Falling In Love...Again

By Mitchell Scott
Posted January 11, 2005

As much as I like to ride my bike, I like to ski more. Call me a bastard, I’m just being honest. I can’t help it.

Standing at the top of a peak looking down; railing singletrack through steep, wide open trees…my mind (and its wrong, I know) allows that question to be asked…what if? What if this bowl were draped with 30-inches of blower? It’s just so soft, so clean, so padded, the whole ski thing. There’s no sweat, no dirt…no nasty flesh wounds, just face shots and air that ends in a giant mattress.

But then something unexpected happened.

It’s winter here where I live. Snow right out the back door. The only two-wheeled opportunities available are snow slide derby sessions to grab a donut or a carton of cream. The trails have all been enveloped by ice and frost and snow. Not as sad as you’d think, though. We ski, and we do it with the help of lifts and backside shuttles. Sometimes, if we save our nachos, in snow cats and helicopters.

It was just the other day, out skiing with a bunch of friends, staring down this big huge sparsely treed face of crystalline perfection. The sun shining, the turns guaranteed great. I look beyond to the endless valleys and peaks of the Selkirk Mountains, all white and perfect with winter, when I have the weirdest thought. I look to Jeff, a riding buddy who runs a cat ski operation high above town, and I ask him, “wouldn’t it be rad to be riding our bikes right now?”

What? The goods are all here…my skis, my buddies, fresh snow, sunshine, and here I am thinking about my bike. Strange shit.

Evolution, man. Every new generation of mountain bike continues to make smooth the rocks and stumps that just five years ago had us shaking down the hill like one of those jiggly wiggly dashboard dolls. Technology has put flow into mountain biking, to the point where my first love might be turning into my second. My God what did I just say?

Which gets me going on how the mountain bike and snowsports industries are mirroring each other more with each passing day. Ever stop to consider the parallels? Lift accessed mountain biking, slopestyle terrain parks, heli drops? The list goes on. Now that we’re airing and carving trails with more speed and flow, biking has that same feel as skiing or snowboarding: the forest blurring by, squaring up to the fall line and giviner, making split second decision after split second decision.

The parallel really comes together when I think of my buddy Jeff. As the owner of Baldface Lodge, a renowned cat ski operation with a big ol’ timber frame lodge and hot tubs, Jeff has been bitten by the same bug. He sits on his Santa Cruz VP Free making phone calls in his office. And he has this dream to turn his lodge into a thriving summer business, with wicked singletrack trails dropping 3,000 feet from view-laden peaks and broad alpine meadows. In the not too distant future, the same guest could spend four days ripping alpine singletrack in the summer, on their bike, and then return six months later to rip the same lines on boards.

But then, I remember there can only be One Love, and I hit up the sweet line between my skis with focus and stoke. I’ve got to admit though, this year, unlike years past, I won’t be too sad when the snow melts…when my new lover strolls in to town.