Soulful Skinning

words :: Matt Coté

It’s what animals hear when they move through snow: the soft sweep of hair against hoar frost, the crunch of crystals collapsing and air rushing out of the snowpack. As humans, skinning is the closest we can get to it. It’s a form of movement that, at its best, is so rhythmic it’s akin to meditation. And, at its worst, can send anxiety sailing. Some skin tracks are too steep, some are too mellow, others are too risky. But one thing is constant: When you’re putting one in, there’s always a backseat driver. Or at least the feeling of one. Most of us skin with the inescapable sense that every person who follows is going to judge us—and they are.

There are few things in backcountry culture that invite as much ire as an imperfect track. The fact is, in many ways, we encourage that outrage. Vocalizing it is a mark of expertise and a way to signal membership in an elite league of mountain people. But it’s also a conceptual trap, one that can bleed out into everyday life and do us a great deal of disservice. It reinforces the idea there’s only one way up a mountain—one single correct route already laid out by nature that you have to uncover. Even though that’s rarely true, just as in life.

The truth is, unless it’s a do-or-die situation, it’s okay for a skin track to be imperfect, because it’s perfectly impermanent. We don’t need to endlessly edit corners and punch new sections in for marginal gains just to piss on what the previous person did. And yet this habit has become a rite of passage, like a secret handshake for the initiated. And what’s worse, it’s timelessly seductive.

Of course, backcountry ski culture adheres to rigid patterns of thinking for good reason. We need standards to keep us safe, and we need best practices for good habits. But in the bigger picture, it’s just as important to recognize when standards need not apply. Skinning is as much an art, an expression and an experiment as it is a science. People are all over the spectrum in how they approach it, and hey, that’s fine. Some are learning, some are financially stressed weekend warriors, some are raising families and can’t spend all day perfecting their tracks. But they’re all just as entitled to experience the ephemeral pleasure of putting one in, however faulty or faultless.

Attaching disproportionate amounts of consequence to inconsequential situations, like someone stepping where you wouldn’t, maps our brains in a bad way. The best humans, in mountains or around dinner-table conversations, are adaptive, amenable, flexible and understanding. Applied to any other walk of life, all-or-nothing thinking is a pathology. We don’t thrive that way; we thrive when we allow ourselves, and others, the space to make benign mistakes.

Imperfect tracks should not be fuel for righteous indignation, but a lesson in letting go.