FIELDS SPRING STATE PARK — A cross-country skiing accident on a snowy trail in a familiar place made me grasp how simultaneously resilient and fragile the human body is.
It was early February 2020, just before the overwhelming magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic hit. I fell on an excursion to the Puffer Butte warming hut — a destination I try to reach at least once a year.
The accident put that tradition on a five-year hiatus that ended this winter with a glorious return.
But that was after the injury created a series of challenges that tested me in ways that I didn’t anticipate.
The hut at Fields Spring is one of my favorite places. It’s just a short drive from where I live in Lewiston. The views its trails offer are unsurpassed, especially the panoramas of the mountains that surround Wallowa Lake. They’re at their height when snow covers the ground.
I love visiting that vista so much that I had dismissed concerns that surfaced five years ago when I arrived at the trailhead with friends.
My thoughts were conflicted. There was a lot of snow, but it was icy and hard. I knew it would be easy to get going too fast. Turning on long, thin cross country skis is cumbersome at best. On the steep, winding routes at Fields Spring it can be particularly difficult, especially when the snow is slick.
Optimistically, the conditions can be terrible at the base at Fields Spring, but vastly better about 100 yards up the trail leading to the butte.
And I know that waiting for perfect conditions means losing out on great adventures. One of my best outings at the park started by carrying my skis over mud before putting them on where the snow started.
I kept my concerns to myself. In hindsight, I wish I had paid more attention to my gut. We reached the hut without any problems even though the snow didn’t improve as we went along.
At the hut, I switched skis with a friend, thinking we were both getting gear more suited to our needs.
My guard was down ever so slightly because of the better skis and my confidence in my knowledge of the trail. I thought the trail near the hut was flat. I was going to sidestep a steep section. That proved to be a huge miscalculation.
Soon I was speeding so quickly, I purposely crashed, thinking I had chosen my timing to avoid getting hurt.
I was wrong. The thumb on my right hand got stuck in the strap on my ski pole and bent back, damaging a ligament.
It would be days before I learned all of that. At the time, I knew something was off, but nothing hurt that bad. I took off my skis and walked back to the car with my friends, rather than completing a loop.
When we reached my car, I realized the injury was so severe I couldn’t put the keys into the ignition with my right, dominant hand. Still I wasn’t really that concerned. The pain was no worse than the mild bruising that often follows falls on skis.
As a precaution, I went to urgent care after I drove us back to Lewiston. They put my hand in a brace.
I thought that would essentially be the end of it — that I would wear a brace for a few weeks and be back to normal.
Instead, I had to undergo surgery to repair the injury. Afterward, my hand and forearm were immobilized in a cast for weeks.
As minor as the injury was, it disrupted almost everything I did other than walking and sitting.
It altered how I slept, buttoned shirts, cut vegetables for my daily lunch salads, held the steering wheel on my car and — these were the scariest of all — wrote and typed, basic motor skills required to complete the tasks required for my job.
My friends rallied around me while we all started to face circumstances we had never encountered as COVID-19 restrictions took effect.
As I recovered, one of the most intense phases of the pandemic started. Almost all businesses and public agencies had stopped doing business in person.
The world felt eerily quiet as we waited for what would happen next. It’s so easy to forget how chaotic the spring of 2020 was.
Amid shortages of necessities like toilet paper, we didn’t know if hospitals and clinics would have the staffing and supplies to treat a higher volume of patients.
We didn’t know when everything would reopen, who would be employed when that happened, who would get sick and how serious the illnesses would be.
I was lucky to be working, but everything kept getting more complicated.
With one hand in a cast that was supposed to stay dry, it was almost impossible to wash my hands.
Even at the early stages of the pandemic, handwashing was one of the few ways that had been identified to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
My daughter came back from college and I joined almost everyone else on the Tribune staff working from home.
I scrambled to call and email my sources to be sure they could reach me. My daughter learned how to attend class virtually while I figured out how to cover meetings online.
Our workloads didn’t diminish. But it was the last time she lived at home. In spite of all the uncertainty, on some days it reminded me of the best parts of maternity leave.
As a family, we adjusted to our COVID-19 normal. Against long odds, our daughter found work that summer and once again left home.
We had some glorious outings. We paddled the Palouse River on an unseasonably warm spring day and had a picnic with bags of ingredients the Pie Safe Bakery in Deary was selling in Moscow each week.
The instant Idaho state parks opened for camping, we landed reservations for a long weekend in June.
But still, the skier in me was quietly slipping away as I gained weight and sometimes struggled to breathe, especially when it was cold.
It felt as if I was losing something fundamental. I started my journalism career at the Tribune because it was an outstanding newspaper in an affordable community close to exceptional cross-country skiing.
Before the snow fell in my first year in the job, I sold the saxophone I played in my high school marching band and purchased the pair of cross country skis I still use today from Follett’s Mountain Sports.
My love of cross-country skiing was and continues to be rooted in great experiences.
I was in junior high when a park near Omaha, Neb., where I lived offered lessons. My mom and I took the class. She was around 50 years old, had never been on skis and overcame her own fears to spend time with me.
When I was in journalism school at Northwestern University, I rented skis at the outdoor recreation center and skied along Lake Michigan.
Twice for Christmas, my husband gave me Swix cross-country ski pants. They are durable. I still managed to push the first pair beyond their limits doing things they weren’t made for such as climbing over logs on skis.
But in spite of all that history, the first Christmas after my accident, I felt emptiness when I put out the decorations we have with skiers, a table figurine of a Santa on skis, four little stuffed bears skiing we place on a shelf along our hutch and an ornament for the tree.
A few weeks later, I was still in that head space when a text arrived from a friend. She was celebrating her birthday with a cross-country ski trip. Would I go?
Until that moment, I was pretty certain I had reached a responsible decision to retire from skiing. But the invitation felt — I’m not exaggerating — like a message from God.
Yes. I would go. And since I was going, I dusted off my skis, removed the straps from the poles and arranged a practice run to help me conquer my fears. A friend who’s a registered nurse accepted my invitation to go skiing at Palouse Divide.
The terrain at Palouse Divide is some of the most forgiving in the region and if something went wrong, I would have help right there.
We had a blast, enjoying the swoosh of skis in the snow, the smell of pines, the thrill of gliding down hills and how all food tastes better outside.
That outing led to others. A fog around me lifted. I lost my COVID-19 weight and with it the difficulty breathing disappeared.
Since then I have skied as frequently as my schedule allows, discovering new places like Fourth of July Pass just off Interstate 90 in the Idaho panhandle.
Still my goal of returning to Puffer Butte at Fields Spring remained elusive. I went to the park at least once, but it was too icy to get to the butte.
I followed the forecasts in the winter, looking for a time with good conditions when my schedule was open. That didn’t materialize until a Saturday in February this winter.
At the park, I bought a pass from a park employee who confirmed the snow was great and warned me about a storm that was forecast to hit at 4 p.m.
I had about four hours, which was more than enough time. At the trailhead, another park employee offered more encouragement. He too warned me about the storm. When I said I was going to the warming hut and coming right back, he reminded me to take time to admire the view.
Fields Spring was even better than I remembered. As I climbed the butte, I could see Waha in the distance through the trees. The trees held clumps of snow that looked like cotton balls. Occasionally, they would fall in powdered sugar sprinkles. It felt like being inside a snow globe.
At the top, I headed to the warming hut, past the site of the accident. There I noticed something I had missed in all my previous visits. The place where I fell was a slope, not flat as I remembered, something that didn’t register likely in the context of all the rugged terrain of the park.
At the warming hut, I savored the view and ate my lunch in happy solitude outside on a bench. Two couples arrived separately. We chatted briefly about our appreciation for the scenery and the absolutely perfect snow.
Then came the part of the journey that I dreaded, going down the hill where I tumbled. Between my extra caution and the soft, forgiving snow I navigated the spot without incident.
The day kept getting better. I gave directions to a pair of snowshoers visiting Fields Spring for the first time.
Now I was a veteran expert, not an injured, middle-aged woman who had overestimated her abilities.
I kept going. Descending from the butte, I met a groomer who was heading up the path, improving on the already exceptional conditions. It felt as if someone had laid out a red carpet just for me as I coasted along.
At the bottom with extra time, I went farther rather than returning to my car. So many puzzle pieces were fitting together.
This wasn’t just my first time back at Puffer Butte since the accident, it was my first time skiing Fields Spring solo.
While I had skied or snowshoed almost every trail in the park, I had never paid much attention to how different sections connected. Alone, I watched building capacity for future trips.
I explored without getting lost, carefully following the time. The day kept offering gifts. On a final quick leg, I glimpsed the Seven Devils for a second or two.
Long before the storm started, I was safely back in my car filled with joy, pride and satisfaction.
That would have been more than enough. But there was something even more powerful that I have vowed to keep close — a greater determination to fight for what I love regardless of how impossible it seems.
Williams is the business editor of the Lewiston Tribune. She may be contacted at ewilliam@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2261.
