Trail crew started Monday. This year I'm running it: six kids and me. Two jobs. A footbridge over Silverjack Creek where the bike trail crosses it, and two miles of new trail on the north side that the mountain wants open by the middle of August.

There's still snow in the trees above ten thousand feet. The creek is high and brown and loud. We haul timbers in on a four-wheeler as far as it'll go and carry them the last quarter mile on our shoulders, two kids to a beam, me in front calling the turns. Same as a sled, really.

I found my bamboo pole. It was lying flat on the needles under the spruce, faded nearly white. I put it in the truck. I don't know why. It's in the garage now, standing in the corner next to the snow shovel.

I won't say much about Columbine. Everybody in Colorado has been watching the same television since Tuesday and feeling the same thing, and I don't have anything to add that's worth adding.

I've been an EMT eleven years. What I keep thinking about are the crews: the paramedics and the deputies and the firemen in their gear on the lawn, waiting until it was safe to go in. That's the worst part of the job, when you're right there and you can't go in yet. And the parents at the school down the road, waiting for the buses, waiting for names.

Shannon and I went to the church in town last night. We don't go to church. It was full. Nobody said much. That was right.

That's all I've got.

Closing day. Season three: 112 days, 58 sleds, no tree wells.

Tonight on the step Shannon said she wants to come to Kansas with me this summer for harvest. She grew up on a dairy farm, she said, she can drive a grain truck in her sleep, and she'd like to meet my mother before my mother dies of curiosity.

I said all right.

She said, "That's it? All right?"

I said all right was a lot, coming from me. She agreed with that.

A year and two days.

Friday on sweep I stopped at the spruce in Silverjack and stood there a minute. There's nothing to see. It's a tree with a hole under it, same as a thousand others. I put a bamboo pole in the snow at the edge where you'd come in from the glade, the way we mark a hazard. It'll melt out in May and trail crew will find it lying there in June and wonder what it was for. It'll probably be me.

Last night I slept fine. I want to put that down too.

SEASON: 98 days, 50 sleds

They came.

Dad and Craig drove out Tuesday in Craig's pickup. Craig got somebody to cover his school bus route. (He drives one mornings now, for the cash. Wheat's still low.) Dad slept in our spare room under Shannon's grandmother's quilt and said it was the best bed he's been in since Truman.

Yesterday they came up the mountain. Neither of them skis. Shannon got them foot passes and loaded them onto Number 4 herself, which means she slowed the chair to a crawl and lectured them about the safety bar like they were nine.

At the top Dad stood out by the shack in his feed-store cap and his good coat and looked at the view a long time. Then he looked at the shack, and the sleds racked outside it, and the radio on my chest.

I had a call at eleven. A wrist, nothing much, but I brought the sled down the face of Lode right past where they were standing. Dad watched the whole way. Craig told me later Dad didn't say a word till I was out of sight, and then he said, "He doesn't go too fast." That's the highest praise anybody in my family has ever given anybody.

At supper Craig talked about the farm. Dad's knees are bad. The question nobody's asked out loud is what happens to the place when Dad stops, and whether I want a piece of it. Craig asked me tonight on the step. I said I'd think. I already know. So does he.

They leave in the morning. Shannon's packing them sandwiches like they're going to war.

SEASON: 84 days, 41 sleds

Christmas on the hill again. Twelve sleds by two o'clock.

A Christmas card came Tuesday from Texas. A real one, with a cardinal on the front. His mother signed it and so did he. He's in college, studying to be a teacher. He's going skiing in New Mexico over spring break with his church group. "Groomed runs only," he wrote, and underlined it twice.

Shannon put the card on the refrigerator next to the electric bill and her nephew's school picture.

Called home at lunch. They passed the phone around. Katherine is seven and wants to be a ski patroller. Maxwell is four and wants to be a garbage truck. Dad got on and said, "You got snow?" and I said yes and he said, "Well." Then he said he and Craig might drive out in February, when there's nothing to do on the farm but look at it. My father went to see Pikes Peak in 1958 and decided he'd seen the mountains.

I'll believe it when his truck's in my driveway.

SEASON: 34 days, 15 sleds

Third season. Opened Friday on two runs of man-made, same as always.

This year Gilley put me in charge of sled training for the rookies. Seven of them. They're good skiers, better than I was. None of them has ever brought a big man down an icy pitch in flat light with his wife skiing alongside crying.

So we practice. We load each other. We take turns being the patient, which is how you learn what it's like in there. You're wrapped up tight. You can't see anything but sky. Every bump comes right up your spine, and you're completely in the hands of somebody you've never met. I make every rookie ride down the steepest pitch on the mountain with their eyes open. Huntley did it to me. I didn't understand why until I was in there.

There's a girl from Vermont, twenty-two, who rode the whole way down without a sound, then climbed out and said, "Okay. I'm going to be gentler." That's the whole lesson. I don't know how to teach it to the ones who don't get it on their own.

Raise to nine dollars.

SEASON: 3 days, 0 sleds