Going to Extremes

After several days of watching winter storm systems move across the surrounding mountains and becoming quite familiar with the decor of watering hole Whiskey Jack's and the taste of bison burgers, I'm starting to not feel quite as out of place as I did the first few days at the Summit Lodge here in Big Sky, Montana. But I'm still pretty out of place. One thing I've come to realize as I mingle with the slope fanatics here is that extreme sports has overtaken baseball as our national past time.

It's everywhere. I accompanied Jane the other night to a program billing itself as a look at the Telluride Film Festival, with highlights from recent showings. Being a bit of a film buff, I looked forward to seeing clips from Telluride premiers like the Qatsi Trilogy or Elephant, or perhaps segments featuring perennial favorites like Werner Herzog or Andrei Tarkovsky. What I had overlooked was that the evening's presentation was actually focusing on the Mountainfilm in Telluride festival, a completely different entity that presents mountain and adventure films. Rather than European art films and American indie projects, I watched short pieces on totally dudical rock climbers and white water rafters bearing a resemblance to Phish roadies. These Not-Ready-For-the-Learning-Channel projects paid tribute to the growing notion that untouched wilderness areas exist primarily as playgrounds for endurance-testers. While others oohed and awed to the feats of athletic skill on display, I wondered what the park service thought about the holes the rock climber gouged into the pristine Humboldt County coastal boulders he scrambled over (his The More You Know-style "don't litter" speech at film's end struck me as particularly ludicrous). When the extreme rafters blathered on about the need to protect the jungles of Papua New Guinea and preserve the many indigenous peoples from the threat of monolithic world cultures, I wondered how blasting the music of DJ Shadow and Bob Marley to images of white dudes plunging down rapids helped further this goal of cultural preservation. In the end, I left the screening with a deep suspicion that there are far too many DV cameras out there.

But even the Mountainfilm at Telluride presentation had some highlights (a charming short feature on sno-cones in the Peruvian Andes offered artfully-staged imagery and inventive editing). The same could not be said of the following night's speech / presentation / hero worship session by a self-professed Adventure Racing warrior. I admit to being unfamiliar with the concept of Adventure Racing until last night. Reliable sources describe it as a physically punishing extreme sport that can drag on for seven days of racing, cycling, kayaking or swimming, over inhospitable terrain, with sleep or rest not optional. Our presenter informed us that Adventure Racing was invented by French athletes in the late 1970s, which would put it up there with mime as one of the few French innovations the world might be better off without. Our speaker was nearly fifteen minutes late - apparently arriving on time for a conference presentation is more demanding than paragliding across Borneo. Within a few minutes of taking the stage, she had referred to the concept of "teamwork" some half-dozen times. She put up a powerpoint presentation with six different variations on the word "team" on the first slide alone. She referred enthusiastically to something she dubbed "group synergy" and promised to help us unlock our own synergistic principles. When she mentioned that she normally gave this presentation to corporate retreats, I started scouting the exits.

The naturalist in me dislikes the confusion of pristine wilderness with an open gym membership. The anarchist in me rejects using athletic group synergy motivational speeches to help maximize profits for corporate headquarters. And the ironist in me can only take so much sweat-encrusted wind-burned earnestness and muscle flexing before he decamps to the hotel room.

The scenery here is beautiful.