Part 2
I was out of my room shortly after 7 am, leaving my roommate, an enthusiastic and excitable Belgian, to wake up and adjust to Mountain Time, and tightly drew my coat around me as I passed through the door from the inner hallway to the outside stairs. The sun had officially risen a few minutes earlier though the town remained in darkness, and to the south over the tops of all the buildings and across Highway 82, only the peak of Aspen Mountain was illuminated, the terminator line separating sunlight from shadow now racing down the slopes. Dormant, bare quaking aspens punched through deep, untouched powder in a grove settled among the suites, bounded by the cleared path that snaked its way around the resort’s ample grounds, and I entered the reception area and past the vacant bar. Breakfast for physicists was isolated from other guests, downstairs where the maître d’ carefully checked and double checked that my name was on the list and allowed me to enter. I was early, but not the first to arrive, set my backpack down at a chair at the sole table with any occupants, walked to fill plate and cup at the buffet station, and returned to listen in on the conversation already in progress about technical, practical, and political minutiae of building the next particle collider.
An awkward line had already formed at the entrance to the Center for Physics, with a few people parked on the patio holding a door ajar, while the staff at the front desk serially checked in people as they arrived, handing over a name tag suspended on a lanyard and offering lift tickets for purchase. Though the conference spanned four full days and half of a fifth, I limited myself to three tickets and had already reserved my rentals through the Center’s preferred retailer, which again came with a significant discount, at least considering the location. The auditorium was on the opposite side of the building, accessible through the single main hallway lined with identical office after office, sliding wood doors that opened to desks to the left and right and walled with broad, tall windows rendering the overhead lights mostly redundant during the day. This week, the offices were first-come-first-served, and already the unmistakable sound of scratching chalk on a porcelain board could be heard sneaking out of a few offices, some participants squeezing in thoughts and conversations before the session began. Coffee and morning treats had been set out in the kitchenette, but I was untempted, and continued to the dual swing doors, pushing below the taped paper sign stating that just beyond which food and drink were strictly forbidden.
With sweeping generalization that is unfair to many physicists, it seems that there is a culture of extreme exercise or outdoor activity that a place like Aspen especially brings to the fore. There are of course the common and mundane sports well-represented like ultra-marathoning where people run a hundred or more kilometers over a weekend through the wilderness, with gross elevation changes measured in miles, or mountaineers who have scaled hundreds of peaks with median summit heights increasing with age. Then, there are off-scale adventurers who, for example, are nearly peerless cavers, members of exploration teams to the world’s the deepest cave system in disputed territory in the Caucasus, and who spend months of the year underground. For physicists of this demeanor, skiing was simply not enough of a challenge, and riding the lifts was inferior transport in addition to wasting all that money, and so, once we were released after the morning they would stick mohair to their skis and skin up the mountain, over the corduroy groomed snow, beneath the high-speed gondola. By the time the lifts stopped 30 minutes prior to ski patrol clearing the slopes, they would turn around for their one run down.
For the previous several years, my skiing excursions had been extremely limited, to a mere weekend each season either with my brother during a family visit or for a rare Tahoe vacation during graduate school, but I started on skis at age four over 25 years prior, my parents driving the 20 minutes from the foothills to Snoqualmie Pass, when tickets were only $19 and helmets were a decade in the future, for lessons week in and week out. Once my brother was sufficiently adept, we would close the lifts down under the lights after school, racing from top to bottom while either our mom or dad, whoever had taken us that night, used my wristwatch to time us and swore that every run was faster than the last. We moved when I was 11, and the drive to skiing increased to two hours, but every weekend during the winter we would click into our bindings and drop into the slopes at White Pass through middle school and then through high school, occasionally returning to Snoqualmie or exploring Crystal Mountain, especially if the conditions had been unusually favorable to permit north slope skiing in July. It was simply no longer feasible to ski every weekend once in college, but I always found time over holiday breaks and joined in to the yearly dorm trips to some BC resort which was enough to maintain my skills and my comfort on the snow. The mountains still called and I indulged when I was able, but had resigned to a casual relationship with them, and found a group of others who were perfectly content to only expose their skis to the snow when pointed downhill. This year’s indulgence began once the half dozen or so of us stamped in our hard-shell boots from rentals and across the street to the base of Aspen Mountain, secured our street shoes in the lockers, and stepped into the gondola.
To be able to reach the bottom of essentially any run, within ski area boundaries anyway, to look back up over moguls, around trees, or through chutes with accomplishment does not require significant technical skill, though with technical skill one does look a bit better doing it to the people on the lift looking down from above. Stopped at the edge of the cat track, ski tips dangling over the cornice, all you have to do to make it to the bottom is to lack fear of diving in, of pushing off, laser-focused on the bump just ahead and not where the hill sinks off beyond your sight, and then, if you do get overwhelmed, to keep your head and pull out into a slow traverse across the slope. By their size and vastly closer distance from their eyes to the snow, small children for the most part lack this fear and never learn it, but it is all the more impressive starting to ski as a teen or adult and determinedly embracing the thrill. Most of this group was in this latter category, skiing precisely because of conferences like these or from accumulated holidays in Switzerland, and in these few hours we ranged over the entire mountain, black and double black diamonds like research projects in miniature, from initial curiosity, to the struggle, confusion, and doubt mid run, to finally dropping onto the cat track below, flush with the exhilaration of achievement.