The Scene

My lack of updates this time around can be blamed on the enticing diversions of a thawed-out Teton Valley, as well as the mighty timesuck of The Wire streaming on Amazon.

But after the blessings of a dry spring, on the doorstep of summer we were hit with more Teton-typical June weather. All week the clouds hung pregnant with moisture and bipolar storms rushed in from the northwest and got trapped in the horseshoe of the south valley. I was going to race bikes on Wednesday (!) but with intermittent rain, snow, and hail showers, the organizers postponed it. The trails here are delicate flowers and etiquette dictates that everyone gives them ample recovery time after weather. It's not Pisgah; here we don't have those beefy pre-IMBA fall line trails, weathered by decades of erosion and covered with loam as absorbent as a dark, organic-smelling sponge. Fortunately it's also not Tahoe; ample tree canopy and a lack of decomposed granite makes me a happy bike rider. 

We rode this the other day. It's hard to find a trail without views of the Grand.
Pic courtesy of MBT

Work is heavy: cranking out as many bars as possible and then transitioning straight into the ordered chaos of the bike shop. Talking to customers about gear makes me sweat--I'm always second-guessing myself and wondering if they can see through me. But I love the vibe and the crew. The crusty mechanics accepted me into their club and I feel totally at home in my new position. Here I don't have to brave the turbulent currents of over-familiarity and politics I encountered in my last (beloved) shop. It doesn't hurt that now I get my own sweet, sweet deals, unreliant on the negotiating power of boyfriends or the whims of the KOP. My only employee purchase thus far (insane self control) was a bell, which I merrily ring through verdant corridors, calling out conversationally, "Hey bear," and hoping any large mammal, ursine or cervidae, will be alerted and will mosey away. 

After work rides are great when the sun doesn't set until 10.

My bosses (one from each establishment, both muscular, short-haired, and ageless women, badass life-juggling entrepreneurs) have showed me rides all over the valley. When left to my own devices, I'll plot something questionable on the map and drag Tyler along. The trail-building community is strong here, and when we're not riding it's fun to attend a dig day and ingratiate ourselves with the local hoe-owners by applying McLeod to dirt for a couple hours. The Valley is also dotted with Fight Club'esque unofficial trails that are well-ridden, spoken of in hushed tones, and rad as shit. This article explains the Teton Pass trail history, but here on the Idaho side the ranchers and ATVers have a much stronger presence, so guerrilla trails stay that way. Last week The Kate took us back by her house to shred some of these unpolished, steep, log-strewn joyrides. I felt like I was in Pisgah, if Pisgah was moon-dusty and moto-rutted. 

It doesn't suck. But summer begins tomorrow and already I'm panicking that the snows will come before I fully reap the recreational wealth this valley has to offer.

Thus Spoke Baker Bill

My father sent me a terribly endearing email that made mention of this here blog and I felt it would do the missive an injustice to simply leave it moldering in my inbox. Voila: 


I do continue to enjoy your blog posts although the alarming situations described have your mother and I welcoming the inevitable onset of warmer weather (and melting snow) in parts west.  That said, there seems to be another disquieting trend appearing in the blog entries that could well complicate your literary prospects.  I always suspected that following a requisite period of some sort of existential misery, you would emerge with a pithy but amusingly engaging memoir cataloging the indignities you had suffered.  Sort of Ben Folds meets Nanny Diaries.  The success of the publication would provide you and perhaps your parents with the financial windfall that we are probably entitled to.  Particularly after the movie rights sold.  Instead we are treated to this onslaught of in vita optimum so relentlessly that one feels the need for a firm tooth brushing after reading lest decay take hold.  Now don't get me wrong, I'm delighted that you are so piddling puppy happy, I just think it might require some recalibration to achieve the anticipated literary success.  So I'm thinking self help book.  By quantifying and formulating your happiness you could bring fulfillment and richness to lives otherwise untouched with the incandescent joy of Just Being Julia.  In addition to selling very well the whole experience of writing and marketing such a narrative would probably make you so miserable that you could then write a second and probably more entertaining book following the original formula outlined above.  Just saying.

Skip This Post If You Get Sick of My Obnoxious and Repetitive Joy Spewing

I was interviewing for a job, sitting at ease with the macchiato the owner had made for me perched in my lap, when she asked, "On a scale of one to ten, how lucky do you feel?" I suppose the question could've meant either statistically fortunate or endowed with a great life, but without hesitation I interpreted it as the latter and said with a laugh, "Right now? 9.5." 

See what I did there? In media res: starting a story in the middle to draw in the reader (all three of you). More about the job interview later. I just need to explain why I'm operating at a 9.5, and every time I sit down to write this post I'm distracted by another awesome thing in my life, so now instead of any kind of cohesion, I'm just throwing out bullet points.

1: Everything is green now. Except that which is still snow-covered. The snow is receding daily and the talk of the town is which trails are clear, which trails are about to clear, which trails are THE BEST and will probably clear within a month.

2: Eastern Idaho has a huge quantity and variety of raptors. I almost wreck the car every time some broad-winged bird of prey soars overhead or preens on a fencepost. I swear I'm going to buy a book to identify them.

3: Trail running! My favorite drug!

Other sports???

4: Tyler, while frustrated and stressed out by his job, has gained the reputation of being one of those priceless above-and-beyond employees. Everyone at work loves him. He is great.

5: Mountain biking! After some digging on Saturday we had an afternoon of good old fashioned dirt jumping/pump tracking at the town bike park and I finally remembered how to ride a bike. I went out with The Kate on Sunday and between the dirt jumps, the leg strength from six months of skiing, and the arm strength from aggressive bar-making, I was feeling pretty fantastic.

Riding bikes in beautiful Swan Valley

6: I went back to Tahoe for a hot second and got to catch up with some very important people. It made my heart happy. I also successfully got Camp out of my system after having pined for it all winter.

Same as it ever was at SSC

7: New job! I'm still making bars of course, because I would never ditch such a great company, but over the course of a couple group rides I chatted with the owners of the LBS (not to be confused with LDS) and they're hurting for help. They're a really cool couple and I hate to see good folks overwhelmed by the trials of owning a business so I offered my free afternoons to them and after a couple conversations and semi-formal interview the general consensus was hell yeah. I'm starting at the shop tomorrow as salesperson, barista, and token female.

I might have forgotten a couple points in there, but no matter. Living the dream, as usual.

Front Page

I found this nice little write-up in the Jackson Hole Daily today: 

Group of Skiers Almost Summit Middle Teton

On Sunday April 27 history was made as three Idaho residents made it almost all the way to the top of the third tallest mountain in the Teton range. Julia Tellman, Tyler Nelson, and Dan Rogers climbed for over seven hours, skinning and then bootpacking up Garnet Canyon and the Southwest Couloir, until ferocious winds, negligible visibility, and crippling fatigue forced them to turn around within three hundred feet of the summit. 

Rogers, a veteran, homeowner, future public official, and snowboard mountaineer, was the strongest of the three and probably would have gone for a second lap on the Middle if not hindered by his colleagues. "Tyler and Julia were riding the struggle bus, for sure," he remembers. "The wind was really blowing and the altitude is always tough to cope with." The Middle Teton is 12,804 feet tall. Says Tellman, professional granola maker, "I've never been so high!...I didn't mean it like that." 

The walls of Garnet Canyon loom over Tellman and Nelson
Photo courtesy of Dapper

Crusty Idaho native Nelson said, "We all put in a lot of preparation for this mission. Julia learned how to ski, which is really an integral part of skiing the Middle. Dan has been playing croquet almost every day to stay limber. And I've been hunting down all the good session IPAs, because when you're on the mountain, you need a beer that's high in flavor but low in alcohol." 

The action started before the group even hit the trail. As they left the house at 4 am, a cop pulled Tellman over, mistaking Sunday morning adventurers for Saturday night carousers. The drive over the Pass proved treacherous, with almost half a foot of snow on the road--the most accumulation the area has seen since mid-April. The voyage stayed exciting even after the turn-around: in Garnet Canyon Meadow, Nelson was caught in a small slab slide but lived to see another day. When asked if he had any good pointers on avalanche safety, he said, "All you really need is an airbag and a GoPro. The rest will take care of itself." On the exit stretch, the group's progress was halted by a mother moose and two yearlings, who crossed the path at a very leisurely pace. 

When the three adventurers, weary and wind-battered, made it to the local brewpub, all of the grizzled skiers at the bar stood up and applauded*. This reporter spoke to filmmaker Todd Jones of Teton Gravity Research over shots of vodka. "They are really pioneers of the sport. It's been at least a week, maybe even a week and a half since anyone got that close to the summit." When asked if he would consider any one of the three to be the newest athlete at TGR, he said, "I think another production company has already picked them up...Poorly Planned something-or-other." This claim could not be verified.  

*Added for dramatic effect; did not actually happen

Job Satisfaction

I love my job for a lot of reasons. I get to wear a hat to work. On powder days my boss tells me to come in late. I get an unlimited supply of lifesaving nugs, the best possible insurance against bonking. I arrive, I work nonstop until finished, and I leave--I'm not at the mercy of the clock or the whims of customers. Every afternoon my arms and back ache, which convinces me that I'll somehow become a rock climber this summer. When I asked for a couple of days off to go to Cali, my boss bent over, touched his toes, and said, "Look. I'm flexible."

All great, sure, but one of the main reasons I love my job is the constant sensory input. As I lay waste to fifty-pound bags of oats or shredded coconut, the smells permeate the air. I hated arriving home from the restaurant reeking of fry oil; I even had to designate a jacket and a scarf as work-specific because I didn't want the rank odor on any other clothes. Now I come home smelling like granola and forget to even wash the spots of honey and peanut butter off my forearms. Measuring and mixing are agreeable tasks. I dole out scoops of hemp seeds, their shells clinging to my shirt. ("Before you get any ideas, they're not viable," joked my boss on the first day, and I, the naif, totally didn't get it.) When I'm wrestling with dried fruit, apricots and tart cherries are the best, because they're delicious, and bananas are the worst, because they're sticky and cloyingly sweet. Once in high school I let a banana squish around in my backpack for a week and now the smell of ripe bananas kind of repulses me. I drag a hand through sunflower seeds with their husks like exoskeletons, flax seeds with their beetle shine, and sesame seeds, which like to congregate at the bottom of a mix bin. I work a paint stirrer through buckets of nut butter, the hateful sheen of oil floating on top promising a layer of cement on the bottom. Once I was in a hurry with a measuring cup and splashed peanut butter oil in both eyes, but escaped with only bleary contacts, thus proving that I'm probably not even a little bit allergic (a big plus in the industry). Between rolling sheets I dart away to drink lukewarm coffee and nibble the trimmings from the previous day's labor.  We alternate between listening to my eclectic and sometimes embarrassing iPod shuffle and the "butt rock" Pandora station preferred by the others, sneaking the volume up in increments until Kate emerges from the office to turn it down. The atmosphere is decidedly chill. Sometimes I fondle the finished product in its matte plastic packaging and fancy labels and think in wonderment, I made this.

Granola porn
Courtesy of our website

And then when I've finished rolling out 105 dozen bars, I stroll home and try to decide what to do with the remaining four hours of daylight. Bike ride? Make dinner? Mail some more nugs to loved ones across the country? Or just mosey over to the pub and see how many friends are there today? 

A Word From the Soapbox

We were over at a friend's house the other night, eating enchiladas and enjoying the usual good-natured bullshitting. One of her neighbors was there too, a local wrench, fellow North Carolinian, and dude of whom I think (thought?) pretty highly. We were talking bikes, of course, and he asked what I ride, of course, so I told him but added that I'd just joined the local team, and before I could reveal the possible new bike purchase that that entailed, he cut me off with a sharp, "They're just letting anyone on that team now."

My friends who know me as a cyclist visibly stiffened. He backpedaled and clarified that he meant they were loose with their pro-form, but the jab still stung. I spent the rest of the night engaged with him in some kind of lame attempt to establish my legitimacy, talking brands and builds and numbers, and the climbers' and skiers' faces showed bemusement then boredom. I love gear talk for gear's sake but I cringe at myself when I fall into these conversations that are all posturing and name-dropping.

Unfortunately, sometimes it feels like that's the only way to convince recent acquaintances and new shop folks that, yeah, I'm a chick but I'm also a competent mountain biker. I don't think that I'm overly sensitive, but it is kind of a drag moving somewhere and doing the slow, elaborate dance of a new shop patron: hi, your kneejerk reaction to my entrance into the shop is wrong, I don't need dumbed-down service, please don't condescend to me. It's tricky to convey all that without outright bragging or obnoxious bike nerd talk.  If you don't get what I'm saying, imagine walking into the bakery for the first time. Based on her immediate visual judgement of you, the nice lady behind the counter explains to you the difference between a baguette and a danish, and asks if you've ever eaten bread before, and if so, have you ever purchased it all by yourself?

Absurd, sure, but the experience has repeated itself in several shops and parking lots across the country. There are so many lady rippers out there that it seems unwise to just assume a woman that shows up at a trailhead or walks into a shop is a beginner or casual rider. I'm curious to hear other opinions on the matter--if you're a chick, do you notice an initial lack of regard from shops and industry folks? Or is this issue unrelated to gender and does every new kid on the block have to prove him or herself? Or (quite possibly) am I just paranoid and too aware of how others perceive me? Pleasantly, I haven't encountered any of this bias in skiing, maybe because there's no organized competitive aspect to the kind of skiing I do. The scene is way more mellow and joyful, which is one of its huge appeals.

A Poorly Planned Production

When you arrive at Grand Targhee, the front of the resort is very unassuming. It's mostly broad runs interspersed with avoidable nontechnical tree groves--for anyone seeking more bang there are a couple of respectable cliff lines and tight powder trees to be found but for the most part it's a solidly intermediate mountain.

Once you crest the resort boundary and drop down the other side, towards the Grand, away from ski patrol's purview, into no-man's-land...Targhee is a completely different beast. The peaks that make up the resort appear to have been bluntly bisected along their north-south axis and its east faces are a multi-storied stack of increasingly massive cliff bands and stark faces. Now that the snowpack has far surpassed a hundred inches, everything previously rocky or bushy has filled in and while the resort is clogged with Mormons and young rippers, we prefer to partake of the Playground, the very accessible but very daunting area below the initial huge cliff band, where the record is held for the largest cliff jump, where (if you are so inclined) you can easily huck ten foot wind-established cornices or fifty foot dun and tan diving boards that loom above the supple powder field. 

Behind the resort...take one lift, kill yourself

As I said, we've been down there plenty of times, but on Saturday we came with a burlier objective; the cliff band below the Playground, where hundred footers are the minimum, is breached by a single couloir, the Tube, a 700 foot drop that seemed to contain no mandatory airs, according to our aerial guidebook. 

We brought a span of rope (along with our friend Dapper Dan who actually knows how to use rope) because, why not? Ambitious lines require ambitious precautions, right?

Well.

After a week of moguled, sun-baked, wind-scoured snow, the powder in the couloir was a delight--each aggressively charted turn on the 50° slope was joyous, if a little nerve-wracking. We reconvened halfway down to take inventory and consider the narrow chokepoint at the bottom. Tyler, being the best among us, took the initial path as usual, and straightlined the choke with aplomb. I followed but was bogged down by hesitance, inexperience, and poor form. A sharp turn found me minus a ski and being dragged down the Tube by my own slough, and the seconds slowed as I plunged my fists and boot into the deep snow hoping to self-arrest before the narrowing of the rock walls. I managed to stop finally and dug deep into my little shelf to calm my rattled nerves. So that's what a slough slide feels like.

Ben eyeing the crux
Pics courtesy of Dapper Dan

After a quick pow wow the guys behind me finished the couloir. Tyler had unearthed my wayward ski at the bottom so I had only to wait, growing colder in the shadows as they made their way back up to begin the difficult ascent. I hugged the slope for a long time, curiously watching them mill around at the choke point. Finally Dapper booted up to me, using my errant ski as an anchor, and let me know that our slough had uncovered a head-tall cliff at the bottom of the couloir and that he had clambered up with Ben and Tyler's help and now would attempt a rescue by rope. 

The boys stranded under a newly-exposed cliff

 I had nothing to contribute to the alarming situation below so I directed my energies upward to establish the bootpack. I falteringly strapped one ski to my pack and used the other to hoist myself inexorably up the Tube. Dig ski into snow above head, kick four times into powder with left foot, hope step will hold, weight left foot, raise right foot, repeat. It was brutally slow and scary but I had flat land and sunshine to look forward to and the couloir was still beautiful--rock pinnacles surrounding me, tiny determined pine trees reaching heavenward away from the snow-choked chute, the wind-stirred powdered sugar sifting down the slope in the late afternoon luminescence.

The climb out into the sunshine

One last gasping lunge through hip-deep snow and I had cleared the couloir. Then I sat and waited, watching big mountain skiers hit huge lines in the Playground, oblivious to our crisis just below, and tried to quell my panic and make a game plan just in case. After twenty minutes, to my enormous relief, I saw Tyler's ski tips bobbing above his pack as he crested the pitch, and Dan and Ben followed. The jerry-rigged rope rescue had succeeded thanks to Dan's know-how, they'd survived the cold and the bootpack, and now all we had was a strenuous but familiar exit and we'd be back on groomers in no time. We hugged and high-fived, jittery with adrenaline, knowing that'd we'd gotten away with it, and that soon this would be just another one of those superlative-filled, wide-eyed skiing stories to be told around the campfire. 

Unrelated

I am at the present stoked on others' successes. A great ski buddy just penned an essay on dawn patrol that really resonates with anyone that pursues life's minor (and/or major) victories. One of my dearest friends Morgan is achieving great intellectual fulfillment at a literary journal after years of menial waitressing, and another BFF is with child after years of documented womb throb. Miss Tuttle is going to KILL it at motherhood. Ella Bella is supporting her man as he delves into the rewarding world of CSAs. Right now I'm reaping life's little bonuses and am very excited for others to experience the same. I'm afraid that satisfaction is stifling my own creative bug but at some point I will start writing again and hopefully the product will be worth reading.