A long way back to the top…

 

Excerpt from Bro Dick – a remembrance

 

 

I don’t know precisely when my brother Dick discovered skiing, but I do know where. It was at Strawberry up on Highway 50. I know this because he immediately stuck a picture postcard of Strawberry Lodge in the corner of the mirror in his bedroom, right across from the picture of Teresa Brewer, his ideal woman. I doubt that they still have an operating ski lift at Strawberry, but the lodge with its gables all along the front roofline is still there. It didn’t take long for my brother to figure out that there were far better places to ski, resorts like the old Sierra Ski Ranch and Sugar Bowl, or Alpine Meadows and Heavenly Valley. He was hooked.

We should have saved his first set of skis because they would be considered antiques today. They were made of wood—I think it was hard maple—and the bindings were a lever and cable contraption where the cable wrapped around a deep groove in the heel of your boot. It was amazing that anyone could ski with this equipment and not end up with knee surgery.

As technology progressed, Dick upgraded his equipment and spent all the time he possibly could on the ski slopes. He once told me that when the snow was good, the weather decent, and the crowds small, skiing was the purest form of fun. Experience taught me that he was right.

I had my first taste of skiing on the bunny hill at Heavenly Valley with my friend Dillon Mini. He had tried it a few times and told me that all I had to do was bend my knees, lean forward a little, and try not to fall down. And that’s exactly what I did, zooming from the top of the lift to the bottom in a perfectly straight line. No one said anything about turning.

I’ve never taken a lesson, but when I started tagging along with Dick, he took me aside at the bottom of the hill and gave me a few pointers on some fundamentals, like side stepping, and snowplowing, and how to make basic turns. Then he took me up to the top of the hill and said, “Just follow me and do what I do.” My brother was a smooth, controlled, elegant skier. He made it look easy. It seemed like he was always in control, and I can’t remember him taking a bad fall, though I’m sure it happened. I did my best to keep up with him.

Our favorite place to ski was Heavenly Valley. The hill is so massive and the view from the top of the main lift is breathtaking. We never tried to ski the face, mainly because I wasn’t up for it, but there were numerous trails to take from the top that provided all the challenge we needed. The great thing about Heavenly as far as I was concerned was that you spent most of your time on the hill and less time in line for the lift. It could take a half hour or more to ski all the way down from the top before you had to queue up for the lift.

I have to confess that we got into the habit of doing something that is a no-no. We’d drop down off the groomed ski run and blaze trails down through the trees and the virgin snow. More than once we got ourselves way down into a canyon and had to come sidestepping back up to the main trail. Dangerous stuff, but man was it fun.

We were skiing at Heavenly one very clear cold day and after several runs down the mountain, we went into the warming hut at the top of the main chairlift to thaw out for a few minutes. We ordered cups of steaming hot chocolate and sat down at a table next to a window on the west side of the hut. The afternoon sun was streaming through the window and the chocolate was delicious and before I knew it, I felt my eyes growing heavy. I looked across the table at Dick and he was nodding off too. He grinned at me and motioned toward the door. We finished our chocolate and headed back out to the mountain. If we’d stayed there another five minutes, we’d have been sound asleep. That was nearly fifty years ago, and I can still see my brother sitting across the table from me in that warming hut. It was one of the best days ever.

Dick had a couple of dreams, all wrapped around his love of skiing. The first was to finish his bachelor’s degree and I think he lacked about sixty units to reach that goal. He worked out a plan to attend the University of Utah in Salt Lake City where he could live with our Aunt Teresa and Uncle Dude. Aunt Teresa adored my brother and was excited to have him stay with their family. The skiing tie-in was the magnificent powder snow at resorts nearby such as Alta. For my brother, it was like going to school in paradise. Unfortunately, he could never convince the good folks of Utah that he was a resident, and the out-of-state tuition was a deal breaker. He completed one year at Utah and then returned to California.

The other dream was to have a neat little A-frame ski cabin somewhere in the Sierras. In the mid-sixties, my brother got really close to realizing this one. He bought a lot at a newly developed ski resort called Bear Valley and started pouring over plans and architectural drawings. We even took a late summer trip to Bear Valley to check out the site. Some of Dick’s friends from work came along and we camped at a lake near the resort. On one of the days we were there, we found ourselves standing at the top of what would be the main chair lift and we decided to hike all the way down the hill that would be the primary ski run. As we started down the trail, there was a neat little sign that said, “It’s a long way back to the top.” We just laughed and went on.

If memory serves, it took about a half hour to get to the bottom of the hill, and about two hours to work our way back up. The sign wasn’t kidding. When we got back to the top, Dick popped the trunk of the car and unloaded what he liked to refer to as a skier’s lunch. He had packed salami and crackers and two kinds of cheese. There were grapes and plums and nectarines. There was a cooler filled with ice-cold soft drinks and beer. And, of course, Mom had sent along homemade chocolate chip cookies. I swear food never tasted so good.

Dreams have a way of changing. My brother never did build that cabin and he wound up selling the lot, but it was a sweet dream while it lasted. Our cousin Margie was an accomplished artist and Dick asked her to paint a picture of the Bear Valley ski run from photos he had taken. That oil-on-canvass hung on the wall of his home for many years. I’m sure it’s still around somewhere.

We should have had Margie add that little sign: “It’s a long way back to the top.”

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