STONE CITY
THE TIMING WAS SUBOPTIMAL. There was an abundance of real winter powder at home. And all sorts of other pressing things that needed confronting. Like climate change. The mice living behind the fridge. The broken light fixture over the sink. The colonoscopy. Just before I left, my wife had shattered her elbow skiing off the 20-foot berm at the end of our street in Mammoth Lakes, California. Twelve thousand dollars a year in health insurance, plus a $5,000 individual deductible. Now she had a titanium plate and screws holding her arm together. She could’ve used my help.
And yet here I was in southern British Columbia, 2,000 air miles and half a ton of liberated carbon dioxide away, lounging on a bed of dry tundra grass in the unnervingly warm high-alpine midwinter sunshine. In my ski boots. With my phone in airplane mode. Enjoying the view. Doing absolutely nothing of consequence other than participating in—even causing to accelerate—an increase in visitation by ever more human beings and possibly lead to the ruination of the very landscape I was currently appreciating.
I worked my way through a sandwich of hummus and vegetables, sipped on a can of locally-brewed organic beer, and gazed south across the invisible U.S.-Canada border into the broken shark’s mouth of the North Cascades. We were seven dudes—six Canadians and myself—the only human beings in 130 square miles of uninterrupted governmentprotected, non-motorized wilderness.
There were the three pro skiers, the porn stars: Mark Abma, Chris Rubens and Eric ‘Hoji’ Hjorleifson; Bruno Long, the photographer; and me, the faithful correspondent from that fucked-up country down south. Our hosts were Sean Dillon, local ski guide and speed flyer, and Nick Mennell, a black-bearded Okanagan redneck with twinkling eyes and a deep well of humorous yarns involving beer and ill-conceived projects with firearms and/or heavy machinery. Mennell was the mechanic and operations guy for Cathedral Lakes Lodge, a private in-holding deep inside the heart of Cathedral Provincial Park.
The previous year, in fat conditions, Dillon and Mennell had hatched an ambitious plan to start Cathedral’s
