Ghost Luck
The haunts of skiers, the breaths of shadows
By ROGER LEBOVITZ

You check whatever you can find. Maps. Old topo sheets. Hand-drawn trail guides from the 1930s. Online aerial photographs. You see where the old trail might have been, dropping from the first-aid cache in the saddle to the road. No one has skied the thing in 50 years. Drift too far to the right and you get cliffed out. And the old first-aid cache? No doubt rotted and completely gone.

There's nothing up there one old timer warns you. Nothing but ghosts spits out another. Don't waste your time says one more. But the promise of a 1,500-foot descent through the trees in a foot of fresh powder is more than enough to stir your imagination. Maybe, if your luck holds, you may just find it.

So one late-October day, the trees stripped bare against a blue sky, you set out to try your luck. Aiming for the saddle, you immediately lose yourself in a hellish thicket of angry saplings. You somehow persevere and slog higher and higher until you find the trees growing bigger, the underbrush sparser. This would make a nice glade, you think, imagining a yard or two of snow filling the spaces between the trunks. It gets even better a little farther on.

Under a maple you stop for a smoke. Looking up, you see where the branches have been lopped off cleanly. Some of the cuts are old, some clearly newer. Phantom saws and footsteps. Perhaps someone comes here after all. The crackle of a broken branch. You knock out the pipe ashes onto a rock. The sun hides behind a cloud and suddenly you feel cold.

You keep climbing. It gets steeper. Then the ground levels and you reach the saddle. The first-aid cache is in bad shape, swallowed by time and the forest. Here backcountry patrollers would have mobilized to snatch a sled and rush downhill to help a skier with a broken leg. Now what's left are a few decaying shingles and scraps of tin.

You see an old bit of flagging hanging on a branch in a tree. Strange. What ghosts would mark their private stash? The sound of rushing wind gusts through the high branches, but they barely move. It sounds like the whoops of long-ago powder days, then quiets to a soft sizzle of snow against long wooden skis.

Three months later you find yourself back at the first-aid cache, now buried under five feet of snow. Ghosts, you soon discover, can leave impressive sets of ski tracks. Perhaps they wanted to share their trail with you. Trying your luck again, you follow the tracks down, down, down through the soft snow and the big trees.

And then the 1,500 feet are over and your luck deserts you again. The tracks end at the hellish sapling thicket; the ghosts slipped through unnoticed or climbed back up for another run. You and your clumsy mortality struggle to the road in time to watch the orange afternoon light linger on the far hills.


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