LEAD STORY
GEOLOGY AND THE SKIING EXPERIENCE BY BRIAN K. JONES
OUTCROP | October 2020
this when you’re a ski instructor. I got spoiled years ago. Even back in my early days of high school, skiing in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I would often stop at the side of the run and let my friends go ahead. I was fascinated by the shapes of ski areas, the U-shaped valleys, the concave slopes, aretes, cirques, headwalls, hanging valleys, the pitches and the rolls. The Cascade Mountains were always fascinating to me as well, long before I became a geologist, before plate tectonics was a household word and before I knew a two-pyroxene andesite from a tholeiitic basalt.
There is a moment, right after sunrise, when the mountain seems to hold its breath. It’s cold alright, no more than a few degrees, but a windless cold doesn’t penetrate good gear, and ski instructors wear the best. On light snow mornings, when the ski patrol isn’t lobbing 4-pound bombs into every potential avalanche chute, we roll onto the chair lift at 8:45, a full 30 minutes before the public. The conditions are always soft, sometimes four inches of fluff, with 8% moisture that vaporizes with each turn in the cold morning air; sometimes soft corduroy that your edges cut through in wide arcing lines; sometimes nothing more than a mist. You can get spoiled by snow conditions like
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Vol. 69, No. 10 | www.rmag.org
