![]() Longhaired and lanky, the Draper-based instructor had loped into my motel room like an amiably upbeat arms dealer carrying a sample flying machine in a lightweight bag. "SNOWKITING IS about 80 percent kite flying and only 20 percent boarding or skiing," Brian lectured on my first day. Splat.īrian skis up to my new impact crater, beaming encouragement. I hear Brian shouting, "Punch it! Punch it!" Wha? Watch out. I'm snowkiting, blistering across the pack. Then-holy shit!-up she'll rise like a breaching Moby-Dick, yanking me out of my crater and onto my skis.Īnd so it comes to pass. I'll ease out the bar cautiously, making the kite rise just high enough to steer it into a brief loop to remove the twist in its line caused by the crash. It will fly wounded, about four feet off the snow, yawing treacherously, awaiting intelligent instruction from the control bar. Sooner or later, the kite will catch wind and flare out dramatically to its full twenty-six feet. ![]() Brian calls it "fishing"-as in, fishing for a low-flying gust. With my left hand grasping the control bar, an ingenious device that functions both as throttle and steering mechanism, I reach forward with my right and pull the front lines, lifting the kite's leading edge to the wind. This is the drill: I'm once again sprawled on my back, my kite crumpled in a heap where it crashed. For instance, I'm becoming competent at the reclining relaunch. It's been the same thing every time-pilot error-and though I've been doing it for three days now, pilot erring, I mean, and wrecking repeatedly, albeit harmlessly and often hilariously, I think I'm finally on the verge of a breakthrough. But for all that wealth of technology and terrain, my patient instructor, Brian Schenck, and I have been confined most of the day to a few hundred square feet of powder, now pocked by impact craters from my many crashes. No question about it, a snowkite is the single coolest piece of sporting gear I've ever hooked up with, like a superlightweight prosthetic wing sprouting from my navel. Whenever one of them launches big air on Bosco's Hill, you can see his shadow suddenly detach and give chase across the snowpack for what seems like a very long distance.Įvery time I see that I want to kick myself for sucking-why can't I do that?-and I'm more determined than ever to get over the first steep hump in the learning curve. The sheer scale of the place would be hard to grasp except for a scattering of distant snowkiters, their parachute-shaped foils flitting along a sea of whipped cream like brightly colored gnats. SKYLINE RIDGE in midwinter is a vast backcountry playground of blue declivities and gleaming white domes the size of sports arenas. It's the sport of anywhere and everywhere windy and cold-though in fact Fairview, the closest village to Skyline Ridge, a wind-consistent and spectacular patch of the Wasatch Plateau, may just be the best anywhere anywhere. These days strangers don't much wander into tiny Fairview unless they have a hankering to attach themselves to a giant kite and go hurtling across the backcountry on skis or snowboards. Before I order, the guy in the next booth lowers his newspaper-wildly tousled hair, haunted eyes, biblical beard disappearing into a Yule-themed sweater-and says, "I don't know about you, my friend, but I'm quite concerned about the course of the present administration." By my second cup he has run the gamut of conspiracy theories, is calling me Grasshopper, and is giving me Internet research assignments.Īs I peel my peppermint, preparing to escape further duties, the café savant sizes up my socioeconomic signifiers and says, "You must be here for that kite thing." I slide across the icy street into a mom-and-pop diner. ![]() I've got a nuisance barker of my own, so it'll be just like not sleeping at home. "They're just living in the bus for a while until the owners move to their new ranch." Not a problem. "Oh, the dogs, yeah," says the innkeeper after I scurry inside. It's full of shaggy, wolflike dogs standing on the seats, barking their heads off. After a white-knuckle drive across the high desert in a blizzard, I see a glowing VACANCY sign and pull into a motel next to a big yellow school bus that, though driverless, seems to be idling. It could be the opening scene of An American Werewolf in Utah.
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