It has snowed. The lawn is white. In the high peaks, it looks like winter. The broad flat top of Braxon Peak has the start of a cornice on its north side. That cornice will grow enough to be there through next July if we have a normal snowy and windy November through March.
Normal requires disclaimers these days, of course.
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NOAA’s Mauna Loa Global Monitoring Lab notes that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere hit 417.1 parts per million in May of this year. That’s a higher level than at any time in the last four million years, and it means the earth will become a solar oven. Of course, it’s already a solar oven, but in its new form it will be much better at cooking.
Four million years ago, Greenland didn’t have an ice cap. Indications are that it’s not going to have one again, after another millennium or so. The Maldives and other island nations will likely have been centuries underwater by then, along with about half of Florida and nearly all the coastal cities in the world. Lots of people will have moved to Greenland, if they can move, and if there are people.
Closer to our own time, the Gulf Stream may stop warming Europe any day, and Europe might appreciate that, at least in the summers. Siberia hit 100 F this July, and will again next July, given that more and more of it has turned black due to tundra and taiga fires. Soggy storms, which used to drop snow in the California peaks, will create ashy mudslides this winter instead of ten-foot drifts. Winds reached 140 mph in an Iowa storm, and damaged or destroyed ten million acres of corn and soybeans.
Not everybody thinks all these are due to changes in atmospheric composition. Climate science has been a contentious business since 1896, when the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius first postulated an atmospheric greenhouse effect. There have always been climate deniers, because climate science is full of apparent disconnects between cause and effect. It’s hard to set parameters for any climate experiment, and anyway, when the experiment is called industrial civilization, every bit of data it yields is subject to interpretation by one interest group or another.
Computer models work well when you have a fixed amount of agreed-upon variables, not so well when you’re arguing whether to include a bunch of them, and a bunch of others are going through phase changes, and there’s a bunch yet of others you forgot to include in your last model, and a small bunch of unexpected interactions between phenomena you really didn’t expect to interact.
Carbon dioxide isn’t the only thing warming the planet. Methane, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and water vapor are in the picture along with ocean heat absorption, water-column layering, and the explosive sublimation of giant methane clathrate deposits.
Add variations in solar output, El Nino/La Nina fluctuations, changes in cloud patterns, loss of seasonal snow cover, heat islands, volcanic eruptions, rooftop/blacktop deserts, and gamma rays generated by too-close supernovas (within a thousand light years or so), and it’s hard to write the supercomputer program that will let you know if you’ll be skiing this winter or next.
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Still, in a few more weeks I’ll be sharpening and waxing our skis, pulling our ski boots out of the crawl space and emptying my ski pack out on the kitchen table so I can throw it in the washer and go down a dog-eared checklist of its contents.
Every year our equipment gets a little more obsolete, but we haven’t worn it out yet, and it works just as well as the newer stuff.
The newer stuff is lighter. I have a friend who skis on new Alpine Touring equipment, and one of my boots and one of my skis weighs the same as both of his boots and skis.
My ski pack is also heavy. It will contain a snow shovel, first aid kit, emergency mylar blankets, an extra pair of climbing skins, bungee cords, tools and headlights. Also candles and matches in case a fire is needed. Extra clothes. Extra energy bars. Extra chocolate-covered espresso beans. Sunscreen and water. A small piece of foam insulation to sit on. A radio and avalanche beacon.
Much of this equipment is on the list because it will allow a night out in below-zero weather if you get injured miles from a road, on steep and timbered slopes. Use it and you’ll be uncomfortable, but you’ll live long enough to see daylight, and possibly a helicopter. Possibly a snowmobile. If the slope isn’t too steep or the timber too thick, you might get back to civilization in a heavy plastic sled, with a blanket and straps to keep you from falling out, and a tow rope to go forward and a tail-rope to keep your downhill speed from getting lethal. You will need friends at the ends of the ropes.
You don’t want to spend two nights out, not at below zero. That’s one reason it’s considered foolish to go skiing alone. Even when you’ve told someone where you’re going, you can make a wrong turn and head down the wrong drainage. You can get caught in an avalanche or fall into a tree well or hit a tree with your head, and it might take more than a day to find you. You could die of the cold if you didn’t die of those other things.
You don’t want to be one of the people who die out there, even if people will say you died doing what you loved.
Climate change may save you from yourself. Or not.
Skiing is good exercise. When I’ve put on ski clothes, boots, skis, skins, poles, and the pack, I’ve gone from 180 to 225 pounds. On a good long ski day, I’ll move those 225 pounds up and down 2500 or 3000 feet. It’s cheaper than joining a gym.
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Apparent disconnects are everywhere. There’s a big one between the macrocosm—which includes droughts and hurricanes, uncontrollable fires, a pandemic, presidential politics, and climate refugees—and the microcosm, which this morning includes Julie and I and our ski equipment, the new snow on the lawn and our breakfast of sourdough pancakes, maple syrup, and bacon that she’s just put on the table.
The microcosm includes a look at the top of Braxon Peak, which was bare yesterday and today looks skiable. There’s a ski route down from the top, if I remember correctly, that starts down the bowl between the peak and the Rotten Monolith, continues down the steep slope above Monolith Lake, climbs back up to the ridge above the fifth Bench Lake, and continues from there down the Bench chain to the trail that leads to Redfish Lake Lodge. The last time I skied it was in April of 1975, alone. The nights of that long-ago month were still flirting with below-zero temperatures, but I wasn’t of an age where caution seemed to be an option. It’s a wonder I’m not still out there.
Caution has made the microcosm smaller since 1975. If the coming November brings snow deep enough to keep our skis off the rocks, Julie and I will put a track on an old logging road that winds up a nearby canyon. It’s a climb of five hundred vertical feet over a couple of miles, and you can get up to cruising speed coming back down if you stay in your tracks. Leave your tracks, and the slope is gentle enough that you’ll slowly come to a stop in shin-high powder.
If and when we get a few good storms, we’ll ski the hill across the road. It’s steep, and you have to watch the avalanche conditions. We ski the trees or stick close to the ridges coming down. Usually we’re skiing there by the middle of December, although I remember one year when it snowed thirty inches on dry ground over Thanksgiving weekend. Just like that, we were skiing anywhere and everywhere we wanted.
The morning’s news reveals that more people are dying from heat and drought. Wars are being fought over water, with more in the offing. Refugees are massing on the borders of countries where it still rains. Thousands of homes in California have burned. Coastal communities in Louisiana have been wrecked by hurricanes. But the amount of misery that the climate is inflicting is small compared to the amount it will inflict in the next decade.
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Over the last twenty-five years, Julie and I have tried to hide in the microcosm, where the catastrophes are survivable, and where misery can be balanced against joy. We’ve tried to live in a temporal microcosm—the present—which is way more survivable than the future.
We’ve done this more or less consciously, preferring to face problems that yield to the human will. When we need a winter’s woodpile, I can sharpen the chainsaw and put it in the pickup, and after a bunch of trips to the woods we have a woodpile cut and stacked. When our pantry starts looking like Mother Hubbard’s, we can get in the car with our stimulus checks and come home with three months’ worth of groceries. When we start bouncing off the walls, we can walk out the door and ski for a day. But when we make plans, we make them for hours, and not weeks or months. We know the greater universe—its climate, its politics, its megafires, its supernovas—could come crashing into our lives at any moment, and our lives of privilege and agency would be gone forever.
Are there ethical problems to living like this? Probably. Once you’ve decided that your civilization is on an irreversible path to self-destruction, you’re not that far from nihilism. Attempts to find nihilism’s shining moral core—Schopenhauer and Nietzsche come to mind—have not ended in greater happiness for humanity, or even for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
I do know that splitting firewood for an afternoon feels like a bigger accomplishment than writing a letter to one of Idaho’s Republican congressmen explaining that the climate has passed tipping points that will make a return to normal temperatures and weather patterns impossible. I know that going skiing while we still have snow seems like the right thing to do, especially on mornings like this, when the peaks are shining white in the sunlight, the air is free of smoke, and the highway is empty of climate refugees.
Julie and I want our thoughts and our actions to matter, but the world where they do keeps getting smaller and more fragile. It’s a world that won’t last forever.
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I hope it’s clear by now that I’m looking forward to skiing. If this year is like past years, I’ll have the equipment in good shape for the first day when a foot or more of new powder covers the old logging road. We’ll take turns breaking trail up to the end, where a big stand of moth-killed Doug Firs stretches bare limbs out to criss-cross the sky. We’ll pull the skins off our skis and start back down our track, skiing into the powder and making little early-season turns whenever we get going too fast.
It will only be the first day of skiing, but it will be a good day, a harbinger of good days to follow, when the snow is deeper, the days are longer, and the turns are bigger, faster, and beyond counting.