I remind him that Snowshoe Thompson, one of the true pioneers of American skiing and the man we are emulating on this donkey-brained adventure, didn't let the triviality of nightfall slow him down. He didn't pitch no stinkin' nylon Taj Mahal, fire up no petrol-hungry stove, or flame no freeze-dried quiche. He kept skiing. Through the night. Snowshoe was a man's man, one who lived up to California's motto, 'Bring me men to match my mountains.'
Back in the 1850s and 1860s when the old timer was toting 60 to 80 pounds of mail on his 180-mile round-trip route into the mining camps of the Sierra mountains, he didn't fret over a little darkness. "He left this cowardly camping deadweight behind," I lecture Hank, "because the mail had to go through."
Hank's nylon pack crashes to the snow and a long sigh signals 'end of discussion.' That pack weighs 60 pounds, not unlike the load Snowshoe shouldered, but it contains a solitary postcard that Hank is delivering to his son. The remaining 59.9999 pounds are the accoutrements of creature comfort and the symbols of a modern California whose motto might be, 'Bring me Beemers to match my vineyards.'
Inside the gullet of Hank's whale are the essentials of an age gone soft, hot chocolate, shrimp bisque, Quallofil booties, Therm-a-Rest mattress, 700-fill down bag, bubble-gum flavored dental floss, Polartec-lined underwear, and even a few pounds of work-related photographic glass.
I drop my own whale, thankful that in this macho journey Hank has succumbed, now the journalistic mission of matching Snowshoe's physical feats must take a back seat to the higher moral code of not abandoning my partner. I also shed what the miners of old labeled "snowshoes" 10-foot-long, 5-inch-wide planks that can only euphemistically be called skis. These facsimiles of the boards used by Snowshoe, who before immigrating to America skied the environs of Telemark, Norway, were crafted by Craig Beck, a current-day resident of Tahoe.
One of Beck's fascinations is summarized by the vanity plate born by his pickup truck: it reads "Snowshoe." Like every true Californian, Beck has written a movie script, and his drama focuses on the American legend, Snowshoe Thompson. A related interest of Beck's is the making of long boards which replicate the skis used by Snowshoe and the miners of his era.
From the late 1850s through the 1870s the Norwegian, Swedes, and Finns inhabiting the mining camps of the Sierras popularized the use of long, wooden snowshoes (or skis) for winter transport. Equally important, these skis provided sport during the winter doldrums when snow and cold brought mining activity to a freezing halt. With 10-, 12-, sometimes 16-foot boards strapped to their cowboy boots, these miners raced for purses known to be as large as $600 (a hell of a mother lode in the days when a buck purchased more than half a Big Mac).
While this may well have marked the birth of American speed skiing, the Scandinavian miners were no beginners at the game. Using home-made, secret-formula waxes (called dope) to slicken their planks, these men are known to have bulleted down 1800-foot courses in less than 14 seconds, an average speed of 88 miles an hour.
Beck's long boards are chiseled from vertical-grain fir and the ones I use weigh 15 pounds, foam-core lightweights compared to the 25-pound oak planks Snowshoe dragged across miles of Sierra snow. These pontoons are in themselves unwieldy, but it's their leather bindings that truly render the tool useless. Move your foot left and the ski goes straight. Move your foot right and the ski goes straight. Which explains why the miners of old could handle speed well, but knew little of slaloming.
That would come later. As a skier of the space-age, my first 12 miles of slogging on this antique equipment has been a revealing exercise. The evolution of ski equipment becomes obvious. First order of business: metal bindings to transfer foot movement into ski movement. Second major innovation: boots with torsional stiffness to do the metal binding's bidding. Next: shorter skis to step or skid through turns. Finally, the subtle points: metal edges to grip ice, torsionally stiff tips to help those edges grip, sidecut for carving....
With skis stuck vertically into the snow and towering above us like Sequoia trees, Hank and I settle into the business of establishing camp. Swampy snows continue to pelt us and by the time the tent rises and we throttle up our flamethrower, we are both shivering lumps of protoplasm. We cocoon ourselves in down bags and I tell Hank stories of Snowshoe Thompson. Many times he would ski through the night, stopping occasionally for a cat nap and continuing on when shivers roused him. When poor visibility made nighttime progress impossible, stories say he would remain warm by dancing the night away on a flat rock. And when storms, like the one outside our tent, struck the mountains, he might locate an upright snag, set the sucker ablaze, and hunker down for the night beside his pyre. Hank takes this in, considers the difference between a down bag and a burning tree, and yells out to the spirit of the dead man, "Snowshoe, what were you thinking?"
What was he thinking? It's a questions we return to often as we spend three days traversing the Desolation Wilderness, a section of the Sierras adjacent and similar to the route Snowshoe followed (most of Snowshoe's actual route is now buried beneath the asphalt of State Highway 50). What was John Thompson thinking in 1856 when he hired on with the Postal Service to fill a newly created niche, to keep communication and supplies flowing between Placerville, California and the Carson Valley after snow closed the summer wagon roads, It would have seemed a foolish job in an age when skis were all but unknown and the deadly effects of wading through waste-deep snow, as was illustrated by the Donner Party in 1846, were all too well known. But Thompson thought back to childhood days in Norway, crafted a pair of skis, practiced using them, and determined that a routine shuffle between his farm near Genoa, Nevada and Placerville, California was a manageable feat.
Hank and I openly speculate whether motives stronger than a postal carrier's salary were at work here. Was it a witch of a wife (Snowshoe was married) that prompted him to ski this 180-mile route two to three times each winter month, Or was it a trap line of mistresses that had him completing that route in five days?
Foolish turned into moronic when after three winters of hauling mail, John Thompson, who by now had been nicknamed "Snowshoe", had not seen a penny of pay from the Postal Service. He would try to collect the money owed him for the better part of two decades, but the government, which was apparently establishing the moral foundation for future governments, didn't believe in paying men for honest work. That could be enough to drive a man insane.
And insanity may well explain why Snowshoe Thompson continued skiing his winter route for 17 more years until death delivered him swiftly from his grind. His death in the spring of 1876 at age 49 came as a surprise. Weeks before May 15 he was his healthy self, quite capable of walking 300 miles in five days should emergency require it, as had been the case during the winter of 1856 when Thompson made an express trip to Sacramento to pick up the anesthetics a Genoa doctor needed to amputate a frostbitten man's feet. Shortly before his death he became so sick he sowed his fields on horseback. A few days later an unknown internal failure planted him in a grave. There were no halfways about Snowshoe, even death he took on in a hurry.
The next day as Hank and I ski across the undulating landscape of the Desolation Wilderness we are openly appreciative of the granitic peaks, the expansive lake basins, and the fragrant red-barked trees. Were such rewards, however, sufficient to indenture a mail man to a Bill-Murray-Ground-Hog-day routine for 20 years, We feel the straps of far more ergonomic packs than Snowshoe's gouging trenches in our shoulders. We smell the sweat pooling around our armpits. We feel the sun strobing in and out of the clouds as it alternately scorches and freezes flesh. Two decades of sufferings with no pay, it's too much for Hank to fathom as he screams, "Snowshoe, what were you thinking?"
We discuss it some more. Sources I interviewed speculate Snowshoe had privatized his mail route and charged miners $1 a letter for the mail he delivered. Those same sources believed most miners continuously ducked the fee, and that the Norwegian was too big a person to retaliate with a black list.
Such eulogies are routinely lavished on legends, but Hank and I sport streaks of cynicism. Could Thompson have played Peeping Tom with people's mail and then, through extortion, demanded payment to keep a lid on dark secrets? How else, we wonder, would the term 'blackmail' have evolved? Supporting this theory is the matter of the man's quick, mysterious death. Was his demise the handiwork of a vengeful 'benefactor'?
While our minds wander in dark circles to understand Snowshoe, I contemplate the musings of Craig Beck, an ardent admirer of the man. Beck, who understands that normal men in bygone days routinely performed feats considered remarkable by today's standards, contends Snowshoe was a simple man of great integrity who loved the mountains and who felt honor-bound to the many people who relied on him as their only link to the world. He was a contented man with no hunger for money.
In fact, Thompson was the person who insisted that the tailings from some of the gold mines he serviced be assayed. He hauled out rubble the gold seekers scorned as worthless and was the first person to know that the area that would become the Sierra's biggest wealth producer, the Comstock Load, was sweating silver. Had he desired wealth, Thompson could have easily filed for claims on the surrounding land. But in 1851 he had tried his hand at mining; he wanted no more of groveling in dark holes for shiny metals. Apparently, not unlike modern ski bums, he was happiest when working the summers and skiing the winters.
As we ski, or rather slog, through valleys similar to those Thompson traversed, I'm having trouble swallowing this concept. We slog below countless telemarking slopes as we traverse from Echo Summit to Aloha Lake to Mosquito Pass to the Rockbound Valley to Miller Meadows and, ultimately, back to Lake Tahoe. Through the Rockbound Valley in particular, mile upon mile of pristine slopes peppered with magnificent specimens of Jeffrey and Whitebark pines draw my lust.
Here, modern skiers could legitimately devote a lifetime to sketching scribbles down 2000-vertical foot canvases. But with the 10-foot boards and leather bindings of the 1800s, such slopes would be suicidal to ski. From our perspective, Snowshoe's skiing exploits were pure work. The part of the equation we label as fun, the part which offsets the work, indeed, which justifies the work, was absent.
So while Craig Beck concludes Snowshoe's head was on straight, Hank and I conclude it was half-cocked. Snowshoe was demented. He was the first of a long string of psychotic postal workers and we should thank God he never got his fingers near an assault rifle.
Our three-day journalistic pilgrimage to understand an enigmatic man, ends with, what is for us, a long day, an 18-mile trudge taking us from Rockbound Lake to Hank's house near the shores of Lake Tahoe. Unlike Snowshoe, who had no personals other than dried beef and biscuits to pack and who would have miles under his skis before dawn, we don't have our traveling REI store packed until mid morning.
With map and compass we plot our way across a small pass and hope to intersect a snowed-over Jeep road that will simplify our outbound travel. Snowshoe himself never carried a map or compass. He contended, "There is no danger of getting lost in a narrow range of mountains like the Sierras, if a man has his wits about him."
Technology more than wits leads us to Miller Meadows as we follow the magnet to which we've entrusted ourselves. At the Meadows, we intersect snowmobile tracks leading east toward Lake Tahoe and we follow them blindly. Miles later we enter a new meadow and the tracks disperse in all directions, but each seems to peter out. I pull out the map and compass and nothing makes sense. The road stretches in the wrong direction and low clouds block any chance of triangulation.
Different ideas come to mind, but nothing corresponds with the map. Yesterday Hank and I laughed over one of Snowshoe's boasts, "I was never lost. I can't be lost! I can go anywhere in the mountains, day or night, storm or shine. I've got something in here (tapping his forehead) that keeps me right." A brain of iron or magnetite, that, we had decided, may have accounted for the man's twenty years of bionic postal service.
At 4:00 p.m. I tell Hank, "I can't be lost, I've got something up here (tapping my forehead) that never knew where we were." The obvious solution is to follow drainages trending east. Even if we don't know where we are, east leads to the lake. But as creatures of a soft age we worry about missing the easy route, that by picking a difficult route we may delay our arrival by a day, maybe even go hungry for a few hours.
Snowshoe would not have hesitated to stride eastward. He wouldn't have worried that nighttime was descending, that his clothes were drenched, or that some miscalculation might add miles to his rambles. We do worry, however, and decide its time to make camp, gather firewood, prepare for the wet night that will soon descend. Tomorrow, with hours of light as an ally, we can sort out our predicament. We start our preparations and through dumb luck stumble across an eastward-leading road. We follow it and soon we are on our way again, confident that the road, rather than our wits, will lead us from this dripping wilderness. An hour after dark, we complete our 45-mile trek and deliver our one piece of mail.
Later, a I sit in Hank's steam bath sipping a latte and sweating out the cold nestled in my bones, I try to take honest stock of how I measured up to the legendary mail carrier. I've learned that in physical build I am his equal, he too was 6-feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. Snowshoe, however, would have consumed our route in half the time.
I'm afraid, however, I can't even boast to be half the man Snowshoe was. Otherwise, tomorrow I'd be back on my skis with an empty pack, retracing the route we just completed. That thought makes me cling to my latte. As I sit inhaling steam deep into my lungs, I accept the truth: my epitaph will never read, "He was a man to match the mountains." Then again, neither will it say, "He was the first demented postal worker."
