ROAD TRIP

Taos Abuzz Over Snowboarding

By Bob Berwyn, 1-29-08

	Taos Ski Valley's Kachina Peak stands guard over the ski area as a late-January storm rolls into the Sangre De Cristos. Photo by Bob Berwyn.

Driving toward Taos from the north evokes a sense of familiarity that’s comforting and a little confounding at the same time. It’s been more than eight years since I last passed through the area, and that was just for a short one-day ski trip. It’s been more than 20 years since I lived here, but watching the skyline of the Sangre de Cristos unfold in the windshield feels like an instant replay. In just a few seconds, an entire slice of my life flashes vividly through my mind: Sleeping in my van in the ski area parking lot and picking wild mushrooms; the old adobe on Kit Carson Road, where magpies chased my cat up a tree and left him stranded, circling and cackling with glee; days spent learning how to tele on a pair of double-cambered 215s, cartwheeling head-first down steep Taos chutes…

But I’m not here to re-live old memories. I’ve come to make new ones, and with Taos in the midst of an epic season, that should be easy. An 88-inch base has enabled Taos to open terrain that hasn’t been skiable in years, including some burly lines on the far end of the West Basin Ridge that could make a grown man cry.

While Leigh reads some highlights out of a guidebook (who knew that New Mexico’s state cookie is the anise-flavored biscochito) I steer the Subaru up the steep and windy canyon, pulling into the parking lot of the Kandahar Condos just as the sun winks out behind the crest of the Wheeler Peak Wilderness Area. I’ve been living in ski towns for about a quarter century, but I’ve never stayed at a ski-in, ski-out place, so this will definitely be something new. Above us, the mountain looms big and brawny as ever, seemingly daring skiers to take their best shot at mastering the VW-sized bumps on Al’s Run, Inferno and Snakedance.

After we check in and unpack, we head over to the Edelweiss Lodge and Spa. We’re scheduled to meet Adriana Blake, granddaughter of Taos Ski Valley (TSV) founder Ernie Blake, for dinner. As marketing director, she graciously shares a few hours of her time late on a Saturday evening to give us the latest Taos skinny. The big news is still the impending arrival of snowboarding in March, and Blake says media interest has been steady.

It’s probably a bigger deal for snowboarders than it is for skiers, since the ‘boarders feel like they’ve been missing out, and the skiers knew all along that it was inevitable. Typical of the way snowboard publications covered the news was the Jan. 22 story in Transworld Snowboarding by Kurt Hoy, who captured some of the tension surrounding the changes in an interview with a long-time Taos patroller. But Hoy also over-dramatized the Taos announcement, writing about “skiing’s last gasp,” and describing the meeting of skiers and snowboarders at the top of Chair 6 as “cultures colliding in awkward silence.”

Skiers and snowboarders have long found common cultural ground based on a love for the mountains and the exhilaration of sliding down snow-covered slopes. Rather than accentuating artificial divisions, we all need to recognize that skiers and snowboarders need to work together to address environmental threats to the mountains like global warming and over-development of fragile riparian corridors in our high mountain valleys.

The real culture clash is not between skiers and snowboarders, but between people who exploit the mountains and sport for short-term profit and those who find long-term spiritual and aesthetic value in a mountain-centered lifestyle. Since its inception, Taos has been a Mecca for people who follow the latter path. Bringing snowboarders on-board will help energize that vibe.

Check back with the New West Snowblog for updated Taos road trip blogs, including the latest on the monster storm that hit the area Jan. 28.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.