Lou Dawson's Memoir Is One of the Best Mountain(s)-Related Books in Years

Stories about climbing, skiing, and generally conquering the Rocky Mountain West offer insights into how the heroes that did such conquering did such conquering.

Huge, visionary, exemplary are the adjectives.

Audacity, tenacity, hyperactivity, superlatively ... the whatevers.

Toss in an adjective, adverb, weird specialized term or two, and you can pull together the greaser for the next over-hyped ski flick. Or a tagline for your own brand.

That's all good and well, but oftentimes such self-reflection is questionable. I remember when Layton Kor's Beyond the Vertical came out in 1983. Reviewers warned of self-promotion—or worse.

Well, if you can concentrate for longer than an Instagram squirt, Lou Dawson is your man and he has assembled a book you need to read.

It's called Avalanche Dreams: A Memoir of Skiing, Climbing, and Life .

I'll explain why you should buy it, read it, and read it again.

Millions of America's bored eastern youth are massing along the spine of the Rocky Mountains. Every one of those kids wants to be a mountain-sports star of some kind: the greatest skier to every don the boards, the sendingest climber on the scantily trod 5.15 scene, the poundingest runner in a landscape of waddling joggers.

Everyone wants to—insert verb here—in the mountains. And to be elite in the process.

The problem with those goals is that you need to put in the miles/hours/effort. You need to do the work. (The dreaded w-word.)

You need to get on the grumpy end of a pound-fest on the Fisher Towers' biggest nastystone or do the brain-bending work required of the scariest route in the Black Canyon.

You need to ski wild peaks. You need to try and push out the biggest, most important climbs in America fastest. It takes decades and decades at the sharpest of edges.

Lou Dawson has done all that stuff, ridden those edges, and his is one of the greatest resumes of an adventurer in the modern-day West. This is your new life guide.

To be honest, I had no idea. I thought he was some kinda ski nerd in Carbondale. To be sure, he is, but at the same time he's a whole lot more.

Dawson has not just described some of the more important climbing and skiing of his life (massively impressive stuff, as my build up would suggest), he's written a book for the ages about mountain towns, hippy culture, skiing, and climbing—but also offers something that I found decidedly cleansing: his attitude.

Let's go back a bit.

Dawson spent his early years in Texas. While he was a youngish man, he popped snakes and scared classmates. As the years went by, Dawson's father drifted more into the realm of hippiedom and eventually took his family along for the flight.

Aspen was the landing zone, and that's where our young writer grew up—more of less—in a loving but dysfunctional family. This is a must-read for any mountain-town refugee.

Colorado ski towns were once the abode of the flower generation, more so than I'd realized, and Dawson does an excellent job describing the long-hair influx.

He nurses it down to the specific drugs, the soul-crushing problems, and the sometimes blemishing outcomes. These towns were filled with questionable people.

As he got older ("grew up" is maybe a stretch), Dawson became a climber, and that dominated much of his life. His pioneering climbs are well known (a few credited to "Lew Dawson" courtesy of Climbing magazine's one-time editor David Bentley).

Stuff like the first ascent of the Ames Ice Hose and a very close drive-by on the first one-day ascent of the Nose are remarkable achievements—yup, remarkably, Dawson & Co. nearly bumped Long, Westbay, and the Bird out of NIAD honors.

His multi-year first ski descents of all Colorado's fourteeners is a landmark achievement. But the extensiveness of all his adventures in the wild are what impressed me as a student of feral activities in the woods.

Some of these stories are flat out frightening. His retelling of climbing Denali in 1973 is one for the ages. Freezing, starving, and running low on everything including mental clarity, Dawson and his companions pushed out one of the scarier Denali ordeals ever documented.

And while most readers won't know how terrifying nailing in the Fisher Towers can be, this book will give them some inclination. His stories are like a typical desert road trip: a hoot on the public side of things and a debilitating nightmare in the head.

While every adventure today is recorded on multiple iPhones and posted before the belligerents are even on the airplane home, Dawson and his rag-tag crew—some of whom clearly weren't fit to be part of his rag-tag crew—walked to the very edges of adventure with barely a mention of these adventures in the public records.

Back then, the two more prevalent types of literary conflict were man versus himself and man versus the environment. Nowadays it's man versus the 6 billion other Instagram posters.

But what will impress you most about this book is his writing, his style. The bloke knows how to polish the language to the point where it shimmers like a pond in Golden. Dawson seems to craft each sentence as if it were to become a stand-alone quote, a stand-alone idea. Something to stamp on a trusted tea mug.

And if you wanna be a writer, copyeditor, whatever, study these sentences. He uses every n and m dash perfectly, he knows where commas go, he understands syntax (that bizarre word that means arrangement).

On top of those qualities, Dawson's tinkering with words is nothing short of gorgeous.

• "... my world spun like summer tornadoes we sometimes spotted in the distance, dragging their mud-gray fingers across the grasslands."

• "Between us, uneasy silence floated in the cloying air."

• "... when the distant hulk of Denali had pulled us through our pain as a nirvanic beacon."

• "As the five of us climbed from his van, our heads craned up like begging dogs."

• "As the sandstone shaman pounded away, a constant rain of effluent poured on our heads."

• "Back inside, I kneeled next to the man-pile."

• "Great literature was supposed to save you, not measure your demise."

• "The hallucinated rainbows and lawn sprinklers were as real as my hand in front of my face."

And those quotes are just from the first couple of chapters.

You get my long-labored point. Dawson's writing is visceral, earthy, dancing, and never dull. Dawson could write a book about Glad Wrap and I'd be an eager fan, devouring every word the way a pauper smackeroos through an old muffin wedged in the butter door.

One proof that Dawson is a master is his brow-lifting use of two- and three-word sentences. "I tried harder. Quivered harder. Nothing worked." Three full sentences in just seven words. You're not gonna run into a lot of writers who can do that. And Dawson does it repeatedly and with great effect ... thus annoying writers who can't. Like me. Never ever. Nope. Thanks, Lou.

What's that expression? "I'd write you a shorter letter if I had the time."

Avalanche Dreams is destined to become a classic. It's like one of those films where every line is a quote waiting to be enshrined in the annals of mountaineering culture.

I would've quoted a lot more of Dawson's book, but the cut-and-paste function involved with the PDF wasn't dancing my tune, if you get my drift.

But the best part of this book? Dawson reflects on everything. In our modern "post-it-immediately" world, there's no time for reflection, to ponder the mistakes we've made and the blunders we're currently stumbling through. Looking back is the greatest guide you'll ever have in your life. Dawson knows that and uses it with subtle and understated emphasis.

By calling it "the Best Mountain-Related Book in Years" I'll probably hear from a few detractors. Go for it. And in the meantime, show me a better tale—or series of tales. I'm all ears. And we can debate the matter. Or not. Maybe.

But for now, I just need to talk this writer into finishing the book I'm writing.

Lou, you free?