Words: Len Necefer with Forrest Shearer 2021-01-25 18:05:57
Lake Fork Peak guards the flank of the Taos Ski Valley, NM. In the last 100 years, New Mexico has warmed, on average, by more than one degree. Since the 1950s, snowfall has steadily declined. Photo: Isaiah Branch-Boyle Forrest Shearer and I first met in 2017 while engaged in environmental advocacy for Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument. We soon began spending time together in the mountains to better understand how we begin to address a broader idea of climate change and to reconcile the history of indigenous dispossession that created our public lands. The mountains have been our teachers, and our quest to find answers has resided in short “cultural” adventures in my ancestral homelands in the Southwest. I only learned to ski recently, but it has provided a pivotally important part of my identity as a Navajo person. It gave me a language to communicate and connect with mountains that I could have never imagined. It has allowed me to explore how our mountain landscapes, and consequently our cultural relationships to them, are changing with climate change. In many ways Forrest has served as a mentor and knowledge holder of safe snow travel and generalized mountain stoke for me. In other ways, I have served as a mentor and guide for indigenous knowledge for Forrest. The common language with which we have exchanged this knowledge has been movement through mountains in the snow. It began with a 2019 trip to Arizona’s highest point, 11 miles north of Flagstaff: Dook’o’oosłííd in Navajo, and Humphrey’s Peak in English. Our preparation to summit this peak began by visiting a Navajo medicine man in order to receive the appropriate permissions. It was also an opportunity for Forrest and me to better understand this mountain through the Navajo perspective. A sacred mountain to the Navajo and many other local tribes, Dook’o’oosłííd and its adjacent heights of the San Francisco peaks were made on an abalone blanket and decorated with abalone shell to create understanding of social unity and life. Home to a handful of Holy People, they were anchored by sunbeams and covered in yellow cloud. As the sun sets, it reflects off the peaks, creating a certain kind of light that represents carrying out your plans. These carried-out plans represent your life. The mountains represent life. For me it provided an opportunity to learn Navajo songs about the mountains, which have framed my adventures since. These songs have become part of my preparation and visit for any backcountry adventure. When I check my beacon is also when I sing these songs—both are forms of protection. On our summit bid we were met with incredible amounts of new snow, bitterly cold temperatures and heavy wind gusts that made us question if this peak was even in Arizona. The clouds and ridgeline were indistinguishable from each other except for the porous, black volcanic rocks exposed by wind scouring. We transitioned to descent mode just off the summit ridge where we were met with nearly a foot of fresh powder. Through this first trip, we discovered a lot about this unique peak, and also how much was left to discuss and learn. We saw Dook’o’oosłííd during one of its highest snow years on record. However, our experience was an outlier. It’s becoming increasingly rare to see abundant snowfall atop “the summit which never melts” these days. We decided it was pivotal to continue this conversation in the Sangre de Cristo Range in northern New Mexico, a place where Forrest and I have deep connections. It’s also a place in the Southwest that is rapidly changing due to climate change. Forrest and I linked up in Taos in February 2020, just weeks before the first COVID lockdowns, and subsequent months to yearn and contemplate adventures in the snow. Later, we took the opportunity to reflect on people, place and global connections. Len: New Mexico is an interesting place to slide around on snow, but it’s been an intersection point for both of our lives. I’m curious if you could tell me your first memories of visiting Taos? Forrest: One of my first memories of snow was when my family traveled to Taos for Christmas in an RV—eight humans and a dog named Opus packed into an RV, course set for New Mexico. Supposedly the car had expired plates, so we got pulled over at some point along highway 40. Knowing my parents, there must have been a strong scent of mary jane coming from inside the vehicle. [We were] headed to the Taos Pueblo, owned and inhabited by one of the oldest cultures in North America, the Taos Pueblo people, who have lived there for over 1,000 years and still live a somewhat traditional and private way of life. You had to be invited by someone that already lived there—we received an invitation from a tribal member that my father knew. In the Pueblo, Christmas is a time for ceremonies, dancing and feasting. I don’t remember how long it took to get there. My dad, David, and my uncle, Tom, traded off driving the land yacht across the desert expanse. Dad brought his sleeping bag and tent—’80s-era winter camping gear—choosing to sleep outside to escape the RV crowds when we stopped for the night. My Aunt Susan, Uncle Tom, and my dad went skiing up at the Taos Ski Valley. There was a lot of snow, especially in town. I would love to go back one day and do it all over again bringing my own family, continuing the antics and the traditions, experiencing the sweet smell of burning pinon wood in the air, brightened light of the luminarias, and the ceremonial dancers casting fantastic shadows on adobe walls. I recently found some artwork I must have done when I was 4. A stick figure more or less, but to me it represents much more. On the back of the drawing it says: “Forrest Shearer Xmas Taos, New Mexico, Indian Painting.” Colored in red, the top of the figure looks to have a headdress, symbolizing strength and honor, the body broad with horizontal lines, and then gets thinner toward the legs, maybe for speed. I showed this drawing to you recently, Len, and you wrote back, “It looks like the Red Road.” In the teachings of the Lakota, the “Red Road” is a metaphor for living a spiritual way of life. The allure of Taos that still draws me in today is the laid-back Southwest vibe mixed with snow. It is as remote as it gets. Rich and vibrant colors abound—deep blood reds at sunrise and the cerulean blues expressed on the Pueblo doors. The snowcapped Sangre de Cristo mountains rising past 14,000 feet provide a dramatic backdrop against the high-desert tones of deep orange and purple. You grew up near there, right, Len? I grew up in New Mexico just an hour or so south of Taos right up against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, outside the small city of Española (pop. 10,495). The depth, richness and amalgamation of cultures in northern New Mexico stand out. In many ways, experiencing the landscape through the many cultures of that valley truly expanded my view of the importance of working across differences in shared landscapes. My friends and neighbors came from all sorts of identities: Pueblos, New Mexicans, ranchers, Sikhs, back-to-the-land hippies, and wide and varied groups of people that would ebb and flow through Santa Fe. I did not fully understand the uniqueness of this place and why it drew so many kinds of people until I left for college in the Midwest. The landscape of northern New Mexico has a gentleness and stillness across most seasons that some describe as spiritually healing. Just down the road from our house is the Santuario de Chimayo, a Catholic Church that is claimed to have “healing sands,” which draws thousands of pilgrims each year on Good Friday who walk the 30 miles from Santa Fe in the hopes of receiving blessings. At many points during our skintrack conversations we’ve touched on this idea about our relationships to mountains. You’ve used the word “empathy” to describe your relationship to the mountains and others. How has this influenced your advocacy and snowboarding? The only way to break down walls, to break down barriers is to listen, to connect on a deeper level. To acknowledge the current state of humanity and the environment we have to open up and have the ability to understand and share the feelings of each other. Empathy leads to change on a far greater scale. It’s truly the cure for all ailments. Through the lens of snowboarding we’ve all been given this window into the physical heartbeat and breath of these living landscapes and mountain ranges. Together we have a chance to actively preserve wild places and the cultures that make these places so beautiful. It’s essentially the same for this entire tribe on planet Earth. If you peel away the layers of the climate crisis, you learn very quickly that real-time impacts are directly affecting communities on the front lines. Fires, sea-level rise, food scarcity, droughts. For the Taos Pueblo, climate change is already decreasing the snowpack that feeds their most sacred lakes and rivers. Through having these skintrack conversations, especially those around indigenous knowledge, I’m learning more about how we can directly look to tradition on how to reestablish our connection to the land. We can rethink management practices around fire and food while at the same time heightening our relationship to our community in the process. One of the concepts that we draw upon as Navajos is this idea of “K’é”: that all things are connected and interdependent. Our role as humans, in order to live a good life, is to keep these relationships we have in balance. This balance, in the Navajo view, comes from our beliefs and the actions that flow from them in how we treat the world around us—not taking more than we need, stewarding the landscapes that take care of us, and our relationships with all the people that also inhabit these places. I’m not a particularly spiritual or religious person. However, I do see the value in our ceremonial practices in that they provide a framework to express these values toward the earth. Each time I go out, I’m taking an experience, and the practice that we are taught to use as Navajos is to give something back to the earth to acknowledge this. Traditionally this offering is corn pollen, but this can be hard to come by. In lieu of it I’ll pause and take time to acknowledge the earth around me and that I’m taking something from it. In my view, this simple act reinforces the reciprocal relationship with the natural world. Essentially, we are stewarding the relationships between humans and the land to pass on to those after us. I’ve found this framing helpful for our adventures and trying to get a bigger sense of why we spend time in the mountains. A recurring theme that we have encountered in the Southwest is the impact of climate change on snowpack. In the last 100 years, New Mexico has warmed, on average, by more than one degree. Since the 1950s, snowfall has steadily declined. The real threat here is the impact on downstream communities that produce much of our food. With 13,000 years of human history in Taos, the snow has always played a role. It is pretty apparent in snow sports when we have a good season. When we have an insane winter and pow days are plentiful, morale is high and so is the snowpack. When we have a shitty season, not only does that drive stoke to an all-time low, but that also affects the amount of snowmelt that provides drinking water and irrigation. In many areas across the United States, agriculture depends on snowmelt runoff. Farmers in parts of the western United States who rely on snowmelt to help irrigate their crops will be among the hardest hit in the world by climate change. Having bad snow seasons in the future will ultimately affect us all, but the impacts are felt more immediately by people who live a more traditional way of life, working the land, like those in Taos Pueblo. I’m hopeful looking forward toward natural climate solutions; protecting and restoring soil is key. Championing for water-resilient crops and regenerative farming techniques is key, as are more efficient dryland farming techniques. Getting to travel through Hopi and Navajo land when we were in Arizona you truly see how water is essential to life, but in order to adapt you have to grow what fits the environment. Traditional ecological knowledge is a concept that gets mentioned quite a bit within the discussion of Indigenous people. In my own life, this has mainly played out through spending time with my family collecting medicinal plants. Early in the morning I would head out with my grandfather as we would weave off trail to find the patches of things like osha root. It almost felt like magic that he knew where to find where each of these plants grew. However, spending time with you in the mountains I’ve seen that your knowledge set operates very similarly to how it played out in my own family. In Taos, even though temperatures were far above freezing, you were still able to find a north-facing gully that still held untracked powder. I saw that these are highly specialized sets of knowledge that come from spending lots of time in these places. How can the knowledge gained by traveling the mountains inform our approach to confronting climate change? Spending time in the mountains gives you a deeper sense of place. This highly specialized knowledge gained from having ears, eyes and feet on the ground that comes from doing what we love in the natural world is essential to the fight against inaction on climate change. The degradation of the environment is happening in front of our eyes. There’s increasing extreme weather and wildfires—it’s right in front of our faces now, whereas when I was young, you’d hear about the Arctic, the melting glaciers and polar bears. The climate movement of the past has provided the data, numbers and science behind it. We also need to use the other side of the brain. Art, culture, sport, spirituality and love can help balance things out. It’s urgent. We need to expand our movement in climate leadership and include everyone, a movement for humanity. But it starts with recognizing changes happening on a local level, in places like Taos. The snow became stickier as the temperatures began to go far above freezing beneath our boards and skier on this incredibly warm February day. We crested the ridge just as the pine trees gnarled and deformed near treeline. Standing atop this ridge I could see the desert floor down the valley. All this snow beneath our feet would eventually melt, maybe sooner than we expected, and flow outwardly like veins pumping life into the landscape below and far down the Rio Grande. This trickle of snowmelt would find its way from the river into a multitude of uses downstream, from a cornfield to a water glass to even cooling a power plant. This trickle would continue farther south through the grasslands to the Chihuahuan desert downstream. It’s all connected, from those who play in these high peaks, to the Navajo nation and the Taos Pueblo below, and thousands of miles beyond, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
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