Knee troubles might deprive joy of skiing, but of the mountains

Acouple of winters ago, I found myself propped on the couch, knee wrapped and held high to drain. You don’t need details except to know that with my knee, the ski season was probably a wrap for the ski season.

“Don’t do anything until you see me,” said my doc, an old friend, gravely. “You can’t take the risk that it won’t heal right.”

This is about the time when you wonder if this doctor knows a thing about skiing, that, A, controlled skiing is far from dangerous, and B, skiing is so important to many peoples’ physical and psychological health that deprivation itself is a health risk.

Now, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I decided that in general, anyone devoted to our winter passion should, when seeking treatment from an orthopedic physician, find out in preliminary conversation if this person skis or is familiar with the sport.

But I was still stuck, and within about two weeks I started to see why so many folks of a certain age head south to duck out of the northern winter. It’s not the cold or snow or wind or dodgy transportation. It’s that there’s nothing to do. Or so it seems.

I had already built more bluebird houses in the basement than I have places to put them, I can only read so much, even of my faves, and TV is simply hopeless.

So what do injured skiers do as the snow piles high in the Green and White mountains and friends send me video clips from Tote Road and Sunday Punch?

“Well, at least we could get out of the house, take a ride,” my wife suggested, so we started to head west of Boston. It was a bright blue winter day, though the banks of dirty plowed snow beside the road weren’t exactly replacing the grandeur of Wildcat for me.

We found ourselves turning into Walden Pond, where the snow quickly improved to sparkling white. As many times as I’d been here, it had never been in winter, a season that Henry David Thoreau wrote about most joyously and studiously in his book “Walden.”

A few cross-country tracks crossed the pond and ringed the edges, with some disappearing into the trees. I was able to walk tenderly, using two walking sticks for support, and we went as far as the railroad banking. I tried to picture the ice harvesters, hoisting the enormous blocks up the banking to load on train cars headed to ice warehouses in Boston.

A few Canada geese (no, they don’t all migrate) had found some open water near the edge where the deepening orange of the afternoon sun flashed suddenly from the water. How still! In summer, thousands of visitors crawl all over this land, but now it was as still as Thoreau knew it, and a perfect winter day. We spent a little time trying to find the bean field and the foundations of Thoreau’s house — all under snow, of course. On the drive home, I thought, this is not skiing, but the key to enjoying winter is to be outdoors in it, whatever you’re doing, and in time before winter ended I might be able to snowshoe some.

As February turned to March, though I thought being at a ski area would make me a little crazy, we did take a trip up to Sugarloaf. Of course it felt like coming home, as it always did. I was getting around walking with the aid of two ski poles now and could walk around the base and over to the Anti-Gravity Complex at Carrabassett Valley Academy, where some students were going through their dryland freestyle training, which is nearly as amazing as watching them out in the terrain park.

Well, it wasn’t skiing, but just being at the Loaf immersed me in the alpine world. I didn’t even feel much deprived until a local friend helped me ride the lower lift partway up the slopes. From the chair I watched a couple of CVA kids tucking it down the headwall of Narrow Gauge, much as I remember seeing Bode Miller race his buddy, Forest Carey, on that run many years ago.

Yup, I will admit, that kind of got to me, as I longed to be clicking into my Atomics right about then. But my real takeaway from a few days at the Loaf is, if you do get a disabling ski injury, but can get around, there’s no need to cut yourself off from the alpine world altogether. I came home from Maine rather refreshed and recommitted to get back to the gym for some rehab work.

The rest of the winter into spring, we made several such trips as my walking got stronger. Though I didn’t need sticks for support anymore, I had grown to appreciate them, especially on off-road walking in the woods.

In the course of that season I amassed a list of trips that remain among my favorite winter walks to this day:

▪ Stowe Pinnacle | A 3-mile easy walk that offers beautiful views of the Stowe Valley.

▪ World’s End | A 2-mile loop in Hingham, Mass., on Natural Resources land that looks out on the Boston skyline and Hull Gut, a main inlet from the open ocean to the east, into Boston Harbor. It’s a beautiful walk any time of year.

▪ Kimberlin Nature Education Center — the Audubon Education hub in Connecticut — and nearby Devil’s Hopyard State Park, with a network of hiking and cross-country ski trails.

▪ North Conway and Jackson, New Hampshire | Either in the busy town of North Conway or out on the Ellis River trail in Jackson, this White Mountain area is the historic center of Eastern skiing and is bound to stoke your fire for the sport you’re missing.