MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Winter 2019

84 ML BLUE WINTER 2019 words :: Leslie Anthony We are “under the wood.” Sous-bois , as they say in French. My friend’s shouts—bending around trunks and muffled by the dense canopy only a metre overhead—remind me that there’s a surprising amount of space under these twisted white birch and stunted spruce. Not to mention plenty of snow. In fact, on a February day during one of the driest winters on record, skiing isn’t just passable at Massif du Sud, east of Quebec City near the Maine border, but downright good, with week-old powder lurking in most of the glades. And that reminds me of something else: I love being in the trees in winter. As we move downslope and larger hardwoods prevail, things open up—though never enough to make the next move completely obvious. Tree skiing, even east of the 100 th Meridian where you can see around them, is still all decisions, discovery and endless permutation: make a turn around one arbour , a new line comes into view and suddenly everything looks different; your next turn repeats the trick. The slope uncoils over the natural contours of the mountain, connected by lines that follow the logic of topography—a logic the trees follow as well. Whether you’re in Japan’s beech forests, Europe’s larch, Norway’s dwarf birch, B.C.’s spruce, hemlock and cedar, or Aspen’s… well, aspens, skiing in the trees offers a different aesthetic than skiing other natural features such as bowls and chutes. And eastern tree skiing—lacking the West’s fuzzy warmth and cathedral spires—is different altogether. Hardwood trees aren’t for everyone: they’re the rough bouncers at a club ready to repel anyone who doesn’t belong, and a girded honour guard to welcome those who do. But if you’re a powderhound at all, it’s a club worth joining. Growing up skiing in Ontario I spent a lot of time in the trees, whether downhill or cross-country. In addition to enjoying the simple beauty of a winter day, it was a way to commune with a forest at its most essential, outside of the cacophonic pageantry of summer. Though moving through a leitmotif of suspended animation, I knew there was plenty going on—stories being told in the wood of brumating critters and burrowing insects, of hormones in the roots ready to send sap racing upward at the first hint of warmth. And yet save for an occasional creaking in the wind, all this industry was carried out in silence. The trees in winter are like entering a realm populated by beings whose sentinel nature is their very allure, as if they both conjure experience and bear witness to it. Perhaps they do: research has shown the human A PAEAN TO WINTER TREES BIO PHILIAC For snowriders, trees are shelter in the storm; for the snow that finds its way into them, they are a filter and preservative, minimizing the effects of wind and sun.