Читать книгу Shaped by Snow - Ayja Bounous - Страница 9
ОглавлениеI. Blooming Season
Dreaming
On the longest day of the year, I wake up shivering. The brazen light of the solstice sun seems to nudge the nearby curtains aside as if they are nothing but a thin veil of smoke, drawing me out of a dream that I fight to hold onto. For a moment, my mind straddles two worlds at once. The brisk, frozen landscape I left in my sleep is much more familiar than the sweltering one I am waking in, with its pale yellow walls, gauzy curtains, and bright white cliffs in the distance.
My body tenses for a moment, my heart tapping in the hollow where throat meets breastbone. My chest rises and falls beneath the thin, white sheet. I struggle to remember why I am waking up here, and why I feel so cold despite the imposing summer heat.
The confusion lasts only a heartbeat as another pair of eyes opens inches away. Something in me registers their shape, the curve of their creases. Their cool, pale color holds the answer to both questions lingering in my groggy mind: why I am waking up in the desert, and why snow filled my sleep. With the recognition comes a swirling euphoria, a lightness that spreads from my chest to the tips of my fingers and toes, residual thrill and movement from the lingering dream.
Last night I dreamed I was skiing. I was moving effortlessly down the fall-line of a mountain, consumed by the cold smoke of powder. I was inhaling it. It was passing through the membrane of my skin and entering into my bloodstream. Water droplets froze and latched onto blood cells, creating icy creeks that turned into raging rivers in my legs, and the steady drip of capillary trickles in my fingertips. Frost crystallized on my eyelashes, my fingernails lengthened into icicles, my eyes froze over like the surface of a pond. My tendons became brittle like frozen bark, my lungs expanded with crystals. The cold connected muscle and sinew to chilled bones. It filled my womb and left frosted fingerprints in my hair.
Last night, I drove hours through a dark, winding canyon, trading mountains for desert. The man whose sharp, cyan eyes met mine this morning was the reason for my dangerous excursion, and, as I comprehend through the heat and haze of the moment, why I dreamed of snow.
Our fling started in the deep, dark months of winter. Keeping our developing intimacy to a minimum, our courtship consisted purely of skiing. We did enjoy the random, but intense, connection that our families shared with Snowbird Ski Resort in Northern Utah; our grandparents were involved in the development of the resort. And we created music together. During those winter months, we enjoyed each other’s company in the mountains and in bed. When May arrived, Colin started his summer job as a raft guide in southern Utah and we had to part ways. I was uncertain of how our loosely formed relationship would hold over what would be close to four summer months of separation. There would only be a couple of chances to see each other, and each required one of us to take on the three-hour drive.
On this particular occasion, I had made the effort. He was in between rafting trips and couldn’t leave the company’s home base in Green River. The timing wasn’t perfect, but it would be our only chance to be together for the next two months. So, in a spontaneous midnight decision, I risked the dark drive to the desert. That night, the summer heat retreated from my skin, the night grew longer and darker, and I felt frost creeping onto the window pane. That night, I dreamed of snow.
Despite the lazy days of the solstice, which draw on forever under the wide, yawning expanse of the sky, summer passes quickly, as summers often do. Upon returning to my home in Salt Lake City, the heat of the valley was nearly as stifling as the heat of the desert where I had said goodbye to Colin.
In Northern Utah, where the Salt Lake Valley butts up against the barrel chest of the Wasatch Mountain Range, summer can sometimes seem too long in the approach, everyone aching for the landscape to push through the hump of the mud season. Yet once it arrives, the heat that presses in around the scrub oak and sagebrush of the valley can be overwhelming, suffocating. It’s in the mountains where the cooler air collects, settling on the granite rocks that give structure to creeks and streams, slithering between pillars of pines, wafting the rich, intoxicating scent of soil into the forest breezes. I crave these cool currents.
Still light-headed from those cold, dark moments with Colin, my skin aches for the touch of chilled fingertips and misted breath on my neck. So I leave my apartment in Salt Lake City and drive south to the mountains. I turn up Little Cottonwood Canyon and roll my car window down, twisting my fingers in the currents of the canyon breezes and playing music that reminds me of him.
For billions of years, water and fire have created the landscapes my family lives in; fire from the metamorphic processes beneath the earth and volcanic activity, water from shallow seas, glaciers, and erosion.
Little Cottonwood Canyon, home to Snowbird and Alta Ski Resorts, was created by a twelve-mile-long glacier. It extended from the topmost cirques of the canyon to the base, where it is believed to have butted up against Lake Bonneville, the Great Salt Lake’s massive predecessor. My parents’ house is just south of the mouth of the canyon, and every time I visit them I try to picture a glacier calving off into an ancient lake along the road I drive. Little Cottonwood Canyon has the distinct U shape common with glacial valleys. Running east to west, the canyon looks like an immense canal, connecting eleven-thousand-foot peaks to the valley floor. It’s straight and open enough that someone standing in the valley can get a clear view of some of its highest peaks. In contrast, the glacier at the head of Big Cottonwood Canyon—the canyon north of Little and home to Brighton and Solitude Ski Resorts—extended only five miles. The upper sections of Big Cottonwood are wider, glacial valleys, but the lower section is winding and shaped like a V, since it was cut and eroded by a river. The two canyons are made up of similar rock formations and neighbor each other, but they each have their own distinct feel. Water shaped them differently.
The walls of Little Cottonwood are steep and severe. One of my father’s favorite places to rock climb during the summer is the enormous granite slabs on the north side of the canyon. The granite rocks of the Wasatch were formed when intense heat began melting material beneath the surface of the earth forty million years ago. For twenty million years, eruptions hundreds of times larger than those of Mount St. Helens filled in the landscape above the earth’s crust, while below it magma rose but cooled before it reached the surface, crystallizing and creating what are known as igneous intrusions. These intrusions are responsible for many of the igneous rocks in the Wasatch, like quartz monzonite and granite. Because of their light color, they stay cool to the touch even during the hottest times of the year. Whenever my father drives past these slabs, he slides his sunroof open so he can look up at the climbing routes. As his passenger, I hate when he takes his eyes off the road to look at mountains. But as the driver this June day, I lean my head slightly out of the window, trying to spot tiny climbers on the white-and-gray-speckled cliffs.
Hanging valleys, where a tributary glacier met the main glacier, bookmark the south side of the canyon. Waterfalls and creeks cascade from the lips of the hanging valleys until they meet Little Cottonwood Creek. The hiking trails leading up to those valleys are some of my favorite in the Wasatch. They curve around the canyon walls, weaving in and out of groves of aspen, keeping to the shadows of pines as they gain elevation. Many of them have creek crossings, where the temperature drops and the moisture in the air becomes tangible. Further up the valleys are cerulean lakes, and above those peaks, arêtes and cirques where glaciers cut jagged ridgelines into bedrock. These lakes and peaks are usually the destinations for hikers, but I don’t care if I make it to them. I desire the coolness of the creeks.
I pull into a trailhead parking lot and step out of my car, breathing in the scent of rock and pine. On weekends, cars can overflow these small lots and line the canyon road, adding what appears to be a layer of shining, metallic scales along the black serpent of pavement. Today, however, I have the parking lot to myself. I begin gathering what I’ll need for this hike—water bottle, notebook, protein bar. My hand hovers over a patterned rain jacket. Do I really have to bring it this time?
I glance at the sky above me. It’s a blue so rich it’s as though the mountains exist within a sapphire. I grab the crinkly thing and stuff it in my bag.
The Wasatch Mountain Range sits on the boundaries of three prominent geological features of the American West: the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau. The Wasatch crowns the Colorado Plateau, the high-elevation desert where I believe the heart of the American West resides. Shaped like an actual heart flipped on its side, the plateau is sliced open by the Colorado River, which moves massive amounts of matter that stains its water red through the ecosystem and out into the west, like an artery carrying blood through a body. Running north to south, the Wasatch is the most western range of the Rocky Mountains and the most eastern range in the basin and range pattern of the Great Basin, which spans from Utah to Eastern California, Southern Idaho to Northern Mexico. As the spine of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, the mountains are a sanctuary for mountain flora and fauna, residents of the Rocky Mountain ecosystem who depend upon the mineral-rich soil and constant water supply that the mountains offer in the Great Basin Desert.
The origin of the name Wasatch is disputed; some sources cite it as a Ute word for “mountain” or a “low place in high mountains,” while others claim it comes from the Shoshone word for “blue heron.” A rumor that the name comes from a Native American word for “frozen penis” circulates through the valley every few years. Sometimes I wonder why so many associate mountains and peaks with the intruding curve of a phallus. When I look at the Wasatch, I see the shape of a woman.
The word cache (of Wasatch-Cache) is more easily defined. A French word with Latin roots, a cache is a place to hide or to store things. It was brought to this region by French trappers, some of the first Europeans to venture as far west as the Wasatch, who used the mountains to store food, supplies, furs, and other tradable goods. Later, notorious robbers, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, would use the mountains as hiding places. A cache might also refer to the natural stores of gold and silver that drew miners up into the mountains in the 1800s.
For many of the one million human residents of the Salt Lake Valley today, the mountains offer an escape from the twisting rivers of cement and boxy confines of suburbia, world-class backpacking, skiing, and rock climbing, and provide the valley with freshwater from snowmelt.
My family has lived in the Salt Lake Valley since the early 1900s. Though my mother’s family hails from the Bay Area in Northern California, my father grew up on a fruit farm in Provo, Utah, about forty miles south of Salt Lake City. My sister and I were born in a hospital near the base of Little Cottonwood Canyon. Until we left for college, both choosing to head to the Bay Area rather than remain in Utah, we lived within two miles of the mouth of the canyon. These canyons and peaks, valleys and cirques are the places that shaped us, that we consider home.
Naming
Half of the bird was the color of a jewel, a bright cobalt that spread from its belly to the tip of its paddle-like tail. Its head and chest were a black onyx, with a few thin wisps of blue between its eyes. It had a crested horn of feathers on its head.
Mohawk, I thought as I stared into its beetle eyes, trying not to blink.
The bird ruffled its feathers once, twice, then took flight, leaving the pine branch swaying from its departure.
I left the cover of the trees and walked to the edge of the lake where my family was eating lunch.
“What kind of a bird was that, Baqui?” I asked. I don’t remember how I gave my grandpa that nickname. He doesn’t know either. It just emerged from my toddler lips one day, barely more than a babble. But it stuck. From that moment on he was Baqui.
My grandpa looked up from his sandwich.
“What did it look like?”
“Blue and black. It had a mohawk.”
He chuckled. “Steller’s jay.”
I had seen plenty of those birds in my life, but never thought to ask its name until I was eight years old. It was a bird I associated with the mountains, one that could always be seen perched on the branches of pine trees.
We were hiking near Sundance Ski Resort with my father’s side of the family. The broad shoulders of Mount Timpanogos, the second-tallest mountain in the Wasatch Range at 11,752 feet, towered above us, blocking the afternoon sun. The adults of the family, my parents, aunt, uncle, and grandparents, were lounging on the flat granite rocks near the shore of a small mountain lake. I had been playing hide-and-seek in the trees with my sister and cousins when I saw the bird. For whatever reason, I decided at that moment that I needed to know its name.
Potawatomi author Robin Wall Kimmerer says in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: “Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.” I had already developed a relationship with Steller’s jays before I knew their name, recognizing the blue breast and mohawk whenever one landed in the scrub oak in our backyard. I knew its call, a throaty screech that doesn’t match its physical beauty. And I could tell the difference between a Steller’s jay and a scrub jay, a close relative with feathers a lighter shade of blue and a soft gray belly. But naming it did give me a certain awareness of the bird, a new kind of connection. Now whenever I saw it I’d say its name.
Steller’s jay.
A few years later we were hiking that same trail with those same cousins. I was carrying a large, gauzy net with a long, wooden handle. There was a mason jar in my backpack with hardened paste at the bottom, soaked with nail-polish remover—my “kill jar.” I was the straggler that day, falling behind the rest of my family as we switchbacked up the side of a steep slope.
“Ayj, you’re holding up the group behind you!” my father called from a few switchbacks above.
He was right. The group I was stalling was eyeing me hesitantly, unsure if they should try to pass or not. Or maybe they were uncertain what to think of the preteen waving a net as tall as she was through the grass along the side of the trail.
My new obsession was bugs. I had been given a biology assignment that summer to catch insects, kill them, and categorize them. I didn’t like the killing part, but I loved learning the scientific names. Beetles became Coleoptera, dragonflies Odonata, bees Hymenoptera, grasshoppers Orthoptera. I took the net with me wherever I went.
I jogged up a few switchbacks to catch my family. My cousins were leading the charge and singing as they hiked, their voices strong despite the elevation. Panting, I fell in step behind my grandpa, the soles of my shoes padding softly on the dense mountain dirt.
Much of the western United States is almost a mile above sea level. We were hiking at an elevation of about ten thousand feet that day. Over ten million years ago the western US began to rise, expanding as it did so. Like a cake rising, the crust of the earth cracked as the expansion occurred, creating faults throughout the West and forming the basins and ranges of the Basin and Range Province. The most active of these faults is the Wasatch Fault, responsible for the drastic eight-thousand-foot elevation difference between the peaks and the valley floors. The intensity of the Wasatch Fault is such that, if not for the constant erosion by the elements, the peaks in the Wasatch could be forty thousand feet in elevation rather than the twelve thousand they are today.
Wildflowers lined our path, delicate and colorful. There were many I couldn’t name by sight, but I did recognize the yellow black-eyed Susans and glacier lilies, white-and-pink columbine, scarlet-and-tangerine Indian paintbrush, and my favorite, deep-purple lupine. They were blooming a little earlier this summer than they normally would. Wildflowers in the Wasatch typically bloom mid-July through August, but Northern Utah had experienced a low snow year the prior winter and the snow in the mountains melted quickly. Once the soil is exposed and saturated with moisture from the snowpack, seeds that have lain dormant in the ground since the fall are able to germinate. When the snowpack is thicker, it lasts further into the summer, pushing the wildflower season back.
After one particularly heavy winter, the wildflowers didn’t bloom until September. The snowpack lasted so long into the summer that my parents skied on the Fourth of July—Snowbird’s closing day. My grandparents went on a hike on my grandma’s birthday, September 18th. Mid-September in the mountains is usually well past wildflower season, when the leaves start changing colors. But that year mid-September was prime blooming season. In a picture taken on their hike, my grandparents stand in a thick field of flowers that reach their knees, the persimmons and indigos of Indian paintbrush and lupine so dense you can’t see their shoes. “Wildflowers in Mineral, September 18, 2011. Fast Max’s 86th birthday” is written in sharpie at the bottom of the photo.
Fast Max is my grandma Maxine’s nickname; she may have never broken the 4'11" threshold in her life, but she was known for her speed on the mountain, both while hiking and skiing. I might call him Baqui, but my grandfather’s proper name is Junior Bounous. However, Junior wasn’t his legal name until he was almost thirty years old. The youngest of a large Italian family, no one came up with a name at the time of his birth. His birth certificate officially read “Boy Bounous.” Baqui didn’t know that Junior was a nickname until his wedding, when he pulled out his birth certificate. Now, the name Junior Bounous is woven with folklore of Wasatch snow and deep powder skiing.
“Baqui, what’s your favorite wildflower?” I asked after regaining my breath.
“Favorite? Oh, I don’t know if I have a favorite,” he said in his slow voice.
My preteen self, in the habit of ranking favorites for everything, from ballpoint pens to polo shirts, didn’t accept that for an answer.
“Well, which one do you like more than the others?”
He gave a chortle, glancing at the wildflowers near his feet.
“I guess I do love elephant’s head.”
“What does that look like?”
“Mmmm, they’re pink. Pinkish purple. Little flowers that look like elephant heads.”
I didn’t try to get any more out of him.
We made it to our destination, an alpine lake called Emerald Lake. Mount Timpanogos loomed to the west, striated cliffs and ridges imposing and magnificent. Most of the rock in this area is limestone, created during an era of heavy sedimentation. Many shallow bodies of water sprawled over the American West between three hundred and five hundred million years ago. Sediment, in some areas three miles thick, was deposited at the bottom of these seas, creating limestone, shale, and siltstone. During two ice ages that occurred thirty thousand and twelve thousand years ago, enough snow fell on this landscape that glaciers formed. They carved out the canyons of the Wasatch. Emerald Lake is one of the remaining features left by the glacier that made this mountain.
Above the lake is another feature left behind by an ice age. A mass of ice and rock slowly creeps down the side of the mountain: a rock glacier where there may have once been a proper glacier. Up until the last century, when a warming climate and more dust in the atmosphere began affecting snow in the Wasatch, the rock glacier had a permanent snowfield that lasted through the summer. Skiers would hike 3,500 vertical feet to ski it. My grandparents were two of those skiers.
My father brought my mother up to this snowfield on one of their first dates. It was early in the spring so they were still hiking on snowpack, but the snow had melted enough that there was a gap between the rock glacier and the mainland. According to my mother it was about five feet wide, and a fifteen-foot drop to a raging creek beneath. In her words, “It wasn’t huge, but it was one of those situations where if you missed your step it’d be the last thing you’d ever do.” My dad picked up the two dogs they were hiking with and threw them across the gap. They tumbled on the snow and stood up, apparently unfazed. Then my dad jumped, without checking to make sure my mother was comfortable following. My father was a professional racer on the US Ski Team at the time and in prime athletic condition. He had an adventurous soul, a way of getting people into situations that might make them feel uncomfortable, but also a way of getting them out. My mother was taken aback, but knew if she thought too hard about it she’d freeze. So she jumped.
We were finishing our lunch at Emerald Lake when my mother suddenly grabbed my net off the ground. She leapt into a field of wildflowers, sweeping the net in front of her. She had a triumphant expression on her face when she returned.
Trapped inside the net was a beautiful black and yellow butterfly. Lepidoptera.
It was much larger than any of the insects I had caught so far. I was a little shocked; I had never really thought my mom to be the bug-collecting type. She smiled when I said as much.
“I wasn’t really into bugs. But I liked picking up bones on the side of the road.”
I was torn. The creature was so beautiful, with long, delicate wings. I didn’t want to kill it. But my biology teacher would probably give me extra points.
“Baqui, what kind of a butterfly is this?”
My grandpa ambled over, placing his hands on knobby knees as he bent over the net.
“Swallowtail. See these tips on its bottom wings? They look like the forked tail of a swallow.”
I placed it in the kill jar as gently as I could. It was too big even for the jar; its wings flapped against the glass. I slid it in my backpack and tried not to think too hard about my decision on the hike down.
I shook its limp body out of the jar once we got home. It was gorgeous, its antennae delicate and curved. Veins of black fanned across thicker spots of yellow like spiderwebs. At the bottom of the wings were little grayish-blue smudges, and two small red dots which I guessed were meant to look like false eyes to distract a would-be predator. I stroked its body with a fingertip. It was so soft. I placed it on the foam board my teacher had given me, using pins to spread its wings to their full extent, and measured it to be larger than my palm. I left it there overnight, letting the body dry out in that position before I’d be able to add it to my growing collection.
I woke up the next morning and went to move it. The butterfly was alive, flapping futilely on the foam board. It had holes in its wings where the pins were still stuck through them, and another pin stuck in its body. My insides burned as I watched its movements. Tears slid down my cheeks as I placed the kill jar over it, making sure it was sealed this time.
Years later, at my high school graduation ceremony, my principal introduced me in front of an entire concert hall.
“Ayja Bounous had the best bug collection.”
Emitting
When I was a child and my father had retired from being a professional racer to become the director of the Snowbird Ski Team, one of his ski coaches was nearly killed by an avalanche while walking out of the old coaching shack at Snowbird. The shack was at the top of a beginner run called Chickadee, built right at the base of a peak named Mount Superior. As Mark left the protection of the shack he heard a deafening rumble to his right. A churning mass of white had dissolved the face of Mount Superior and was tumbling toward him at impossible speeds. He dove back into the shack rather than jumping in his car. His instinct saved his life. The avalanche took his car over the lip of the road and down onto Chickadee. The small wooden structure, reinforced with large logs, remained intact.
During the summer, the peak’s iconic appearance barely hints at the avalanche risk it poses during a different time of year. Superior is composed of cottonwood tillite, glacial till that’s been pressurized into solid rock, and tintic quartzite, metamorphic granite. The combination of the two creates waves of rust and cream that colors many of the peaks in the Wasatch. Around one hundred million years ago, the North American continental plate, which had previously been traveling east, switched directions, colliding with the denser plate that the Pacific Ocean is on. One plate sunk beneath, nudging the other skyward. The landmass that we consider the western United States was lifted up, one reason why much of the western US is almost a mile above sea level. The collision resulted in an era of mountain making. The iconic waves on the face of Mount Superior, most noticeable in the rusty, tillite formation, are what remains of the ancient mountain range. Since the peak is covered by snow in the winter, this pattern is most prominent during the summer, and adds dramatic movement to the mountain’s stony appearance.
To the east of these waves are gray-and-white-striped cliff bands of limestone and marble, which contrast the neighboring creams and dusty reds of Superior. The feature is a popular climbing destination called Hellgate. The first avalanche I saw as a child was one that careened over those cliffs.
I was once hiking with a friend along a trail at Snowbird, directly across the canyon from Mount Superior. Looking at Superior’s auburn-streaked face, he remarked that the mountain was much more beautiful during the winter. For reasons unclear to me in that moment, I was offended by his comment. I couldn’t comprehend how he could compare the two. I grew up as close to the mountains during the summer as I did during the winter, and for me to choose between them would be like a mother trying to pick a favorite child.
I once asked Baqui if he had a favorite season. He responded: “Yes. It’s called the four seasons.”
Superior is a popular peak to summit during all seasons. In the winter, skiers and boarders will skin up it to ski down, making it some of the most sought-after backcountry terrain up Little Cottonwood Canyon. During the summer, many hike to its peak along a more gradual ridgeline, or scramble up the south ridge. The south ridge is exposed and a bit treacherous. A rope and climbing gear aren’t necessary to climb it, but a level of athleticism and sure-footedness is. When my parents climbed it, my mother asked my father to rope her up during a certain section, just in case she were to lose her footing. He attached the rope to her and she climbed the section confidently, only to realize he hadn’t actually been holding onto the other side, letting the rope drag behind her. My mother said that the summit of Superior was gorgeous, but made even more beautiful by the thrill and exposure of the scramble. She said they were hiking the edge of fear and excitement.
Of the places and peaks I’ve been to in the Wasatch, I haven’t made it up Superior yet. I tried one summer, but there was so much smoke in the air that I decided against it. A few of my friends hiked during that time, and said their lungs and throats burned with the effort and they felt sick afterward.
The mountains aren’t quite the escape from the valley heat that they used to be during summer months. Wildfires have impacted the quality of living in the Salt Lake Valley in recent years. Some of the smoke pollution is from fires in Utah, while some smoke blows in from as far away as California and Oregon. Fires are a common occurrence in the West during late summer and fall, and they’ve been getting worse. The summer of 2018 was the driest year ever recorded in Utah and one of the worst summers for air quality from the resulting smoke. And fires are predicted to get more violent in the American West as climate change continues to affect our atmosphere.
Climate change is a disputed topic but it shouldn’t be. I’d wager that if not for the money in the fossil fuel industry, climate change wouldn’t be a debate. There is little doubt in the scientific community that climate change is happening and that humans are contributing—and that the consequences will be catastrophic.
When sun rays enter the earth’s atmosphere, some of the light is reflected by lighter-colored matter, like snow and clouds, but most is absorbed by the oceans, soil, vegetation, and rocks, as well as things like parking lots and infrastructure. The energy from this light is then radiated back out to the atmosphere as infrared heat. Particles in the atmosphere, like carbon dioxide and water molecules, absorb this energy and radiate it in all directions and back toward earth. Known as the greenhouse effect, this phenomenon is what makes our planet warm enough to live on, and is responsible for the abundance of life on earth.
The particles in the air that contribute to this effect are called greenhouse gases. Some particles in the atmosphere react either physically or chemically to the warming, while other particles don’t react. Particles that do react don’t control our climate but rather are controlled by it, and contribute to a feedback system. Particles that don’t react are called forcing gases, and are the most important regarding climate change.
Water vapor is the most common feedback particle. Water molecules end up in the atmosphere by evaporation from bodies of water and plant transpiration. The warmer the temperature of the air, the more water vapor the air is able to hold. As evaporated water rises into the atmosphere, it can cool and condense from gas back into liquid. This is how clouds form in the atmosphere; excess evaporated water in the form of gas condenses to become clouds and eventually rain or snow.
Greenhouse gases that “force” climate change, like carbon dioxide, are ones that don’t react to temperature changes, like water does. When heat is radiated into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide doesn’t change form with the energy, but instead blocks it from leaving the earth’s atmosphere and radiates the heat back to the surface of the planet, causing more warming. And as planet-wide warming continues it leads to more evaporation, and more water vapor in the atmosphere, which in turn causes more warming. Water and carbon dioxide play off each other to enhance climate change, but if not for carbon emitted from humans, this effect wouldn’t be so great.
It doesn’t take much carbon dioxide to cause this. Carbon dioxide is measured in the atmosphere by parts per million (ppm). Pre-industrial-era carbon concentration was around 280 ppm. This means that for every one million molecules of other gases in the atmosphere, there were 280 molecules of carbon dioxide. This is the level that the current life-forms on our planet evolved to survive in. By the environmental group 350.org’s estimate, 350 ppm is a reasonable and healthy goal for our planet—hence the organization’s name. Currently, we’re over 400 ppm. It’s likely that we’ve passed 400 ppm for the last time in modern times, and we’re releasing approximately 2 ppm into the atmosphere each year. Once we pass 450 ppm, scientists believe, we will not be able to mitigate the earth’s warming.
Large swaths of materials on the earth sequester carbon dioxide, storing it for long periods of time and preventing it from entering the atmosphere. When they absorb more carbon than they release, we call them carbon sinks. Dense forests are a type of carbon sink; trees and plants take in carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and convert it into starch. Oceans are another. Dissolved carbon dioxide in the oceans gets used by organisms like phytoplankton for similar purposes. An important carbon sink is the permafrost, soil in places like the Arctic Circle that’s been frozen for at least two years, though much of it’s been frozen for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Frozen organic matter in these soils contains large amounts of both carbon dioxide and methane.
As the planet warms, these carbon sinks are becoming carbon emitters. When we cut down forests, we not only remove organisms that pull carbon dioxide from the air, but we usually burn them or convert them into other materials, releasing carbon emissions. The ocean is one of the planet’s most important carbon sinks, absorbing approximately 30 percent of carbon emitted by humans. But as the temperature of the ocean warms, its ability to dissolve carbon diminishes. And when the permafrost melts with the heating of the poles, which are some of the fastest-warming places on earth, carbon in the form of both carbon dioxide and methane could be released in a massive “burp.” Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, trapping heat about twenty times more effectively than carbon dioxide does. There is almost twice as much carbon stored in the permafrost than there is in the atmosphere today, so the melting permafrost will have very alarming consequences for climate change.
Along with the poles, mountains are already feeling the effects of climate change more than places at lower elevations. Elevations over thirteen thousand feet are heating up to 75 percent faster than elevations under six thousand. Winters are expected to warm four to ten degrees by the end of the twenty-first century. Alpine ecosystems might be hardy when it comes to surviving frosts, blizzards, and thick snowpack, but they’re delicate when it comes to climate change.
The cycle of life in the mountains is timed with the snowpack. When a snowpack melts early, it exposes the soil to the elements. This allows vegetation to start growing sooner, but it also means that the new growth becomes susceptible to frosts, which can keep occurring in the mountains through June. Early snowmelt also means that alpine soil dries out quicker during the summer months, which affects pollinators, insects, and animals reliant on plants for sustenance, and secondary consumers who rely on those insects and animals for food. When high alpine meadows experience stress from warming temperatures and drier environments, more tolerant plants establish themselves during those vulnerable times, disrupting mountain ecosystems.
The snowpack in the mountains provides up to 75 percent of the freshwater in the West. We might not be able to see large-scale carbon emissions in the atmosphere, but we can certainly feel the effects of it here in Utah. Desert ecosystems, mountain ecosystems, and agricultural land, all reliant on snowfall, are under threat from climate change. As are our forests, which are becoming more susceptible to wildfires from less moisture. And with forest fires comes air pollution, smoke, and hazy skies. Bad for hiking, terrible for our health, destructive to our land. Deteriorating snowpack from climate change is one of the biggest threats to life in the West.
Building
“Ready?”
I shouldered my backpack and nodded to my mother.
“Ready.”
If there was ever a mountain goat in my family, it would be my mother. Slight in build, shorter and smaller than me, her size is deceiving when it comes to hiking. As I fumbled to adjust my bag, she propelled herself down the trail.
Our path curved around the right side of the lake before switchbacking up a steep slope. Just before the trail cut upward I glanced left, to the far side of the lake, to see if I could get a final glimpse of my father before we began our climb. But he must have already found a trail into the dense vegetation that lined the shoreline, for he was nowhere in sight.
The sky above us was the shade of blue I always associated with the Wasatch, a brilliant azure framed by rust-colored peaks and emerald pines. But gray clouds threatened its edges. Their foreboding color didn’t just imply rain, but thunder. And hail.
We could sense, rather than hear, the rumbles coming from the other side of the ridgeline, as though the thunder was coming from deep within the earth rather than the sky. The sound wasn’t loud, but its muted timbre made it seem even more ominous.
We had started our hike from a friend’s home in an area called Grizzly Gulch, located at the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon. It was a gorgeous summer morning in the mountains, temperatures in the mid-eighties, no storms in the forecast. My grandparents joined us until we reached the ridge that separates Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons. My parents and I continued down to a series of lakes, where we stopped to eat lunch.
My father got a call from Baqui while we ate, warning us that he and my grandma had just been caught in a hail storm. It had moved in from the west, and lasted about two minutes. If I were just visiting the Wasatch I may have thought he was joking. But having grown up in its shadow, I knew how unpredictable the weather patterns could be. Summer afternoons are wildly deceiving, when thunderstorms can build and break on the crowns of the Wasatch while the valley below remains sunny.
Uncertain if we should chance hiking up to the exposed ridgeline or remain by the cover of the trees, we finished our lunch quickly, listening to the high trillllll of a spotted towhee. There was still no sign of any storm. The nearby peak cast its reflection into the calm lake at our feet, a prism frozen in glass. According to my grandparents, there was a hail storm just on the other side of its ridgeline.
Then my grandfather called again, reporting that another brief storm had hit, this time with lightning.
“Where are these storms?” I asked as my father hung up.
But even as I spoke we heard the barest growl of thunder, without any hint at which direction it came from. We gathered our things. My dad thought he remembered a path that could get us back faster, but didn’t quite know where it started or the state it was in. My mother and I shared skeptical glances; my dad was notorious for convincing people to follow him on a “shortcut” and then winding up on a cliff band or stuck in a marsh, a scenario we lovingly call “Bounousabuse.” When he admitted there might be some bushwhacking involved to find the trail, my mother and I decided not to chance it.
Wishing us good luck a few minutes later, he took off down the left side of the lake while we headed right, starting our climb as the barest hints of the storm began peering over the ridgeline.
When my mother is determined, or frightened, she can set a pace that even men with much longer legs than her have trouble keeping up with. Panting, I kept my head down, focusing on the trail, wiping sweat from my brow every few minutes. The sun continued to press down on us, and each time I looked up the gray clouds seemed to be perched right on top of the ridgeline, not yet spilling into the basin. But the thunder was growing louder.
We were approaching a shoulder, a nook in one of the ridges that led to the peak above us, when my mother turned to say something.
“Looks like—oh.” Her words disappeared into the breeze as she looked behind me in shock. A wall of moisture smeared the basin we had climbed out of. While we focused on the storm in front of us, the one my grandparents reported, another had moved in behind us. The sun had somehow remained in a patch of blue sky, just above us, giving us a false sense of comfort while clouds encircled the basin. Spidery fingers of lightning flickered through the gray streaks of rain across the valley.
Leaving the trail, we beelined toward a little cliff band with some tree cover, ducking into a grove right as the sky broke over us. It hit so quickly we didn’t have time to take out our rain jackets, and as we bent over our bags to grab them out, hail the size of pomegranate seeds began stinging the backs of our necks. Thunder shook the ridgeline menacingly. Lightning silhouetted the few trees that stood around us.
“Do you think this is a safe spot?” my mother asked over the sounds of the storm.
“I don’t know,” I responded. “Do you?”
The rocks we stood by were not so much a cliff band as they were large, straight boulders, freestanding in the shoulder of the mountain. There were a few pines around us, probably six or seven, and they weren’t providing much protection from the hail. We were surrounded by the tallest things in the vicinity.
Discussing our options, we decided that the grove was still safer than retreating back down the exposed path we had just hiked up, or continuing on the trail across the face of a mountain. I attempted to remember everything I had ever heard about lightning, though I knew much of it was myth. Getting rid of our hiking poles seemed like it wouldn’t hurt, so we tossed them into some bushes thirty feet away, then hunkered down beneath the trees again, keeping our feet close together.
I once asked my father if he was scared of anything. He always seemed so fearless, jumping off of cliffs on skis, rock climbing, windsurfing chopped-up ocean waves.
“I’m scared of things you can’t control,” he said. “Things like lightning, or avalanches. You can do your best to stay out of situations that will get you into them, but they can be unpredictable. That’s what scares me.”
My family has a history with lightning. When my dad raced for the US Ski Team in the 1980s, one of their races in New Zealand was interrupted by a lightning storm. My father was at the top of the course when a buzzing noise started; he fled when he noticed a man’s hair standing straight up. Lightning struck my grandparents’ car once while they were driving through southern Utah. My parents were near the summit of Kings Peak in eastern Utah when my mom’s braids started curling up at the ends, and my dad’s hair rose from his scalp. They had also been caught in a storm on the side of a cliff while rock climbing a multi-pitch, anchored to the wall by metal pieces and no quick way to get down. And around the time I was born, a family friend’s son was killed by lightning while camping in southern Utah. The storm had been miles away from his campsite.
I could almost see my mother replaying all of these events in her mind as we stood in the trees. Hail bounced around our feet. The balls grew in size as the minutes passed, smacking our shoulders and jacket hoods relentlessly. The thunder and lightning were now simultaneous. My legs, bare beneath my shorts, quickly went numb, and within minutes there was almost an inch of slush around our feet. My light running shoes soaked through immediately. This was not the two-minute storm my grandfather had reported. I leaned up against the granite rock, then, noticing the black-and-white veins in it, pushed myself away, wondering if certain types of minerals and rocks attracted lightning.
Another flash-boom, so blinding and awful that I was tempted to fall on my knees and crawl away—where? There was no escaping this.
“Look!” my mom exclaimed, pointing up the ridgeline.
Above us, about a hundred feet away, a tree was softly smoking through the haze of hail.
Forty-five minutes had passed since we took shelter in the shoulder, and still the storm showed no sign of retreating. Each time it seemed as though the storm was getting further away, a new round of lightning would roll in. Too scared to touch our phones, we had not tried to contact my dad to see if he had managed to get to safety. We stood in four inches of hail slush, and I was beginning to feel feverish from the cold. The only purpose our rain jackets really served anymore was lessening the impact of the hail on our skin.
One … two … boom!
Now desperate to get off the mountain, my mother and I had started silently counting between flashes and thunder. It was rare to make it past two.
Flash!
I watched my mother’s mouth form an O, but the thunder came before she could finish mouthing “one.”
After the next flash we counted one … two … three … and my mother’s eyes widened. The trail ahead did not continue on the ridgeline but it still looked dangerous, cutting across the face about a hundred yards beneath the summit. We’d be the tallest things for almost a half a mile. But the situation had become dire enough that we needed to move, and we still had another three miles of hiking to get back to our friends’ house. Those miles, at least, were beneath the cover of thick forests.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Ready.”
We dashed out of our hiding spot, abandoning our poles to the bushes we had thrown them in earlier. We were almost halfway across the hill when the world broke apart in light and sound. Flash-Boom! We stopped running, our instincts dropping us into a crouch. There was nothing around us, no kind of shelter. Even crouching, we were the tallest things in the vicinity. Each slow second passed with fear that the next second might be our last. I suddenly and fully comprehended my parents’ fear of lightning.
My mother looked up at me, terror in her eyes, and said, “What do we do?”
My mother had always fiercely protected me, almost to a fault. If I came home from school upset from something someone had said, she’d be on the phone within minutes to call up the parents of whichever kid made me cry. When I was so shy I couldn’t talk to waiters, she’d order my ketchup for me.
And now she was turning to me to make the decision. Our eyes held each other for a long moment. I briefly wished my father was there to choose for us. Despite his daring that gets us into uncomfortable situations, he maintains level-headedness while our composures dissolve.
Flash-Boom! Flash-Boom! Flash-Boom!
I looked both ways. We were definitely closer to the shoulder we had just left. We could run back and continue hiding, or we could risk the longer route to shelter. But there was no way we were staying there, out in the open, waiting for someone else to make the decision.
“Let’s run to the woods,” I said, pointing to make sure she understood. “Ready?”
She nodded, her eyes unblinking in her pale face.
“Ready.”
It felt as though hours passed, but we were beneath the cover of the trees within two minutes. As the adrenaline faded we began comprehending how cold we were. The declining path was flooded with hail that had partially melted into slush, and we slipped and fell all three miles to the house.
My grandparents and father were waiting anxiously when we arrived. My dad had found his trail, more protected than the one we were on, and made it back two hours before us. My mother and I were both so weak it was all we could do to strip out of our wet clothes and into the dry ones they gave us. I felt flushed and nauseous, and a headache was attacking my head and neck. My limbs ached. It took hours before we felt good enough to drive home.
I had experienced unexpected Wasatch storms that had sent me running for cover many times in my life, but none as ferocious as that.
Breathing
There is a place at Snowbird named after my grandpa that’s home to some of the most beautiful wildflowers in the Wasatch. It’s a small, cupped hand, the upper cirque of a glacier long gone, called Junior’s Powder Paradise. Powder Paradise, its common name, is the upper section of Mineral Basin, the same place where my grandparents posed for a picture among the wildflowers. A ridgeline leading to Twin Peaks encircles almost 180 degrees of Powder Paradise. In the summer it contains a lazy stream which, due to high arsenic levels, flashes bright copper back at the sun. Dense, green moss encroaches upon the shores of the stream. The water gathers at the lip of the cup, becoming a small pool before ducking under the basin’s rim, disappearing into the mountain, and reemerging as small, babbling waterfalls on the other side.
It’s named after my grandpa because of the role he played in helping develop Snowbird. He worked at a number of resorts during his ski career, beginning with Timp Haven, now called Sundance, then Alta, Sugar Bowl, and finally Snowbird. When Snowbird was being developed, Baqui helped design the runs, deciding how skiers would interact with the landscape as they traveled down the mountain. He started the ski school as well, and held the title of Director of Skiing until he retired at ninety years old.
One of my grandpa’s favorite trails in the world starts at the top of Hidden Peak and descends into Powder Paradise. He’s summited peaks and backpacked through deserts, but this beautiful yet simple gathering of copper and green, accessed only during the summer through the gates of paintbrush and lupine, holds his heart within its moon-shaped curve. I couldn’t tell you why exactly; that’s between him and the mountain.
It’s not just during wildflower season that Baqui loves visiting this place. During the winter, when white has paved copper into hibernation, he visits this bowl even more frequently. It’s named Powder Paradise for a reason.
After one particular run, when life and location came together perfectly, he connected, however momentarily, with this place. He called it a “perfect run,” but he didn’t mean that his skiing technique was perfect or the snow was the best he’s ever experienced. He couldn’t describe what happened that day, but it seemed to me as though his body had merged with the snow and the basin for a few moments before retreating back into itself. It was a deep, profound, and perhaps slightly frightening moment for him, one that twisted into his body and mind.
My grandpa couldn’t find a word to describe how he felt. I’d wager that most humans during their lifetimes will have experiences like his, when we connect with another human, animal, or place. Over the years, some have attempted to assign words to these fleeting encounters.
While looking into the eyes of a bighorn sheep, author Ellen Meloy says, “There is in that animal eye something both alien and familiar. There is in me, as in all human beings, a glimpse of the interior, from which everything about our minds has come. The crossing holds all the power and purity of first wonder, before habit and reason dilute it. The glimpse is fleeting. Quickly, I am left in darkness again, with no idea whatsoever how to go back.”
Once, while I was gardening in my backyard, I stopped to take a break from bending over the garden bed, sitting down and digging my hands into the soil between two rose bushes. I sat there, still and quiet, for a minute or so. Two California quails, one male, one female, came out from behind one of the rose bushes, pecking at the ground as they did so. They startled me, but I managed to keep still, holding my breath. The male noticed me first. He straightened abruptly, gray-blue chest puffing out, the dangling, black hook on his head shaking. The female straightened next, her light brown plumage soft and feminine next to her mate’s bolder stripes of white. They both glared at me sideways, their heads cocked at stiff angles. I imagined I could sense alarm and hesitation in their stare. But I thought I caught a sliver of something else in their eyes, just out of reach, a type of unattainable knowledge. No sooner had the thought crossed my mind when they both flew off the ground, their short, fat wings beating so violently in the small space that I recoiled, my shirt snagging on the rose bush behind me. I was left in the stillness and silence after their departure, my heart beating viciously in my chest.
Philosopher Martin Buber separates these moments of truth from the experiences in our day-to-day lives by defining them as encounters. He says that when an encounter occurs, it can only last for a moment, because the minute we realize that we’re having a moment of enlightenment the encounter fades, returning to an experience. For Buber, a moment of encounter means a moment of knowing what God truly is: love.
Back in the 1700s, the word sublime was used by scholars like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to describe these moments, specifically when they occurred in the wilderness and simultaneously included terror and pleasure. While climbing Mount Katahdin in Maine, Henry David Thoreau had a moment of disorientation while connecting with the wildness of the mountain, and exclaimed that he felt contact! with the rawness of the landscape.
Ellen Meloy would call the enlightenment a glimpse, Martin Buber would call it an encounter, while some scholars would call it a moment of sublime. Thoreau might call it contact! Adding my own voice to the choir, I would call it birth.
Whatever it was, Baqui told me that a single tear emerged from his olive eyes in that moment.
I have a theory about souls. I believe that every living thing has a soul, and our souls create the fabric of life, which is sewn into the landscapes of the earth through vibrations, or energy. The evolution of life was the marriage of the living fabric to the material landscape, the product creating a soul. Living bodies, which are composed of the vibrating matter of the landscapes they originate in, borrow patches of souls from this energy source, combining physical material with life, and once the body is no longer living, the soul returns to the landscape it originated from, a “soul’s place.” Along the course of life, a soul picks up vibrations from other places. This energy, while held snugly over the world, is constantly shifting and moving due to the movement of souls. Nothing is separate. Our bodies are composed of physical matter that we borrow from the earth.
And when we have those encounters, those glimpses, those moments of birth, we are collecting energy, our souls merging with the landscape and bringing new material into our existence.
Powder Paradise is my grandpa’s soul’s place: the womb from which he originated.
Growing
Glass bottles clinked against each other as I shrugged off the terry robe. Hanging it on one of the wooden pegs lining the wall, I pulled the beer bottles, already slightly wet with moisture, out of the large pockets of the robe. One of my cousins from my mother’s side of the family, Reyna, her three-year-old daughter, Kyler, and my mother were already in the pool.
It was a gorgeous, late-summer’s day at Snowbird. My cousin had flown in from Seattle with Kyler earlier that week and we were staying in a set of rooms at the Lodge, one of the hotel accommodations up Little Cottonwood Canyon. They were here for the Oktoberfest Snowbird hosts every August through October. We had spent the day at the event, listening to live music and entertaining Kyler. She still had face paint on as she floated around the pool in her water wings, her cheeks striped with the orange and black of a tiger.
I slipped into the pool next to my mother, grateful for the moment of peace. In a few hours, Oktoberfest would close for the day and this pool would be crammed with people, but for now we were the only ones enjoying it. The event had been packed; we could barely move through the crowds. Snowbird can experience some of its busiest days during Oktoberfest, with more customers coming up for the beer on these days than on a powder day.
Many ski resorts are diversifying their business models in anticipation of climate change. One of the ways the ski industry will be affected by a warming planet is shorter winters, and in most locations around the United States the ski season is getting pushed back by days and weeks. Many resorts are starting to struggle to open for the holidays, a crucial time for resorts from a business perspective. Seasons are ending earlier, as well. By expanding their summer business, building zip lines and mountain bike trails or hosting summer festivals, ski resorts are adapting to a changing climate.
My mother smiled at me as I passed her a beer. She’s never loved classic beer, but she does enjoy a good grapefruit radler.
“Coming to the Oktoberfest while you’re pregnant wasn’t great planning,” I teased Reyna. She had arrived in Utah with the news she was pregnant again. All bets were on that she’d have a third daughter. There have only been women born into my mother’s family for the past three generations.
Kyler was twirling around in her floaties, entertaining herself on the far side of the pool. From somewhere in the surrounding pines a Steller’s jay called. I felt a tinge of jealousy that Reyna was pregnant again, that she could make the decision to have children so easily. I imagine that it’s an easy decision for most, but whenever I talk with my group of girlfriends about motherhood, the conversations are weighed down with hesitation and fear. We are scared of bringing children into a landscape destined for climate change.
“How did Grandaddy end up investing in Snowbird?” Reyna asked, stretching her arms along the side of the pool.
While my paternal grandfather, Junior Bounous, was helping to design runs and create the ski school at Snowbird, my maternal grandfather, Grant Culley, was donating funds to help build the resort. He was the first monetary investor, and was given the first pick of rooms to own at the Lodge. He chose ones on the topmost floors, a set of four that sits where the hotel bends northwest so that our family could enjoy direct mountain views as well as views down the glacial valley. We were staying in those same rooms that weekend.
“A man named Ted Johnson,” I answered. “He was Snowbird’s original developer. When Grandaddy and Gummy used to ski at Alta, he was there too and had the idea to develop Snowbird just down the canyon from Alta.”
“Wow,” Reyna said, “Grandaddy must’ve trusted Ted a lot to put so much money into an endeavor as risky as a ski resort. You’re basically investing in the developer.”
“He definitely had a great relationship with Ted,” my mother responded, “but the way Grandaddy saw it, he wasn’t really investing in Ted. He did it for the snow.”
Her words snagged in my chest.
“The snow?”
“The snow, and the mountain. He’d been skiing at Alta for a while, and we’d always go into the backcountry. A bunch of that terrain became part of Snowbird when it was developed. So he already knew the mountain, he knew the terrain, and he knew how consistent and light the snow is here. He said it wasn’t even a decision, really. He knew that Ted was a reliable guy and a hard worker, but the real reason he agreed to it was because he trusted that the snow would always come. He knew it’d be a good investment from the start.”
My grandfather Grant Culley was a businessman who created a life for himself and his family by investing. When he began studying at Stanford University without any money to pay for his tuition, he invested in himself, gambling his way through school. Afterward, he put his time, money, and career into an insurance company that initially failed. When he and his partners tried to launch their business again, it succeeded. My mother was a little girl when Merrill Lynch bought the company, and their stocks tripled overnight. My grandfather then set his sights on purchasing land. Responding to ads in The New York Times, sight unseen, he bought a bay in the Inside Passage of Canada and a coconut plantation in Fiji. Our family still owns the cabin in Canada.
“He always wanted to invest in snow,” my mother continued. “He was addicted to light powder and steep terrain. When I was a kid we’d always have to drive all the way out from the Bay Area to the Wasatch to ski, rather than just going to Lake Tahoe. And he’d pack up his and Suzanne’s ski gear and fly up to the Canadian Rockies to go heli-skiing with a guide named Hans Gmoser. They’d stay in an old logging camp with no central heating or plumbing.”
“Gummy would stay in a logging camp without plumbing?” Reyna said incredulously. “Our glamorous Gummy, who had a different ski outfit for every day of the week?”
“I know, I still have a hard time imagining it,” my mother responded with a smile. “But within a few years, and with funding from Grandaddy, Hans upgraded and built a lodge in an area known as the Bugaboos.”
“But Grandaddy never really saw any return from these investments, right?” Reyna asked. “It’s not like our family makes any money from owning rooms here.”
“No, but that was never part of it for him.” My mother smiled softly, her almond-shaped eyes looking up to the auburn and green hillsides. “He always called it a passion of the heart.”
***
Before my grandparents were born, others had their own stakes in this same landscape, but for different purposes. In the mid-1800s, gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc were unearthed in the Wasatch and in the Oquirrhs, the mountain range across the Salt Lake Valley. The discoveries attracted miners to the Utah mountain ranges. The township of Alta was created up Little Cottonwood Canyon to accommodate thousands of miners, along with railroad cars to get the materials and mined minerals up and down the canyon.
The town flourished for decades. It had its hardships, including a fire that destroyed almost all the buildings in the 1870s and a series of avalanches that took over one hundred lives. In their haste to build a town, the residents chopped down much of the old-growth forest, not realizing that the trees had anchored the snow on the steep slopes.
That was not the only foresight the mining population lacked. Mining for minerals is a classic boom-and-bust cycle. The money flows vivaciously when there are accessible minerals in the ground. But mining, like oil, gas, and coal, is not a renewable resource. Once the resource dries up, the money does as well. By the 1920s, there were only a few residents remaining at Alta. One of them, George Watson, elected himself mayor and began buying up old mining claims, hoping that another boom would come around. When it never came, he sold those claims to the US Forest Service. That land would later be integrated into Alta Ski Resort.
Miners relocated their lives to try to strike it rich, but many of them never considered that it was not that great of an investment. They’d flock hopefully to wherever whispers of minerals were reported, settle down, create a town, build infrastructure, and elect officials, never considering that the prosperity wasn’t permanent.
A boom-and-bust cycle is happening today, this time with fossil fuels. Many have invested in those industries with the same mindset miners had—that the prosperity from investing in oil and gas is permanent. Fossil fuels haven’t hit the bust part of the cycle quite yet, from a monetary and political perspective at least, but they’re much more devastating than their mining predecessors. Not just because they will run out, like any nonrenewable resource, but also because the carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases they emit into the air will translate to sea-level rise, mass extinction, droughts, destructive storms, and perhaps even the end of society as we know it.
A new kind of migration has influenced Utah in recent decades, one composed of skiers, snowboarders, and outdoor enthusiasts instead of miners. It’s a migration that many of my friends are part of, that Colin is a part of. They may be drawn to these locations for recreation rather than extraction, but they have similar mindsets to the miners: this prosperity is permanent.
Warmer temperatures, more precipitation in the form of rain rather than snow, and dust storms will be the downfall of snow in the American West. Climate change will send the ski industry into decline, degrading the snow, which we didn’t realize was a nonrenewable resource until now. The demand for snow will grow as the resource becomes scarcer. As resorts in lower elevations close, more enthusiasts will have to travel further from their homes to ski. Higher-elevation resorts, like Snowbird and Alta, will become busier, till they, too, lose their snow. Instead of ghost mining towns, we will have ghost ski towns.
When both sets of my grandparents chose lives based around snow, one from a business perspective, one as a career, they never predicted it would become a nonrenewable resource. My parents, too—my mother a ski instructor, my father a ski racer and coach—never realized that a life built around snow might not be stable in the future. They never had to worry about climate change when choosing a career.
But my sister, Tyndall, an instructor at Alta and a coach at Snowbird, is aware of the risk of investing too much of her life in snow. Not many of her coworkers realize this same risk.
We returned from the pool and I sat on the couch to do some writing. Kyler walked up to me and looked down at the words on the page. Picking up a nearby pen, she underlined a word.
“What does that say?” she asked.
“Snow,” I responded, smiling at her.
She underlined a phrase.
“What does that say?” she repeated. I stopped smiling, alarmed at the words she chose.
“Mass extinction.”
“And this one?” she asked, underlining a full sentence this time.
Fossil fuel industries are propelling climate change.
She looked up at me expectantly, her round olive eyes soft with curiosity. I swallowed, the words dry in my mouth as I spoke them aloud. She tilted her head to the side, blond curls touching her cheek.
“What does that mean?”
I couldn’t answer her. How do you explain climate change to a child?
Waking
I wake up early to get to his house before he awakens. His front door is unlocked, and I push it open softly. His bags from the river are all over the floor, still full. The wooden floorboards creak underfoot as I cross the living room and walk down the hall to his room. He is still asleep, legs tangled in the thin sheets, his hair spiraling out across the pillow in blonde ringlets. I lower myself onto the other side of the bed as gently as I can, but my movements make him stir. Colin reaches over and pulls me closer to him.
“Hi,” he murmurs in my ear.
“Hi,” I whisper back, smiling.
“Do you want to bike over to my grandparents’ house?”
I look up from the dish I’m washing.
“Bike? To your grandparents’?”
“Yeah, it’s only ten minutes away. We can stop at the bakery en route and pick up some coffee and pastries.”
I haven’t met Colin’s family yet, besides in passing prior to us dating. The Gaylords have family gatherings in Salt Lake City quite often, but Colin has never invited me to one before.
“I don’t have a bike …” I start, but he interrupts.
“I’ve got an extra one you can use.”
I busy myself with some dishes to hide my pause. Now that we’re both returned from our summer travels, our relationship will have to move in some direction. It had been on the cusp of transforming prior to our separation, but had halted when Colin left for Green River. It seems to me that we can’t sustain such a casual relationship; we’ll have to either move forward and become more serious, or retreat to being friends again. We’ve reached a crossroads.
The moment stretches on. If I hesitate any longer it’ll become awkward. My stomach churns a little at the thought of meeting his grandparents. And, though I don’t care to admit it, biking on streets makes me nervous.
“Do you have a helmet?” I ask.
A few minutes later we’re coasting down Colin’s driveway. I feel a little silly, wearing a helmet when he doesn’t have one on, but I don’t quite trust myself to not fall over during this ride. It’s a quick trip, even with the stop at the bakery. Within ten minutes we are stepping off the bikes in front of a house with a pile of aspen logs on the front porch and a rack of antlers mounted to the garage.
“Does your grandpa hunt?” I ask, eyeing the rack.
“He lives for it,” Colin responds. As we walk up the driveway my ears pick up a familiar song coming from a tree nearby.
Weee-wooo. I turn my head, listening intently. I recognize the birdcall, but can’t place the name.
Weee-wooo. Then a series of garbled noises makes my memory click.
“Look, a black-capped chickadee,” I say, pointing to the black head and white breast as I see it.
Colin glances over toward the tree, raises an eyebrow, then knocks on the front door, apparently uninterested. My face flushes a little with embarrassment. Maybe I’ve shown my bird-nerd cards too soon.
Colin’s step-grandmother, Claire, opens the door and welcomes us inside. We are greeted enthusiastically by a large black dog—his grandfather’s hunting dog, Tru. Bud Gaylord, Colin’s grandfather, is sitting at a round dining room table. We sit next to him, placing the steaming cups of coffee down while Claire grabs plates for the cinnamon rolls.
After some questions and conversation about how Colin’s summer on the river went, our conversation turns to Snowbird and family.
“I’ve known your grandparents, Junior and Maxine, from way back,” Bud says. “Back when we were building the Cliff Lodge.”
“I forgot that you built the original Cliff.” The Cliff Lodge is one of the hotel accommodations at Snowbird, similar to the Lodge, where my family has the set of four rooms. “That’s where my parents got married, actually.”
“Oh, they did?” Bud chuckles, scratching Tru behind an ear. “Ah, it broke my heart when we had to sell the Cliff. We were trying to avoid bankruptcy. We did avoid bankruptcy, but letting go of that place was hard. Now, I know who your father is, but who is your mother? Is she from Provo, too?”
“No, my mother’s family is from a town near Palo Alto in California,” I say. “Her maiden name is Culley. You may have known my maternal grandparents as well—they were some of the original investors in Snowbird.”
“Not Grant and Suzanne Culley?” Bud asks, lifting his eyebrows. “We used to have a set of rooms right next to their rooms at the Lodge.”
“That’s them!”
Bud looks at me over his cinnamon roll, a scrutinizing expression in his watery eyes.
“Does your family still own those rooms?”
I smile. “We still celebrate Christmas there every year.”
He nods, his gaze slipping from my face to something behind me, something in the past.
“We used to spend Christmas there, too.”
He continues to stare so intently at a memory that I imagine I can smell the scent of cinnamon and pine, hear the music and bells of a holiday long gone.
“Your grandmother had a piano in those rooms, a grand piano—I have no idea how they even managed to get it up to the sixth floor!—and she used to play the most beautiful songs on it.”
His hands rise to waist height and he sits up straight, as if there is a piano in front of him. His eyes turn suddenly toward me, with the same lightness Colin’s gets when he’s excited.
“We could always hear her playing Christmas carols through the wall. Do you still have that piano in the room?”
“We do,” I assure him, beaming at his excitement, at the image of my grandmother playing the piano with her family circled around her, singing as she plays.
“Ah, you do. She was quite the woman.”
The conversation transitions to December and Bud’s upcoming ninetieth birthday. In the next year, Bud will turn ninety, Colin’s father, Randy, will turn sixty, and Colin will turn thirty. Grandfather, father, and son, at thirty-year intervals.
“You guys could add on another little one to the mix,” Bud jokes. “Ninety, sixty, thirty, and zero. Four generations of Gaylords, thirty years apart. This would be the only year to do it, better get to it!”
We laugh, but a heaviness lodges in my chest at his words. As silly as it may sound when I say it aloud, the risk of losing a child deters me from even wanting to have one. Any child I have could witness a World War III over access to fresh water, islands and cities disappearing beneath the ocean, and a refugee crisis the likes of which the planet has never seen. She might see the western United States experience a drought that could turn the Salt Lake Valley into a dust bowl. Her children may never see glaciers in their lifetimes. And, with more precipitation in the American West falling as rain rather than snow, my grandchildren may never get the chance to learn how to ski, or to catch a snowflake on their sleeve.
We emit carbon during our lifetimes, leaving our footprint on the earth’s climate. It’s unavoidable living in the United States, where our buildings and transportation systems and economy are powered by fossil fuels. But the biggest carbon footprint you can leave as an individual is having children. By one estimate from a study conducted by Oregon State University in 2009, “under current conditions in the United States … each child adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions.” If that child has more children and grandchildren, that number grows. By choosing to have children, we give choices to others to continue our carbon legacies.
I’ve had countless conversations with other young women my age who experience this same anxiety. The discussions seem to be geared toward women especially; sometimes it feels like it has become the women’s responsibility to save our climate by choosing to forgo starting families. A woman’s “carbon legacy” is seen to include more than a man’s carbon legacy does. I recognize this, and I know that this conversation is putting emphasis on individuals reducing their personal carbon emissions, when in reality climate change stems from the choices of large oil companies and politicians more than from our individual choices.
And it does not escape my notice that mothers are often the ones on the frontlines of environmental and climate activism. They are the ones who stand up to big oil companies when the health of their children is threatened. Becoming a mother is becoming a fighter, a bird that takes wing when there is a threat too close to her hatchlings to either distract or attack the threat, putting her life in harm’s way to protect her chicks. But even so, when it comes to imagining what my daughter and granddaughter’s lives will be like by the year 2100, I grow fearful.
Of all the conversations I’ve had surrounding this topic, I had never thought about how this conversation might go with a significant other who wants children, or with his family who expect grandkids. I become uncomfortable as I sit between Colin and Bud. What if Colin wants to raise a family? If I became firm in deciding not to have children, it could be a deal breaker for us one day.
I stop traffic on the ride back home, trying to follow Colin through an intersection as he turns left. I feel so stupid, the hem of my dress flapping in the wind, threatening to fly up to my belly as I bike in front of the stopped cars. But as we turn down a less traveled road, Colin slows so I can ride next to him. He reaches his hand out to me. Carefully, I lift one of my hands off the handles, seeing if I can maintain balance. In an embarrassingly slow motion, I reach a shaking hand out. He takes my hand in his for a brief moment. Then I wrench mine back again, the bike wobbling dangerously beneath me.
