
The Colors of Touring
by Andy Dappen
My daughter paints in oils. One of her paintings on the
living room mantle of a goat’s face, looks realistic
from a distance but is swatch book of color when examined closely. “Painting makes
you see color completely differently -- there are so many shades of color and so
many colors within color,” she has told me. “You don’t recognize that at first,
but when you try to paint what you’re really seeing, it’s fascinating what you
find inside the blue of the sky, the green of a tree ... or the white of a goat’s
face.”
I decide to practice observing like a painter on an early
morning ski tour. Rather than believing what my brain says, I keep asking what my
eyes actually see. The start of my tour is through the blackness of early
morning. The sky is deep, deep gray overhead and brightens to a slate gray on
the eastern horizon. In the southern sky a crescent moon hangs on a mottled
charcoal curtain like a slice of cantaloupe.
The sky begins to lighten surprisingly quickly. To the east,
dark gray fishbone clouds are stamped over a lighter gray sky. Contrails from
jets flying to places east are gray ribbons strung across the sky. The trendy
crescent moon, feeling orange was so last-half-hour, is now a pale shade of
margarine.
The sun is 30 minutes from breaching the horizon but the
stratospheric contrails suddenly
light up. Are they orange, pink, or…something
in between? I decide they’re salmon. The fishbone clouds have morphed, too. Now
they are variegated shades of gray and white. The color of the snow around me is subtle and I fail to define if the
highlights on the hummocks ahead are eggshell white or tinged with the palest
of yellows. The shadowed sides of the same hummocks are equally confusing – are
they pure gray or gray tinged with blue?
The sun keeps climbing at its relentless pace, and this kaleidoscopes
the sky and clouds to the east through
shades of pink, orange, yellow, and white. The contrails I’ve been watching
flame to yellow and then wash-out to white. My fishbone clouds do the same.
On the western horizon a thin veil of clouds surrounding
Pitcher Peak turns to magenta while the cotton-ball clouds over Twin Peaks go
pink. Soon the whole massif of Twin
Peaks facing the sun is pink-washed. But the pink is a momentary affair that's as
transitory as joy. As quickly as it arrived, the pink yellows and then whitens.
All these color changes have me reaching for the camera on a
minute-by-minute basis. Bare skin on 25-degree metal turns my digits blue.
Actually they are a dark red accented with blue to the point of being maroon.
But they feel blue. I up the pace to pump warm blood their way.
Near my summit, the sun tops the horizon. The heat is
immediate and I understand Twin Peaks
better – the warmth makes me feel pink. The bark on the ponderosa pines I ski
past are suddenly emoting warmth as well -- their trunks are mottled orange
poles, their canopies composed of countless needles that are green with a hair-thin white lines added by the sun.
The summit view proves to be a gray affair. Yes, there are still subtle
pastels of yellow and
pink on the clouds to the east and the snow catching sun
is salted with rainbow sparks reflecting off frost crystals. But around me is a
landscaped colored by hundreds of shades of gray. The clouds in the western sky
easily exhibit over a dozen shades -- I see everything from bruised gray to dirty newspaper
gray. The snow on the shaded side of the hill is rippled and layered from wind
and each of the ripples is a different ring of gray. Meanwhile, looking out at the
shaded hills on the horizon, my mind attaches green to the trees, brown to the
rocks, and white to snow yet this all a trick – my eyes actually see a
monochrome scene composed of complex gradations of gray.
During the descent the artist’s eye is shoved in the pack
along with the climbing skins. The snow’s texture and composition is nearly as
complex as its color. It’s windblown here, sun crusted there, firm in this
place, breakable elsewhere, easily carved on one turn, and trapping the skis on
the next. Strict attention to its appearance and feel is needed to keep on top
of the snow rather than to find oneself inside it.
Half way down I stop to take in color one final time. Around
Burch Mountain to the north, the shadowed draws of hills are the color of shark skin while the
crests of those same hills glow in shades of yellow and white. Overhead the sky
is anything but a uniform hue of blue -- it stratifies into bands ranging from
cobalt directly above to a washed-out robin’s egg blue near the horizon. The
scene in every direction is head spinning -- no wonder the brain generalizes --
there’s so much color it’s impossible to catalog it all.
Only the overall color of this pre-work, morning ski tour is
easy to peg: Pure gold.