Sprinter of Fools
an early-season ski trip gone right
November 26th, 2024
I went on the ski trip as a joke, but joke’s on me, ‘cause today was my best ski day in years.
There was only one run open the entirety of the two days we were at Palisades. I skiied it, over and over, fifty-six times. It didn’t get boring. Today it was storming all day and there was thin powder in the morning; yesterday it was Ithacating late in the afternoon and felt like my childhood at Greek Peak: skiing through neither snow nor sleet nor freezing rain but something in between. I was on my new powder skis. My guilt about buying them, new, as my third pair of skis, on top of splurging for the full Ikon Pass, immediately evaporated. I’m so blissed out. Every decision I’ve made in my life has been perfect, because it’s led to this.
This is not what I was expecting from the trip.
B. is visiting for Thanksgiving. He decided when he moved to Boulder this summer that he was going to get into skiing as his new Thing, despite being otherwise and previously completely uninterested in sports and the outdoors. I’ve been getting a flurry of text updates. He bought used skis off Craigslist; he bought an Ikon Pass; he paid eight hundred dollars for new boots. He’s already been skiing three times in Colorado this season. A few weeks ago he told me he wanted to go skiing when he was back. I was like, yeah, whatever; we can go skiing. He didn’t seem to realize it’s way too early to go skiing. No one goes out of their way to ski before Thanksgiving. But he was so enthusiastic, and I bought the fancy pass this year, and I’m off work all week, so my marginal cost was just the gas to Tahoe. Shitty skiing sounds better than sitting in Palo Alto! I’m in.
B. got obsessed. He decided we should take S.’s Sprinter so we could sleep in it. Taking the Sprinter means taking S., as the mechanic. It’s a death trap not just to its occupants but to itself. Also S. has never skiied before. (“Growing up we were told that was a white person thing.”) B. persuaded him to come. Whatta salesman. S. decided to rent skis, then decided to rent a snowboard instead, and then bought gloves from Alibaba’s equivalent of Amazon Prime, and then bought, also from “Alibaba Express,” what was advertised as a full-body snow-suit covered in NASA logos and patches. It was an Apollo astronaut Halloween costume with some insulation. He decided he needed to buy butt pads, too. He watched three YouTube videos on snowboarding for complete beginners.
I only paid vague attention to the planning. I watched it, detached, expecting a shitshow. It’s a terrible time of year to go skiing; B. doesn’t know what he’s doing and S. knows even less; the Sprinter is a suicide ship. An atmospheric river was in the forecast. We’re not even going to be able to get to Tahoe. I-80 is going to be shut down from all the snow and all the traffic! I was checking and re-checking the forecast and the Caltrans chain control/snow clearing maps. I never heard B. and S. mention the weather once. They weren’t even thinking about it. I said nothing, because, as the Nueva motto goes, Learn By Doing!
I was in teacher mode: I’m the more experienced person watching less experienced people try to do something, and I’m going to let them make their own mistakes. How else do we learn? I’m not going to lecture. Obviously I wasn’t going to let them make dangerous mistakes, but “stuck in standstill snow-stopped traffic for six hours in a Sprinter” isn’t a high-consequence mistake. Nor is “have a shitty trip because it turns out there’s a reason no one skis Tahoe in mid-November.” Half the fun of teaching is watching everyone make hilarious mistakes, and cackling endlessly in the corner. First you’re laughing at the kids, and then, once they’ve figured things out, you’re laughing with them. We’re all laughing at each other and our human finitude.
B. was so excited about skiing. I didn’t want to interfere with his beginner’s joy and excitement.
Everyone I know who owns Sprinters spends more time fixing them than driving them. If it were in full working condition S. would be bored. It’s a 2004 ex-DHL delivery truck with 347,000 miles. Diesel. Just a shade lighter than school-bus yellow. A traversing latitudinal crack system across the windshield. Front seats from a junked Tesla. S. machined plates to mount them to the stock mounts. His last-minute fixes: install more cabinetry, fix the diesel heater, replace a coolant line, replace two of the fuel hoses.
Initially I sat in the back on S.’s backpacking chair, then decided that was too awkward and spent most of the drive sprawled on a yoga mat on the floor. The turbocharger roared right under my butt as we accelerated up the on-ramps. The hose blowing off is a common ailment. S. bought a cheap aftermarket turbo. He accelerates onto the highway, rapidly loses power, pulls over, and crawls under the van to wrench the turbo air intake back on more tightly.
I joked he should install a flight engineer station. S. and B. sitting in the front seats, as pilot and co-pilot, and me back here, the third person, as the engineer! B. roared with laughter. There’s enough going wrong with the van all the time that that he could use one! We joked about ordering analog dials off eBay and hooking them up to the most absurd OBD sensors. And switches! Fuel cutoff switches. A fuel dump switch! S. said he’s tried to find a used flight attendant jumpseat to install between the two front seats. There’s space. That’s where I was kneeling during the parts of the drive in which I wanted to look out the window.
Sunday we left Palo Alto at 5 and picked up B. from J.’s place in Concord. In Vacaville we stopped at the Winco. B. became obsessed, justly so, with the bulk section. Together he and S. bought, for the two-day trip, $200 of food. I had brought four Clif Bars and so bought nothing. S. had ordered a helmet from Amazon Prime, but it wasn’t going to arrive in Palo Alto in time, so he redirected it to an Amazon locker in suburban Sacramento. Speeding towards Sac he got a notification that the delivery had failed. Oops.
We got to the Donner Pass Sno-Park just before 11. The air was cold and dry, and the snow was crunchy, and the stars were glittering and everything smelled like smoke. A Jeep and a Volvo were doing donuts and filming themselves. S. microwaved us too-spicy Hot Pockets for dinner. He wanted to turn on the diesel heater overnight but B., ever the hypochondriac, worried it’d asphyxiate us. The two of them slept on the bed; I slept on the floor. To stay warm I topped my sleeping bag with two of S.’s alpaca wool blankets. (Shearing alpacas is his other hobby.)
Monday we woke up at 7 and drove to Palisades. S. made us instant coffee with Winco eggnog. He dropped $150 on a helmet from the ski shop. I tried to persuade him he didn’t need a helmet for the two-degree magic carpet slope, and then let him just take mine, but to no avail. Palisades was stupid: there was one lift open (plus the magic carpet); it was barely 500 feet vertical, narrow, and not worthwhile. I did one or two runs with B., another one or two runs by myself, and then we took the base-to-base gondola over to Alpine. Yes! Much better!!! Still only one run (plus a bunny slope/magic carpet), but it was a reasonable length and width, and had lots of space and different terrain.
It wasn’t a powder day, but I was wearing my new powder skis, Blizzard Rustler 11s. The snow was groomed and solid; it got messier as the day wore on. It was heavy and hard to cut through. There was intense vibration on my harder turns, and they didn’t feel that stable at speed. It’s fine: they’re powder skis! I’m sure they’ll do great on powder. I sat on the chairlift with a bunch of people who either were wearing, or who had, Rustlers, either the 11s (widest and most pow-oriented) or the 10 (narrower but still wide and made for powder) or the 9 (even narrower but still decent on powder). They were all talking it up. “Yeah, it’s not the right day for the 11s, but they’re still way better on this stuff than what most of those people have,” one of the guys said, pointing at the slope.
S. made us lunch in the van: Shin Ramyun with a poached egg, green onions, and shiitake mushrooms, cooked in cast iron on induction.
After lunch I decided to switch to my groomer/race skis (the ex-demo Dynastar Speed 4x4s I bought a few years ago). And… it was just like… OH.
OH.
This is what it’s supposed to feel like.
The skiing I had done all morning was fine. But it wasn’t this. Yes. Yes. This is skiing. This is what it feels like. This is what it’s supposed to feel like.
Like when you try a drug, and there’s a mild come-up, and it’s like, this is nice, and then all of a sudden it hits you.
That’s what switching to my race skis felt like.
All of a sudden I was so fast. I was so stable. I was carving. I was skiing exactly the way I wanted to be skiing and doing exactly what I wanted to be doing and doing it right then and right there.
Ohhhhhhh yes.
People were standing still on the slopes as I zoomed past them. No chatter. No problem cutting through all the choppy snow. No instability.
I skiied until the lift closed.
The snow started around noon and after an hour turned into a wet, ambiguous mix. It got cold but I had hand warmers in my boots and my gloves. Other people got scared off and the slopes cleared out and there was more space for me to go fast. The snow was thick and slushy on the slope. Just like childhood.
At 4 I stumbled into the lodge. B. and S. were working on their laptops. (S. hadn’t bothered to take the day off.) S. offered me his backpacking bladder of port and B. got out a Coors from his backpack. “Do you want a beer?” “No. I want a cigarette.” I sprawled onto the chair with an afterglow smile.
Eventually S. went to go get the van, and I deputized B. to carry my extra pair of skis. Walking down a metal staircase by the side of the lodge, B.—who was wearing normal boots, not ski boots—slipped and fell. He screamed in pain. “Why did we take this staircase?!? It’s so steep! It’s so slippery!” He hobbled down the rest of the stairs, barely. The Sprinter was 30 feet away. “I can’t walk that far!” He leaned against a pole moaning. “I think my season’s over,” he said, as S. pulled closer.
We drove to the motel. “The Inn at Truckee.” Two queen beds, $110 for the night; cheap, because, as discussed, no one goes skiing now. We opened more beers. S. went to fiddle with the van and make food. B. lay in a bed moaning about how he was too injured to ski again on Tuesday and had maybe ended his entire ski season. By falling, not while on skis, or even while wearing ski boots, but while walking in normal footwear. I was blamed, for making him carry my extra skis, and for insisting we take the side staircase; Larry from the boot shop got blamed, too. (“Larry’s Boot Shop,” which had charged him $800 for his new boots, is his current default villain.)
I hung everything up to dry and blasted the heat. Steam room motel room. All the boot liners came out. Everything inside-out. “Let me feel your legs,” I told B. A muscle injury. Lower quad. No big deal. “You’re being so sweet! Why are you being so sweet to me?” he moaned further. I told him to take a hot shower. S. returned with dinner: mashed potatoes and frozen pizzas cooked in his van microwave. And a salad. We struggled to hook our laptops up to the TV but eventually did and I put on Cody Townsend ski videos. I offered to take the floor, but S. wanted to sleep in the van. B. and I both got beds.
Tuesday morning the motel had prepackaged food for breakfast. I pocketed as much as I could: muffins, Belgian waffles, breakfast burritos, oatmeal packets, Nutella packets, teabags. I took the extra toiletries from the room, too.
We drove to Alpine. Six inches of fresh snow on the ground. Still only one run open. I put on my powder skis and got first chair.
Immediately it felt as good as the previous day. Fast and powerful and perfect. I skiied the entire day. Just two short breaks. The air never warmed up, nor did the sky get any lighter. Meditative moments on the chairlift. The vibration of the cable. The sandblast of sleet against your face. Steering my skis into pockets of powder. Feeling them cut as I carved. Thirty-four runs, 24,000 feet of vertical, 57 miles horizontal. Five hours and eleven minutes of moving time and 6:57 of elapsed time (per Strava). Three minutes short of the full 9 am to 4 pm lift hours. Afterwards I was thrilled and blissed.
“I have never seen Andrew this happy and non-gloomy,” B. said, texting a picture of me to one of our co-op groupchats.
On the drive home I requested chill music, to match my mood. In honor of our landlord B. played a Grateful Dead concert. Magically the roads were clear. The Sprinter hummed. A. texted me poems. I sat on the floor writing. When I finished I glanced up, just in time to see the towers and the lights of the Bay Bridge glittering through the windshield.
