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Ski World Mourns, Celebrates Powder Legend Dolores LaChapelle

By Bob Berwyn, 1-26-07

The ski community lost a cherished member this week when long-time Silverton resident and powder skiing pioneer Dolores LaChapelle died of a stroke in Durango, Colorado. When I saw the first news of her passing on Lou Dawson’s Wild Snow blog, I wanted to post something immediately, but instead found myself thinking deeply about what it means to write, ski and live in the Rocky Mountains. Then I went skiing, looking for the best snow I could find in this dry, cold January in Colorado. I think Dolores would have wanted it that way.

Dolores etched many first tracks down challenging pitches all around the Rockies. The Utah Ski Archives, for example, give her credit for making the first known descent of Alta’s Baldy Chute, along with Jim Shane, back in 1956. Along with her ski exploits, Dolores was also a gifted writer, as well as one of the early proponents of deep ecology, a philosophy that considers humans to be an inseparable part of the natural environment.

I first happened upon one of her books at Maria’s Bookshop in Durango in 1996. I had just switched careers in mid-life, determined to become a journalist and maybe someday even a writer. In between scrambling for freelance assignments and pestering then-Durango Herald sports editor John Peel for a gig as a ski columnist, I bought and read “Deep Powder: 40 years of Ecstatic Skiing, Avalanches and Earth Wisdom,” a slender volume that somehow for me captured so much of what backcountry powder skiing is all about. I immediately went back to the store and bought a half-dozen more copies of the book, which over the years I sent out as gifts to my closest ski friends. I kept a copy for myself. It’s always been one of the jewels in my ski library. I read it once more, maybe for the tenth time, before sitting down to write this blog.

When I moved to Durango in 1996 after my stint as a youth hostel operator in the Sierra Nevada, I knew I wanted to write; to write about skiing, life and the environment, and how they are all related. I wanted to somehow get beyond the cliché-laden verbosity of the glossy skiing mags, with those endless top-ten lists of powder stashes and ski town bars. For me, skiing was something much more than just a holiday diversion, and I felt there had to be a way to express that, hopefully without being too trite or sappy. Dolores helped show me the way. I gave her a call one day, out of the blue, and sent her one of the columns I had done for the Herald as a tentative step in that direction. She was kind and warm on the phone, and immediately invited me to come visit in Silverton.

So I did. It was the only time I met her in person, although we had several phone conversations in the subsequent years. She fit into the vibe of the funky old mining town perfectly, exuding a warm, relaxed energy that put me at ease instantly. Her silver-white hair gleamed like frost over a steaming cup of tea as the late-afternoon mountain sunlight slanted in through the cabin window. Her wise, world-worn and crinkly eyes said as much — or more — then her words. I don’t remember the exact course of the conversation. I wasn’t there to do an interview, so I didn’t take notes. What I do know is, when I left, I was much more confident that I was on the right track — that I could at least try to express deeply personal thoughts about the connection between skiing and life on paper, and perhaps have them published somewhere, adding in some small way to the already vibrant collection of existing ski literature.

As I re-read “Deep Powder” these past few days, I realized how much of an influence that book has had on my own writing during the past decade. It helped me understand that skiing was a huge part of my environmental awakening. The simple acts of skinning up an untouched backcountry bowl, of wending through ancient forest groves, of standing atop a solitary wilderness peak and then floating down, nearly weightless, through fields of powder have created an abiding respect for nature that goes beyond what I’ve learned from books and interviews with biologists and land managers.

The very beginning of the book hits close to home. Dolores describes growing up in North Denver and skiing on Loveland Pass during the WWII gas-rationing era. It so happens that Loveland Pass is just a few miles from where I live right now, so each time I ski there, I think of her descriptions of carving through the big white bowls on over-the-head skis, then clambering aboard a pickup truck for the ride back up the hill. What a great ski tradition to carry on! Later on, she writes about skiing powder with her child in a backpack at Alta, a practice that’s now frowned on at most ski areas. But that passage was part of the reason that I took my own son on a backcountry ski trek at Loveland Pass in a backpack before he was two years old.

Dolores also wrote about skiing in the context of her marriage to, and subsequent divorce from Ed LaChapelle, one of this country’s earliest snow scientists who helped shape the very roots of the Forest Service’s avalanche programs. This became more important to me as my own marriage faltered and I started to question my own commitment to the mountains and skiing. One of the charges against me, so to say, was that I put skiing before my marriage. For as much energy as I put into my ski writing, I was apparently never able to explain adequately to my wife how important this connection with the mountains and the sport is for me. I felt maligned, since I felt I had achieved a sustainable balance between the relationship and family, work and play.

The last time I spoke with Dolores was a few years ago, to talk about this recent turn of events in my life. I wanted to know if there was different path I could follow to avoid the train wreck that was looming ahead. It was a short conversation, and this one I do remember. Dolores told me to go climb a mountain and look deep inside myself; to stay true to my heart.

So I take these words from her book to heart each time I go out in search of fresh tracks:

“Powder snow skiing is not fun. It’s life, fully lived, life lived in a blaze of reality. What we experience in powder is the original human self, which lies deeply inside each of us, still undamaged in spite of what our present culture tries to do to us. Once experienced, this kind of living is recognized as the only way to live – fully aware of the earth and the sky and the gods and you, the mortal, playing among them.”

A small archive of Dolores LaChapelle photos is online at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriot Library.

High Country News blogger Jonathan Thompson commented on Dolores here.

Even the generally irreverent crew at the Teton Gravity Research online forums paid respects, with one member thanking Dolores for “writing the consummate book on what it means to ski deep powder and deep ecology.”

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