A writer muses on a favorite pastime.
By Brett Millier
A ritual complaint passes among skiers on the Red Kelly Trail around the College golf course that, once upon a time, groundskeepers groomed and maintained the trail for classical Nordic skiing and that because of walkers and dogs on the trail, they quit. In fact, the College did maintain the trail, but the end of that era probably had more to do with global warming and the rise of freestyle skiing than with the flow of humanity that insists on using the trail.
Winter tracks along the Red Kelly Trail will tell you a lot about that flow. For one thing, it is unceasing. No matter what the snowfall, a cascade of intricately marked boot soles, paw prints, big-foot snowshoes, stroller wheels, and running shoes crisscrosses the homemade parallels carved out and maintained by the skiers themselves. Pockmarks at intervals show the prevalence of classic poling technique, but even these are reconfigured by the giant prehistoric bird-foot angles left by freestylers. There are tracks of big dogs and little dogs, snowshoe-sculpted ovals, the geometry of boot soles, the tiny feet of squirrels and raccoons, deer tracks, and the perfectly etched toes of chickadees or jays; even, once, a bobcat. I confess I take my dogs on the trail when I ski, and they hop like rabbits to avoid bottoming out when the snow is deep—leaving oval bellyprints and vertical holes in the snowy woods. I think of this variety of tracks as evidence of democracy in action, and of the College’s wise decision to share this resource.
I encounter the trail in a variety of conditions and am amazed by what and who I meet there. One sees mishaps, and the evidence of mishaps—wipeouts, struggles to get up, parents bending over a tangled child trying to bring her to her feet on her skis. The pinwheel of tracks showing a failure of nerve at the top of the steep hill behind the eleventh hole. Once I actually saw a parent on skis harnessed to a sled containing a very small child, who glided along oblivious to his father’s astonishing exertion. Last winter I wondered about a set of widely spaced gouges that turned out to belong to a tall, thin college student running on his toes in sneakers on not-very-packed snow. After big storms, one finds the peculiar tracks (and the even more peculiar appearance) of snowshoe racers, fitted with special racing shoes.
A few years ago, long after the College stopped grooming the trail regularly, I went out convinced the trail would be glazed with ice and miserable to ski. But someone with a groomer had taken pity on us, breaking the ice along the whole circuit, and the skiing was terrific. It seemed to me a miracle, and I have been grateful ever since.
Nowadays, skiers make their own conditions on the trail. The first brave souls out after a snowfall carve the tracks; others follow and reinforce them. Soon a second set of ski tracks may appear, alongside a wide chain of snowshoe tracks. Then come the boot soles to trouble the tracks, and the skiing slowly deteriorates until the next storm. Rain and ice make for treacherous skiing, particularly on the trail’s two nerve-testing hills. Walkers and skiers and dogs and snowshoers find a little bit of what makes Vermont great on the Red Kelly Trail, as their tracks will tell you.
Brett Millier is the Reginald L. Cook Professor of English and American Literatures at Middlebury.