Soul on Snow

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The tips of my skis are buried crosswise like Pick Up Sticks in a bank of snow that has also swallowed my left arm. My entire body is tangled in a pose that would make a yoga teacher sigh.

No matter — the morning sun is patterned on the pine-shaded snow like loom strands. It’s a balmy 44 degrees. A silky breeze dries my hands as I right myself and point my skis back down the trail.

On a practically perfect late winter day at Eastern Oregon’s Anthony Lakes ski area, where the Nordic trails wind their way around evergreen forest, this tumble was probably the result of my paying more attention to a gray jay in the pines than to a downturn in the path.

The high-elevation snow is as dry and forgiving as cotton, and there’s no crowd to witness my downfall — only Dick Knowles, the Anthony Lakes Nordic program director, who kindly accepts my claim that I intended to spill. You can cruise for hours around the trails up here and barely see a soul; Knowles designed the 40-kilometer system of interconnecting loops to achieve just that. In an hour of skiing we encounter one other couple; we nod and pass on.

"Out here, the dance hall is the place for social gatherings. Ninety-four percent of the people who go out cross-country skiing don’t want to see or talk to anyone. They want good snow, a substantial trail system, and peace and quiet,” Knowles explains. And that’s just what we find in abundance.

"Abundance” is an apt overall descriptor for the Oregon skiing experience. Few states or Canadian provinces offer such a wide variety of terrain, facilities and conditions for winter sports — including alpine or Nordic skiing, snowboarding, snowshoeing or snowmobiling.

Eastern Oregon is classic inland West territory, where high bowls capture heaps of dry, powdery snow, jays commonly known as “camp robbers” chatter in the pines, and skiers traverse the snow-draped shoulders of broad mountains. This is not the Rockies but rather the Elkhorns, an arm of the Blue Mountains, yet it is remarkably similar.

Central Oregon is high desert, where buttes and volcanic cones scrape equally dry powder from Pacific fronts, and slopeside vistas encompass hundreds of square miles of juniper-dotted Great Basin.

And in the Cascades, prodigious snowfalls embrace the high flanks and mid-mountain passes of North America’s formative backbone. There, Mt. Hood offers America’s only year ’round lift-served skiing.

All these areas have facilities and trail networks to serve any type of winter sport. Some offer the sort of low-key uncrowded skiing that’s rare these days. And in each place the air, the light, the snow and the landscape are distinctly different.

This wondrous variety is an accident of climate and topography — Oregon is astride the Cascades, it’s atop the Great Basin, and it’s in the path of the Pacific jet stream. It’s a happy circumstance that’s easy for both residents and visitors to enjoy: The state’s ski areas are all within a day’s drive of Portland or Seattle, or a quick plane flight from those cities and others.

I learned to cross-country ski in the Rockies, but now I’m here to reclaim the experience and have expectations of sunshine, ample snow and pine-scented solitude. The journey starts at the 90-year-old landmark Union Hotel, the closest lodging to the ski area, then on to the Anthony Lakes Nordic Center, itself a restored 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps cabin.

Knowles and I head out the main southern loop, which winds around the edge of Anthony Lake, passing beneath the timberline crag of Anthony Ridge and, coincidentally, beside the slope where Eastern Oregon residents established the first lift here in the 1930s. (The alpine area has since moved a couple hundred yards west along the ridge, so the Nordic system is completely separate.) Across the lake is a now-abandoned ski jump, one of the first in North America.

“The judging platform those old skiing cowboys used to use is still up there in the woods,” Knowles points out. “This was pretty much their winter rodeo.” A former World Cup skiing guru, Knowles lives on a ranch at the base of the Elkhorn Range, and despite traveling the globe to ski, he has no trouble resisting attempts to lure him elsewhere.

“Where else would I want to go? This is paradise.”

After looping around the main two-kilometer circuit, we head west on Anthony Lakes’ newest drawing card, a sensational 12K trail that winds around and up the ski area’s ridge, concluding at the top of the chairlift. Nordic skiers can, if they wish, take the lift up and cruise back down. More dedicated skiers ski up and back — a full day’s mission for most. This trail is shared with snowmobilers, but it’s 20 feet wide, and each sport gets an ample half the trail.

A steady half-hour jaunt takes us to a vista point where the trail skirts a steep slope, and my reward is a sensational panorama that sweeps 200 degrees, from the timbered marches of the westerly Blue Mountains to the snow-blanketed heights of the Eagle Cap Wilderness in the Wallowa Range northeast. It seems as if I’m looking at half the West; there’s no distinct horizon, just ever more distant ranges offering a sun-doused infinity of timber, snow and rock.

The trip back to the Nordic center is a 15-minute glide, the sort of gentle cruise that makes cross-country skiing exhilarating. The fresh breeze, born on the snowy ridge above and brushed through lodgepole branches, has a distinctive, whooshing sound I’d recognize anywhere. I first heard it and smelled the pine scent it carried when I strapped on skis more than two decades ago. Though I’m just a visitor, I feel right at home.