The Asulkan Cabin. The day before we departed, I got my hands on a copy of Dr. Fadi-man’s “Microdose How To Guide” 3 and some liquid LSD. I had no way of knowing how strong the LSD I had purchased was, so I had to go with a best guess when it came to watering it down. With a little bit of math and some distilled water I had what I hoped would be 15 micrograms to each drop of liquid. Fingers crossed, we set out early. According to Dr. Fadiman, unlike an actual LSD trip, the whole idea of microdosing is that you don’t trip. The effects should be so subtle you aren’t aware of them. Not like Dock Ellis who was so high on acid he couldn’t see straight when he became the 170 th person in Major League Baseball history to pitch a no hitter. So, every few hundred feet I would stop, look around, and wait for that creeping hand of the psychedelic to tingle up my spine. I would stare deep into the forest waiting for an unnatural shimmer of movements. I would stand deadly still, waiting for the intensity of the ambient sound to grow. But it never happened. Typically, when I am splitboarding, not only am I dying on the inside and out but I am also miserable and angry. But this time I was in a joyous state. I was traveling with Seb Grondin and Chuck Morin. Seb and Chuck are both serious mountaineers and ripping snowboard-ers. Not only was I keeping up, but when we would stop, I also found myself exhilarated and pumped up to the point of Chatty-Cathy-ism. I had felt like a genius packing my bag with nothing more than seven peanut-butter-and-Nutella sandwiches, a sleeping bag, 1L of LSD wa-ter, two liters of scrambled eggs, one camera, three lenses and one bat-tery. The tour to the hut was long and at times grueling, but surpris-ingly painless. It was dangerously cold, but at no point in time did I feel the slightest bit uncomfortable. It was like my body was in perfect flow. Four hours later, I reached the cabin and had enough energy left over to 3 https://www.scribd.com/document/290897905/MD-HOW-TO-info get out for sundown turns. It felt like cappuccino was flowing through my body instead of cold, congealed blood. Things could have been really bad up there. The cabin isn’t that big and the sleeping accommodations are intimate to say the least. Weath-er moved in and we had to scrap any serious alpine aspirations. Yet life in the cabin was great. I slept like a princess with dreams so vivid they could have been a watercolor Disney Film. Even midnight visits to the outhouse were pleasant. One night on the john, I pushed open the door so I could see the stars and mountains. I thought to myself: “These are the moments we live for—not the moments of triumph on high peaks or victory in the arena or lust on the beach, but the shitty uncomfortable moments in places you shouldn’t be, doing things you have no business doing. That’s living.” I finished my business and strode barefoot back to the cabin. I hadn’t told anyone about my microdosing experiment, but something tells me that when I walked into the cabin barefoot and grinning like an idiot they knew. Maybe it was true: Microdosing can help put a positive glow on an otherwise uncomfortable situation. Or maybe it was just a placebo effect. Maybe it was the crew I was with, or maybe it was the serenity of the Asulkan Valley. It might have been the combination of all of it. I don’t think I will ever know for sure. But that may be the point. Those psychedelic pioneers ingesting hallucinogens around the fire weren’t tripping out in an echo chamber to discover what they already knew. They were searching for something. A sign, an answer. Hell, maybe they were just trying to escape the doldrums of primitive life. What do you think about that, Dr. Fadiman? The author would like to thank Jason Cohanim and Tyler Brown for their assistance with this story. THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL 107
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 15.2: Page 107
