Now my poem Moving Line.

Started mornings where we stopped the night before.

Shoved woo stockinged feet into cold boots.

Mitten falls of cold corn mush into warm mouths, clapped boots to skis hoisted packs to bags.

Eager to bear that and strode off into each bright white morning of sunlit snow.

Six weeks, single file, 490 miles across Colorado, the skis of three men tracing a line never before draws.

The plan was to ski across Colorado.

We were sort of willing to take the positio that there wasn't somebody else telling us the correct way to do this.

That we were putting it together ourselves.

How do you sleep?

How do you eat?

How do you move?

What's on your feet?

What's your hat like?

We weren't doing anything by the book.

There was no book.

And so when you say that we were the first to ski across the state, it may be so that that's the case.

But to me, that seeme like that's what life was about.

One should go on these journeys.

In in the Wild Lands.

One has to kind of get metaphorical to be able to describe these kinds of experiences.

The very act that one's story, when I look backward, is marked on to the land behind me.

I felt like we were the artists on the canvas.

The moment you left that mark and the snow.

At the time, I may not have understood that this journey was not just a journey, but my entire life's journey.

And it became both the expression of and the experience of my life working.

I'm a kinetic artist, which means I think that expression has not materiality, not the stuff, but the way that it moves.

The reality is defined by the motion itself.

This notion of being out in nature as a moving element.

And what I realized on the Colorado trip was what's important is not who you are.

It's how you move.

When I was growing up in Boulder, I got my first skis when I was ten years old in the late 1940s.

Boulder made its own ski area upon the mesas here, west of Chautauqua.

It was a very primitive ski area, but it was a start for all of us.

And then I learned about cross-country Nordic skis.

They're narrower and have a different kind of binding.

But back in those days, we couldn't get any of those skis.

So we bought downhill skis from the Army surplus store, and we used a bandsaw to slice strips off the sides of the skis to make them narrower and lighter.

Once I started cross-country skiing, I became fascinated by polar exploration.

I was especially captivated by Freddy of Nansen crossing Greenland in 1888 to 1889.

No high tech, no support, just him and five other guys crossing all of Greenland on skis.

And so he became my signatur hero for expeditionary skiing.

When I got to Boulder, I wanted to ski.

I had heard about this gu saying, he's going to lead a ski tour up in the mountains and meet at this parking lot.

And I just showed up at that, and there was Alex and we just went, boom!

By the late 60s, John was already a ski buddy.

And then in the early 70s, we ski the length of Yellowstone National Park.

It was our first serious expedition, and it was a well researched, well-planned, well executed expedition.

So once I was thinking in terms of expeditionary skiing, I wanted to do something big, like ski across Colorado.

And so several years after the Yellowstone trip, this cross, Colorado plan came up.

And then Alex and I basically planned that trip.

And Peter.

Peter was a ver likable, well-educated fellow.

The three of us got along absolutely wonderfully.

He was on our first Yellowstone expedition in 1973, and I admired the fact that he was an extremely competent backcountry skier.

Peter was great.

He was a great person in my life.

When was the last time you heard from Peter?

45 years ago, basically.

And never again afte the expedition where he is now.

I have no idea.

My parents got me on skis at a very young age.

I was six years old, and, like Alex, I learned in a very kind of primitive type of ski.

Hill moved to Colorado, and that's where I met John.

And, John was the one that go me turned on to Nordic skiing.

And we used to go out and do day stuff outside of Boulder.

John and Alex came to me with the idea of the trip, and I don't think I hesitated for too long.

I just wanted to experience what that was like for being out there that deep for that long.

There was a lot of work prior to the trip that was needed.

It took almost a full year of planning the route.

We did some summer scouting.

Some very critical spots neede to be looked at in the summer.

Time to see if they were safe.

The Colorado Mountain Trail Foundation had given us a grant that helped us finance the trip, because they wer very interested in our project, because they wanted to kno what our route was going to be.

And then, after extensive route planning and research, we decided that we would ski across Colorado from near Durango and southwestern Colorado to the Medicine Bo range of far northern Colorado.

And so once Peter joined and we had figured out what the route was, I think we decided, yeah, we can ski across Colorado.

Let's do it.

Starting in the San Juan Alps, hot lava rock hardened by 80 million winters of deep snow through its Silverton snow packed streets up to the treeless mesas 12,000ft high, that capped the Rio Grande headwaters.

Mesa, shaped like an envelope or summer of lightning to hammer sparks on.

Dropped to create Creed.

Crouched in the shadow of cliffs that once echoed pistol assassinate.

Wound along the coac at top of hills to Monarch Pass, where spring melt flows west to the Colorado, at least to the Arkansas.

Climb through the side.

Watch among high peaks, bursting into the sky through the high elk graves to fabled aspen.

From on high and down to streets streaked with spray mud.

Climb through the chain of cars.

Your legs breath held under tippy slopes, flanked rearward of the mountain bearing a Holy cross.

Chain gang down a stream bed turning fast from snow to water.

Climbe a spiked gore range with lashing winds, then ski down perfect slopes of snow.

Climb north from Keystone to the Williams.

Work in Vasquez Ranges touched down at Frazier.

Crept off 20 miles to Monarch Lake Cove, Lakeside to Grand Lake, then north to the national park that was backside to our own home across the Continental Divide.

The seventh and last time round the headwaters of the Pooter.

And finally Medicine Bow, close by Wyoming, where our track ended and the plowed road began.

Our motto was, all we need to do is eat, sleep and travel.

So going light became the theme of the trip.

The signature motivation for the expeditio was to have lightweight packs.

Our packs a three Yellowstone were about 45 pounds.

The packs of skiing acros Colorado were under a 20 pounds.

We decided as a group to switch from wooden skis to fiberglass skis, just because they were a little bit less breakable.

John was a complete master at the sewing machine, and he sold us a lightweight tent that required no poles.

We could just set it up with skis.

We had avalanche beacons and avalanche shovels for avalanche rescue.

We also decided we would no carry a stove and gas cartridges that we would cook over an open fire.

That meant we would only cook in the evening.

We would have cold breakfast and just wake it up i the morning, have a few snacks and take off skiing.

And so we were planning and testing out foods and, you know there were all kinds of things about ho how can you fit this in a pack.

And Alex had the idea for having the food so we didn't have to carry on our backs.

Part of going light was to use cache buckets for our food supply.

We put stuff in the buckets and buried them in the snow at various sites.

The caches had food as well as more ski wax, 35 millimeter film, and the quadrangle map for the next section of the trip.

I remember having some reading materia and I cut the book up, and just in the next cache I would have more more pages to read.

So there was always something to look forward to in a new cache, and we had stickers made to put on the bucket saying, if you should happen to find this cache, please do not disturb in any way.

Lives depend on it.

Thanks and backcountry greetings.

It took us a whole week to drop off the caches.

We started driving from Boulder to Grand Lake and then south through the state, deposited 19 cache buckets.

And we put all these thing in on the way down to Durango.

We spent maybe two day in Durango doing things and then we departed on the trip.

It was March 15th, 1978.

So that was key because you still had good snow that you could scale and you had the warmth of spring.

Our very first day out, we climbe 3000ft up to a very high ridge and a very strong blizzard started lashing us.

The wind whips up the snow during a blizzard, and so the visibility can go down to absolute zero.

To not fall over, you have to like, look at your feet as you're walking with wind and hear this.

It's like being in outer space or something.

We didn't have a GPS device, but when that happened, we knew from our navigatin on the map exactly where we were and we could take a compass bearing and just follow the compass.

The idea was to work with the weather and then beyond that, suffer it because there's no turning back.

If you're out side 24 seven for weeks at a time, your body gets so used to it you never feel cold.

But for the most part, we had some really nice, beautiful Colorado bluebird days.

You know, the wind is and blowing all the time and after it's been blown and stops, it's serene.

Wove our tracks through places wild and far.

Remote in summer and forgotten in winter.

In perfect silence.

Our raven shadows three.

And a line darkened the snow for a brief gliding instants.

The classic day was pulling this huge climb up the side of some horrific ridge, and getting up to that little pass that was up at the top.

Now I'm sitting on a roller coaster ride that goes into my future as far as I can see.

We were moving along this general course, but there was a freedom about a kind of a waiver from that course.

Where do you camp?

Where did where do you go?

Up in the plateau.

What's your line?

Everything is being adjusted at all times.

The way you behave, what you're thinking.

And no wa was it about getting to the end.

It was really abou the co-creation between you and.

And the natural.

We were creating this art project and it was a magnificent artwork.

Ther was a sense of accomplishment, a sense of paying clos attention to what you're doing.

The satisfactio that what you try to do works.

And then, of course, there was mishaps.

We all got giardia on the second day out from Creede by drinking from a stream that probably in the summer, was polluted by cattle.

That was a bad day.

And at that point, Girard had just become known by people.

Before that, you could you could take your metal, share a cup and just dip in the creek and and just drink right out of the creek.

We're learning problems.

We had very lightweight boots with a different kind of binding.

Don't needed by a company in Minnesota.

But the boots were not strong enough and the soles started to peel, peel off, and we had to tape our boots together to keep them going.

By the time we got to Aspen, we had to discontinue using that kind of boot.

And John's wife, Sally, brought our own ski boots to us in Aspen.

I can remember driving over to Aspen to see John and he had lost all this weight.

He had been ill and he just looked like he had gone ahead to, like, asceticism or just hung the edge.

And so it wasn't the best connection between he and I, because it was almost like he couldn't see me because he was so use to looking at some far horizon.

She saw that right away, like I was always just looking beyond her.

If you're in a snow field there's nothing talking to you.

Unless an individual rock shows up, you need to suddenly see it.

But my eyesight is looking at the whole field to learn what's going on in all of it.

Drew our line forward a dozen miles a day, thre moving specks and a vast white a scale of things we liked and sort.

Arms and shoulders taut to the task.

Like ropes.

Hoisting sails.

Those sails, our lungs blown full by clean mountain air.

That made us feel like ships floating in the sky.

By day 38, we got to the Vail Pass Highway, and when we had buried a cash bucket that was one of two episodes on the trip where our cash was gone and we had no extra food.

That was the day I really wanted to quit so many times.

John and Alex kept, you know, encouraging me a little bit more, a little bit more.

They were very patient in this food cycle where literally, I don't know if I can clim that next hill without eating.

The very effort to keep moving seemed enormous.

The only option was to keep skiing.

We were in such good shap by then, so we weren't panicked, wasn't pleasant.

That's all.

But you keep coming back to the rhythm of skiing and the glide.

And that's all you're doing is gliding, breathing.

You're off.

And your head of course, just like meditating.

And there's a transcendence about it.

You know, you feel like you're really out there, but you felt like you were more integrated with it.

I had never felt like that in my life.

And the deepe I go back into the wilderness, the deeper I feel that.

This love of the land and the mountains and nature and snow on sky is some kind of human experience.

My experience was being an active agent in something that is creating itself as you participate in it.

And on this journey, we were the active artist Creational element.

I think that art is a form of exploration and exploration, especially through untracked wilderness terrain is definitely a form of creativity.

There are lots of different ways of enjoying the outdoors and becoming inspired by the outdoors.

To be creative.

And that's where we got the idea of a moving line.

The skis are not just metaphorically, but literally drawing a line on the snow.

The line was both real and imagined.

There was beauty in that side.

There was also historical significance in that thought.

I like making contact with nature and finding words to describe that.

The idea of the moving line was definitely a poetic inspiration for me.

So poetry became the central creative part of my life.

That's really sustained me in my old age.

I think there's this feeling of looking back at these lines drawn on the land as kind of proof that I existed, or the more than that, that it was good.

And the line is somehow enlivening me now, even.

It's still part of this wonderful life.

A line that fades to nothing in the spring, yet stays forever as a shining light in the memories of those who made it.

The trip took us six weeks.

Our total altitude gain was 65,000ft.

Our total miles 490.

And the whole time.

From Durango to Chambers Lake, we saw zero people.

Not one single person in the backcountry.

We finished on May 3rd, 1978.

We hitched a ride and got to Fort Collins.

I can so clearly remember seeing lilacs in bloom and just pulling that lie that blossoms into my face.

That was a glorious experience.

So in that sense, it was time for the trip to be over.

But there wasn't any sense of relief.

I am glad this is done with, like John Muir used to say, going off into nature is like going home.

And after so many day and weeks, being in that space, it felt very much like home.

The goal was to do this crossing of the state.

That that was a worthwhile thing to do and a human life.

But I'm wondering whether ther was a sense of accomplishment, you know, because lots of people have crossed the state.

We're not the first people to cross the state in all kinds of ways of traveling.

So did I ever do anything new?

I did something wonderful.

I know it was wonderful.

It was very satisfying to have accomplished the trip, but I became extremely busy.

And in the years following the expedition, I can't remember how much I stayed in touch with John and his wife, Sally.

But Peter just faded out of the picture for me.

I'm not a person who tends to keep in touch with people you know, over the years.

That's just not my personality.

I'm kind of a loner type.

Hi, Johnny.

Nice to see you.

Yeah.

It's good to see you.

It's going to be pretty exciting to see Peter after after 45 years.

I am so curious.

You ready?

I guess.

Oh, here he comes.

I see him with the cap.

Hey, there.

You look vaguely familiar to people.

Hey, Peter.

Yeah.

How are we doing?

Yeah, it's worth it.

Did you.

Do you have fond memories o skiing across Colorado, Peter?

I do, I do.

Very much so.

And, I appreciate you two inviting me on that trip.

And we know that was.

That was huge.

I can say it was one of the highlights of my life.

I have nothing but wonderful memories of the trip.

I think it was the toughest thing I've ever done.

And.

And probabl the best thing I've ever done.

But on a level you keep wanting to go back to and and get more of it.

I felt like my life was utterly changed by that trip.

Yeah, even to the point of being a different person.

I think there is something else in us, in our in our consciousness, that loves the empty space.

And this is very similar to the artistic mind you are in creatio and therefore are the creator.

At the same time.

There's an expression that has been used throughout my life b those of us who go into nature.

The expression is either you can't or it's hard to bring it back with you, that there's this experience you get into out there that feels so total and so immersive and so completely right.

How do you bring it back?

Yeah.

How do you bring it back?

The answer is that this creative self tha is the same self that's there, that's out there, brings it back by being itself.

You just keep on creating.

There's things still moving.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's still moving.

We're part of history.

Like it or not.

Like it or not.

Right.

I now consider it not only just a memory, but a permanent piece of art.