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Until you've skied naked off a San Juans' summit, warm San Juans sun baking your body, cool San Juans' air washing over your privates, feeling the tug of gravity and the float of bottomless, your best friend leading the way - you haven't lived.
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The Icicle Hole is named for the frozen seep, the spring that turns into a giant ice stalactite that hangs above the water each winter. In summer, the seep is nothing more than a glistening streak on a hundred-foot high sandstone wall that rises out of the river on the far bank, but in winter the frozen fall can be impressive.
The river is hard to get to - miles from anywhere, a handful of unmarked turns on washboard dirt roads in the western Colorado flat country surrounded by the LaPlatas, Mesa Verde, Sleeping Ute, the Abajos and the LaSalles.
I'd driven hours to get there, and I was standing knee deep at the bottom of the Icicle Hole, blissfully alone, when he appeared. At first, I wasn't sure what it was, whether I was awake or dreaming, but the icy water stabbed at my calves and turned my skin to gooseflesh - a feeling too immediate to allow the notion that I might be dreaming to persist.
It was real.
There, at the top of the pool, was a man, naked, except for wading boots and a fishing vest, casting into my pool!
He did not acknowledge me, and I sure as hell wasn't about to acknowledge him. I gathered in my line and backed away from the river, angry, confused. I walked a half mile downstream to a lesser pool and began to fish again.
With the benefit of time, the strange event began to make a little sense.
Suppose you had driven half a day to get to a favorite river, a favorite pool, and when you arrived you found a stranger fishing it up from the bottom? What better way to get the stranger to leave than to take off your clothes, wade into the top of the pool and begin fishing down toward the bottom? Surely the stranger, stunned, would leave and you'd have the place to yourself.
Situated in my new location, I chuckled, admiring the naked fisherman's audacity, silently tipping my tattered fishing hat to him.
That sonovabitch was a fisherman!
Only later, much later, did I learn that the naked fisherman was pretty well known among the local angling fraternity. Some of the friends I told this story to were far less amazed by my encounter with him than by the fact that after decades of fishing in the area I hadn't run into him sooner.
"Oh him," one buddy said, "he does that all the time!"
Eventually, I came to admire the guy for his dedication to angling, the fact that he'd do almost anything to get a river to himself, and when I got to thinking about it I remembered I had done the same thing once before by accident, except it had been on a mountain, not a river.
A lady friend and I had climbed McMillan Peak after a dump to get fresh tracks. Typical of the San Juans between storms, the day was clear and the sun unbelievably strong. There wasn't a breath of wind. After lunch on the summit ridge, after stashing climbing skins, empty sardine tins, water bottles and Ziploc bags holding a few crumbs of crackers and the remnants of strong cheese, we began to shed layers because we were roasting.
Off came wind shells.
Off came wind pants.
Off came sweaters . . .
She smiled at me, and I smiled at her - it became a game of clothes-shedding chicken and neither of us flinched.
We clipped into our Silvrettas wearing nothing but boots, hats and packs, dug our ski tails into the cornice and flew off, skiing naked, eighting the sun-drenched bowl that is McMillan's northwest face.
I won't say it was the most exhilarating run of my life. I won't say it wasn't - there are too many candidates, but I will say this: Until you've skied naked off a San Juans' summit, warm San Juans sun baking your body, cool San Juans' air washing over your privates, feeling the tug of gravity and the float of bottomless, your best friend leading the way - you haven't lived.
Far below, a bunch of college students in an outdoor pursuits class were eying us. Their course had clearly been heading toward our ridge, our bowl, our powder, but as we descended, naked and laughing hysterically, they abruptly altered course, heading off to the anemometer at the other end of the ridge.
We came back, she and I, a few days later and there were only two tracks in our bowl. Ours. The route down from the anemometer had been beaten into crud by the college students. We climbed up into our bowl and gained the summit once again. After a quick snack we moved over a few feet from where we'd skied off the day before, and danced down the slope again in untracked powder.
I haven't skied naked in years, but I'm thinking - the next time I drive half a day to get to a remote river, hike in and find someone parked in my favorite pool . . .
Steve Meyers is the author of On Seeing Nature, Lime Creek Odyssey, Streamside Reflections, The Nature of Flyfishing, Notes from the San Juans and San Juan River Chronicle.