Jennings: When it’s hard to see, seek trees

The forecast for Saturday predicted overnight snow, followed by warming temperatures, rain and wind later in the day. My wingman Dan and I planned to rise early and get first tracks before fresh powder changed to concrete.

Mt. Spokane got 7 inches overnight. I had been waiting to ski terrain accessed by the new triple chair. A blanket of fresh snow promised great conditions for breaking it in.

Poor visibility was expected. But we know Mount Spokane as well as our own backyard. Spend enough time at a ski area and you become familiar with the pitch of the slopes, the shape of the glades and proximity of boundaries – even when you can’t quite see them.

The morning began with the powder day buzz among folks standing at the front of the line, waiting for chair one to begin loading. The queue steadily lengthened behind us and vanished into the fog. On the ride up, the chair in front of us was barely visible.

When visibility is nil, the basic strategy is to head for trees. Contrast between the trees and the snow provides depth perception you need to ski well. If coverage in the trees is sketchy, skiing along the edge where piste meets glade helps determine your direction of travel. Mountaineers call this “using a handrail.” But handrails won’t help you unless you know where to find them when you need them.

Seeing the ghostly blur of Mount Spokane’s new Chair 6 terminal when we unloaded from Chair 1 was disorienting. It has changed the familiar feel of the summit area. At least lift cables disappearing into the void showed the way down.

I was wearing goggles that optimize visibility in flat light. But the moment we dropped into a run skier’s left of the lift line, a layer of freezing fog reduced my visibility from a few feet to absolute zero.

The last time I was back here, I skied weaving lines through timber. The trees were gone. My wingman disappeared into a whiteout. On the slope of a mountain I’ve skied for decades, I had no clue where I was.

After a few tentative turns in heavy powder, vertigo forced me to sit down. I looked for a handrail and found a ribbon of corduroy laid down along the left edge of the piste. At times the fog was so thick my skis vanished. I would come to what felt like a stop only to realize I was still moving and have to sit down again, feeling kind of queasy.

There’s an official diagnosis for this experience. It’s called “ski sickness,” a condition specified 25 years ago by Swiss scientist Rudolf Häusler, a professor in the Bern University Hospital’s ear, nose and throat department. According to Häusler, much like seasickness, the dizzy, nauseous feeling of ski sickness happens when the body is confused by an onslaught of conflicting stimuli.

Three physiological systems work together to maintain our balance. The visual system is what we rely on most. The somato-sensory system controls our awareness of our bodies in the space around us. The vestibular system in our inner ear helps our brains figure out which way is up.

When white-out conditions take away our vision, the other balance systems have to take up the slack. They often fail. To see how this happens, stand on one foot, find your center, and then close your eyes.

In the abstract of a 1995 paper published in the journal Acta Oto-Laryngologica, Häusler wrote:

“The pathophysiology seems to be related to vestibular overstimulation from winding turns on uneven ground, insufficient visual control, especially on foggy days with reduced visibility (on so-called “white days,”) often in connection with minor ophthalmologic problems such as myopia or astigmatism and altered somato-sensory input due to the wearing of ski boots and skis.”

I couldn’t have said it better. Fortunately, you don’t need a dose of Dramamine to recover. Just find an area of the mountain with better visibility.

Finally, the Chair 6 loading area materialized out of the void. My wingman was patiently waiting for me. We headed for familiar territory in the front side trees, looking for safe, predictable lines. Later it turned out that the only place to find any visibility on the mountain was in the lodge. My tour of Mount Spokane’s new territory would have to wait for another day.