Why a Solo Trip Is the Best Form of Self Care
I hoisted my boot bag over my shoulder and slowly eased the sliding door open, stepping into air still heavy with the scent of smoke. I felt more than a little guilty creeping out while my kids were still asleep, but I was trying to draw as little attention as possible to the fact that I was escaping to 12,000 feet, high in the Rocky Mountains. After all, my kids would be okay. They were now back in their own beds after being evacuated to a hotel room for 11 days with me, my husband, and our three cats while the Palisades Fire loomed nearby. We all needed some space. But when my oldest son found out I’d left, he wasn’t angry about that—he was mad he didn’t get to come.
“But Mom, we ski together.”
“Yes, Max, that’s precisely the point.”
I headed to Crested Butte, Colorado’s Eleven Scarp Ridge Lodge, which runs a snowcat skiing operation out of a ghost town called Irwin. At one point in the 19th century, this former mining town was home to 5,000. Now it’s home to a few snowcats’ worth of skiers a day and an extensive snow safety team that mitigates potential avalanches with explosives. Thanks to two adjacent peaks that halt clouds in a weather phenomenon called orographic lifting, over 1,000 acres operated by Eleven gets hit with 450 inches of dry, cold-smoke powder a year, two times what the rest of Crested Butte can expect.
Even though my solo ski trip had been on the books long before the fires broke out, I probably could have brought my kids as last-minute add-ons: Scarp Ridge Lodge has five en suite bedrooms and a bunk room for little ones (there’s also a second building in town called Eleven Sopris House), which means you can either book by the room or do a full-property buyout, as many groups of friends and family do. Next time. I had to remind myself through a fleeting wave of mom guilt that the point of this getaway was to ski as hard as I could, mostly alone.
The author on her first day of skiing.
Until I went away to high school, I skied competitively—moguls, specifically. I put in 70 days a year, keeping my legs pinned together, my shins pressed against the front of my boots, while I perfected tight turns compulsively. I’m a very good skier. It’s probably the thing I do best, and for a minute, I thought about trying to go all the way. But ultimately, it wasn’t competing that I loved most. Unless I was following the boys on my ski team out of bounds and into the trees, being pushed beyond my own sense of self-mastery, what I loved most was skiing by myself in a type of moving meditation.
Like many parents, I had been eager to get my two sons onto skis, not understanding what I was sacrificing in the process: my own freedom to move around the mountain. For the past seven years, I’d been hauling extra skis on my shoulders, shoving little feet into boots, recovering lost mittens, sourcing endless snacks, and marshaling my kids onto lifts—then following them down the jump trails of their choosing and paparazzi’ing them with my phone so they could watch their little tricks over hot cocoa. One day, during the week we get to ski every February, I did the same top-to-bottom cat track with my youngest nine times. My thighs throbbed from snowplowing and my feet were numb from the cold. Yet this trip back home to Montana every winter is something I love.
In Colorado, though, I only had to look out for myself. I could roll onto the cat ski after a hearty breakfast and some acclimatizing electrolytes and let the Eleven guides do the rest. Parenting can be summarized as weighing and making a vast number of decisions every day and then generating enough momentum to keep everyone in motion until bedtime. Relinquishing control and being told where to go, and when, is a fantasy few moms can afford. As we reached the summit and strapped into our skis, I followed our lead guide, Megan, down little couloirs into spotless aprons of powder; the tail guide, another extraordinary woman, swept from behind, ensuring everyone made it through intact. We did this six, seven, eight times a day—dropping into chutes, navigating through tight patches of forest—stopping only for an hour at lunch to stretch out our legs by the fire in a beautifully restored cabin and feast on chicken Parmesan and elk shepherd’s pie.
The entire house is enriched with extra oxygen, making the ascent to the mountain town a little easier for those who live at sea level.
Anyone who has lived through a forest fire—watching nature naturing from aerial shots on TV, praying your home will escape the flames’ wrath—will acknowledge the fear that can settle in the body from abject powerlessness in the face of something so mighty. As I stood on the mountain the second day, looking down a particularly steep and narrow stretch that required navigating between two small cliffs, I could feel something in me release: a resynchronization, a recalibration. I could let the snow take my fear. Yes, I had an avalanche beacon strapped to my chest, and yes, I was skiing to the edge of my capacity as an out-of-shape 45-year-old who now lives at sea level in Los Angeles, but I could move down this face gracefully, easily, as I’d always known how to do.
Later that night, as I slipped into the heated pool back at Scarp Ridge Lodge, I let the saltwater hold me—and finally allowed myself to cry. I’d been holding a lot, over-functioning through anxiety as so many moms know how to do. As I floated around, I knew I was safe—exhausted and yet back in my powerful body.
The next day, as my plane from Gunnison descended into Denver, we were buffeted by winter turbulence, and the woman next to me reached for a barf bag. My oldest son can’t take a car ride longer than 30 minutes without Dramamine, and I carry a kit for him. I knew just how to mother her to the ground. Fresh bag? A wipe? A gently rubbed back? Max would laugh at this payback as if he’d been with me all along.
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