Back in May, I moved northeast out of Sandy into Cottonwood Heights, a stone’s throw from the canyon where I spent my winter.  I’m living with two ski instructors, Tim and Connie, and their two boys (10 & 8), plus three cats, one turtle, and one black Labrador/Great Dane mix.  It’s a house they built themselves, custom-designed to comfortably fit their six-foot-plus frames.  I need a step stool to reach the top shelves of the pantry, and I have to stand on my tip-toes to work at the countertop. The house is full of light, music, and color.  The windows at the front of the house are open to a panorama of the Wasatch Mountains.  There are speakers in every corner, even in the bathroom, and Jack Johnson, Michael Franti, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen are regulars on the playlist. Photographs of family and friends plaster the fridge, walls and tables. My room is huge and bright, with six floor-to-ceiling windows.  It’s a room that begs to be decorated and inhabited.  For the first time, my few backpacking possessions seem inadequate, and within a week of moving in I’d already arranged to have my favorite Peruvian rug shipped to me from NH.  Tim and Connie’s is a house that feels like a home.

Though I endure rather than enjoy the city life, staying in Salt Lake through the summer has allowed me to take pleasure in being a part of a community of friends and their dogs, of rock-climbing partners, hikers, strong, creative women and outdoorsy men.  Winter relationships have grown and blossomed.  Chris, or Koogs, my skiing partner, has become my best friend and boyfriend, and partner in most things.  Together we’ve road-tripped to Colorado and to Utah’s Shakespeare capital to see Henry V.  We’ve hiked and biked and camped; gone to outdoor concerts, festivals, barbeques and parties; dog-sat, floated the Weber River on inner tubes, and soaked in the Diamond Fork hot springs.  Having someone with whom to share the summer enriched each moment and experience.

One of the summer’s highlights was a trip to Moab, Utah’s red rock Mecca and the gateway to Arches National Park.  Chris and I left Salt Lake one Friday night in May as the full moon was rising, and spent the weekend camping on top of a rock, with no roof over us but the stars.  On foot and on borrowed mountain bikes, we explored Edward Abbey’s desert paradise.  Early spring in the Utah desert means vivid green life against red buttes and mesas.  Biking before sunset on our second night, we turned a corner and observed a small grove of mature aspens standing in front of a sheer red wall.  Their bark glowed green in the low sunlight, and their slender branches curved gracefully, elegantly, as if frozen in the middle of a slow, twisting dance.  In that cool, potent moment, I believed we had found the lost Ent-wives of the Lord of the Rings.

As the warmth of the summer in the desert west fades and I look ahead to a second winter spent in Salt Lake City, it would be easy to be fearful, to wonder why I’m not moving on, as my custom has been.  Instead, I’m excited.  I feel like a new stage is coming in the life of Susan the Traveler.  The wave of serendipity that I’ve been surfing has become an eddy, a current swirling contrary to the main flow.  Though the pace has slowed, the voyage continues, and I’m happy to float on these friendly waters, trusting the swell to carry me where I belong.  I’ve got a new set of telemark skis and my old job at Brighton back, and I’m ready to make the most out of the winter and enjoy my new community of friends.  Let it snow!

White's 10-inch, lace-to-toe Smokejumpers, men's size 5.

Welcome to the new Susan. From hippie world traveler to burly, smoke-breathing firefighter. Instead of hugging trees, now I’m wishing they’d catch on fire so I could save them and start getting some of that legendary overtime and hazard pay. It’s not a natural transition; it’s taken training and various other components.

Start with $453 boots.

White's Smokejumpers - BEFORE fire season.

White’s Smokejumpers: ten inches tall, handmade, leather, Vibram® soles secured with fireproof thread and steel screws, reinforced toes and logger’s heels. They’re tough to break in, and not only for the hard leather and hard foot beds that wear red puffy blisters into sensitive heels and arches. I wore my new boots to my first day of chainsaw training. The six foot lumberjacks who taught saw school peered down their impressive beards and indicated my shiny, clean White’s with a twitch of the chin or elbow. “This must be your first year,” one said, his eyes raised appraisingly to my face. “Oh, well…” I looked down and saw their battered, scarred boots next to mine. “What gave me away?”

It was a relief, during our field testing day, to scuff my boots in the dirt and fill the eyelets with sawdust as I felled my first two trees. Armed with a 28” Stihl 044 saw, thick green chaps, a felling axe and a pouch of wedges, I strode up the hill behind my tester. My legs felt heavy; I had to lengthen my stride and step purposefully, balancing the 25-lb. chainsaw on my shoulder. I dropped two trees, two bug-killed pines. My arms shook as I finished the back cut on the last tree and stepped away, watching it land right where I’d placed it. Tired but thrilled, I caught a glimpse of my shadow as we came out of the trees and crossed the road back to the trucks. It looked like a firefighter’s shadow.

Add Nomex®: the forest green and sunshine yellow fire-resistant uniform of the wildland firefighter. The pants are stiff and the cargo pockets make them heavy, loaded as they are with ear plugs, lighter (every good firefighter knows how to start a fire as well as put it out), Leatherman (or comparable pocket tool), pen, notepad, Smokey calendar (for documenting hours worked and tasks completed), and the indispensible IRPG (Incident Response Pocket Guide – required, abbreviated “how-to” for every imaginable fire scenario). I also wear my gloves on a carabiner at my belt, and, because I work on an engine, I carry a spanner wrench for tightening hose fittings.

There are several types of firefighting resources in the employ of the federal government. Initial attack (IA) squads respond to a fire when it’s first spotted, typically when it’s a single tree that’s been hit by lightning and can still be handled by six people with shovels and a chainsaw. Hand crews fight fire the same way that the IA squads do, using tools and saws to cut miles of line – a wide swath of mountainside cut and scraped down to mineral soil – in an attempt to stop the fire from advancing in a certain direction. Every fire fighter will work on a hand crew at some point in his or her career, whether it’s an initial attack effort or while fighting a 50,000 acre fire in conjunction with other resources. Helicopters and air tankers are expensive but essential tools that can quickly drop hundreds of gallons of water or retardant on large fires, as well as transport ground crew and supplies to remote edges of a fire. Finally, there are fire engines, smaller, modified versions of the shiny red pavement queens that deal with structure fires in cities and towns across the US. I work on Engine 411 in Salt Lake City, serving the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache (yoo-IN-tah) National Forest. There are seven people on my crew. Shane is our engine boss and Watson’s our lead; between the two of them they have close to twenty years of firefighting experience. Graham (25), Brock (21), and Tomas (23) have worked on the engine for 2-4 years each. I’m the new person, the FNG, and so is Maren, the only other woman on the team: a 19-year-old, blond, French student from Brigham Young University. I like my crew. I like rolling around in our engine and unloading at a gas station or campground and moving like black-booted posse through the parking lot.

Stir in some required training. In six weeks I’ve been paid to attend chainsaw school, fire school, resource management school, map-reading class, radio class, SOP class, pump school, driving school, sensitivity-and-political-correctness class, first aid and CPR class, rules-and-regulations class, and ATV school. Fire school was a week long. Lessons ran the gamut from the sleep-inducing: “Chain of Command”; to the confusing: “Programming Radios”; the fascinating: “Weather and Fire Behavior”; and the terrifying: “How and When to Deploy Your Fire Shelter”. The latter involved an hour of video footage of walls of flame against night skies, shots of mangled trees choked with smoke, and a somber narrator’s voice describing how Firefighter X’s series of errors led to his hellish demise. After being properly scared into paying attention, we were led outside as a class and given practice shelters made of green nylon. We took turns being timed, shaking out the fabric, wrapping ourselves up, rolling around on the green lawn. It was about 65 degrees, partly cloudy, and extremely difficult to imagine someday facing a 6,000 degree flame front with only a bottle of water and a sheet of aluminum foil to keep me alive.

Today’s June 21. It’s pouring rain. As of a week ago, Utah had received 120% of its average rainfall for June. The mountainsides are a patchwork quilt of saturated green leaves and fat grasses. White clouds hang around the peaks like pillows. Nothing’s burning. There’s lightning every day, but the rain douses it immediately. Anything it strikes sucks up the scorching energy and carries on being wet and happy. The government, however, pays me to be on duty forty hours a week, and as there are no fires, the crew’s got to do something to keep busy. This means classes. It also means sharpening tools, washing hose, building hose packs, and lots of thumb-twiddling.

Pour on copious amounts of exercise. We train as a crew, at the gym if it’s raining, hiking if it’s not. When we hike we dress in full fire gear, hardhats, long sleeves and all, carrying our 30lbs of required personal gear plus a tool (shovel, rhino, Pulaski, combi) or a chainsaw or a can of gas for the saw. We carry radios and practice passing messages from the head of the line to the back, and we go as fast as we can as far as we can until we can’t. Then we do pushups, wall-sits, lunges, and crunches. Marching as we do in a line, in bright yellow shirts and blue hardhats, we draw attention on the trails. One day we paused for a water break on a rock outcrop halfway up Mt. Olympus. The sound of spinning rotors suddenly drowned out our conversation as the Channel 4 news-copter appeared above us and zeroed in, its nose camera swiveling to catch us in action. We waved and grinned and shook our heads.

The hikes are hard, even for me. And it’s only going to get harder. And hotter. Training, gear, and instruction aside, I’ve been told again and again that I won’t get it until I actually see a fire and smell the smoke and feel what it’s like to dig line for sixteen hours straight. I’m missing that one crucial ingredient, and it’s going to have to stop raining before that happens. In the meantime, I listen to the stories of my crew, absorb the advice of the lumberjacks and the other experts, explore my national forest, and look forward to that first spark.

Happy Susan.

My new God’s name is Ullr.

Floating. Floating all day. On 24 inches of freshies, on good vibes between friends, on rays of sun sparkling on snow crystals in the air. Floating in the afterglow of a fantastic day. The Wasatch got dumped with snow all day yesterday, and I called in “overwhelmed” at my Solitude night job, leaving my Wednesday wiiiiiide open to pay tribute to Ullr (ooh-ler), the Norse god of snow.

I went out with Brighton friends, Jack, Koogs, and David. We rode to the top of the Great Western chair and slipped our way out of bounds and paused between the huge, smooth, wind-sculpted cornices that hung over Lacko-Waxen, a 100-meter (wide and deep) bowl on the back side of Clayton’s peak. We peered through the tips of our skis at the sparkly white expanse of untouched snow below and dropped in one at a time. David launched a small jump at the bottom of the bowl and landed in a cloud of snow. “I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING!” he howled as he continued making turns in the nearly chest-deep snow. Hiking back up, out of the bowl, I followed Jack as he broke trail up the side of the hill. It’s quiet outside of the resort. Placing my feet carefully in each boot-shaped hole, I climbed, hearing only the breath moving in my lungs and the crunch and squeak of the snow in the boot pack. My skis rocked slightly in their straps on my backpack. The sun came and went, warming my back and highlighting my shape on the snow in front of me.

Following the boot-pack back to the top...so we can ski it again.

It was so good, we did it again. This time taking a slightly different line, to the right, I tore over a small knoll and turned into the funky fall-line, carving in powder that would be over my head if I fell, my head bursting with pleasure with each smooth, soft slice. The snow made a sound like pffoooooo as it exploded under my skis and flew into my face and into my lungs. It’s like breathing in dry diamonds; tiny frozen crystals melting on the walls of my lungs. The four of us climbed back up to the ridgeline and followed it farther out of bounds under the summit of (Mt.) 10-4-20. White snow and glowing sun and black, rocky, mountains overlapped against the inconstant, day-after-the-storm sky like a collage edged in silver. Light snuck through the clouds and dappled its way along the tops of the trees, blessing the evergreens with golden-green halos. I moved down through the aspen trees, twisting and turning and still finding endless, deep, untracked snow, arriving at the run out, where an established ski trail snakes through the flats and the trees, back to civilization. Rushing through the trees with my skis plastered to the trail, I slid around and up the sides of corners like I was on a bobsled track, ducking branches and drafting behind Koogs on his snowboard, dodging and laughing when he tried to trip me up.

Popping out of the trees back into the resort boundaries was like waking up out of a dream. There were so many people, happily churning their way down groomed trails that have already seen a dozen, a hundred other skiers. Their very presence was noisy, and I was stunned to remember that this is where I am usually skiing, and happy to be there. Hours later, I sat in the bar with Jack. We were both smiling, vaguely, as we sipped from our Pabst Blue Ribbon 24oz cans and studied our cards over his caribou-horn cribbage board. I slowly pegged my way to victory, and Jack turned his cards over and sighed, tired, satisfied. “What a day. What a day.” Amen to that. Praise be to Ullr, and praise be to Wasatch Powder.

I can’t wait to get spoiled.

Salt Lake City, Utah, home of the Greatest Snow on Earth (they say).  With seven ski areas within ten miles of each other, all less than an hour drive from the city, all averaging 500 inches (12 m) of powder every winter, I don’t care if it’s the “greatest” or only so-so, just as long as they let me ski on it.

Twice a week I work the counter at the Brighton ski school, selling lesson packages and directing harried parents to the rental shop, the bathrooms, the cafeteria.  My uniform is jeans, a fleece vest, and a baseball hat or beanie.  I answer phones and smile at customers and when it’s slow no one minds if I read a book behind the desk or slip out to take some runs.  I love my job.  I hitchhike to work or to ski every day from the mouth of the canyon, me and a handful of other bums.  Yesterday I rode up with a registered nurse who described to me the first time he witnessed a C-section birth.  “Dude, I grew more in that half an hour than I did through all of puberty!”  Today I waited in a line of cars that snaked for ten miles through the jutting canyon walls.  I watched the emergency lights spinning for an hour, on the other side of the trees where a truck had rolled over the embankment.

I live with Kathy, a cheerful massage therapist, and her husband Troy, a construction worker.  Winter and the flagging economy give him plenty of hours to fill playing WWII video games and shouting at the University of Utah football team.  Kathy’s sixteen-year-old, Mackenzie, makes occasional appearances as a dark-haired zombie on a stool in front of the TV on the kitchen counter.  I have a room to myself, furnished, full use of the kitchen and a living room, wireless internet, and the company of a balding cat when I want it.  They’ve also loaned me a bike for the winter.  Not having a car, the bike means freedom, and being able to visit the local library twice a day.  I grin at how much faster a bike is than walking, even as my teeth chatter and my hands turn to ice in the wind.

Beginning a life in a new place is always hard, and I’m a little bit lonely, despite the friendliness of my co-workers and the kindness of the Eaton family (wonderfully gracious friends from back east who gave me a place to stay when I arrived and helped me find work and housing).  I’m still smiling, though, and I can look ahead to a month from now when the slopes will be overflowing with snow, when regular paychecks will be plopping into my checking account, when I know the names of all the ski instructors I work with, when I am too busy to think, when I’m apparating from powder day to night job to day job to drinks at the pub with the other scruffy snow addicts, when all of this is normal, when I forget that I’ve ever lived anywhere else.