first years in Jackson, I had the pleasure of forging some of my closest and longest-lasting friendships on both groomed cord and hike-to sidecountry lines (and at the Spur bar and the Mangy Moose, along with some other hidden places on the mountain). So, usually sometime in September or October, I’ll make my way out to Teton Village and sit at a bar, grab a martini, and open my laptop to do my decidedly online job and think about the days when I was spinning DINs for a living.
Also, by this time of year, my body is tired, and I desperately want to chill. Summer is exciting and busy and impossibly full when you live in the shadow of the Tetons. The fullness of it is borne of summer’s scarcity. Summer is impossibly short here in Jackson. For what feels like only six weeks of the year, we lucky residents have a gigantic, 4,000-square-mile playground that is completely open and ready to be recreated in. Peaks in the Tetons are free of snow, the Snake River runs blue and warm (out here, warm is a cool 60 degrees), and ridgelines are clear, open, and dry. The sun rises before 6 a.m. and sets well after 9 p.m. Every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, the echo of the Jackson Hole Rodeo reverberates off the town hill, Snow King, and floats in and out through open windows, acting as the soundtrack to your evening. You can spend 10 hours in the national park, and then wiggle your butt into the wee hours of the morning at live music. This, in fact, is the expectation.
Every day is endlessly long and absurdly short. Strava accounts are going insane — your neighbor ran the Teton Crest Trail yesterday and then spent three hours dancing at a Parcels concert on top of Snow King. Your boss swam two miles across Jenny Lake and back before work on a Tuesday. Last week, five people you know did the Grand Teton Picnic, separately.
I am, of course, subject to this chaos, and I’ll be the first to admit that my Strava can be similarly insane, although not even close compared with others. Once I saw someone describe their version of the Teton Crest Trail day-attempt as the Weenie Hut Junior version, meaning that they started at the JHMR tram and ended at Cascade Canyon, which is 30 miles long instead of the traditional 40. In Jackson, you live in a universe where 30 miles and 4,000 feet of elevation gain is the Weenie Hut Junior version.
Mercifully, we also have September and October, which are intended for chilling. The 4 a.m. wake-up calls for a 30-mile national park day are supplanted by lazy mornings drinking coffee over crossword puzzles, and the most exciting plans you have in October are the Jackson Hole Ski and Snowboard Club ski swap on Saturday.
This time of year, the sun sets earlier. The nights are cooler. Tourism slows. Our bodies get necessary rest while we pack away our wetsuits, bikes, kayaks, and trail runners.
In exchange, we spend calm, reticent weeks wiping the dust off skis, swapping out storage wax for a fresh tune. Anticipation grows as the first flakes begin to fall both in the valley and on high peaks, while snowmakers start blasting snow on the trails in an attempt to open JHMR by Thanksgiving. I realize with the same naive surprise every year that maybe I’m not only a summer girl.
AMBER BAESLER for The Washington Post via Getty Images
In fact, I am so into the white ribbon of death. There is no worse skiing all season, and there is no better. It is both the bane of my existence and the object of all my desires. The one manmade run scraped down to a sheet of impossible blue ice becomes the actual center of my social life and physical exertion after two months of melancholic solitude and sometimes boredom. February will come, as it does every year, when we are griping about no new snow on Teton Pass and less than 70% of the trails open at the ski resort, but let’s not forget the white ribbon of death, or, as I prefer to call it, the slope of hope.
The fullness of summer is borne of scarcity, and so is this early-season ribbon of snow. We love it because it’s all we have, but it’s everything we have. And we get to slide around on two planks (or one) together again.
Perhaps, and stay with me here, I’m not only looking forward to the skiing I will get to do, but for the skiing I already did. Hours of endless giggling on chairlifts and skin tracks and community and terror and presence in the immeasurable silent beauty of the Tetons have filled up a reservoir of memory. Am I still out here to add to it, or make sure it’s still full?
Did the best part already happen? Is the loss of the novelty the loss of the thing? Do I really just like nostalgia? Do I actually like the white ribbon of death, or more so that it signals the beginning of a long season of morning bootpacks and dinner parties and 8 p.m. bedtimes?
I’m not sure, but what I can tell you is that every year I’ll exhale on the first crisp September morning and think, you know, I’m actually pretty excited to go skiing.
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