The Last Footprints on the Moon

Someone, I can’t remember who, wrote that ski tracks are like signatures: You can only stare at your own for so long. And while that’s truthful, it’s not fully true. Yes, after a time, sure, you get your fill and move on. But there’s an ongoing, underlying magnetic draw to lines you’ve sketched in the snow. More than once at the bottom of a pitch I’ve turned and taken a picture of a particularly tasty powder field marked by my passing, the better to fix the sensation of each arc in memory and to savor the path of learning that brought me there. Sometimes we need confirmation we exist, I suppose, even if that confirmation only lasts until the next storm.

Ski tracks are a reflection of mood and a barometer of our relationship with our gear, the snow and weather, and the slope itself. They exist in a way that a line drawn on a wave with a