Any turn is a good turn skiing on Thanksgiving weekend

Determined to ski on Thanksgiving weekend, I accepted an invitation to join my friend Joel Armstrong at Schweitzer for some alpine touring.

Armstrong, a Spokane mortgage banker, skis Schweitzer backcountry every weekend, if he gets his way. I followed him to Big Blue, a peak about 3 kilometers north of Schweitzer Basin.

Schweitzer was closed. I was eager to declare my season open. It would be nice to leave the gloomy side of a temperature inversion that had settled into the region for several days.

Returning to the familiar early-morning ski mission routine was a great feeling. On the drive, roads were shrouded in a dark, fuzzy mist that did not lift until Schweitzer’s village faded in and out through tears in the blanket of clouds.

Armstrong greeted me at his condo with a mug of strong coffee. He presented for my use a vintage backcountry setup suitable for scraping over rocks. Leaving the village, we drove to an old jeep road cut into the backside of Schweitzer Bowl.

Climbing with skins from the trailhead at about 5,000 feet, we skimmed lightly over rocky sections on the southern exposure of the jeep road. The coverage increased with elevation, and the sun broke through.

Soon we rolled over the top of the South Ridge and rested at the 6,389-foot summit of the Lakeview Triple. There was about a foot of wet snow. The lift sat idle, chairs swaying slightly in the breeze. Signage we’re used to seeing at eye level towered above us.

The route continued down the saddle where Stiles drops into the bowl. We dropped out-of-bounds there and traversed north, gliding on a cat track at about 6,000 feet. The alpine forest was quiet. Evergreen fragrance filled the air. Moose, deer, snowshoe hare, ermine and grouse had left tracks in the snow along the way.

We reemerged inbounds at Siberia where the T-bar takes off to Little Blue. After working hard to keep up with Armstrong for about 3 miles and 1,500 feet, I longed for the T-bar to be running. At the top I was rewarded with a brief descent to the saddle between Little Blue and Big Blue.

Here the snow was lighter and deeper. The skin climb to Big Blue’s summit was smooth and straightforward. We ate lunch basking in sunshine at about 6,600 feet. Roiling clouds crashed like surf on the slopes below us. Distant peaks poked out of a sea of fog out to the horizon. Mt. Spokane looked closer than one would imagine.

I savored the view. Looking east with the sun directly behind me, I witnessed a rare and amazing phenomenon. My shadow projected into the mist as an enormous, triangular shape. The head of my shadow seemed miles away, surrounded by a huge, rainbow-colored halo. Soon it winked out as a passing cloud blocked the sun.

Later I learned this was a “Brocken Spectre,” named after a peak in Germany where it was described for the first time in 1780. It’s an optical illusion that occurs when climbers judge their shadow in the mist to be at the same distance as faraway land seen through gaps in the clouds. The colorful rings, called a “glory,” are reflections off water droplets at the antisolar point, like a rainbow.

After lunch, we managed about a dozen rock-free turns down Big Blue. The return route was paved with diamonds as the lowering sun glinted off the snow. It wasn’t an epic beginning for the ski season, but it was a memorable one.