Email this article

San Juan Shangri-La

By Ken Wright

"[We can] wake up, and create our own day ... We choose a liquid space of celebration and risk."

- Hakim Bey

It was a dream-like day. Or maybe it was a day-like dream.

Either way, it seemed I suddenly found myself in a truck creeping up a muddy single-lane mountain road gouged between tall, overshadowing snowbanks. It was early morning. I lifted my head out of the truck's sunroof, filling my nose with scents of decaying ice and the sappy life-blood of the broken, dismembered trunks and limbs of trees that had been swept down in the many avalanches lacing the valley. These brittle sticks were now sticking out from the snow-corridor's walls in dark, bony fragments. Foreboding fragments, for over the rim of the snow-cut I could see fresh spring sloughs and slides laid over the rough remnants of the season's older killers.

Then we were on skis, and hauling backpacks full of camping gear. Ahead lay a snow-filled valley like a Pleistocene playground, a craggy mountainscape of unbroken snow. Which seemed crazy, even to my sleepy (or sleeping?) mind. It's mid-May, right? Just last weekend I was luxuriating on a hot desert river trip, no? But my "real world" mind and memories had no role here. The sky was a depthless oceanic blue, the sun surreal and piercing. We trudged upward along a long ski track - following others? All I knew was to follow my companions, expecting they knew where we were headed.

Miles. We came to a division in the ancient glacial valley. Decaying, sunburnt buildings stood half-buried in the absurd "Day After Tomorrow" snowpack. Here, too, fresh avalanches like upside-down mushroom clouds lay splayed and splattered, falling out of cirques and couloirs, and superimposed on top of older, deeper remnants of even more explosive snowslides.

My friends chose the left valley, where thousand-foot white-walled ramparts marched away out of sight over a crisp rounded rise in the valley floor. We slid on, across the snow, up the hill, until we crested the rise. And there we saw it.

I'd heard stories about such a place. Of course, there are tales of such mythic spots the world over - Shambhala ... Shangri-La ... Brigadoon ... Atlantis - those ethereal, ephemeral, egalitarian kingdoms where peaceful warriors gather for rituals, celebrations, renewal, rejoicing and challenges. Places that then fade back into the landscape, protected by the earth, clothed in some sort of magical cloaking, until the tribe meets again, conjuring the kingdom back into existence, for a time.

And I'd heard the tales of our own version of such a power spot in our own beloved San Juans. Many late nights around pool tables under smoky lights in local bars, and around flaming campfires, and on chairlift rides, and on long mountain walks, I've been told the fables of the village that appears dream-like in the snow high in the ragged San Juan spires. There, it is said, a warrior society of snow stalkers gathers and rallies to share and to shred the surrounding snowfields, for a time. And then the tribe disperses and the snow-village fades away, for a time.

Shangri-la in the San Juans.

In fact, I'd heard just such a legend the night before, from the two friends who have appeared here in this dreamscape ski with me. I'd heard that the encampment had been seen again, up north, up high, up some forgotten and forlorn glacier-scoured, rock-strewn, snowfield-patched and avalanche-scarred mountain valley. Like this one.

And there it was. Surreal. Dreamy. Mirage-like. Somehow archaic and modern at the same time - instead of brick or stone or log, a canvas kingdom of orange dome tents of various sizes rising like colorful bubbles from the whitewash of the valley floor. Excited, we floated on our skis - in the way that dreams let you convert your awe and desire directly to motion - down the hill and into camp. We were welcomed by two guards who pointed us to one of the many lodges arrayed in the snow. We dropped our gear. They asked us to make an offering. And in the spirit of warrior kinship - of ski-bum kind of warrior - they in turn offered us beer.

We felt we were meant to be there.

And we were meant to be up there. I looked up and around, and I noticed for the first time that the slopes - all the alluring, enticing, rising and gleaming fall lines around us - were marked with the meandering tracks of descending skis. We needed to go. So we went.

We climbed, pulling ourselves up drainages and slopes and ridges and headwalls. For hours, it seemed. Or minutes, it may have been. Or a full lifetime. It's hard to know in those dream places, where time's true nature is revealed: just a dead memory-record of the path of the flow of the living and glowing moments that are the only real reality - the difference between the trip itself and the odometer that measures it. In dreamspaces, as it should be all the time, perhaps, it's the path of those flashing moments and not the mental time-trail that we acknowledge.

We climbed farther, higher, steeper. I was winded and worked and wickedly, wonderfully happy when we reached the top and stopped and looked around. Ahead stood a horizon of great, glistening peaks like quartz shards. Then I noticed that there were, on every slope, others like us, like slow-moving blips on a radar screen wending their way up or meandering their way down in wide free-falling turns, unreeling behind them sine-wave-shaped mountain-side line art.

It was time to carve our own. One by one, we pushed off and dropped over the edge of the abyss. The wide white fell away before me, and I fell onto it, with only my skill and style and resolve keeping me from falling into it. The spilling of corn ice crystals sliding down the near-sheer slope below me sounded like a stream as my skis rode the flow.

Hours later, back in camp, the sun sunken, and the warriors re-gathered. The scene was surreal, even for a dream - a kitchen the size of a bus had been carved into the snowpack, complete with ice tables and shelves. A snow-block wall held a well-stocked bar. And in a packed-down common area, a rendezvous was under way: dozens from disparate tribes, represented by their colorful collage of ski gear, circled together, all drinking and laughing and spouting loud, animated, gesticulating renderings of the day's epics and adventures and experiences and views and visits, like Vikings or pirates or explorers or braves back from their wild forays.

And as high-country twilight lapsed into a star-strewn and moon-lit night, as the gathered snow-worshippers grew familiar with each other - and as the bond of honor forged on shared risk, challenge and beauty morphed into celebration and camaraderie - the magic of the mythic and mysterious warrior kingdom was once again unleashed, in its own, unique San Juan Mountain way. A banquet emerged from the snow-kitchen: a platter the size of the hood of a car covered with fresh sushi served by a tiny, cheery Thai chef in Sorels. Glowing flying disks streak over camp. Sledders in the moonlight launched themselves down slopes and off ramps. The burning effigy of a popular cartoon character lifted one selected burden from the mind of each participant.

This is a good dream, I thought to myself as, after hours, it seemed, I snuck away. I knew that it was ending - that, soon, after the revelers had returned to their own clans, the snow-carved camp would melt away, dissolving back into memory and story, like a sand painting. Or that this dream, if that's all it was, would slip away from the grasp of my myth-making mind.

But I didn't want to forget. So I vowed, as I crawled into my moon-glowing dome in middle of this transitory mountain village, that when I woke up - wherever I found myself waking up - I would write this tale down.

And that's what I did.

Ken Wright lives the dream in Durango.