Organic Ski Adventure

     Thirteen of us started the winter in cabins that we’d spent the summer jacking back to level and chinking from the weather we knew would arrive at 7500 feet up in the Salmon River Mountains.
     I’d showed up with a mate and a two-year-old daughter in July after spending six months on the road wandering across the West, stopping long enough to work for the gasoline it took to nudge our ex-telephone truck another hundred miles down the highway. 
     The last job I had held was on the Blackfoot reservation in Montana as a location scout for a bunch of Hollywood buttheads who were trying to cash-in on the mountain-man-meets-noble-savage theme. I quit when one of them got nasty with a waitress in a Browning café as she tried to explain that there was no wine to go with their overkill steaks because it was a dry reservation. 
     That night we palavered with a couple who said that they’d spent a few days in a wonderful hot springs town above the Salmon River in Idaho. I’d fleeced Hollywood for $500 so we headed that direction, climbed up the grade from the River of No Return, and arrived in paradise during a spectacular summer thunderstorm. The young folks welcomed us, fed us supper, and I was hooked for the next 50 years.
      The $500 and some work at a sawmill were enough to fill our cabin with cases of canned goods, a large box of dried apricots and fifteen pounds of almonds. It began to snow just after dark on Halloween while we were throwing an “Adios Civilization” party. Big Al the Kiddies’ Pal covered “Teen Angel” before he and his entourage cased-up the guitars and headed back over the summit to spend Winter at the fountainhead of pizza and beer. 
    We didn’t have many visitors that Winter. A couple of old friends spent three days frostbiting their toes while snowshoeing in to visit. They left behind a set of pure itchy gray long johns that they didn’t want to carry back out. I was to mail them in Spring. 
    By early March there were five of us left in town. A flow of 113-degree water doesn’t cure itchy feet or cabin fever, so eight folks including my kid and mate had hitched rides on snow machines back to civilization.  I kept on soaking and smoking and drinking homebrew and building furniture and rejoicing that my wallet was in the cupboard and that chickadees landed on my hat brim.  
     In April it began to stay above zero some nights. I was down to a diet of boiled potato flakes, dried elk, peanut butter, apricots and almonds, and decided that it was time to ski 32 miles for a piece of pizza and a couple hundred gallons of real beer.
     I owned cheap cross-country skis, cheap poles, and fake leather boots with less than five miles on them, but how tough could it be to ski into town? It was downhill, right? So, I packed up some apricots and almonds, a couple of tins of Prince Albert, a change of clothes, sleeping bag, and the wool long johns, to take to the post office. I headed toward town at daylight one Friday morning.
     It was not all downhill to town. By three in the afternoon I was a mile over the summit, laying alongside the trail. The south-facing snow had heated the snow above freezing point. Wads of ice stuck to my skis. That’s when I realized that I had not remembered to bring ski wax. 
   So, I broke for lunch. While chewing a cud of almonds and apricots I thought about the situation and tried to recall what real ski people had said about klister wax. I knew it was a gooey substance. Could I brew my own from spruce sap?  Should I wait for night and walk on the crust? Maybe I should just sit right there to be rescued, even though I hadn’t seen another soul all day.
    I was lighting my third home-roll when the solution came. The apricots! I could turn the apricots into impromptu klister wax. I used a Buck knife to scrape off whatever wax that got me that far, and then chewed the dried apricots, two-by-two, into a fine enough paste that I could apply a tin film to the bottom of the skis.
    I worked. The spit and the apricots froze to a sheen when they met the snow, and I slid along at a pretty brisk pace except for one more heartbreaking uphill section. I spent the night in the well of a spruce tree, beat and cold, but after I wiggled into the itchy long johns and scrunched down into the sleeping bag, I actually got two or three hours of sleep before walking the rest of the way to town on the frozen crust. I kept those long johns for ten years. 
    By noon on Saturday I was bellied up to the bar, telling backcountry stories with pizza grease in my beard. Three days later Cayenne Ken and I drove the back way up the Salmon River to the snow line and skied the last twelve miles home by whiskey and moonlight, before the sun got to the snow. The summit opened again to vehicular travel in June and our population returned to thirteen.