Salty Peaks

Scotch. With ice. This shall chase my cold away.

We have returned from Utah, a land bursting with abundance of powder and wives. In the two weeks leading up to our trip it snowed just about every day. In the week that we stayed at Alta it didn’t snow a single inch. Nevertheless I would go back there in a heartbeat. I ache in the absence of mountains. Saunas, stick shifts, tea and mountains. It is with these four things that one can invent true happiness.

I caught up with friends in Salt Lake, some of whom I expected to meet, others who were a complete surprise. These were all great things. I am still snowboarding quite well, despite a dry season in the Pacific Northwest last year, and a prior season that was cut short by the snap of bone. Apparently I still know how to ski as well, and was able to hold my own at Alta for a couple days. That is, until we met a local gal on the chairlift who took me down off the backside.

At more than 10,000 feet we climbed and traversed a half mile, and with my mouth full of copper and exhaustion I proceeded to roll down the 40 degree slope. She danced, quite literally danced, to a small grove of trees, and once she was satisfied that I wouldn’t kill myself getting the rest of the way down, bade me good afternoon and went off to shoot The Columns. I decided to hit some groomers under the Supreme lift, in an attempt to fish my ego out of the gutter.

This trip consisted of equal parts skiing and snowboarding, which I found to be just fine. My complete switch over to snowboarding back in 2001 was partly to pursue a personal goal, and partly a financial decision. I couldn’t afford the gear for both sports, so I decided to blow everything I had on the sport that I didn’t know how to do. Yet.

In other Salt Lake news, today it came to my attention that the trailer for the movie Pirates of the Great Salt Lake is now online. You must go watch this trailer. You must then watch it again.

To be honest, I am a biased observer. First off, My name is Dane and I can’t stop thinking about pirates. These guys are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet. Sometimes I dress up as a pirate. Other times I build pirate websites. When I work at camp I am known as Dane the Pirate. Like any good pirate I even have pirate secrets, about which I am not currently at liberty to talk about.

Despite all my love for pirates, my passion pales in comparison to that of The MacKay. The MacKay is a good friend of mine who runs his own business making handcrafted pirate hats, and he has always been my outfitter for piratical gear. I sport an acrylic-treated Captain Jack Sparrow hat in brown, which currently resides on my freakily awesome pirate skull hat stand. At the favor of the ocean breeze, I would love to grab an original MacKay hat in black before I return to camp for the summer.

All this is to say that my friend The MacKay was responsible for outfitting the cast of Pirates of the Great Salt Lake with pirate hats. And that his friend Quicksilver provided the necessary piratical ceramics. The MacKay actually traveled down to the San Francisco Independent Film Festival to see PotGSL, and Bilgemunky has been kind enough to publish his review of the film.

Needless to say there is plenty of stuff going on down in Utah, without even beginning to mention the convenience offered by polygamy and state-run liquor stores. They even let you pump your own gas, but everything you buy there has, like, a 25 percent sales tax stapled to it so they can pay for the Winter Olympics.

The 2002 Winter Olympics, that is.