The Old Ski Hill

Yesterday was a sunny day here in the Rogue Valley, but the rain storm over Thanksgiving weekend had left a thick coat of white on the tops of the mountains. Roads go up into the snow in many places around here. One of the most prominent is the road up Mt. Ashland, where there is a regular ski lift and lodge. A likely place to test out the equipment for my son and grandson. Morgan wanted to go too, so he took everyone in his handicap van. Nobody could think of a smaller facility, or a free one.

The point is that I got thinking about how reliant we were as kids in Petersburg in finding some place to slide down. Petersburg kids would start on one of the hills right in town with their Radio Flyer sleds. The Lutheran Church hill fit the bill for us real well. You could get all the way down to the theater on a good day, and maybe even have to bail out before crossing main street. Not that there was much traffic on it, but you just never knew.

After all, someone had sledded down a hill out by Skylark City and went right under a truck and out the other side crossing the highway. Maybe that was an urban myth for all I know, just to keep kids off main street.

I graduated to cross country/downhill skis of the wooden bear-trap binding variety. Then we'd head across the muskeg up to the old ski hill. It had a rope tow in days past. The rope tow had a Ford Model A engine and it was still there, albeit, in 'good for an anchor' condition. I can't imagine that lasting very long sitting out in the open as it was. The log warm-up cabin was still there though. One of my favorite pictures of my father is of him on skis in front of the warm-up cabin, striking a swashbuckling pose with his aviator sunglasses. Must have been after the war.

I'll never forget one day at the old ski hill, which for us on the north side of town, started behind Mrs. Israelson's house on the hill to Beede's pond. (Now the road to the airport.) It was about a mile and a half, down to Buschman's dam, then out of the woods and across a long upward sloping muskeg to the base of the mountain behind Petersburg. I think the airport rock quarry road is just to the north of the old ski hill location.

There was one person in town who knew how to downhill ski at least, and he cut quite a figure coming down the hill, for all of six seconds. If you wanted to ski down the hill you had to sidestep all the way up, and that limited how high you wanted to go. For most of us, turning wasn't in our vocabulary. It was hike to the top, then schuss straight down and try to stop close to the cabin any way you could. My brother, Arnold, caught a hole left by a snow bunny's ski boots near the bottom, and twisted his knee pretty good. I think he had to be skidded out on a stretcher.

Which is how I got to be skiing home alone that day. There was some heightened concern for Arnold as it was becoming apparent he was a talented runner. And he did get to college under some understanding to be on the school's track team. I can vouch for how fast he is. One time behind Petersburg Mountain we saw a black bear sliding down a snow slide right at us. When I turned to look for Arnold he was a hundred yards away. Never saw him run, he just appeared a long distance away like some sort of cartoon animation.

Well, I ended up skiing back to town myself that day, having been abandoned by parents with shifting priorities. It was fine going, but it had been a tiring day, the skis were thick wood, and I must have only been about nine years old. I came to the fork in the trail that let to the Israelson's house, but for some reason I took the other one as the easier looking one I think. Turns out it led to a different part of town. Which was confirmed when I met Norman Fredrickson on the trail and I knew he didn't live in our half of town. So, back up the trail to the fork I went. That was the hard part. I probably didn't add on more than a couple hundred yards to the trip, but I didn't need that at all.

When you got off the trail at the road, then you carried your skis through town to home. I remember waking up on the couch minus my wet pants, and only half conscious, walking past my dad and Ed Fuglvog sitting in the living room talking. Kind of like adding insult to injury. Thinking on it now, my dad and Ed were probably having a hot toddy after being out in snow themselves all day.

That was snow sports in Petersburg prior to the sixties. That muskeg to the ski hill was the same one that large numbers of Canada geese sat in to eat cranberries on their way south. They would fly back and forth every day from across the bay, to their cranberry patch. Their numbers were falling during the time I remember seeing them. Then after the '64 earthquake, when their nesting grounds on the Copper River delta raised up so the bears and wolves could get the eggs. I don't remember seeing any geese flying back there after that, especially after they built a runway right through that muskeg.

Too, I remember flocks of sandhill cranes coming over in the spring, stretching from horizon to horizon. And they were big flocks. It took you back to some primordial time just watching them. You guessed it, you'd be hard pressed to find a little flock of fifty flying north now.

The last time I saw any geese around town was hunting ducks over by Coho Creek in the evening some decades ago and four geese came in for the night. Those four were perfectly safe flying in my direction in those days. We pretty much specialized in sneaks through the woods to assassinate mallards snoozing at high tide.

But back to winter sports, which is getting to be the main thing to do down south here. Considering there aren't two ducks to rub together to make a fire that I see. We saw three guys floating down the Rogue River a couple weeks ago with shotguns pointing all over the place. We wondered how effective their head to toe camo clothes were considering they were drifting in a purple boat. I heard that steelheaders will do that too. They'll drift down the river fishing, but if they see some ducks, will take a pot shot at them. That probably worked a lot better back when we'd see rafts of thousands of ducks at the mouth of the Stikine River near Petersburg.

In fact, we were going to check out a steelhead riffle on the Rogue the day the kids went to check out Mt. Ashland. Besides not being too keen on getting up in the dark the day after our belated Thanksgiving dinner, I guessed the river was still too high from a hard rain the day before. That was all it took to sleep in. The house was still real warm from burning the last of the firewood. I'd been waiting for Jesse to get back from seeing his Army buddies at Ft. Lewis.

So, fishing and hunting are out for the season, and snowboarding is in. Jesse's snowboard gear, that he bought with his first seine settlement in Petersburg a dozen years ago, is still in working order. The bear sausage and 4 H pork are in the freezer, and now to get some firewood. I've been cutting up all the oak trees that fall on the Elks picnic grounds near Eagle Point. Last year I got a couple of chords making a notch in a big old dead-fall to try get a car through. The notch still isn't wide enough. Maybe this year.