MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN Jeremy Jones and his daughter, Mia, touring from camp to start the first day of bagging peaks and riding lines in the John Muir Wilderness, CA. Photo: Cody Mathison Words Jeremy Jones “WE SHOULD DO A High Sierra trip this year,” I’d muttered one too many times to my daughter, Mia. The plan and approach are the same as it has been since I went all-in on foot-powered snow-boarding over 20 years ago: stuff backpacks with food, fuel and feathers and head west aiming to get a layer back into the range. Twelve hours later, spring be damned. Wind driven snow and single digit temps in early May—where’s the beach? Is it winter’s last gasp? Temps are too cold for sun-softened snow. Will it be enough to keep us off the sun crust? Is it a futile dream? Must be present to win. Ninety percent of the time you spend with your kids is before they are 18 years old. That thought had me cancelling trips all winter, as Mia spent her final winter at home, for now. If only I could bottle up our time together. My hope is her love of snow keeps her coming back. It was my love of those things that sent me west at 18, never to return. MIA SLEEPS WHILE I wait for the water to boil, tucked in my sleeping bag. I think back to the Deeper days in the late 2000s. Mia was an infant. That first night on a ridge with Jonaven Moore watching the sunset. He breaks the silence: “this is the coolest thing I have ever done.” We had walked through a portal away from the synthetic into the real world. The mountains say-ing, “Welcome, we have been waiting for you. There is a never-ending supply of mountains, and the learnings are infinite… It’s gonna be hard, but worth it.” The High Sierra was a perfect test ground. High peaks guarded by long approaches and huge vertical relief. Dark-to-dark days left us crawling back to our car or camp completely smoked. Shoot-ing quality footage was futile. The distances too far, the lines too big, the snow too variable, but High Sierra bred strength travelled well in other ranges. We were all on DIY splits, carrying too much gear and not enough water. What I thought was the twilight of my career was actually the dawn. The kit has tightened up, our approach has been refined, my fitness is better, but the mountains have not gotten any smaller. Mia, however, is thriving. She got her “front pointing badge” yesterday, on bulletproof ice hidden under a few inches of powder. “If you slip you need to dive on your ice axe as fast as possible,” I warned as she got higher off the deck. 058 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 21.3: Page 58
