“The Path of Apprenticeship: The Zen of Yellowstone”
I glide through the forest. Sinking into each turn, the powder rolls up my thighs. My skis carve crescents through the open firs, neither fast nor slow but with ease, like a looping stroke of calligraphy.
This is my third ski tour in Yellowstone. I’ve spent perhaps fifty days winter camping in the park. I skied up to Heart Lake and back today, covering about 20 miles. Traversed two small passes, navigated by compass through two snow squalls, forded one river. Now it is dusk and so cold my beard has frozen into a thicket of ice bristles.
I slide into a broad meadow and cut silently over the drifts. My wax, a blue kicker over buffed green, is splendid. I’m practically levitating. Kicking, floating on one ski balanced like an ice skater, then kicking with the other leg. It’s a rhythm so natural and so elegant that once you’ve mastered it, the movement—instead of the speed or the distance covered or the day’s destination—becomes an end in itself. Kick, glide … kick, glide … kick, glide …
Through this motion, this mantra of muscle, I slip into a state of grace. Everything fits. The darkling sky mirrored in the violet snow. The snow feeding the trees and the hidden creek. The creek cutting the mountains. The mountains and me. We all dovetail together.
The tent comes into view, an orange speck set inside sentries of thin-limbed aspen. I stop. I’m drawn to the tent, but I’m also reluctant. I don’t want this long day, so smooth and solid, to end.
My mind goes on ahead. Not far from the tent, steam is rising into the frigid air. Ah, the thermal pools, the deep warmth of summer in the dead of winter. Dan Moe and Keith Spenser, my companions, will already be there. Long johns hung on upended skis, heads back against a mossy log, white bodies sunk up to their sunburned necks in the gorgeous hot water.
Soon I’ll join them. In an hour it will be night and minus 20 and dark as only distant mountains can be. Soaking, we’ll lean back and stare up at the crystalline stars. Dan will name the constellations: Gemini with Castor and Pollux, Canis Major, Ursa Major, Boötes the Herdsman. An hour later, like a resurrection, the moon will rise and the snow will sparkle and we’ll still be lolling in the delicious hot water. After all but dissolving, we’ll climb up the five-foot rim of snow, dash naked to the tent, and dive into our sleeping bags.
I see myself safely cocooned in down, my cold toes curled around a hot waterbottle, writing in my journal and plotting the day’s travel on the topo. When the coyotes begin to sing, the call and response bounding over the luminous snow like the nimble animals themselves, I’ll switch off the headlamp and listen, more at home than I am at home…
Standing on my skis and leaning on my poles, I turn and look back. I can just make out the faint line of my tracks scalloping down the slope, then running straight to me, as if bringing a secret message. This simple line, disappearing backward, gives me a profound sense of satisfaction.
It occurs to me, as I push off and begin again to kick and glide, that I almost know what I’m doing. The next thing that comes to mind is Woody Jensen.
Like other callow young men, I took up karate in college. Okinawa Te. Woody Jensen was the instructor. He was fluid, lean as a marathon runner. Every muscle was defined, from his corded neck to his knotted calves. He was spareness itself, every kick, every step, every word precise.
We stretched for 20 minutes before each lesson. Woody could touch his palms to the floor. He could do chinese splits. After stretching we practiced kicks. Side kick, front kick, roundhouse. Again and again. Woody would walk among his pupils wordlessly repositioning the angle of an ankle or the twist of a hip.
We spent less time punching. “The leg is seven times stronger and one-third longer than the arm,” Woody told us. We were expected to rehearse the kicks until our legs moved with alacrity and accuracy.
I was always eager to try, if incapable of executing, the more difficult kicks. While other novitiates were humbly perfecting the simple front kick, I would be leaping into the air and spinning like a Bruce Lee wannabe.
Woody also emphasized the katas, formalized, sequential routines that, if diligently practiced, teach one the basic skills of karate—blocks, feints, kicks, punches, steps, turns. My favorite was the Falling Leaf kata, but I can’t say I worked at it consistently or intelligently. To get it right was a slow process. I was impatient.
One evening Woody was watching me go through the motions.
“You are a fast learner,” he said. “It is unfortunate.”
I was dumbfounded by this hardshelled nut of truth. It became my own personal koan, one that would take me years to crack open.
Woody knew I was far more passionate about the outdoors than I was about karate. One spring day when it was snowing hard, huge flakes dashing themselves against the windowpane like desperate hummingbirds, Woody called me out of a kata and told me to leave class and go cross-country skiing that minute. On another occasion, when honey sunlight came pouring through the window and I felt trapped indoors like a bug in a jar, he excused me from class early and suggested I go rock climbing.
After I had been in karate for a year, I was allowed to spar. I was fearful and reckless. One evening I sparred with Woody. I was fighting—kicking and punching and spinning—and he was dancing. Swaying his hips, deftly bobbing his head, sweeping his arms, nimbly balanced. Nothing I did touched him. Exasperated, I attempted a spinning back kick—a committing move. Instead of ducking out of the way (I telegraphed badly) Woody stepped in close and placed his foot on the little toe of my pivoting foot. My toe broke instantly and I fell to the mat. Woody used athletic tape to bind the painful little piggy to its neighbors.
“It will heal in a few weeks,” he said, “In the meantime, I’d like you to use that time to think about why you are studying karate.”
I tried, but abandoned the soul-searching to play outside. I went skiing despite the toe and did a winter ascent of Medicine Bow Peak.
A week after I returned to lessons, Woody asked me to stick around after class. When everyone had left, he sat down in front of me.
“So Mark, why are you studying karate?” he asked, peering up at me.
I told him I liked it.
“You like the image of karate, or karate?”
I started to protest.
Woody stood up. “One day perhaps you will teach me how to cross country ski.”
He held out his hand and we shook.
“Goodbye, Mark.”
Two years later, still in college, I did my first ski tour of Yellowstone, a giant, one-month circumnavigation. It was meant to be an epic.
Skip Mancini was my partner. We mailed food drops to the park’s east, north, and west entrances, and went superlight—so light we took summer-weight sleeping bags, and froze almost every night. But we were greenhorns and anxious to suffer. How far we skied every day was paramount, hence, we cruised right past the elk and buffalo and, unbelievably, even skipped every chance to sit and relax in the park’s hot pools. We were in a hurry to do something big.
On the last night of the trek, we cooked in our tent. We were tired of fixing dinner a hundred yards away, hunched against snowstorms, stomping our feet to keep warm. We hadn’t seen any grizzlies anyway, only the occasional long-clawed prints. Skip mixed up a batch of biscuits and we ate one honey-and-butter-smothered delicacy after another. It was heaven.
Later than night I heard snapping in the forest. I wanted to believe it was merely branches breaking from the weight of snow. Nope.
Something was circling our tent. Several big somethings were circling our tent. I woke Skip. We didn’t have to say what we both knew: Our tent smelled like a biscuit. Our bags smelled like biscuits. We were like two pigs-in-a-blanket.
I told Skip that I’d heard grizzlies were afraid of fire. We both lit our Bic lighters as if we were at a Grateful Dead concert.
“I don’t think this is the kind of fire they meant,” whispered Skip.
“I got a plan,” I squeaked. “We’ll light the tent on fire. Nylon burns like anything.”
“They don’t care if their meat is cooked or not.”
“I’m serious.”
“You’re stupid.”
“OK,” I said in a whisper, “what if we light our sleeping bags on fire and swing them around our heads screaming at the top of our lungs.”
“Listen!” Skip said abruptly.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly.”
I feel certain we set the world speed record for breaking camp. Skinnying out of our bags, we dropped the tent, crammed everything onto the sleds and tiptoed through the bear tracks encircling our camp. Then frantically skied away.
After college I was fortunate enough to be unemployable (a degree in philosophy helps) and moved into the mountains. It seemed the natural thing to do.
One of my treasured books as a boy had been The Wilderness of Denali by Charles Sheldon (1930) which describes his three years—1906, 1907, 1908—living alone in a cabin on the slopes of Mt. McKinley. Sheldon was an indefatigable hunter and naturalist, a consummate observer of creatures. In this book, a day by day journal, he records everything from the cannabalistic habits of shrews to the mating behavior of Dall sheep. Five species of mammals were named in Sheldon’s honor and it was through his personal efforts that Mt. McKinley National Park was established in 1917.
Sheldon’s vigor and competence as an outdoorsman were legendary. He always traveled alone and much preferred winter. Temperatures in the minus 30 range were his favorite, so that he could snowshoe hard without overheating, regularly covering thirty miles in a day lugging a rucksack heavy with specimens.
Living in a cabin through the winter, I tried snowshoeing but found it slow and cumbersome. Snowshoeing, as the name implies, is nothing more than walking on snow. You walk up a mountain, you walk down. For covering any country at all, the snowshoes’ utility—never mind elegance—is unconvincing. Snowshoeing is to skiing what rowing is to sailing. You have this vast ocean of snow to traverse. Why muscle every inch of it, when, with practice, you can sail! I didn’t know how Sheldon did it, but I wasn’t going to.
I skied every day and thought I was improving, but I didn’t have a teacher. I didn’t think I needed one. I believed in the nobleness of being self-taught. It wasn’t until I was taking an on-snow test in Colorado, hoping to become a certified cross-country ski instructor, that I suddenly saw myself as I was, a yokel with the strength and endurance of a mule, my technique inversely proportionate to my ability to suffer.
Bill Hall was the examiner, a tall, tan master of the art whose technique was so effortless, so flawless, he flowed over the snow as easily as the wind.
“You’re kicking backward instead of down,” Bill said. “Imagine there’s a nail going straight through your foot. Kick down. Try it.”
“Good, good, but you’re still dropping your back leg too soon.” He stepped forward, raised my leg and pressed my chest down.
“It’s all about balance. Try it again.”
I did, and suddenly, miraculously, I was skiing right for the first time.
Back in my home mountains I practiced. And practiced.
In the optimistic zeal of youth, it is our right to shun teachers and spiritedly reinvent the wheel. This too is part of the process. Mentorless, mistakes are made by the bushel-full, often resulting in misery, which provides a wholesome way to toughen our mettle and create our own tall tales. For a while we believe we are going where no human has gone before. When reality eventually wears through this illusion, good teachers become godsends, people we seek out.
Between the ages of 18 and 28 I spent maybe 500 nights camping in the snow. It was total trial and error. I made countless screwups, some of which I was lucky to live through. Still, I learned how to build a passable snowcave, how to track elk on skis, how to forecast the weather from clouds. It was an apprenticeship, although it is only now that I recognize it as such.
On the second Yellowstone tour, we did a smaller loop. We had nothing to prove. The point was simply to be out there, not to epic. We took our time skiing a 15-day circle through the Bechler Canyon region, stopping at as many hot pools and geyser basins as we could. It was surreal to be buck naked in sub-zero tempartures amid snow ten feet deep, gleefully jumping in and out of heated rivers and pools. This was one of two good reasons for touring through Yellowstone versus anywhere else.
The second was the animals. We slid around herds of steam-snorting buffalo buried up to their chests. We discovered small herds of elk hiding in the timber. Around Shoshoni Geyser Basin, where the ice had melted, there were flocks of geese and ducks bobbing on the black water and chattering away. Along the Snake River we spotted sandhill cranes, moose in the willows, a fox trotting gaily along the bank. Killdeer, camprobbers, chickadees, ravens, bald eagles, one redtailed hawk. We went slow enough to see them all.
We brought lots of food and huge sleeping bags, wanted for nothing, lived like kings in the wilderness, and never once asked ourselves why we were there. It was self-evident.
Apprenticeship: taking the time to thoroughly learn the fundamentals. It’s a sedimentary, accretionary process. Which is such an old-fashioned concept it took me an embarrassingly long time to get it. As Americans, we’re almost trained to be impatient. Fast this, fast that, we can too easily rush our lives away.
So here’s a rule I try to remember: Rushing is almost always wrong. Rushing robs you of the charm of the moment. To rush is to have the mind always out ahead of the body, which is so unnatural that stupid mistakes are inevitable. Haste makes waste. Swiftness is just the opposite of hurrying. To be swift you must be efficient. Efficiency in the outdoors is a form of mindfulness. It’s about focus and having the knowledge and ability to make the right moves—which requires experience, which, alas, requires time.
Cross-country skiing is a craft. Kayaking is a craft. Mountain biking is a craft. Mountain climbing is a craft. To become competent takes us all years of practice. So why do we climb the bump in a our backyard and immediately want to take on Everest? Climbing Everest without actually having developed the requisite skills is like putting a quarter in player piano and pretending you are a pianist. Who’re you kidding?
So here’s another rule I’m trying to accept: Shortcuts are pointless. If you’re engaged in an activity because you truly enjoy it—the motion of the body, the skills you are acquiring——what’s the sense of skipping ahead. It’s like skipping the middle of a novel or the middle of a song. The power of any experience is a function of its depth, a depth which can only be fathomed through dedication and discipline.
And. Hidden inside the nut of discipline is a secret message: to apprentice is to accept the unfolding beauty of progression. To become at ease with where you are in the spectrum of expertise. I have a good friend who has killed the simple, visceral joy of cycling and climbing because he never believes he’s good enough. He sets his sights so high that his personal performance is always a disappointment to him. Being covetous of what you are not is corrosive. Enjoy the slow blossoming of your own skill. This is the craft of developing a craft.
Last rule: the process is the point. It’s a cliché, I know. It’s also what Woody was trying to teach me so many years ago.
Mastery is an illusion, grace a momentary gift, apprenticeship endless.
Case in point: the last Yellowstone trip.
The next morning I decided to go for another long jaunt—an opportunity in itself learned from the previous Yellowstone journeys. Instead of touring in a circle, thus forced to drag the whole heavy camp along everyday, we had skied in for two days, then set up a basecamp from which we could do fast, light all-day tours.
I decided to retrace my own tracks for several miles, then veer south.
Approaching the slope I so leisurely carved down the evening before, I was stunned, stopped dead. My tracks were gone. They came swooping over the crest …and then vanished at a long deep shelf in the snow. The entire slope had avalanched. The crown wall was two feet deep, the debris pile at the base enormous. I would have been buried without a trace.
I hadn’t dug a snowpit the whole tour.
I just thought I knew what I was doing.
Bedrock & Paradox 
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