Toward the end of the 2020-’21 season, as the ice was just beginning to break up on the first round of the pandemic and the sketchiest snowpack in history west of the Rockies turned to corn, I had the opportunity to travel to Montana to do a little exploration of my mental health via backcountry ski tour.

Don’t get me wrong: I was doing fine, all things considered. Sure, the lodgepoles and the whitebarks were dying or already dead; seas were rising; winter was disappearing. Humans were proving irredeemably mean and shortsighted. My own 16-year-old son, even though he’s a great skier, had made clear he preferred Fortnite over powder. Garbage-eating ravens were taking over the world and all the grinding hours I spent every work day video chatting in defense of the environment were making not a damn bit of difference.

But hey, I was skiing almost everyday, sneaking it in whenever I could. Whether it was early morning hot laps on Mammoth Mountain corduroy before the crowds set in, low-angle backcountry wiggles at sunset, or just an afternoon walk in the woods with the dog—as long as I was on skis, even on crappy old snow, there was balance and well-being. Call it happiness. The trick, of course, was how to hang on to that feeling when I wasn’t on skis.

When the invitation came over the wire to join Iraq War veteran and outdoor wellness pioneer Stacy Bare in Cooke City, Mont., for what he was calling an “intentional adventure,” I didn’t hesitate. His outfit, s, aims to “lower stress, increase joy, and deepen connection” through backcountry skiing. Whether all that would help me address my own underlying malaise in any significant or enduring way, I had my doubts. But I’d seen the Beartooths in summertime and had always wanted to get up there on skis. I was only half vaccinated and I hadn’t been on an airplane in a year, but I canceled a week’s worth of Zoom meetings anyway and booked a ticket to Bozeman.

1. Intention

Then it started to get real. Before I headed out, I was supposed to schedule a one-on-one “intention setting” session with the operation’s Chief Health Officer, Koorosh Rassekh. Looking at the profiles of some of the other participants, I wasn’t sure my issues measured up. There was a pro-kiteboarder and entrepreneur from Hood River whose mother had died when she was 9. Her father had been in federal prison for eight years for growing and selling weed; he was finally released on her 30th birthday. There was a competitive freeskier and mountain biker from Jackson Hole who was dealing with physical injury, crippling fear, and intense professional pressure. And a money manager from Omaha who’d nearly died from heatstroke during the Boston marathon. He couldn’t shake the conviction that he was going to go out young—sooner rather than later—like his grandfather had.

And of course there was Bare himself, a towering, jovial, big-hearted man-child who has defused land mines, lost friends to snipers’ bullets and IEDs, and narrowly escaped being blown up on the streets of Baghdad. He had to literally climb his way out of the depths of depression and drug addiction. These people are heroes, with real trauma to work through. What did I have to complain about?

“Oh you’ve got plenty you can work on,” my wife assured me.

I shared this with Rassekh at the start of our first video meeting. He wore a knit-wool skull cap, Atticus Finch glasses, and a thick, salt-and-pepper tangle of a pirate’s beard. On the wall behind him was a big blue painting with white letters that read On To The Next Mistake. He laughed heartily. Apparently, his wife was also skilled at sniffing out the fine line between his true self, such as it was, and his self-deception.

“Ask my wife,” he said. “She’ll set you straight about the folly of what it means to be me.”

Setting intentions was not a particularly new concept to me. Most mornings I wake up intending to knock out a thing or two on my ever-growing list of shit that needs to get done. And rarely, if ever, do I head out into the backcountry without a fairly specific notion of where I intend to go and what I intend to climb and ski. Even if that intention changes along the way based on conditions or whatever else—where I might’ve set out to climb this peak or ski that line, now I intend just to get home and have a cold beer and a hot shower—the intention is there. But setting an emotional intention for a ski trip? That was new.

For starters, I resolved to be more mindful and aware of what I was feeling at any given moment and where that feeling was coming from. The evening before I talked to Rassekh, I’d gone out to rip a few end-of-the-day wellness laps on old Chair 22, in what I think of as my backyard on Mammoth Mountain. I’d stopped by my son Jasper’s room on the way out. As usual, he was one with his bean bag, his laptop, and his iPhone.

“Join me?” I asked.

He didn’t even look up. “I’ll head out in a little bit,” he said.

It couldn’t have been a more magical session. The snow was soft, edgeable chalk spread with a fresh coat of wind buff. The air was still and crystalline. The world was bathed in sidelong, liquid light emanating from over the Ritter Range. And it was all mine for the last hour before the lift closed. Where had everyone gone? The playlist in my ears paired perfectly with the contours of the terrain as I sliced and soared. I felt alive, fit, free, masterful, focused, sublime.

When I got home, I found Jasper still in the same position on his bean bag. I felt—I was trying to pay attention to the feeling—anger, disappointment, guilt, sadness. How had I failed so completely as a father? I couldn’t help but say something mean and sarcastic. And then I felt shitty. I went back and apologized. I vowed to myself that I would let it go. I would let him be the person he wants to be, the person he is. The kid is awesome, after all: smart, funny, confident, compassionate, irreverent. Why should it matter that he find his passion—if that’s what it is—in something other than mountains and skiing?

“Good luck with that,” said Rassekh with deep empathy and compassion. This was not new territory for him as a father, a fellow lover of skiing, and a longtime family therapist. On the one hand, he explained, there were limits I would have to set as a parent. I had to do what I could to help my son make good decisions, to help keep him from ending up “face down in the gutter,” as Rassekh put it. Maybe, in the whole big grab bag of dissociative experiences available to today’s teenager for the quelling of pain and boredom, binge-scrolling through pop culture memes and latter-day SNL skits was hardly the worst.

On the other hand, this was about me and my own twisted inner landscape. So, he suggested, maybe the intention could be framed as follows: “How do I notice the difference between my activation and what my kid needs?” Okay, I thought. I might have to noodle on that one for a while. Activation? And then the hour was up.

To make sure my external kit—the gear, the body, the non-emotional stuff—was dialed for some big skiing in the Beartooths, I put in a long day on Mount Wood with a friend, climbing 5,400 vertical feet from the shore of Grant Lake. The last 1,000 feet up the main gully, my ski partner and I kicked in one step after another in progressively deteriorating mashed potatoes, hauling ourselves upward at a steady pace in hopes of beating what was likely to be a massive wet slide. I became mindful of the burning sensation in my legs and lungs. I took the opportunity to further hone my intention into something simpler and perhaps considerably less attainable: I would aim in all instances to remain aloof from pain and suffering.

I could hear Rassekh laughing inside my head: “Good luck with that.”

The next day, the day before I was to fly to Montana, in the midst of some fun spring afternoon resort cruising with my wife, in an instantaneous lapse away from the present—I have no idea where my mind went—I caught an edge and broke my leg.

I held onto my intention. There was pain—plenty of it—but no suffering. I waved and smiled to the gawkers on the lift, sketched my way down the mountain on one leg, hobbled into the ER. It was a lucky break, as it were, a clean snap of the fibula. There was nothing to be done: no cast, no boot, just four to six weeks of putting my left leg down very, very carefully. There would be no skiing in the Beartooths for me that season.

Still, the next morning, given that this was to be an inner journey anyway, and my right leg was in fine shape, I drove myself to Reno, donned a KN95 mask, availed myself of a wheelchair ride through security, and flew to Montana.

2. Exploration

I hitched a ride up to Madison and out across the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park in a rental car with Sensi Graves, the kiteboarder. Winter was starting to pull back from the sage steppes of the Lamar Valley. The bison were moving. Up toward the Absarokas, to the northeast, a late spring storm was gathering. It seemed likely there’d be a fresh dusting of powder in the morning. For those who could ski. I felt the old anticipation in my gut, even though I knew I’d be missing out.

Clear-eyed, eternally smiling and sparkling with energy, Graves—named Sensi for Sinsemilla, or seedless cannabis, by her father—talked about the current transitions she was working through: moving away from competition; deciding whether she wanted to get out—or double down—of the sustainable swimwear business she’d been building for years; and either way, actually marry her longtime fiancĂ©. She’d just come from visiting her grandfather in Orange County. He’d been her primary caretaker when she was younger. Now he was dying.

Graves had been on the fence about coming on this trip. She’d never done “any backcountry anything,” as she put it. She learned to ski when she was two, and started snowboarding when she was 13. “I don’t want to be the weakest link in the group,” she explained. Plus, she should really be working. “And then I was like ‘wait, that’s ridiculous.’ I want to say yes to adventure. That’s what I’ve built my life on.” So she borrowed a splitboard from a friend and learned how to take it apart and put it back together. She also borrowed avy gear and immediately began fretting that she wouldn’t be able to use it properly.

She talked about the pressure she felt, with her dad, with her business, to be more than just a human being, to be instead what she called a “human doing.” She talked about her intention to slow down, to be present and aware, to feel like she was “enough.” For my part I talked about the apparent futility of environmental activism, how no matter what we did—all the action alerts and comment letters and calls to members of Congress—it didn’t seem to make a damn bit of difference.

While we chatted, she drove like she was late to an important business meeting, pressing right up onto the tailgate of the car in front of us as it slowed down to appreciate yet another roadside wildlife tableau. I put my feet on the dashboard, trying to focus on the wide-open landscape. Since I couldn’t ski powder, I thought, maybe instead I’d spot a wolf or a grizzly. We later learned that we’d blown right past a pack of wolves on a kill beside the road. Neither of us noticed.

Cooke City, population 80-or-so depending on the season, is one of the most remote hamlets in the Lower 48, especially in winter. Just over the Montana line from the northeast entrance to the park, corralled within towering ramparts of rock, ice, and hanging snowfields, the ramshackle collection of old shacks and retired vehicles that comprise the town clings to either side of the road, half buried in snow drifts. There’s no cell service, and only very limited internet. The main street—the Beartooth Highway—dead-ends at the east end of town in a berm of snow. Even with a broken leg, a person can hobble the five or so blocks from one end of town to the other in a handful of minutes. Most people, it seems, commute up and back on snowmobiles.

Ordinarily, a wintertime Happy Grizzly șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű would involve packing into a backcountry hut with the whole group, quickly bonding over intimate sleep sounds and foot smells. This time, due to lingering pandemic realities, we spent the nights in town at the High Country Motel. While this arrangement may have slightly reduced the full-blown intensity of the experience, it had its advantages in the form of hot showers, fresh-baked cinnamon rolls in the morning, and some private space for decompression each evening after beers, pizza, and Grateful Dead bootleg tracks at the Miner’s Saloon.

The first morning broke crystal blue. I suited up, pulled on my insulated rubber boots (in lieu of ski boots), and stepped my way gingerly, deliberately, across the icy parking lot and up the street, leaning on my ski poles for stability. I told myself I’d already had my fair share of powder days for the season. There was no reason to get worked up about this one. Enjoy the scenery, focus on the inner landscape, count on coming back some other time to sample the vertical. A local free-range dog, already enjoying the warm asphalt in the middle of the street, watched me hobble by without lifting his head.

Over breakfast in the green-carpeted conference room of the Motel 8 where we met, there was a round of introductions and intention-sharing. Bare talked about his own journey from deep depression and self-demolition to recovery, finding purpose on wild rivers and mountains, and eventually working to help other veterans find the same through outdoor adventure. He talked about learning to ski in order to be able to go back to Iraq to reframe his experiences there by climbing and skiing the country’s highest peak, 11,847-foot ​​Cheekha Dar, meaning Black Tent in Kurdish.

Rassekh described 30 years of being plugged into “a life that made no sense, like the Matrix movie,” and the multiple substances he leaned on to get through it all. “Except in the mountains,” he said. “But that was fleeting.” The goal here was to achieve an intentional reset over the course of 72 hours of outdoor adventure—according to Bare, a period of time significant enough to affect a fundamental shift in one’s mindset—and along the way to provide some tools for integrating that reset back into our everyday “default” lives.

They laid out some basic directives: push yourself physically and emotionally, but also take care of yourself and don’t be afraid to ask for help; pay attention to the interplay between the external world and the internal; be careful and intentional about the words you say; avoid using the words ‘should,’ ‘could’ or ‘would’; aim for levity whenever possible (and appropriate); embrace curiosity; seek awe. “We’re here for each other,” Bare explained. “We welcome your voice and your quietude.”

It was clear from the beginning that this was not a standard backcountry mission with solely physical objectives. This was not going to be an effort to log maximum vert or tag specific rad lines. Given the range of backcountry experience and abilities, with first-timers on one end of the spectrum and seasoned skiers and riders on the other, the MO here was just to move through the landscape at a shared pace, a pace that under ordinary circumstances might not be optimal for people at either end of the spectrum. To support each other. And to keep a light touch on our personal emotional objectives along the way.

Our guides to the external landscape were Ben Zavora and Logan DeMarcus of Beartooth Powder Guides, both lushly mustachioed men-o’-the-mountains who were also remarkably patient and sensitive to the unique objectives of a group like this. (“I may look like a portrait of toxic masculinity,” said Logan, softly, like a nice young man helping an elderly widow across a busy street.) They gave us a rundown of what they estimated to be a generally stable snowpack, unique to the Beartooths at this point in an unpredictable season. With the weather warming quickly there was even the likelihood of an incipient corn cycle over the coming days.

I talked Zavora into letting me tag along for the snowmobile shuttle out to the edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. Despite the powerful spring sunshine, the air was cold. Wisps of spindrift unfurled from the high ridges. The meadows were coated with two or three inches of new, wind-sifted snow. The skiing, for the others, was going to be excellent. At the Wilderness boundary, we parked the sleds and ran through an avalanche search exercise. We all managed to recover the beacons in fair time—even Graves, with her borrowed gear. Then the group set off in single file out into the Goose Lake cirque on skis and splitboards, with me following behind on snowshoes, one delicate step after another.

I didn’t make it far. I crested a barely-perceptible hillock at the edge of the basin and dug myself a shallow snow pit for protection against the northerly breeze. While the rest of the group skinned up the slope in the distance, chatting and laughing, I settled into the sunshine with my little thermos of tea, a sandwich, my notebook, and my old tattered copy of Edward Hoagland’s “Notes from the Century Before.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had the opportunity to sit for hours in one place, alone, with nothing to do but read and write and think. Surrounded by a dreamscape of snow and peaks and blue sky, with no cell reception. Nowhere else to be. Or more accurately, the last time I’d actually embraced such an opportunity without squirming or complaining or just inventing an excuse to move on. Perhaps never.

The soundlessness of the place was awesome—in the traditional sense of provoking awe and wonder—with only the occasional spasmodic scream of a two-stroke engine breaking the silence far away in the distance. At some point, I heard a human whoop, swallowed immediately by the muffled abstraction of the landscape. I peeked up out of my half-cave and watched as, one by one, my new friends came down the slope, each painting a line according to his or her instincts and abilities, one carving tidy little scallops, another long, swooping question marks. I couldn’t tell from that distance who was who, but I recognized Graves’ voice as clear as if she were standing right next to me: “That was awe-some!” When everyone completed the run, they set off up the skintrack for another lap.

That night after dinner we gathered in Rassekh’s room to share perspectives from the day. Graves had struggled with the kick turns, and the borrowed boots hurt her feet, but she’d been able to let that go and to settle into the backcountry groove. The money manager from Omaha was a new convert to the time-space of the uphill skintrack. “I could do that all day,” he said.

Everyone seemed blissfully present and aware, grateful even—or maybe especially—for the little aches and pains and general body-fatigue produced by a long day in the sun and the snow. Rather than dwelling on individual challenges and traumas, the focus of discussion was on the elemental lessons that might be learned from this kind of pared-down, uncomplicated now. Individually, everyone seemed to be working on a version of allowing his or herself to be enough, just as he or she was, working to ease the driving pressure of self-imposed expectations. Thanks to the tone set by Bare and Rassekh, the group served to provide radical and authentic support for everyone’s individual internal work.

“Even though our circumstances are different,” said the freeskier from Jackson, “the group container allows us to see how our minds are the same.”

The next morning we were joined at breakfast by Jesse Logan, one of the world’s foremost experts in whitebark pine ecology. He happened to live in a cabin right up the street. At 76, he was still sneaking around the mountains most days on backcountry skis like a wizened forest elf (as Bare described him).

Whitebarks are an ancient species of pine found in high-elevation landscapes across western North America. They’re a keystone species, foundational for the entire ecosystem, and the most important food source for grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone. Some of the best skiing in the world is among whitebarks. “I don’t know if I love whitebarks because of where they are, or I love where they are because there are whitebarks,” said Logan.

Unfortunately, they are now in full collapse.

“For 30 years, the scientific consensus has been that climate change is real and it’s gonna kick our asses,” Logan said. And sure enough, after too many millennia for our little brains to fathom, the balance has now suddenly fallen apart. Whole forests have blinked out in the last decade, with more than 80 percent of all whitebarks succumbing to pine beetle, blister rust, and/or wildfire. The grizzlies, for the time being, seem to be hanging on, at least within the confines of the national park where they can’t be shot. But the genetic viability of the population remains very much in question.

In December 2020, after a long and tedious stretch of coalition building and campaigning—“after 15 years of struggle and wasted time,” said Logan, his voice cracking with emotion—the United States Fish and Wildlife Service finally proposed to list the whitebark pine as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. A few months later, on the same day I was lounging in a snow pit in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness watching other people ski powder, that same federal agency resisted significant political pressure from Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, including from some of Cooke City’s most prominent citizens, and officially declined to remove the grizzly from the endangered species list.

These little bureaucratic victories were not likely to save the forests or the bears from what they face. It all seemed catastrophic and hopeless to me. But Logan, for his part, was amazingly, inspiringly, philosophical. “The little wins matter,” he said. Even if for him it was time to step away, to leave the uphill battle to a talented and capable next generation, as he put it, to put his prodigious focus instead into fly fishing and backcountry skiing.

The group spent the rest of the day following Zavora and Logan up a skintrack straight from town into one of the last remaining healthy whitebark forests in the northern Rockies. It had been spared from beetle kill, miraculously, by a lucky cold snap in 2009. Meanwhile, I borrowed Rassekh’s van, Zavora’s snowshoes, and a can of bear spray from Logan, packed a lunch, and drove down into the park hoping to limp my way into another dose of awe.

Hours later, I was sitting on a lichen-encrusted boulder several miles out an unplowed road along the edge of a closed bear-management area. I saw days-old grizzly tracks on the way out. A pair of bison grazed just downslope, watching me one-eyed out of the side of their enormous skulls.

I wondered, doubted, if bear spray would have any effect whatsoever if one of them were to decide, just for the hell of it, to charge across the sagebrush at me. An osprey wheeled overhead. Scanning the plateau through prescription sunglasses, I saw a bull elk in the distance. Then another. Then, trotting below a gentle ridgeline above a stand of aspens, maybe a mile away, something clearly dog-like. A wolf? I pulled off my shades, fumbled binoculars to my eyes, and there he was—or she—looking right at me. A wolf. And then it was gone.

I wanted to sit right there in the vast silence until darkness fell. I had snacks and hot tea and a headlamp. I imagined a big old sow grizz cruising across the hillside in the last rays of the setting sun. And then I remembered how long it was going to take me to get back down to the van, limping along on snowshoes over crusty, uneven snow. Plus the hour’s drive back up to Cooke City. I remembered how everyone had left their street shoes in Rassekh’s van for when they got back from skiing at the end of the day. I should get back, I thought. And then I corrected myself—avoid the word ‘should,’ Bare had commanded.

I want to get back and get everybody their shoes, I said, out loud, into the still, sage-scented air. And in fact I did want to. So I stuffed the binoculars into my pack, strapped the loathsome snowshoes back onto my feet and hauled myself off the rock.

3. Integration

As with most expeditions away from everyday existence, even before the trip was over there was that familiar dread that seeps in toward the culmination of a happy interstice. Out here in this untethered space, amidst the big sky and vulnerability of strangers, I could see it all clearly. But how to carry that feeling back into everyday life?

“What do you want to take away from this experience?” Bare challenged the group.

“After the ecstasy, the laundry,” added Rassekh.

For Graves the experience was transformational. “We were so in the present,” she would say to me later. “Being in nature allows for that.” She found a new level of awareness. She learned how to recognize when she was letting her external circumstances—her successes or challenges or losses—determine how she was feeling, and then how to swing it the other way. “I realized, Oh wow, no matter what we do we are worthy. Whatever it is, this is something I can handle. It doesn’t mean anything about who I am.”

On the last full day, much of the group opted to skip the next steep skintrack and the fast-warming, increasingly variable snow. Logan’s knee was acting up. Others felt physically depleted and emotionally exhausted. So we piled into Rassekh’s van and followed Zavora’s truck back into the park for an easy nature walk.

Along the way, Logan told stories about the ancient Fremont people walking through this landscape 14,000 years ago, and about the Nez Perce and the early white trappers. He talked about the successful reintroduction of wolves in the late 1990s. He pointed out thickets of willow and aspen. The wolves had brought down the population of elk to sustainable levels, allowing the vegetation to come back along the streams and gullies in the park, helping to improve water quality and fish habitat.

I could feel the equanimity and ease of the present, the irrelevance of the future. I recognized the need—nay, the desire—to let my son live his own life without the burden of my own expectations and disappointments. If later he wanted to come back to skiing, or to some other means of bringing all things to the radness of the present, it would be there for him. The whitebarks and the wolves and the grizzlies would go the way they would, with or without my input.

“You will find yourself in a place where you’re going to have the old experience,” Rassekh would say many weeks later, during our final integration session on Zoom, when my leg was healed enough to ride my bike. “The opportunity then is to notice, to recognize which part of you is present. And to respond. Maybe it’s time for another adventure—even just in your backyard.”

Moving forward, I set a new intention to remember that I would always have more to learn from my son than he would from me. And when the world seemed doomed or I otherwise lost track of the goodness of my fellow humans, even if I couldn’t escape onto my skis, I would always be able to access the ringing blue stillness of that powder-filled cirque high in the Beartooths.

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“I have an existential question,” announces Jonathan, the anesthesiologist, over a breakfast of fresh bread, jam, cold hot dogs, and cheese. “Why are we here?”

Streets of Sinaia.

Bucegi Range signpost.

He sips from a cup of General Mills CafĂ© Français, a tin of which he has carried in his backpack halfway across the globe—from California to the northern fringe of Wallachia, and then (by way of two Communist-era cablecars and a pair of alpine touring skis) up and over the Bucegi scarp at the kneecap of the . șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű the window, grey light rises over a thin dusting of new snow on midwinter crust.

All things considered, Jonathan’s question is a welcome variation on his usual: “Where is everybody else?” We have the whole vast dining room—indeed, the whole seven-story hotel—to ourselves. The place has the feel of an abandoned railroad station in Siberia. The only staff, as far as we can tell, are two college-age girls who stand rooted behind the reception desk as we come and go in our ski boots and a sullen waiter who appears occasionally in the dining room to field requests. There are mirrors on the walls, and marble tiles, and small craftsy landscapes rendered in grass and twigs and pebbles pasted on canvas.

We are only three days into an eight-day ski tour. We are here, of course, because it’s a place none of us has ever been before. Because there are mountains to be explored, and skiing to be done, all at a fraction of the cost of a comparable trip in, say, the Alps.

Jonathan’s younger brother, Andy, who is at this time the only general surgeon at the only hospital in the small resort town of Mammoth Lakes, California, has put a trip together and invited some friends to come along. Bill is a hand surgeon in Salt Lake City, Frank a radiologist in Oregon, Rich a thoracic surgeon in Seattle. And then there’s Joe, another friend from Mammoth, a pro skier turned speculator and man of leisure whose wife—a beautiful Italian woman from the Dolomites—is supposed to have signed a pre-nuptial agreement that she would never stand in the way of his passion for world travel. Which, whether it’s actually true or not, seems to me a marvelous arrangement. (In my world, a trip like this will be paid for dearly in guilt, recrimination, all manner of extra home improvement projects, and the rubbing of aromatic oils on my wife’s calloused feet.)

Andy and Joe will later become embroiled in a deeply scandalous and illegal love triangle with a teenage girl. Andy, husband and father of two boys, will absent himself by way of a lethal dose of succinylcholine and potassium chloride. Joe will go to prison. But that will come later. These are the good old days, when the promise of an afternoon in the woods and an untracked line—to say nothing of a week’s recess from family and scrounging for dollars—still seems like a kind of blessed dream.

OUR GUIDE, IULIAN COZMA, is an electrical engineer by training, now serving as Romania’s only full-time licensed mountain guide. He has the build and buzz-shorn cranium of a pro rugby player, a smile that draws from every muscle in his face, and an inspiring collection of the latest styles and colors in backcountry outerwear. He met us at the airport in Bucharest with a driver and a late-model Volkswagen passenger van. When, within minutes, the van’s transmission blew, he made a call on his cell phone, opened the sliding door, smiled, and asked us to please leave all our gear behind and join him for a bonus walking tour of the capital.

Bucharest proved a fine big modern city with a subway system and an eclectic blend of neoclassical, Communist-utilitarian and postmodern architecture. There were stray dogs and shopping malls and Eastern Orthodox churches. There were Parisian-style coffee houses, McDonald’s restaurants with clean restrooms, dark thickets of overhead utility lines, and Peruvian buskers in Plains Indian-style feather headdresses on the main square. On a gray winter’s day the only color came from advertisements for undergarments, electronics, and cell phone service providers.

As we walked, Iulian explained a few things about his country. The best fish in Romania, he said, is pork. The biggest industry is timber, which is sold to Arabs. The Communist dictator Ceausescu, before he and his wife were treated to a firing squad in 1989, had placed a heavy emphasis on math education. And so, Iulian explained, Romania had gone on to become the world capital of electronic crime, costing eBay upwards of a billion dollars a year. “In Romania,” he said, “honestly, there is much really black money.” Meanwhile, in those last days before the city of Sofia got its own Ikea, Bulgarians by the busload, armed with E.U. credit, were streaming into Bucharest every weekend to get cheap Swedish furniture.

Romania has a long history of accommodating well-armed visitors. It was here, more than 40,000 years ago, that Homo Sapiens may first have moved in on the Neanderthals. The Romans set up a colony here in the second century AD, extracting gold and wheat and a half million slaves, eventually abandoning the place to the Goths and the Huns. There were the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires and the MittelmĂ€chte. World War II brought the Nazis, then the Soviets. In his two decades at the top, native son Ceausescu outlawed abortion, declared the killing of grizzly bears a capital crime (except by his own guns or those of visiting dignitaries), built one of the largest buildings in the world to house his bureaucracy and security apparatus, and then paid off 100 percent of Romania’s foreign debt, nearly starving his people in the process. Now Romania is a “full colony” of the European Union, as Iulian put it (only half jokingly), and is by far the biggest debtor nation of the International Monetary Fund.

None of this seemed to matter very much later that evening up in Sinaia, a ramble-down mountain resort town at the head of the Prahova Valley, where we dined on chicken schnitzel with potatoes and ham to an up-tempo synthesizer version of the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” As he would at every meal, Andy photographed the food in order to be able to show his family what he’d eaten while he was away from home.

“To our wives,” said Jonathan, raising a glass of quite decent local merlot.

“To our trip,” said Frank.

“To the hall pass,” said someone—maybe it was Rich.

The real problem, Iulian announced, was that six inches of rime ice had collected during the latest storm on the safety cable of one of the higher Communist-era cablecars that was to have aided our forward progress. The cable had snapped. A new 10-kilometer cable would have to be ordered and brought from Italy, Iulian explained. Which was not likely to happen any time soon. Not to worry, we assured him. We’d brought our climbing skins.

The following morning we buckled our boots, shouldered our skis, and walked down the cobblestones to the first, still-functioning cable car that would lift us out of the valley. There were local snowboarders in one-piece camo suits blasting gypsy punk in the parking lot. A young couple in designer skinny jeans ran a sled down the plow berm.

As the tram rose above the forest toward the high, windswept plateau at the crest of the Bucegi, I asked Iulian about the bears. I’d read that, thanks in great part to Ceausescu’s draconian and self-serving conservation policies, Romania still had the largest population of brown bears in Europe—more than five times the total number of grizzlies in Montana and Wyoming. On his grandmother’s farm, Iulian explained, it was generally budgeted that 10 out of every 100 sheep would go to the bears (and the wolves). There was some hunting allowed these days, he said. The local forestry companies permitted a handful of bears to be taken each year as trophies at around 20,000 euros a head. The best place to see a wild bear, he said, was at the dumpsters in Brasov. Then he told the story of the American woman who two summers before had been killed by a grizzly.

They had their food in the tent, he explained. There were dogs barking. The woman went out to take a photo. The bear gave her one good swipe with its paw and that was that. Iulian’s moral went like this: “You don’t make a photo with a flash to a bear that is hunted with dogs from killing sheep.”

I CAN THINK OF no more civilized way of touring an ancient European countryside than on skis in midwinter. The days are spent in leisurely (if not entirely sophisticated) conversation, marching upward or sidelong in a track cut and groomed by the fellows in front. The doctors compare their hairiest procedures (“So I got to needle her brain,” says Rich, describing how the stench of pus was enough to bring the fire department) or their most disgusting culinary exploits (“There was that pig colon soup in the Philippines,” says Andy). Jonathan gives a thorough disquisition on the history of chemical sleep aids. Frank tries to piece together a half-remembered joke about a goat-smitten Irish stonemason. Joe relates again the story of how he once got thrown in jail in Saudi Arabia.

With stray dogs in tow, we click and glide atop buried gas lines, mile after mile past iron crosses and haunting rock formations evocative of old women in babushkas, across narrow, wind-blasted traverses, through dark forests of perfect Christmas-tree spruces, around hay wagons piled high with garbage and pillaged by ravens and bears. There are mossy stone walls and handpainted trail markers with distances measured in hours. There is the carcass of a fresh, lynx-killed chamois on a slope across the gorge. There are ice-coated high-altitude weather stations, sagging shepherd’s cabins, and tin-clad refuges with dormers canted leeward toward the dawn. From solitary caretakers we purchase stone-cold beers and long expired Coca Colas that still, all these years later, taste as crisp and effervescent as when they were bottled.

We pause on minor summits, shed our climbing skins, and one after another carve squiggles down slopes of thin, old, wind-sifted powder. Then we climb again.

At night we drink palinca and wine, we play hearts, and drink some more. We dine in our hut slippers while our stinking boot liners dry by the brazier. We take turns making contact with our families on the Internet.

The news that three feet of dry, light powder have fallen on our own mountains halfway across the globe should not so greatly affect our sense of purpose. And yet it does. But then it will begin to snow—right out there in the darkness beyond our window in Romania. “It appears to be snowing,” Jonathan will observe. The rest of us, superstitious as sailors, will try not to acknowledge the stuff. But it will come, and keep coming. The next morning we will have to stomp out a new trail over the range to Sinaia through eight fresh inches of newly-fallen fluff.

Iulian’s driver will meet us in Sinaia. He will shuttle us east and north to Transylvania, to the High Fagaras range where the mountains are younger and taller and sharper. We will share the highway with horse carts and expensive German sportscars and flocks of sheep. The snow will continue. It will drive sideways across half-flooded fields of winter wheat and potatoes, over tile-roofed villages and abandoned Communist paint factories, apartment blocks, and rough-piled hay. We will not see the mountains until we are in them, winding up the old military road through the birch forest. There will be an enormous Carpathian elk standing in the road, like a magic stag. Fifty yards from the top of the cable car to BĂąlea Lac the operator will have to jump out into the storm to dig passage to the wheelhouse.

“Where are all the other people?” Jonathan will ask, once again, and Iulian will offer to send his question to the Ministry of Tourism.

For two days we will ski laps in a paradise of fresh snow and jagged peaks and ice-blue sky. When finally it comes time to stuff our packs full, to hike out over the col and make the long descent to the base where we are supposed to meet the driver, we will find we would prefer to stay.

THERE’S AN OLD SAXON ski lodge just off the summit of Poiana Brasov, the local resort where Iulian first learned to ski. The lodge was built in 1887. It was commandeered and fell into disrepair under the Communists but has since been returned to the local Saxon association and restored. It has a bar, a dining room with a hand-painted ceiling and a wolfskin on the wall, a one-room museum of ski memorabilia, and cozy dormitories upstairs where guests can stay overnight.

We’ve dallied so long in the Fagaras that we’ve missed the last chairlift of the day, and so must put on our climbing skins and hike right up the empty piste to get there. The light is failing, the snow bulletproof. When finally we kick off our skis at the top, with the sun just sinking into the haze in the valley below, we find a group of locals gathered on the deck, bottles of Ursus beer in hand, shouting their way through a Romanian cover of Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”

As it happens, it’s the lodgekeeper’s birthday. He was a famous national ski racer back in his day, and all his friends and family have made the trek up the mountain for the occasion. They’re happy to have us join them for drinks and a feast, and afterwards, when the tables have been carried out and the disco lights plugged in, dancing. At some point in the colorful flashing haze of cigarette smoke, with Ricky Martin singing “La Vida Loca,” the lodgekeeper’s wife explains that this is pretty much how it was under Ceausescu: you’d take bread and a bottle of wine to the neighbors’ and drink and dance for weeks on end. “When Romanian people have problems,” she says, “they are making lots of parties.”

Later, when the little kids have already gone upstairs to bed and the old folks are drowsing in their chairs against the wall, someone finally asks: “What are you doing here?”

“Do you not see a lot of Americans?” asks Jonathan.

“Why would they come here,” the man says “when even Romanians would prefer to go to Austria?”

By now we know the answer, of course. And down the road we will look back on this as one of those brief windows of simple pleasure we almost took for granted. But now our legs hurt from skiing and dancing, our eyes are bleary, our throats are sore from singing Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra and Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus,” and it’s too late to try to explain.

David Page is the author of the Lowell Thomas Award-winning

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One late summer morning in the forest above Lake Tahoe, with the sun blazing and the traffic rushing by on U.S. Highway 50, I find myself crunching through dry pine-needle duff looking for wild mushrooms. Of mushrooms I know only that they come sliced or whole in my local supermarket, brown (which somehow hints of the wild and is more expensive) or white; that a particular hallucinogenic variety can be obtained on the black market for recreational purposes; and that a high percentage of those that grow in the wild will either make you very sick or kill you dead.

Paiute Historical Officer Raymond Andrews.

Farrell Cunningham explains how to harvest wild rye.

Basket of gooseberries.

Page’s grasshopper ramen.

Luckily, I have as my guide on this virginal foraging expedition a jolly fellow by the name of , who knows mushrooms. In this glittering age of industrial agriculture and packaged food, Shaw has made a name for himself writing about what he calls “the forgotten feast,” publishing high-art recipes for the preparation, eating, and enjoyment of things like cardoons, yucca flowers, oyster toads, and squirrels—stuff that most folks don’t think of as food, or think of at all.

With us is his friend Joel Martyn, a Lutheran pastor from South Lake Tahoe. He’s a big man with a thin beard and tattoos up and down both arms. He carries a large holstered Buck knife in his camo backpack. One of his Facebook profile pictures shows him on his knees beside a 6-point bull elk he’s just killed with a bow and arrow. “We try to forage and hunt what we can,” he says of his family. “It’s free, it’s healthy, and it’s fun for the kids.”

Shaw has received vague intelligence from a local friend who claims to have bagged five pounds of boletes a few days prior. We zig-zag off-trail through the lodgepoles, looking for little pushed-up mounds of duff— “shrumps,” as these gentlemen call them— beneath which lurk either cool, fresh, edible mushrooms or piles of rotted, fungal material that Shaw compares to sticking one’s hand into cold deer guts or diarrhea.

“It’s good habitat,” says Shaw, kicking at the dirt, “but it’s dry. Crunchy-crunchy.” He talks about how professional mushroom hunters lie about their finds. In a few weeks, he says, when the season gets going, you might catch a fleeting glimpse of one through the trees, like Sasquatch with a square backpack specially designed to keep the precious porcini buttons from getting crushed. The good stuff goes for upwards of $45 a pound.

We find a few shriveled but deadly corts, a classic Alice in Wonderland spotted fly agaric toadstool, and something that might once have been a bolete but has long since been mutilated by squirrels or insects or time. Shaw and Martyn handle everything with bare hands, which is shocking to me: I’ve always been afraid to touch unknown wild mushrooms for fear of poisoning. They look at me with the kind of pity reserved for the feeble of mind.

We find a child’s ski glove, a plastic bottle, and an old tire. We find an imperfect shrimp russula (“tastes like shrimp,” Shaw explains), a red russula (“of the lose your lunch bunch”), a pair of golf ball mushrooms (“you gotta cook ’em a long time to make ’em tender”), and a gigantic russula of another sort that Shaw says the Russians are willing to eat “after salting the hell out of ’em.”

Along the way, especially beside the road where they have been thoroughly sprayed with exhaust, heavy metals, and who knows what else, Shaw points out other potentially forageable plants, like cow parsnip, oyster plant, elderflower, and chinquapin, a kind of acorn once highly prized by the local Indians. “There’s a huge category of forageable stuff that’s small and fiddlesome that I just don’t deal with,” he says in reference to this last. Starch is the hardest thing for foragers “unless you’re willing to spend an inordinate amount of time grinding acorns.

Martyn crashes through a thicket of alder along what must in the springtime be a course for snowmelt, and disappears on the other side. We follow, pushing through the branches and balancing our way across on a fallen log. Out the other side, Shaw drops to his knees before a pair of definitive shrimp russula. “Shrimpy,” he says. “No doubt about it.” He cuts each one off at the base of its stem with his knife and brushes it clean. Then he stows them in a paper bag to be transported home, sautĂ©ed in butter, and eaten.

Later, after scouting the burgeoning gooseberry crop up a side canyon across the highway, my appetite fairly whetted by two thin, minty leaves of pennyroyal and two small, sweet currants, I head down to South Lake Tahoe for a slab of meatloaf and gravy.

WHEN MESSRS. BREWER AND Hoffman of the first rode down from Yosemite to the salt-rimmed shores of Mono Lake in July of 1863 by way of a trail so steep and strewn with the carcasses of dead horses that it was then, and is still today, known as Bloody Canyon, they found Indians on the beach harvesting piles of alkali fly larvae. Brewer, who was a botanist and would later become professor and first Chair of Agriculture at Yale (and was much more interested in the quality of imported European grapes and pears than in the abundance of native berries and nuts), called them “worms.” He described how the locals dried the larvae in the sun, how they rubbed off the shells to expose the oily kernel within—”like a small yellow grain of rice.” They called it kutsavi, and were in turn called Kutzadika’a, or “people who eat flies.”

Brewer tried some. “It does not taste bad,” he wrote, “and if one were ignorant of its origin, it would make fine soup.”

Mark Twain visited the place a few years later and eventually made the following observation in his wildly popular book : “All things have their uses and their part and proper place in Nature’s economy: the ducks eat the flies—the flies eat the worms—the Indians eat all three—the wild cats eat the Indians—the white folks eat the wild cats—and thus all things are lovely.”

And thus has been lost to us—to most of us, anyway—an enormous amount of practical knowledge about our natural surroundings. Now, at a time when everything from Sappho and Pythagoras to the complete opus of Lady Gaga are accessible in digital format by way of the Internet, knowledge about edible or otherwise useful wild plants and insects seems as arcane as, say, the morphology of the Xyzyl language of southern Siberia. But the knowledge is out there, if you dig a little, deep in the ever expanding archives of YouTube and the blogosphere, in a range of field guides and cookbooks of varying utility, and in the minds of a handful of knowledgeable folks out in the field.

These days, the most powerful cautionary tale for those who would strive to learn the seemingly impenetrable lore of nature’s bounty is that of Christopher McCandless, as told by Jon Krakauer, first in the pages of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine, then in his book Into the Wild, and then retold by Sean Penn in his movie of the same name. In these versions, the young romantic attempts to live by his wits deep in the Alaskan bush with the aide of a book on local flora, but ends up dead in his sleeping bag from having mistaken a poisonous plant for a good one.

In the opening section of his definitive guide to foraging, , Samuel Thayer makes a roundly convincing case that this is pure fiction. What killed McCandless was the same thing that killed Robert Falcon Scott and his men on their way back from the South Pole in 1912: lack of calories. There are plenty of poison plants out there to be sure, but with patience and diligence and proper methodology, he argues, they can be avoided.

“We have sought, developed, cultivated, and become accustomed to calorie-dense foods for so long,” Thayer writes, “that most of us have never been without them. When you realize that a stick of butter has as many calories as two and a half quarts of blueberries or seven pounds of broccoli, you can see why the innate human desire for calorie-rich, low-fiber food developed.”

THE DAY AFTER MY first mushroom hunt, having slept soundly in the back of the family Honda beside Interstate 80 and then gorged on a pile of scrambled eggs and ham at a classic diner in downtown Truckee, I am wading into a sea of wild rye in the Bear River Valley with Alicia Funk and her friend and mentor, Farrell Cunningham. The way she tells it, Funk first got interested in native plants by way of an indigenous grandmother she once stayed with in the Ecuadorian rainforest. She’s since edited a number of books on medicinal plants and co-authored a handsome and practical volume entitled . But, she says, she learned most of what she knows about local traditional ecology from Cunningham.

Cunningham is a member of the Mountain Maidu tribe, one of a handful remaining who can still speak the language fluently. He grew up, as he puts it, pointing to the northeast, toward the headwaters of the Yuba, “just over those mountains.” He wears loose-fitting khaki trousers, a dark blue linen button-down and a black fedora with a feather in its band. He could be a young Romani headman in the south of France.

“Most everything, if it’s good, is not a lot of work,” he explains. Cunningham demonstrates how when the rye kernels are ready (which they are not quite yet), they can be harvested into a basket with an easy sweep of a stick. He points out a well-shaded rock outcropping in the middle of the field, riddled with grinding holes where the women of the tribe once made basket-parched rye flour.

The gooseberries are ripe and ready and indeed fall off into Funk’s basket with the slightest tap. They are a spiky fruit, well protected from birds and squirrels and other foraging animals less deft than humans. Cunningham takes one carefully between his fingers, cuts it open with his knife, and hands it to me. I peel back the skin as best I can in order to get my teeth into its sweet, juicy meat without piercing my lips. The flavor is fabulous, like some exotic blend of kiwi, mango, guava and lime.

The meadow here is a kind of paradise, a historic grazing stopover for early pioneers on the Emigrant Trail. Owned by the Pacific Gas & Electric Company for most of the 20th century, the valley, hemmed in by two busy highways and traversed by high-tension lines from a dam and powerhouse upstream, is now set to be divested by the utility under the terms of a decade-old bankruptcy proceeding. Cunningham is working to have the Maidu tribe written into the final agreement as contractual advisors on the ecological management of the valley. In the meantime, stock grazing is no longer allowed, and the meadow fairly teems with oaks, sugar pines, sunflowers, mountain wasabi, Indian tobacco, elderberries, serviceberries, chokecherries and manzanita. There’s yarrow, a natural antiseptic, and soaproot too, which is apparently a good remedy for poison oak, and can be crushed into a dammed-up section of stream in order to suffocate and harvest fish. There’s also an abundance of deer and squirrels and rabbits. For the first time, I can begin to get my head around how a group of people with the right knowledge and skills could live here comfortably, in a place like this, gambling and telling jokes and eating their fill from what the land provides.

Cunningham steps around a fresh pile of bear scat, full of processed manzanita berries. He points out a little clearing in the grass, in the center of which the ground has been charred slightly. Last week he was here showing students the traditional method of cooking grasshoppers. You make a little pile of dry grass, light it on fire, and throw the hoppers onto the blaze, he explains. The bug’s instinct is to burrow down to get away from the fire. The fire dies quickly, leaving in the warm ashes a delicious quantity of rye-toasted, protein-rich grasshoppers.

“Mostly the kids love to catch them,” he says. And then he reaches out and grabs one. Just like that. He holds it by its wings. “You could skewer him and cook him with your lighter too if you wanted.” Then he lets him go.

I LIVE IN A ski resort town called Mammoth Lakes on the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada, more than 100 miles south of Lake Tahoe and 30 miles south of Mono Lake, at the edge of the largest desert in the United States. Our only local supermarket—Vons #2400—is reputed to be that chain’s largest grossing store in California, with prices for anything from coffee to butter to Chilean asparagus tending to run more than double the national average. I love the idea that one day my family and I might be able to wean ourselves from our dependence on that store as our sole source of calories. And—perhaps because I’ve seen a little too much of Africa and Latin America, and/or because I’ve read too much Cormac McCarthy— it’s not hard for me to imagine a time, down the road, when we have no choice but to find an alternative.

People were getting by around here, making art and babies without a grocery store from at least the end of the last Ice Age, more than 10,000 years ago, all the way into the early 20th century. But I keep thinking it must have been more of a struggle around these parts than up in Maidu country. We get about 14 inches of precipitation on an average year, of which nearly 90 percent falls as snow during November to March. I have friends who in some years manage to do a bit of extreme gardening, coaxing a tomato or two and perhaps a handful of tiny strawberries from a well-mulched, copiously watered, south-facing slope. My particular quarter-acre of wind-honed pumice yields white pine, red fir, a not-so-productive variety of manzanita, and some kind of spiky shrub I have yet to identify.

We have a vibrant community of chipmunks, deer mice, Stellar’s jays and ground squirrels (two of which have just skittered in and out of the open door to my office). But if Sam Thayer’s calculations are correct, I would need more than 16 squirrels—or “eight squirrels, 2 1/4 pounds of roots, and 3 1/4 pounds of berries”—every day. How many more of all that would I need to keep my wife and two growing boys alive and helpful? How many sacks of pinyon nuts? How many grasshoppers and bushels of Pandora moth caterpillars?

“There’s an awful lot of food around here if you know what to gather and when to gather it,” says Raymond Andrews, walking across the dirt parking lot to one of the official Ford Explorers of the Bishop Paiute Tribe. “But our ancestors were more balanced, and more in tune with their bodies than we are today.”

Andrews is the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, responsible not only for identifying and preserving historical sites on and off the reservation, but also, dauntingly, for preserving traditional Paiute-Shoshone culture—languages, dances, songs, stories, basketry, stringmaking, flintmaking, traditional foods, and medicines—and at the same time working to pass the whole package along to the children. He tells me about a video they made to try to teach the kids how to harvest, use or prepare eight essential items: pine nuts, piaga (caterpillars), dogbane (for string), wye (for starch), willow (for making bows and curing headaches), rosehips (for vitamin C), cattail tenders and watercress.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a knife, would you?” he asks, getting into the truck. I don’t; clearly I still have a lot to learn. Andrews shrugs it off, turns up the AC, and drives me up and down the washboard gravel roads around the town of Bishop, showing me poison hemlock, sweet sage, stinging nettles. From last year’s freshwater clams he shows me the sun-bleached shells, from which, ground up and mixed with wild tobacco, a fellow can make tsogo, a powerful version of wild snuff. He tells me how to make a podo, a digging stick, from a well cured branch of mountain mahogany, and how a tenderfoot might fashion a decent pair of shoes from sagebrush bark.

“As long as you know where water is, and how to rest in the middle of the day, not exerting a lot of energy. If you know how to trap things. And where little animals stay. If you’re not afraid to eat insects,” he smiles. “You could survive for a while.”

AS THE SUMMER GIVES way to the first hint of autumn, my friend Brant and I take our kids for a short backpacking jaunt in the high country adjacent to Yosemite National Park. We’ve brought with us—for the placation and motivation of the minors—copious amounts of energy bars, dried fruit, salami, and ramen noodles with salty chicken-flavor packets. A hundred yards inside the wilderness boundary, my son Jasper, who has recently attended a week of “Bug Camp,” has already caught a grasshopper. “Give it to me,” I say. “I’ll eat it.”

“Really?” says Beckett, the four-year-old, beaming.

All four kids circle around to watch the spectacle. They jump up and down with anticipation. I know better than to examine the thing, or to think about it. I take it by its wings as I’ve been taught, and pop it into my mouth. It’s crunchy at first, then chewy. It takes me a while to locate the mostly familiar earthy flavor of dried mushrooms. And then I swallow. “Not bad,” I say, washing it down with water. And really it’s not. Though it does make me yearn for a good ripe gooseberry. (Only later will I read that one should always eat grasshoppers well cooked, as they may carry tapeworms.)

By the time we reach our campsite at the end of the day, on a granite-strewn bench at about 11,000 feet, the kids have collected eight or nine of the little hoppers now flitting about in a custom-aerated Ziploc baggie. Brant and I are left no choice but to toast them over the cookstove and sprinkle them over our ramen. Later that night, with the moon rising over the basin to the east and Saturn setting in the west, I will dream about grasshoppers. In the morning I will leave the kids eating instant oatmeal under Brant’s supervision, and set off up the nearest peak, gobbling sweet, delicious, wild currants all the way to the summit.

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We meet at the top of Skyline Drive, above the funky, ranchette village of . The morning is cool, the sun still procrastinating in the depths behind Case Mountain and the Great Western Divide beyond. A rafter of wild turkeys grazes on the neighbor’s lawn.

Post-ride refreshments

I refuse to be intimidated by the locals’ gleaming fleet of deluxe full-suspension rigs. They offer me a loaner. I decline. I’m used to being the only one on a hardtail from back at the end of the 20th century. I like the way it climbs; I know how it handles in the narrows; I know exactly how much torque it takes, when I really need it, to get out of my clips. If nothing else, I trust my gearing. But when these guys saddle up and without equivocation point tires across a narrow ramp feature right there in Mark Hirni’s front yard, I should (but don’t yet) see my impending humiliation.

At the end of the street, we ride through the Bureau of Land Management gate and settle in for the long climb up the old Salt Creek fire road. It’s 10 miles up to the first sequoias but we’re not going the whole way—not this time. Coming from Mammoth Lakes, at 8,300 feet (on the other side of the range), I feel strong and chatty, buoyed with extra oxygen. We talk about how the BLM picked up all this land in a series of trades with local ranchers beginning in 1979, how certain areas were highlighted for mountain biking only in the late 1990s. The entire complex comprises about 14,000 acres, rising from 1,200 feet of elevation at the gate, through a series of oak and chaparral ecosystems to six distinct sequoia groves, to the summit of Case Mountain at 6,818 feet and the southwestern edge of Sequoia National Park beyond.

You could go from here to the summit of Mt. Whitney, and from there another 200 miles to the northern edge of Yosemite National Park without crossing another road (though you’d have to ditch your bike at the first park boundary). Aside from the total eradication of grizzlies and wolves and Indians, and a pock mark here and there from some failed effort at finding gold, the place is much as it has been since the end of the last ice age, eleven-odd thousand years ago.

Threading his way through coyote scat, Chip Chapman, an architect from Visalia, not winded in the slightest, recounts his inventory of local mammal sightings: horse, deer, bobcat, black bear, mountain lion. “You don’t really want to see a mountain lion,” he says.

Tom Brown is a contractor and woodworker. Aaron Cochran is an engineer for the phone company. They live down in Visalia too, but do their best to meet Hirni and others to exercise their mounts up here every Sunday morning—and every Wednesday night too (the latter with full night-lighting equipment on their handlebars and helmets).

“The best time of year is late fall and early spring,” says Tom, describing the bounty of waterfalls in the spring, the gnarly creek crossings and the buckeye bloom. “The worst time is late spring, when the weeds are over your head and you can’t see the trail.” And of course there are certain days in July and August when it’s just too hot to do anything but sit around and drink beers.

We pass the so-dubbed Three Amigos at a switchback where we trade the last of the cool, still morning for full sun-exposure and a slightly mitigating down-canyon breeze. Phil Fortney, who is head of maintenance at a State Mental Hospital in Porterville and a die-hard member of the Skyline Dawn Patrol, shows off his glistening new drive train. “Check out the bling-bling,” he says, describing his recent checkered past with a series of clunky, noisy chain rings. “Now I’m stealth, man.” The only thing he spends more money on than his bicycle, he says, is on his kids’ private education.

At a picnic table at a place called the Corral, at 2,760 feet, beneath the shade of an oak, we regroup, drink water, look out at the valley and the mountains, and munch on energy chewies. From here on out it’s singletrack and fast. Chip and Tom are gone before I’m even clipped in. Aaron graciously plays sweep down the Cable Trail and back up to Bear Junction, at 3,000 feet, bareheaded and scornful of his helmet until it gets serious. And then it gets serious.

Down we bounce along the Creek Trail, through jagged gullets of mossy granite, across upended meadows of blooming yellow tarweed, on trails little wider than a front tire, slipping and skidding on beds of dried oak leaves. I’m glad I’m not trying to follow a map. I’m on Tom’s tail as he leaps through a cleft in the trunk of an ancient oak. “The Octopus, if you choose,” he says. I choose not.

Then we’re into a downhill minefield called Chutes & Ladders. Aaron watches me wrangle my rig back from a teetering nose-wheelie off a dry rapid—barely. But around the next corner it’s over. I catch a rut, land hard on my helmet, in the weeds, with my bike on top of me. I have burrs by the hundreds in my hair, in my shorts, in my socks. I’ve skinned my shoulder and have blood dribbling from my knee.

My nerve’s gone and my equilibrium’s shot, but I’m good. I wobble down to where the others are waiting. I’ve been afforded a terrible glimpse of a future in which I can no longer ride a bicycle off-pavement, in which I am old and frail and unpleasant to be around. And then I go the way of the grizzlies and wolves and Indians: into oblivion. “That was awesome,” I say. These guys and their buddies built these trails. They’ve been riding up here for nigh on 12 years. It’s not fair. “I’m gonna have to come back and try that again sometime,” I say, dreaming already of spring, when the grass is green and the world is softer.

After a while we get through the unforgiving rock gardens and onto a trail called Old #1, the very first to be laid out for riding bikes on, back in the ’90s, when the sport was still civilized. The old cowpath rolls and sidehills pleasantly through the grass at a nice four percent, then jumps the road. We portage a barb-wire fence, cross a dry creek on a narrow plank bridge, and eventually glide back down to the gate. Well-chastened but also inspired to get back on my game, I throw my antique ride in the truck, hose some of the local landscape from my wounds. There’s courage left in me, I know. I just have to find it.

Or maybe I need a new bike.

BETA: Skyline Drive leaves CA 398 from the Veteran’s Building on the north end of Three Rivers. The BLM gate is at the end of the road. Parking is limited. Be respectful of the neighbors. Don’t block driveways and don’t leave trash. All trails are intermediate to advanced. A basic trail map is available for , but I highly recommend trying to tag along with the locals first, on Sunday morning. Keep an eye out for poison oak, mountain lions, and armed marijuana farmers. Bring spares, tools and water. Yield to horses and hikers. Leave open gates open and closed gates closed.

From , 2nd. Ed., by . Copyright © 2011 by David T. Page. Used by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

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