WHOOPEE WONDERLAND
What are all those people doing up there? There are just about 100 of them, shoulder to shoulder and stacked deep, being held back by the rope stretched taut by a ski patrolman. They are restless, stamping their skis. From this point, at the top of Colorado's Vail Mountain, peaks of the Rockies extend as far as the eye can see. Beyond the assemblage, on the other side of the rope, there is not a mark on the fresh snow of the night before. It is approximately 9 a.m. And then, without warning, the patrolman lets the rope fall. He wisely stays off to one side. What happens next is pure whoopee.
The skiers surge forward as if someone had sounded a cavalry charge. They spill over the edge and down into the powder snow, creating white explosions as they go. Individual skiers swoop and bounce ecstatically. The individuals soon become small dots, each surrounded by its own cloud of powder. The dots move down and down into what seems to be an eternity of slope. Then they are out of sight, swallowed in the vastness of the back bowls of Vail.
This is the moon landing, the Hope Diamond, the World Series of skiing. Hyperbole? Not to confirmed powder hounds and bowl freaks. And there is, indeed, a special madness to bowl skiing. Some say it is wrought by the disorientation brought on by sheer open expanse and steepness, a sense of being adrift in a universe of ungroomed snow. There is in some bowl skiers a kind of freneticism that is not entirely attractive. Herb Eaton, Vail's slope maintenance supervisor, says, "The type of skier who lines up to charge down first—the skier who insists on his tracks being the first in the snow—well, that type can be a little weird. I've seen people actually climb up and over the hood of a Snowcat—while wearing skis—to get to the hill first." Eaton is wary of such skiers. "We stay out of the bowls when there's a crowd of those guys straining at the rope. There are too many dummies and daredevils on the hill on those days."
This is not to say that bowl skiing attracts only chargers. At Park City, Utah, where the stunning Jupiter Peak Bowl complex opened two seasons ago, there are rarely crowds. Craig Badami, marketing manager, says, "Jupiter is too steep and too deep for a lot of skiers. So almost everyone who gets over there early in the morning can end up on his own private course where no one else goes."
Bowl skiing is at its best in the West, and most resorts have a bowl or two to sell. Sun Valley, Idaho has the long runs of Christmas Bowl. At Alta, Utah a large and swooping bowl called Devil's Castle beyond the main ski area can be reached only by a slightly strenuous climb. Snowbird, down the road a piece from Alta, offers five lift-served bowls and, like many other ski areas, has a number of back bowls than can be reached by helicopter or a bit of hiking.
But locating the bowls is one thing; explaining what they are is another. Jackson Hole, Wyo. has some of the finest bowls anywhere in the West, both in the ski area and far out into the mountains beyond. Paul McCollister, the founder and principal owner, and a group of Jackson Hole ski patrolmen, talked for half an hour about the properties of a true bowl. Some insisted it had to be concave in shape, with a lip or cornice at the top. Others said no, a bowl could merely be a broad gully with sides that curve upward. Others allowed that perhaps any sloping terrain that was open and constant, unbroken by ridges, could be called a bowl. Some included long steep snowfields, perhaps burned over years ago. Could such terrain be passed off as a bowl? Yes, that was proper enough, too.
Indeed, the celebrated back bowls of Vail—though they form a sort of amphitheater around the valley below—are in large part burned-over slopes. Bill Brown, a venerable mountain man who helped cut many of the ski runs at Vail, recalled the making of the bowls. "The whole area had been burned over and there were only stumps. There wasn't much clearing for us to do. To us, it was real cheap skiing. Early snow, powder snow, lots of snow—it was a real boon and we knew a good thing when we saw it. In those days, there weren't that many powder skiers and the bowls were strange territory for most people. It used to take four days, maybe even a week to ski off the powder then. But with all the crowds around here now, it's done in two, three hours."
But if there are bowls and bowls, there is only one classic bowl. The formation producing it—the result of glacial action over 10,000 years or more—is called a cirque. In his book On Mountains: Thinking About Terrain, John Jerome describes the process in this way: "The upper end of a valley glacier—its beginning point—will be marked by a cirque. The glacier originates below a headwall, where eddy currents in the mountain winds cause blowing snow to collect and settle. This accumulation turns to solid ice...and freezes to the mountain surface. Freeze-thaw cycles and the pull of gravity on the accumulating mass draw the incipient glacier away from the head-wall at the uphill end, forming a Bergschrund (mountain cleft) between ice and rock. The pulling away plucks rocks from the headwall; the rock then becomes part of the load carried down the valley by the glacier. This plucking action is the first step in the formation of a cirque—the amphitheater-like mountain bowl that makes one of Alpine country's most spectacular features."
For thousands of years the ice continues to pick up rocks from the middle and sides of the cirque, causing the terrain under the glacier to become more and more curved—and more steep. Jerome says, "So long as the glacier maintains its size, the cirque continues to carve its way uphill, working its way toward the summit of the mountain" by bringing down more rocks from above. When the glacier finishes its work and melts away down into the valley, it leaves a lip or cornice at the top. More important, it also leaves those lovely steep, curved sides so admired by the bowl skiers of today.
The same sort of snowy love affair is carried on in European ski areas since, as Jerome puts it, "all mountains are basically big chunks of rock and the same laws of glacial physics apply." In fact, there are a couple of outstanding ski bowls in the Parsenn area above Davos in the Swiss Alps, where glaciers have done the right job for the occasion. But there remains a difference to bowl purists: timberlines are usually much lower in the Alps than in the Rockies and the quality of snow isn't as good. Without quality snow, the fanatics insist, a bowl is just another depression in some hillside.
Still, nothing is ever constant in the world of mountains, no matter what the continent, and even as we whoop and holler and bust the powder down some gorgeous cirque, be forewarned that it may last for a few lifetimes, but not forever. "Inevitably in our 10,000-year warming trend, shrinkage has set in," Jerome says. "Once a glacier starts shrinking, the cirque is exposed to ordinary erosive action, which reduces the steepness of its sides, softening the contour...."
But whether a bowl is a perfect cirque or merely a nice wide gully or gap, it may form natural avalanche paths, and can be desperately dangerous under certain conditions. In fact, the better the bowl, the greater the danger. At most areas, ski patrolmen keep a close watch on the bowls, particularly in the morning after an overnight snowfall. They often touch off a series of explosive charges to trigger avalanches that might otherwise bury skiers later in the day. They keep a keen eye on cornices. Only after the patrol has deemed an area skiable are paying customers turned loose—and it is this wait for the seal of approval that causes the excited mob to gather at the ropes of Vail.
The back bowls of Vail have a grand and rambling feel to them, with long and fairly steep sides. In the radiant Colorado sunshine, the bowls give a sense of descent that goes on forever. And that, not coincidentally, is the name of one of the nicest runs at Vail: Forever.
Also among the super bowls in the West are those at Taos, N.M. Once known principally for a kidney-busting straightaway adjoining the lift line called Al's Run, the resort has expanded to offer some 400 acres of lift-served bowls. They range from panoramic but relatively gentle runs down Kachina Bowl to swoops into the gullies of West Basin to the steeps that flow past gigantic boulders on Hunziker Bowl. South Fork is an expanse offering a four-mile run from top to bottom. It is a good place to ski all winter, and it borders on Utopia in the softer snows of spring. South Fork has no lifts; it requires skiing or hiking in. And one must climb back up after the run down. Well, there is one alternative. Those who choose not to climb can hike out through the bottom of the bowl into the valley; it is a beautiful but difficult marathon that, according to Taos Manager Ernie Blake, includes acres of brushy obstacles that lie in wait "like a winter jungle."
All the bowls at Taos have been open at least five years. The oldest—and the toughest—is West Basin, which began operating in 1965. It boasts three stunning chutes, all of them so steep, says Blake, "that you cannot go straight down—even the super-best skiers have a hard time doing anything more than tight wedel turns." The chutes are named Stauffenberg, Fabian and Oster, after three German officers involved in various unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the last years of World War II. West Basin is so steep that only the bottom quarter can be groomed. Kachina Bowl, on the other hand, was long ago cleaned and swept treeless by avalanches, and can be machine-smoothed top to bottom.
And then there is Jackson Hole, that he-man's retreat in the Grand Tetons, where the front of the mountain offers superb bowl skiing. In Rendezvous Bowl, you can streak down half a mile, with a vertical drop of 900 feet at a 32.5-degree pitch. The section up near the top, fittingly called The Cirque, ultimately widens out to a massive, concave scoop. These are good runs, often full of powder in the morning and, as the season progresses, corn snow in the afternoon.
But the hairiest bowls at Jackson are off beyond the main area. They are not served by ski lifts or grooming equipment or by any ski-patrol service, including avalanche control. Often there is simply too much snow out there for safe skiing. Still, it is highly praised terrain for powder hounds, even though it is reached only by a method foreign to the average Alpine hotdog, hiking in on skis.
One of the newest clusters of bowls—possibly destined to become the most famous of all—is a 650-acre paradise around Jupiter Peak in the Wasatch Range above Salt Lake City. Jupiter opened in the 1976-77 season after a long and difficult lift installation. The bowls are four miles away from the base lodge at Park City. From atop the main mountain, one skis down the back side, then rides up again on a new 3,600-foot lift. It leads to a high, curving rim of snow surrounded, in the distance, by peaks. Stanchions for the new lift to the Jupiter rim were hoisted into the area by helicopter, and the cost of the installation, including a shorter lift on the "tame" side of the mountain, was $1 million.
Although much of Jupiter Bowl has the required rim top and teacup-curved sides, there also are trees scattered through some of the region. Thus, jitterbugging through the trees has become one of the kicks the hyper-hotdogs enjoy most about Jupiter. There is fresh powder—from a couple of inches to several feet—almost every morning. Craig Badami, whose job as marketing manager is to sell the place, outdoes himself when he talks about the powder on Jupiter. "Sometimes it really flows right over your head. You're in so much powder, you're swallowing snow. You're breathing snow. It's like you're in your own private blizzard. It's like you died and went to heaven."
One Jupiter run is called the Om Zone, after the famous chant. Another is known as the Isle of Giants—named for the size of the trees one must dodge. And there is one hairy, steep side (48 degrees) with a single obstruction in all its expanse: Dead Tree Bowl. But the maddest run of all in the universe of Jupiter is a slash through the trees just off the rim. It is called Portuguese Gap and falls away at an honest 52 degrees—so steep that, in order for the run to stabilize enough to hold its own snow, it must undergo several hours of foot-stomping by brave volunteers after the first couple of blizzards in November.
Skiing the bowls offers a variety of thrills and contours. One can roar down Portuguese Gap as though fired from a cannon; ripple down Forever with a crowd of friendly, barking powder hounds all around, or head for the untouched spaces of Cody Bowl above—and beyond—Jackson Hole. Whatever form it may take, bowl skiing is as good as skiing gets.
PHOTO
JOHN G. ZIMMERMAN
Meandering into Vail's China Bowl, the skier at left finds a lot of loveliness in the loneliness.
PHOTO
JOHN G. ZIMMERMAN
Acre upon powdery acre of beguiling skiing opens to bowl hounds at Park City's Jupiter Peak area.
PHOTO
JOHN G. ZIMMERMAN
Inspired by the untracked snow of Jackson Hole's Cody Bowl, most skiers will turn into cutups.
PHOTO
JOHN G. ZIMMERMAN
Groomed trails are for the unenterprising; bowl skiers much prefer busting through the powder.