A guide to backcountry skiing in the Oregon Cascades
BEND, ORE.
Dexter Burke has a simple answer when asked what draws him to backcountry skiing. “Expensive lift tickets,” he said.
For that reason, and certainly many others, backcountry skiing has become increasingly popular over the last few years in Oregon and throughout the West. Burke, born and raised in Bend and a backcountry skier for more than 20 years, hopes his new book, “Oregon Ski Atlas,” will encourage more skiers and snowboarders to venture out on some of the more remote Cascade peaks in Oregon.
Basically a photographic guide, and marketed as a “coffee table paperback book,” Burke’s first book includes route names on several prominent peaks and some limited uphill route information.
“This book was never meant to blow up secret stashes or bring more crowds to already crowded places,” Burke said. “With the exception of Broken Top and Mount Hood, all the volcanoes in the book rarely get skied by more than one or two different groups of people at the same time. My hope is that showing these more remote peaks will lessen the crowds at the more popular areas.”
The book includes 48 pages with aerial photos of Mount Mcloughlin, Mount Thielsen, Diamond Peak, Broken Top, South Sister, Middle Sister, North Sister, Mount Washington, Three Fingered Jack, Mount Jefferson and Mount Hood.
These major Oregon volcanoes offer a vast amount of terrain for backcountry skiers throughout the year. But Burke said there is little recorded history in first descents and attempts on these rugged slopes compared with areas such as the Tetons in Wyoming, the North Cascades in Washington, the Wasatch in Utah and the Sierra Nevada in California.
“My hope is that this book will draw out some of the old ski pioneers and they will share their stories so we can start to create a better understanding of who were the first brave skiers in the Oregon Cascades,” Burke said.
He added that while the “Oregon Ski Atlas” highlights certain routes on these mountains, the backcountry skier must still figure out the specifics and the logistics of his or her adventure.
“Part of the fun is exploring, and I feel like this book acts more like a catalyst for what’s possible,” Burke said. “But it’s up to the reader to figure out the details and dangers.”
Snow is already starting to accumulate in the Oregon Cascades and soon backcountry skiers and snowboarders will start planning their trips for this winter and spring. Burke said his favorite season for backcountry skiing is late spring/early summer, when snow still clings to the high Cascades and the weather improves.
He said the most challenging of the peaks in the book depends on the conditions.
“The unpopular truth is some days you go out, and it’s a sheet of ice,” Burke said. “When that happens, even a 15-degree slope can become pretty challenging.”
Avalanche safety should always be at the forefront of backcountry plans, and
Burke cautioned that the “Oregon Ski Atlas” does not offer information on how to ski these peaks safely. Rather, skiers and snowboarders should consult the Central Oregon Avalanche Center, Oregon Ski Guides and/or Three Sisters Backcountry for more information on avalanche safety.
“Even then, there is always a risk,” Burke said. “The best thing you can do is team up with someone who has been doing it for a while and have them show you the ropes.”
“Oregon Ski Atlas,” from Alpenglow Publishing Studio, is available for $30 at oregonskiatlas.com and select retailers across the Pacific Northwest, including REI.
Feelings are fleeting, but finding words for them brings solidity – or even solidarity – to moments both ebullient and dreary. Witness “languishing,” a word that flew across social media feeds after a New York Times story called it the “dominant emotion of 2021.” Naming that diffuse malaise was oddly comforting.
Words for obscure emotions remind us we have company in our most private moments, writes John Koenig in his prologue to “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” a compendium of words he invented (or reinvented, in some cases). Koenig is taken with the “aches, demons, vibes, joys, and urges that are humming in the background of everyday life,” he writes. Take for example “zielschmerz,” the throb of dread that sometimes hits when you’re on the cusp of realizing a longheld dream. Or perhaps you’ve savored a moment of “nyctous,” which Koenig defines as
“feeling quietly overjoyed to be the only one awake in the middle of the night.”
Koenig began coining and compiling such words on his website in 2009, a foray followed by a YouTube channel and TED Talk. Some of Koenig’s creations have, Pinocchio-like, come to life and escaped into the wider world. His 2012 neologism “sonder,” which Koenig called “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own,” is the namesake for, among other things, several studio albums, a hospitality company and eateries in California, Wisconsin and Kosovo.
Some of Koenig’s words are cobbled from snippets of European languages, while others are simply pulled from the world’s bargain bin of used-but-still-useful vocabulary. For example, Koenig’s adjective “idlewild” – “feeling grateful to be stranded in a place where you can’t do much of anything” – is borrowed from the original name of John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Flipping through the book may bring jolts of recognition. After posting “sonder” on his website nearly a decade ago, Koenig writes that he received an avalanche of emails from readers thanking him for putting words to a feeling they’d experienced but never named. Entries in the dictionary range from pithy definitions to mini essays on modern life’s anxieties.
It’s not all whimsy, and a philosophy of language weaves through the dictionary. Koenig, who works in advertising, encountered such ideas as an undergrad at Macalester College and remains entranced by the subtleties of language. Words “function as a kind of psychological programming that helps shape our relationships, our memory, even our perception of reality,” Koenig writes.
He quotes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aphorism that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” In the most extreme version of this reasoning – a theory called linguistic determinism that’s almost entirely shunned by linguists – our native tongues imprison our minds, leaving us capable only of understanding the feelings and concepts our languages allow. That can’t be the case: Think of the readers Koenig encountered who immediately recognized their previously unnamed experiences reflected in words like “sonder.”
A scaled-back version of this idea, however, has currency among some linguists, researchers and psychologists. In his 2010 book “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” Israeli linguist Guy Deutscher argued that the words we use can subtly channel our experiences and habits of mind. Neuroscientist Kristen Lindquist, who leads the University of North Carolina’s Carolina Affective Science Lab, has found that words help crystallize quicksilver emotional experiences into something more recognizable. Psychologist Tim Lomas created an interactive lexicography of emotion words in languages from Akkadian to Zulu, positing that expanded sentimental vocabularies enrich our inner lives. (The Lomas lexicography includes several entries drawn from Koenig’s writings.)
It’s undeniably thrilling to find words for our strangest feelings. “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” is most compelling when Koenig casts light into lonely corners of human experience. “In language, all things are possible,” he writes. “No sorrow is too obscure to define.” Some of these words have particular resonance for a world rocked by a pandemic that has left many isolated in the extreme.
Take “kenopsia,” the eerie, echoey feeling of a busy place, such as a shopping mall or downtown boulevard, when it is suddenly emptied of people. Or “solysium,” a kind of delirium arising from spending too much time by yourself.
In a sense all words are made up by someone, at some time. It’s an idea that lends living, breathing languages like ours their precarious charm: The things we say across the breakfast table, or whisper in a lover’s ear, are simply made-up words we’ve deemed useful enough to keep in circulation. “A word is only real if you want it to be,” Koenig writes. It’s a defense of language’s endless creative possibility, and a fitting coda to an enchanting book of madeup words turned real.