AWAKENING
Beijing, a city of 21 million with notorious air pollution, has a small but growing skiing community.
The sun hasn’t yet made it over the dusty city skyline, but human friction offsets the morning chill as businessmen, students, and errand-runners ebb and flow to the singsong commands drifting from the concrete rafters of the Beijing subway station.
Three stops down Line 13, a ski bus waits to shuttle groups of giggling teenagers to Nanshan Ski, the closest ski resort to China’s capital city. On this platform, I’m struggling to find breathing room amid a city of 21 million.
The hydraulic door pops and I throw my skis into a pod of suits and hospital masks. The stampede follows, and as I hear the doors ding closed behind me, I’m swallowed into a humid mass of crumpled morning newspapers and sour sweat. Caustic overhead lights amplify a sense of claustrophobia.
A week earlier, photographer Garrett Grove and I landed at Beijing’s Capital International Airport in the throes of smog so thick it blotted out the air traffic control towers and hung an apocalyptic haze inside baggage claim. A perfume of stale smoke invaded the night air, cutting our breath short as we rolled oversized ski bags through the creamy black of evening murk.
This morning, air dust clung to parked cars as I shouldered my skis through the open-air markets of sleepy hutong neighborhoods. Out from the underground and on the bus—one of the city’s two ski-specific shuttles—high school passengers adjust baggy-fitting outerwear and pose for selfies. Outside, urban sprawl clashes with agricultural roots, cranes towering above frozen fields of golden hay as silhouettes of unoccupied apartments rise from sandy soil. Beyond them, Beijing’s mountains loom, brown but prominent. Along the ridgeline, the Great Wall meanders from barren peak to barren peak.
And then they appear. Strips of white streaking down a mountainside, impossible contrasts slicing through an earth-tone sea. The selfies stop and eyes glue to the windows. Some of the kids start bumping shoulders, others forget group poses and turn their cameras around. Nanshan is nothing spectacular—a handful of low-lying trails topped with a lone mogul run and a lift tower with an ancient temple façade—but its existence is symbolic, especially in this crowd of young eyes. Fifty miles from downtown Beijing, these slopes are a world apart from the gray stranglehold of urban China.
Stepping off the bus, I peel away from the swarm heading toward the rental shops. I pay the 20RMB,
