by DK | Dec 11, 2015 | .
The ski trails at Park Creek and Alturas are not groomed at this time. We are hoping to begin clearing, packing and grooming of the ski trails during the third week of December.
“So what’s taking so long?” the impatient ski enthusiast might ask? “What’s the story?”
Wave after wave of snowstorms had blown shut the cave door opening, but Divinius sat comfortably inside, watching shadows dancing across the rough stone wall. He had even given them names. Who knows how long he had been in there watching this strange shadow world, when on the morning of December 11th, Timinius and Thadeus Sardonicus broke down his snow door and dragged the old neoplatonic pagan, kicking and screaming, out into the sunlight. “Time to start grooming old man!” Sardonicus growled, “Time to face the real world.”
“Yes, I know that very well”, replied Divinius, “but the snowmobiles are still in the shop and there are many trees blown down in deep drifts and disarray beyond what even I can cut and I still have to address my holiday greeting cards!”
“No excuses,” said Timinius, “call the Woodsman, he’ll know what to do.” Divinius opened the shiny new flip phone he’d bought at the dollar store for just such an emergency and made the call… Now something would happen.
by DK | Mar 25, 2015 | .
Sitting on a log overlooking the beach at Devil’s Elbow, Timinius saw the corked bottle awash in the foaming Oregon surf and thought it must be some sort of joke. Messages in bottles were usually only found on fairy tail beaches. But when at last, a gleaming green wave dropped the salty flask at right at his feet, he knew that this was something real. Fan mail from some flounder? No Bullwinkle, a real message. He removed the cork, unrolled a rather damp post card from Davinius and the pretty girl from the village, and read the pencilled scrawl… “Hope you’re doing well, pineapple crop looking good this year, Aloha from Hawaii! P.S. Sawtooth Ski Trails done for the year.”
That same day, standing next to a log in Riggins, Idaho, Thaddeus Sardonicus was taking photos of leaping salmon with his rather large ancient looking film camera. He noticed a small bottle bobbing into a back eddy and heading towards shore. That’s odd he thought as he reached down to pick it up….
by DK | Mar 20, 2015 | .
As he finished washing the last spoon from the Alturas Lake Soup Kitchen, Davinius felt a bit lost. He was in a free fall. A blazing hot sun was baking ski trails and threatening to bring a quick end to the cross country ski season. He knew that some people thought global warming to be a myth, but Divinius understood that there was a deep underlying truth to this ancient myth, that of the great conflagration of things upon the earth. “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time.” Steering the ginzu groomer through the melting snow pack, Davinius had to give up, he could no longer control the machine. He felt like Phaethon, son of Helios, the sun-god, who tried to drive his father’s sun chariot across the sky but found himself tilting and careening out of control. Because he lacked the weight to drive the sun chariot in the path of his father, he burnt up all that was upon the earth, and tumbled from the sky, like a burning star falling to the earth. “Oh well”, thought Davinius, “it’s not so bad, not the end of the world, just an early end to this year’s ski season.” He climbed off the groomer and turned up the Heartbreakers on his iPod, “I wanna free fall out into nothin’, gonna leave this world for a while, and I’m free, I’m free fallin’…”
by DK | Mar 12, 2015 | .
On Wednesday, the 11th of March, youthful vigor and determination served Timinius well as he groomed the trails to Alturas lake and North Cabin. After all, the ski season was not yet over. The ski club’s two older groomers, however, were not sure about that, still moving very slowly in dazed confusion after the celebrations of Ski Festival Weekend. Thaddeus Sardonicus was heard to mutter that he needed a vacation and had disappeared into some remote wilderness location where he could not be reached by telephone or bicycle. Divinius washed a few soup kettles trying to be useful, but otherwise could do nothing constructive at all. On Thursday, snowmobiling out to pick up the last coolers and tables left over from Sunday’s Alturas soup kitchen, he noted the odd fact that 393 years had passed since Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, founders of the Jesuits, had been canonized as saints on this day in 1622. Holy Smoke! Divinius had been taught by the Jesuits as a child and his mind was still cluttered with Latin and Greek. Was there anything relevant in there? What was it that Homer, the blind bard, had said about snow in the Iliad? He could barely remember…
Thus on a wintry day the flaky snow
Incessant falls when Jove the treasure opens
Of snowy tempests and of hoary frosts
He scatters o er the world a fleecy deluge
A depth of snow conceals the mountain tops
The verdant meadows and the manur d fields
The banks of rivers and the Ocean’s shores
While the wide main receives into its bosom
A snowy inundation from the skies
by DK | Mar 6, 2015 | .
On March 6th, the 540th birthday of Michaelangelo, our intrepid groomers, Davinius and Timinius, meditated on the great Florentine master’s vision of the creation. A vision he had made so palpably real on the frescoed ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. They contemplated the power of the creative act and the responsibilities it entailed before heading out on a brilliant Friday morning to create some corduroy for this weekend’s expected congregation of ski festival believers. As the pretty girl from the village toiled over tubs of soup to feed the masses, she could not help but notice, as Davinius and Timinius strode out the door toward their waiting 4 stroke snowmobile grooming machines, that they bore a striking resemblance to Bounarroti’s depiction of God the Father and Adam in the aforementioned fresco. She was so proud of them! On Thursday, the Trail to the Lake, Over the Hill and Sheep Thrills had already been groomed by the dynamic duo. While these trails looked pretty darn good and skaters reported them to be “awesome”, the grooming pair headed out once again chanting their new motto, “Good, better, best, never let it rest, ’til the good is better, and the better is best.”
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