the ski journal
Few people get the chance to create their dream publication from scratch, especially one that’s eagerly awaited by a hard-core skiing audience tired of surfing and snowboarding being the only sports with coffee table-quality rags (The Surfer’s Journal, Frequency). As The Ski Journal’s founding Editor, I pitched, assigned, copyedited, and basically hustled all content for each issue during my tenure, as well as wrote story captions, filler material, website content, emails, press releases, and more. I also contributed stories to each issue, including the intro (“Crux”). Here are a handful of my contributions.
Friends in Low Places
By Kristopher Kaiyala
Crux, Issue 3.4
You don’t need mountains to ski. Just ask my distant Finnish cousins. Their ancestors likely invented the sport a few millennia before Mesopotamia came up big-time with the wheel.
To be fair, Finland does have some height in its far northwestern corner, but the land isn't exactly mountainous. Halti (1324m), Finland’s highest point, isn’t even a peak. It’s the shoulder of a long, moony ridge whose highest point lies just across the border in Norway. Close, but no cigar.
Perpetually flat Finland deserves its native name, Suomi (pronounced soo-ah-mee), which loosely translates as “swamp.” The country’s average elevation is around 500 feet—but steadily rising since the glaciers melted, as everyone there eagerly told me during my last visit. The glaciers left behind depressions which are now lakes, some 60,000 of them.
When Finns ski at home, it’s probably down a manmade ramp or down the road to get groceries. For dozens of centuries, in Suomi and all over the world, skiing wasn’t a leisure sport but a way to get around. To migrate and hunt during the dark months of winter. Why use skis on a hill? That’s what snowshoes were for. Skis were for getting across the icy flats to the nearest sauna, or to sneak into the hardwoods for a bronze-age kegger.
Only recently has man sought mountains for enjoyment. The relative ease with which you can climb into a heli and ascend to gnarly peaks would scare the stitched reindeer hide off medieval Paavo, and not just because of the mechanical bird. Mountains were once the domain of evil spirits, death and destruction. In some parts of the world, they still are.
Today most of us see things differently. The scientific age has brought many gifts—vaccines, iPhones, The Clapper. More than these, it has taught us not to fear. We still sense unease in our stomachs standing at the entrance to a perfectly steep chute, but we know that with just the right pressure and balance, our skis will float us home. It's that combination of danger and charm that draws us to high places.
Mountain ranges are the focus of this year’s Photobook. As alpine skiers and mountaineers, we’re in puppy-love with peaks of every shape, color, region, and origin. But that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate skiing anywhere—and anyhow—it occurs. From the swamps of skiing’s earliest days to America’s own Land o’ Lakes and beyond, as long as you strap skis to boots and have a good time, we’re of the same tribe.
Legacy
By Kristopher Kaiyala
Crux, Issue 2.3
In the sunny town of Sequim, Wash., where incoming ocean tides turn sharply south from the Strait of Juan de Fuca and enter the narrow passageways of northern Puget Sound, there's an unusual retirement center. Its inhabitants aren’t cared for in assisted living quarters or offered daily buffets or bingo cards three nights a week. Rather, they’re propped up on permanent display in the parking to endure the wind and rain and crows and seagulls and squirrels and Frisbees and whatever else nature and man throw at them, as their frames and joints slowly decay. It may sound gruesome, like something out of a Vlad the Impaler manual for living, but it’s actually pretty cool. It’s where old presses go to die.
Presses are the machines that bind all the layers of your skis together in one happy sandwich. The Lib Technologies factory in Sequim has many of them, which they use not only for an upstart line of skis, but for numerous models of snowboards and skateboards. Sequim seems an unlikely place for such an operation; loggers, fishermen, and casino workers still rule this land. And though the tall Olympic Mountains loom nearby, getting to the closest major ski area requires at least one ferry ride. Yet Lib Tech and its small but stoke-filled staff thrives there, producing shred tools by the thousands for international distribution each year.
Making the toys we play on causes attrition, and every few years Lib Tech has to replace an aging press no longer fit for the assembly line. Most presses see their last useful days in Sequim, and so rather than showing up on eBay they proudly get decommissioned to the Lib Tech parking lot hall of fame, blissfully resigned to time and the elements. One such machine, known for a long time as the “Yellow Press,” was originally designed for use by a man named Hub Zemke.
Hub Zemke holds a unique place in ski-manufacturing history, as you will see on page 52. If you’re around my age (38 going on 19), then your parents probably skied on a pair of planks Hub designed and produced in the ‘70s when the ski industry enjoyed unprecedented periods of growth and innovation. The phrase “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” applies not only to many of the products of the “hot dog” era, which now seem a bit silly to us, but also to the men and women who pioneered new techniques and materials, ones that continue to influence ski and snowboard manufacturing today.
To stay active in this business you have to roll with the changes, sometimes reinvent yourself. The Yellow Press started out making skis in Reno and then, after trading hands a couple of times, was converted to make snowboards and eventually skateboards before cooking its final core. Today it stands beneath a tree, guarding a parking space, a stoic symbol of more than two decades of hard work.
Skiing has its journeymen and journeywomen, just like any other field or endeavor. The same can be said of its machines. From its time with Hub to its present inactivity, the Yellow Press lived a good, long life, and made a lot of people happy. That's a legacy for which we should all aim.
The Wait
By Kristopher Kaiyala
Crux, Issue 3.3
A couple years ago my then three-year-old son was crying in the basement. Nothing terribly unusual considering he routinely sat outside the foosball room moaning until I’d come down to play a few rounds with him. But this particular time was different. He wanted in the garage.
The garage is a special place. It’s where we keep our gear. Opening the door, we walked in together, and through his sniffles he motioned toward his skis. They were leaning against the cement wall with all the other pairs we own. I grabbed his them, plus his boots, and carried them out to the rec room for him to play with.
As expected, he wanted to put on everything. Fair enough. Truth be told, I’ve toured all over the basement in my own gear. There’s no vertical rise from the TV to the washer and dryer, but I’ve traversed that ascent nevertheless. We squeezed his growing feet into his boots. Then we clicked his boots into his bindings, one satisfying snap at a time.
We looked at each other. His eyes were still wet but we were on the great tram of contentment. Small smiles crept over both of our faces. As a parent, it doesn’t get much better than seeing your kid bond with something that you yourself deeply love.
Then he raised his arms for me to pick him up. I said no, he needed to walk around and gain some balance. He shook his head and asked me to stand him up on the wooden arm of the futon. Uh sure, I said, hoisting him 18 inches off the carpet and holding him steady with my hands. Suddenly he bent his knees and surged forward, and I squeezed just in time, swinging him safely through the air.
That’s when he went ballistic.
It’s tough to explain to a screaming toddler the side effects of hucking to a flat landing. I quickly took off his skis, not wanting to catch a tip in the eye (or anywhere else), as he wriggled and screamed, “I just want to ski!”
I held him tightly. “Me too, buddy, me too,” I said as I carried him upstairs to the kitchen and sat him on the counter, trying to calm him down. “Hey!” I said in my reassuring daddy voice, “Only three more months!” Outside the grass was long and green, blowing in a late August breeze. The morning glory was blooming. Not very convincing.
“Nooooo!” he wailed, burying his head in my chest. “Nooooo! No! I need to go NOW!”
Me too, buddy, me too.
The Wheelie
By Kristopher Kaiyala
Issue 3.1
A springboard diver and a former Peace Corps volunteer walk into a bar. Only it’s not a joke, it’s the celebratory end of a good day of shooting on Bald Mountain. Sun Valley’s famously azure skies didn’t fail the duo who spent several hours setting up zones for a photograph that soon would appear on the cover of the Fall 1974 issue of Powder.
Bob Burns, the diver-turned-freestyle-mogul-skier, whose bump segment in Dick Barrymore’s The Performers (1971) sent shock waves through the burgeoning hotdog scene, was eager to show off his signature “Wheelie” move. Photojournalist John Terence Turner, by now out of the Peace Corps and reporting for various newspapers and stock agencies, readily obliged.
Burns was a flamboyant character—a polarizing ski industry star—and his backstory and trajectory were compelling: a college springboard competitor and one-time national marbles champ from rural Idaho who started skiing late, at age 20, and who now was ruling the mogul circuit on unconventionally short and soft skis designed in his garage. He also had a flair for the dramatic, as Turner discovered first hand when the pair met 10 years prior.
“This guy was crazy and he was going to take me apart,” wrote Turner in a feature story on Burns in that same issue of Powder, recalling a volatile encounter in 1963 on Baldy’s Olympic run that involved shovels and wingmen. Turner, then a Sun Valley patroller, was unceremoniously assigned course preparation for the yearly A-B downhill when Burns and a racing pal screamed past. Not pleased with the close fly by, Turner told him so. Twice. A challenge he would regret.
“I had heard somewhere that when the whites of the eyes showed all the way around the iris, it was a sign of insanity,” he wrote. “I found myself staring into a pair of the craziest looking eyes I’d ever seen.” Friends on both sides intervened before things got bloody, but the event left a lasting impression on the photojournalist. Burns was a good story.
A few years later the two worked together at K2 on Vashon Island, Wash. When Burns decided to leave K2 in 1972 and return to Sun Valley to start his own line of skis, he hired Turner to help with advertising. Both men also knew a couple guys in Ketchum with the last name Moe, who had recently started a grassroots magazine. It was an exciting time for The Ski Company, but what it needed to compete with the big boys was a good dose of publicity.
Sometimes the person and the product are synonymous, and that was never more true than in Burns’ case. Customers scrambled to get their hands on the limited pairs of The Ski largely due to word of mouth and Burns’ stature as a freestyle rebel. The story of Burns and his David versus Goliath fight against the establishment was a natural fit for Powder.
Turner had his story assignment, now he needed pictures. It wasn’t hard to pull Burns away from ski-building; he was on Baldy every day anyway, as he is to this day, ripping the steepest lines on potato-shaped moguls while onlookers gazed in awe. Turner snapped close-up shots of Burns spraying corn out of the troughs of bumps, ski tips upended, Burns’ long, blonde hair shining in the wake of his own jet stream—a clear amalgam of joy and brutal focus etched on the skier's deeply tanned face. Even in black and white, as the story and images were printed, the photographs exude power, intensity, raw energy.
Yet the cover, printed in color, struck a different tone: an exhibitionist, a man in full corporate- and-self-promotion mode, doing the “Wheelie” for the camera, grinning wildly behind unique orange ski bases with blue rectangles that would pique even the uninitiated.
A more artful reading is that of an era in flight: the persistent blue skies, so prevalent in ‘70s ski films and images (did it ever actually snow? only at night?), the collared ski sweater and stretch pants, the sun-kissed skin and notable lack of hat or goggles. The unbridled spirit of a decade when ski films had rock ‘n’ roll symphony soundtracks and men were putting space buggies on the moon.
Would an image like this make a magazine cover today? Not likely. But then we don’t put men on the moon anymore, either.
Dick Barrymore, Inventor
By Kristopher Kaiyala
Premiere Issue
Dick Barrymore is telling me about skiing’s very first helmet camera. “You know, there was this guy,” he says, and suddenly the moment changes. A second ago we were talking about lenses and wind-up lengths and kilograms, but now we’re talking about a person and you can feel and hear the scenery change as Barrymore breaks into one of his trademark stories—a creative trait that bankrolled his 25-year career as one of America’s most entertaining and prolific ski filmmakers.
“There was this guy,” he says, and Barrymore, 73, may as well be narrating to a packed theater now. His voice rises and I can sense from the cadence of his words that the crescendo to a punch line is just beginning. “His name was Jim Farnsworth. He got the idea,” he continues slowly, metering each word, “that he was going to film a scene from a skier’s point of view. This was in about 1960,” and at this he pauses for a few seconds, as if that’s the time it takes to transport himself from the kitchen of his Sun Valley home into the driver’s seat of the vintage Porsche 912 he owned while touring Europe and filming his 1967 lecture film The Last of the Ski Bums.
“So Farnsworth built this steadicam contraption,” continues Barrymore, “that had two metal bars that ran over his shoulders and extended two feet in front of him and two feet behind. Behind his head the bars connected to a lead weight that counter-balanced the camera that hung from the bars in front of his head.” Barrymore laughs. “He was nuts! What happens if he falls? He’d be wearing that camera in his teeth! But anyway,” and I’m reminded of a few bad dental visits from my youth, “he decided he was going to ski down the hill with this thing on, ski right across the deck of the Aspen Highlands lodge to the tiny A-frame hut that housed the bar, and catch a beer and drink it, capturing it all on film. Jim Farnsworth,” he adds with emphasis, as if the name alone explains the significance of the stunt.
“People watched him set up the shot. He shoveled and shoveled snow. He worked it all out with the bartender and everything. When it was ready, he came down the hill at about 40 miles an hour and skied right across the deck—about a hundred feet—as planned. Only problem was,” and here Barrymore’s voice accelerates, “when he got to the end where the bartender was supposed to open the door on Farnsworth’s command, and be waiting with his drink, something went wrong and he crashed into the solid wood door! He ended up in a pile and everyone watching laughed!” And as Barrymore's voice peaks you can almost hear his packed theater audience laughing along with them.
Like a good comedian, Barrymore has a final gag up his sleeve. “When it was over,” he chuckles softly, “Farnsworth asked the bartender, ‘Why didn’t you open the door?’ ‘I’m sorry,' said the bartender, 'but I got tied up with a customer.’”
The silver-tongued delivery leaves you wondering whose story it really is—Barrymore’s or Farnsworth’s. Chances are it’s a little of both, a reflection of Barrymore’s gift for invention, another career trademark that garnered him if not financial riches over the years, then certainly career divertissement and a larger-than-life reputation as the James Bond of alpine cameramen.
“But that photograph,” he says, referring to the image featured above and on page 75 of Barrymore’s 1997 autobiography, Breaking Even, "that picture came later." Of all the classic and hot-dog images from the 1960s and 1970s contained in his book, the photograph of Dick wearing his homemade helmet camera is the best of the bunch. Posing self-glamorously, Barrymore seems mad scientist, daredevil, and mischievous little kid all in one shot.
“That’s me in Dana Point,” he says. “It was a warm, southern California day in about 1965 and I had just put that thing together and tried it on. We took the picture aiming toward the sky so it would look like it could be anywhere.” He had good friend and fellow Dana Point filmmaker Bruce Brown (of eventual Endless Summer fame) snap the photograph.
(A side note: fans of Greg Stump’s 1987 ski epic The Blizzard of Aahhh’s may notice a compelling resemblance between the angle and context of the Barrymore/Brown photo and the brief footage of a helmet cam-wearing Glen Plake at Squaw Valley getting ready to drop the “line that even [Scot] Schmidt thought was a bad idea,” at about 30:47 in the movie. The similarity may be accidental, but Stump, an avowed fan of Barrymore and his films, paid tribute to Barrymore’s legacy during Aahhh’s’ legendary opening narration sequence. Those few seconds showing Plake could easily be Stump's homage to a mentor.)
Barrymore had used first-person POV footage once before, while filming High Skis on New Zealand’s Tasman Glacier in 1961. “I held the camera on my skis while skiing. When I got back I thought the footage looked pretty good, but it was a little shaky.” He decided his movies could use more of the rush of speed and movement that first-person POV provides, and so he set about designing a more stable system to achieve the result he wanted.
Helmet cameras had been used by skydivers for decades before Farnsworth and Barrymore appeared on the scene, but the models weren’t suitable for skiing. “We tried using them, but they were mostly war surplus and in the cold weather weren’t reliable. Eventually I realized I’d just have to build my own.
And so he did. The final prototype took about an hour to put together. “I drove down to the motorcycle shop and bought a Bell helmet. Then I took a piece of sheet metal and bent it around it,” he says, and now his voice gets theatrical again. “We mounted the K100 [camera] on one side, and to counterbalance it I found a can of Drano and emptied it out and then filled it with sand until it was the same weight as the camera.”
I mistakenly mention the unquestionable use of duct tape, thinking, probably like most people, i et and comparably featherweight Beaulieu camera. But that year was a prolific one for the homemade helmet cam. It was particularly advantageous for shooting racing footage, a staple of Barrymore’s early films. Viewers could see the gates whoosh by the same way that skiers like Pepi Stiegler (who wore the cam on at least one occasion) did, creating a powerful visual effect.
“After a while,” waxes Barrymore, “it seemed everybody wanted to ski with the helmet camera. It was new. Sure it looked funny and it was a little heavy—we had a lot of weight up there—but overall it worked pretty well."
Just like the rest of Barrymore’s inventions.
Lines In Skiing (Feature Intro)
By Kristopher Kaiyala
Issue 2.2
Some smart guy a long time ago reasoned that a line is “the shortest distance between two points.” This guy never stood in line for a Radiohead concert or for the old tram at Jackson Hole.
Lines have mathematical definitions, and real-life deviations. Nowhere do the latter occur more than in skiing. “There’s my line,” your friend might say, pointing his or her pole upward at a snaky chute that takes a hard dogleg above a fist of granite and another shake through a wistful skirt of trees. There’s something screwy about ski lines. They rarely go straight.
In our snowy universe the word “line” has many meanings. It’s a brand of skis started by a college kid in his parents’ garage. It’s access to a bro-brah deal for your favorite gear. It’s the same old story Bernie gives about why he didn’t make it to the mountain on powder Tuesday. Lines are sweet, sick, epic, impossible, clean, sketchy, claimed, stolen, and sometimes never repeated.
Like the lines of communication in the Ski Journal office (Matt answers the phone and yells across the threshold, over the perked-up ears of Dr. Gonzo Yellowdog, to Jeff that another tree has fallen in his backyard, but not to worry Baker has 20 inches of new), these short essays are cobbled together. By no means do they represent every line out there; you know as well as we do that lines are created with each passing storm. But collectively they form an erudite pastiche of skiing today.
Or maybe that’s just a line penned by some smart guy.
Sacred Peaks
By Kristopher Kaiyala
Issue 2.1
J.R. Murray sat in his office on the morning of March 12, 2007. The ski area whose operation he oversees on the flanks of northern Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks had abruptly closed a day earlier. It had been another turbulent and unpredictable season—something the employees and customers of Arizona Snowbowl have begrudgingly grown accustomed to—and without any significant snow in March, usually Snowbowl’s biggest month, it didn’t make sense to stay open any longer. Murray, who has spent 22 seasons at Snowbowl, gazed at the mostly bare slopes near the resort’s base and envisioned a scene with hundreds of skiers and snowboarders riding the lifts and enjoying a bountiful harvest of high-desert spring corn.
Then the news came. As Murray hurriedly sat at his desk and skimmed the just-released 64-page document, he found the part that mattered most: the decision by the three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that would determine whether Snowbowl could make snow from reclaimed wastewater, as granted in 2005 by the Coconino National Forest (on whose land Snowbowl operates under a 777-acre special use permit) and later by the U.S. District Court of Arizona at Prescott in January 2006, or whether it would be forced to endure an operational setback of worst-possible-scenario proportions.
Murray read the critical paragraph and then called a meeting to prepare for the media storm that would follow. As his staff listened, he told them that the Ninth Circuit Court had effectively reversed the lower-court Prescott ruling, blocking Snowbowl and the Forest Service from going forward with its plans to create a state-of-the-art snowmaking infrastructure. “I explained our options and our intention to continue the process,” says Murray of his conversation with staff members. “We knew the plaintiffs would claim victory so we focused on the fact that we had prevailed in the previous three rounds of decisions and remained optimistic that we would ultimately prevail as we believe the laws are on our side.”
In its ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court found that by approving Snowbowl’s usage of, in its words, “recycled sewage effluent,” the Forest Service was in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and that in one respect the Forest Service’s Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) violated the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). A five-year process, initiated by Snowbowl in 2002 and carried forward by forest supervisor Nora Rasure, had met a roadblock seemingly as big as the Golden Gate Bridge.
The March 12 decision didn’t entirely surprise Murray. “We knew the make-up of the three-judge panel. However to actually get the ruling and read it was very disappointing.” Later that day, Eric Borowsky, general partner of Arizona Snowbowl Resort Limited Partnership, issued a strongly worded statement on Snowbowl’s Web site that either galvanized support for or opposition against the ski area, depending on which side of the issue one sat. “Unfortunately, once again, the NEPA process has been abused and the taxpayers of our country held for ransom by a small group of activists who believe that they personally own our nation’s public lands,” read a portion of the letter. “If this ruling is allowed to stand, then our national policy and congressionally mandated multiple use doctrine on public lands is dead for all practical purposes.”
Later, Murray would spell out the ramifications of a Snowbowl without snowmaking more severely: that the resort’s very existence is at stake. “With snowmaking, we have a great ski area located within two hours of almost five million people. But there is no way any ski area can continue to operate and make necessary improvements when there is no predictability or consistency in its business cycle. No prudent investor would undertake the risk without snowmaking.”
That same morning, in nearby Flagstaff, Howard Shanker was sitting in his office when he got word that the court ruling had been released. He pulled it up quickly, read through it, and forwarded it to his clients. He spent the rest of day fielding phone calls from the press. News of the Ninth Circuit decision spread rapidly on blogs and message boards, and soon was published in places like Forbes and the New York Times. For a case with such small beginnings, it had grown into a media maelstrom.
Shanker, 47, who was born in the Bronx and attended Georgetown Law School and practiced in the nation’s capitol before moved with his family to Arizona 15 years ago, had represented several groups in the Prescott district case in 2006. When that appeal failed to overturn the Forest Service’s FEIS, Shanker took the case to the feds in the Bay Area, where he represented the Navajo Nation, the Yavapai-Apache Nation, the White Mountain Apache Tribe, the Havasupai Tribe, the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Flagstaff Activist Network, all of whom (along with other groups represented by other counsel) opposed Snowbowl’s expansion and snowmaking plans on various religious and technical grounds.
Considering the agencies that Shanker and his clients were up against, the successful Ninth Circuit appeal was nothing short of a David versus Goliath victory. “Some of the judges in the court must have a good heart and looked deeply into themselves to realize that the [San Francisco] Peaks are so sacred to us, and they understood our beliefs,” said Bucky Preston, one of the Hopi plaintiffs. Shanker seemed more confident in the legal process of finding flaws in scientific and philosophical posits. Of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the wastewater issue, Shanker says “either would have stopped the project. The RFRA claim was more important in the sense that it established a substantive legal basis for protecting the exercise of Native American religion and practice.”
Tribes and activist groups viewed the victory as a long-overdue deterrent to what they see as years of injustice and the despoiling of a highly sacred and naturally dramatic site. They also viewed this battle as an old one. Since Snowbowl’s creation in 1938 it has been mired in controversy. And ever since the Coconino National Forest became steward of the San Francisco Peaks more than a hundred years ago, it has been the object of intense distrust among the people who first called this land home. There have been moments of cooperation, such as the closing of the White Vulcan Pumice Mine in 2002 as brokered by then Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbit, but given the state of the relationship between the tribes and the Forest Service today, the two groups seem separated by nothing less than a great mountain.
The upper bowl of Agassiz Peak (12,356’) is a skier’s dream. Treeless and gently curved like the cupping of a large hand, it forms the topmost section of Arizona Snowbowl—and is officially out of bounds.
Snowbowl’s Agassiz Triple Chair accesses the shoulder of the peak to about a thousand feet below the summit. From there skiers and snowboarders can funnel down established runs or forested glades into a wide valley separating Agassiz Peak from adjacent Humphreys Peak (12,643’, the highest point in Arizona). Encircling Snowbowl’s permit area above and on either side is the Kachina Peaks Wilderness Area.
"Snowbowl and the Peaks have this magnetic draw," says Lynda Fleischer, 48, a nearly 20-year resident of Flagstaff. Fleischer is program director at the Flagstaff Ski Club and is a level 2 certified ski instructor at Snowbowl, where her husband and three children also ski. She beams when she describes the ski area. "Snowbowl is like being in your own backyard. It's one of the oldest ski areas in the country and you can sense the history around it, which makes it feel like home. The terrain is challenging, by far the best in the state, and when it snows it has the best powder in the southwest. It's just a magical place."
There are several major summits within the San Francisco Peaks—an eroded and extinct stratovolcano—which on average rise 5,000 feet above the desert valley floor. The Peaks are visible for hundreds of miles in all directions. To the Hopi they are Nuvatukyaovi (“high place of snow”). To the Navajo they are Dook’o’osliid (“shining on top”) and are the westernmost of the four sacred mountains that define the Navajo ancestral land.
As carefully and painstakingly pointed out in the lengthy opinion written by Ninth Circuit Court judge William A. Fletcher, for the Navajo and Hopi and other tribes, the Peaks are central to their creation stories and past and present cultures and religious ceremonies, as well as home to their deities and the many mountain shrines devoted to them.
The Peaks area is also home to Flagstaff, a bustling mountain and recreation community of nearly 60,000 and growing. Because of its northern location and high elevation (nearly 7,000’), Flagstaff manages to remain relatively cool during summer. During winters, at least the good ones, storms are drawn to the Peaks and can drop 250 inches of snow. But if you ask J.R. Murray, he’ll tell you good winters are hard to come by lately.
Indeed, most local experts say the outlook isn’t good. “There have been lots of detailed, long-term climatological studies of the Colorado Plateau on the scale of hundreds of years,” says Roderic A. Parnell, chair of the Center for Environmental Sciences at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. “Everyone indicates that we have entered another drought cycle and the questions that remain in debate are how long is it, and how bad is it.”
As with the entire interior western U.S., water is a defining issue. Water drives everything from public policy to land use to development to recreation. People get into fistfights over water. Cows and horses grow bony without it. Forest fires break out and everyone points fingers at each other.
When Snowbowl began its quest for improvements in 2002, which also included facilities upgrades and glading of new runs, it looked at various sources for water for snowmaking. “We looked at drilling wells and using potable water sources,” says Murray. “Both would have been met with more opposition than we have now. Drilling into Mother Earth was very controversial with tribes, and using potable water in a desert state in the midst of a drought is bad public policy.
“Reclaimed water was proposed because it is available in large quantities," he continues. "No winter use for it exists in Flagstaff, and the state agency in charge of permitting uses determined it was safe and allowable." It's easy to tell that Murray believes Snowbowl's plan isn't merely executable, but exceptional. "Reclaimed water is the cornerstone of growth in Arizona. Society needs to come to grips with the fact that reclaimed water will be in our water source in the future, and in thousands of cases, it already is. It is the wave of the future. Our project will win environmental awards once completed. It is leading edge and forward-thinking.”
From a national perspective, it’s hard to picture Arizona without its lush, green golf courses. Most are irrigated with grade A or A+* reclaimed wastewater. The same goes for many parks, school yards, residential landscaping, even some food crops. The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ), which sets the standards for wastewater use in the state, notes that wastewater is presently allowed for snowmaking in four states. However, as stated in the Ninth Circuit Court ruing, Snowbowl testified it would be the first ski area in the nation to use nothing but reclaimed wastewater for snowmaking, as opposed to a diluted combination of reclaimed wastewater and water from other sources.
Under the Snowbowl and Forest Service plan, A+ reclaimed wastewater supplied by Flagstaff’s Rio de Flag Reclamation Plant would be piped underground for 15 miles to the ski area, providing a water source for fire-suppression needs along the way during summer, and pumped into a 10-million gallon storage pond to be constructed near the top of the Sunset Chairlift. Additionally, a significantly smaller backdrainage catchment pond would be built north of the snowtubing lots. Water in the smaller pond would be pumped back into the main pond after collection. The Rio de Flag plant would provide up to 178 million gallons of reclaimed water to Snowbowl between Nov. 1 and Feb. 28 for snowmaking and for other uses such as the flushing of toilets. (Snowbowl estimates it can eventually reduce its potable water consumption by 65%, a notable conservation measure.)
For most of those opposed to Snowbowl's snowmaking plan, it’s what’s in—or what might be in—the reclaimed water. (Here, semantics play a large role in the public debate; one entity’s “reclaimed wastewater” is another entity’s “treated sewage effluent.”) The Sierra Club, the Flagstaff Activist Network, and the Center for Biological Diversity each in turn raised technical concerns during the environmental review process about the presence of substances like pesticides, cosmetics, hormones, pharmaceuticals, and so-called endocrine disruptors, all things that are either not required for testing or that are not easily tested for or that simply cannot be removed from wastewater. The issue boiled down to what happens to these substances when introduced to a pristine mountain environment: Where do they go when wastewater snow melts, and what effect might they have on organisms, including humans, who are exposed to them or may accidently ingest them in liquid or frozen form?
It was the latter red flag that caused the Ninth Circuit Court to rule that the FEIS was in violation of NEPA, noting that ADEQ itself “has specifically disapproved the human ingestion of such water.” The judge panel found that the Forest Service did not adequately explain or address the risks involved with potential ingestion, or how it would address those risks with public users of the ski area via signage or other means. Had the Forest Service been more diligent in its study and explanations of that particular issue, one wonders whether the Ninth Circuit Court would have taken the Forest Service to task so harshly.
But despite the technicality, the NEPA portion of the panel’s ruling was small compared to the extensive and articulate Religious Freedom Restoration Act portion—so small, in fact, that one wonders if the faith of Bucky Preston and others pining for the restored “purity” of the Peaks was indeed rewarded.
Robert Tohe was working in his office on the morning of March 12 when a field lawyer contacted him about the Ninth Circuit Court ruling. As an Environmental Justice Organizer for the Sierra Club in Flagstaff, he was present, along with Shanker and Murray and many others on both sides of the conflict, during the Ninth Circuit hearing in September of 2006 in San Francisco. The hearing had strangely run longer than the usual allotted time, leaving Tohe and other appellants with a lingering sense of optimism.
Tohe, 59, is a long-time activist. He’s also Navajo. He grew up in the Four Corners area and while studying engineering at the University of New Mexico in 1970 he joined the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island. “It was an emerging time when Native activist voices were finally being heard,” he says. Tohe was one of many in the greater Flagstaff community who orchestrated rallies and gatherings and meetings to raise awareness about the Snowbowl issue. He also helped the Sierra Club and other groups unite under the legal representation of Howard Shanker for the Ninth Circuit appeal.
On March 12, Tohe scribed a press release that stated, among other things, that “the San Francisco 9th Circuit Court of Appeals delivered justice to the sacred San Francisco Peaks and the Southwest tribes,” and that “[The ruling] is a national wake up call for those that will try to desecrate sacred mountains like the San Francisco Peaks.”
To the native community and activist groups, the ruling was an obvious win. To Snowbowl and the Forest Service, the decision—and phrases in the press like “wake up call” and “justice”—were harbingers, whether real or imagined, of public land-use activism to come. No longer would science and sound planning alone dictate policy. A new factor had entered the equation: sentiment.
Who you side with in the Snowbowl controversy may depend more on conviction than fact. For a case heavy on data—soils studies, water reclamation analysis, infrastructure engineering, historical and anthropological cataloguing—much of the debate comes down to belief. Belief in a sacred mountain and its living deities. Belief in the multifaceted use of public lands. Belief that the Ninth Circuit Court has liberal leanings. Belief that Snowbowl’s very survival hinges on a multimillion dollar snowmaking system. Belief that the general public is highly in favor of, or starkly against, the expansion. Belief that a culture that has suffered immeasurable historical loss has finally received a small dose of justice at the hands of the federal government.
Daniel Kraker, news director and reporter for public radio station KNAU in Flagstaff, says the issue has divided the small community like nothing he's seen. “There’s a lot of anger in the air, and both sides have taken up intractable positions. There seems no room for compromise.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise that many non-native people around Flagstaff don’t or can’t fully understand or sympathize with the tribe’s point of view. In several places in the FEIS, the Forest Service openly acknowledges the spiritual needs and practices of the tribes on the Peaks. However, “Current studies indicate," begins one section in the FEIS, "[that] the proposed use of reclaimed water for snowmaking represents a low risk of adverse environmental impact to plants, wildlife, and humans. In addition, the tribes have not identified any locations where plants or other natural resource material are gathered within the Snowbowl SUP area.”
Snowbowl says that its 777-acre SUP occupies just 1% of the Peaks. It insists this is beyond fair. But to the native opposition, for the sake of their ancestral sacred ceremonies and spiritual completeness, the Peaks must remain entirely pure—pure from development and pure from wastewater. “You wouldn’t urinate in a church,” one tribal member was recently quoted as saying.
The commitment to and motivation behind the tribe’s efforts to block Snowbowl’s expansion also depends on belief—and varies depending on who you talk to. Skeptics say the tribes want the ski area completely closed down, to divert business to Sunrise ski area. Or the tribes want to own Snowbowl themselves. Some, even in Snowbowl’s camp, claim that activists are using the “Native American card” to drum up emotional support for their cause, that the Indians are but pawns in a larger environmental and social maneuver.
“The tribes are not being manipulated or used by activists,” says Shanker, who recently announced he is running for Congress in 2008. “That’s just silly. Tribes these days are pretty sophisticated when it comes to litigation”—he points to the unsuccessful legal attempt by an association of Navajo medicine men and the Hopi tribe to block Snowbowl expansion back in 1979—“and are often at odds with environmental groups. But this happens to be one of those things they agree on.”
Snowbowl ramped up its message in the months following the Ninth Circuit Court decision. “We could lose the right to enjoy the forests,” it boldly claimed on its ski-area blog in April. With the backing of the Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce—which cites a Northern Arizona University study in 2000 that shows that during a healthy, four-month season Snowbowl contributes $20 million to the local economy—Snowbowl and supporters like the Flagstaff Ski Club have built the web site Reclaim the Peaks (www.reclaimthepeaks.com) to fortify and broadcast their opinions. Activist groups are doing the same on their site, Save the Peaks (www.savethepeaks.org), and the information—or misinformation and hyperbole, depending on your point of view—contained on both sites serves to further strain the issue and divide the two cultures.
“I have lived in Northern Arizona for almost thirty years,” says Northern Arizona University’s Dr. Parnell, “and have seen nothing like this for dividing a community which can usually find consensus about environmental issues.”
On May 30, 10 weeks after the Ninth Circuit ruling was delivered, the Department of Justice on behalf of the Forest Service submitted a request for a re-hearing of the Ninth Circuit Court decision. Snowbowl did so as well, as an intervenor in the case. The Ninth Circuit Court is not required to re-hear the case, and should it not, Snowbowl can appeal to the US Supreme Court.
In the mean time, Arizona skiers and snowboarders wait in limbo to see if one day they may have a ski resort that can open in November and close in April every year, permitting the use of manmade snow. The Navajo, Hopi, and other tribes and activists will wait, too, and watch, as they have for a long time, guarding and upholding a spectacular mountain range that they and skiers each hold sacred for vastly different reasons.
* The main difference between A and A+ reclaimed wastewater, according to a source at ADEQ, is the amount of nitrogen remaining in the water. A+ has significantly less nitrogen than A.