“Lassen & Shasta California Ski Atlas: A Photographic Guide To Skiing California’s Most Iconic Volcanoes”

Though I may get out over my skis pretty frequently, they are only metaphorical. Dexter (Dex) Burke, on the other hand, knows the real thing. According to a news release, “Burke was born and raised in Bend, Oregon where he fell in love with backcountry skiing in the Three Sisters Wilderness. That passion has led him to ski all over from California, Oregon, Washington and beyond.”

Burke, with help from SWS Mountain Guides, has just published a stunning full-color, 10x10-inch “Lassen & Shasta California Ski Atlas: A Photographic Guide To Skiing California’s Most Iconic Volcanoes” ($32 in paperback from alpenglowpublishingstudio.com). “The goal of this book,” Burke writes, “is to keep things simple and give you the quick 411 on skiing around Lassen Volcanic National Park and Mt. Shasta…. Consider this book the ‘Cliff Notes’ to skiing some of the area’s best descents.”

Most all of the full-page overhead images—did I say stunning?—were taken by Burke in the late spring of 2023 after the extraordinary snowfall. He cautions backcountry skiers that “most, if not all, the ski lines mentioned in this book are avalanche paths. The slopes can and will kill people.” Take avalanche classes, know how to use your equipment, go out “with someone who actually knows that they’re doing, not just an internet buddy. Seriously, don’t die; dying sucks.”

That said, the atlas provides 17 access points, verified to work with Google Maps, along with dozens of routes (and the page numbers where they’re shown). For example, in the Mt. Shasta region Konwakiton Chute is 2800 ft. downhill; it’s 5 miles and 7700 ft. uphill from Clear Creek trailhead at 6500 ft. And there, on three pages, lies the Chute in all its snowy glory.

Each image is labeled with key features; on one of the pages showing Konwakiton Chute there are labels for Mud Creek Bowl, Sargents Ridge, and the I-wouldn’t-go-near-that-if-I-were-you area called Avalanche Gulch. The images of Lassen Peak are especially breathtaking.

This book, and a companion volume, “Trinity Alps California Ski Atlas,” are a snow skier’s delight. And delightful for those of us more into sno-cones.

“Waiting On The Word: A Poem A Day For Advent, Christmas and Epiphany”

“We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,” writes poet and Anglican priest Malcolm Guite, “But he is with a million displaced people/ On the long road of weariness and want./ … His family is up and on that road,/ Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,/ … The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,/ And death squads spread their curse across the world./ But every Herod dies, and comes alone/ To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.”

This portion of Guite’s poem, “Refugee,” commemorating the Feast of the Holy Innocents on December 28, reminds readers of “what might be called ‘the shadow side’ of the Christian story, … a season that looks back at the people who waited in darkness for the coming light of Christ and yet forward to a fuller light still to come and illuminate our darkness.”

For Guite, who has performed in San Francisco and other US (and UK) venues, poetry can “help us restore that quietness, that inner peace, that willingness to wait unfulfilled in the dark, in the midst of a season that conspires to do nothing but fling bling and tinsel at us….”

“Waiting On The Word: A Poem A Day For Advent, Christmas and Epiphany” ($15.99 in paperback from Canterbury Press Norwich; also for Amazon Kindle) provides reflections on each poem so that the revelatory words of a John Donne lie clear before the reader. 

Contemporary poet Luci Shaw, in “Kenosis,” writes of the babe: “So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door,/ broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash,/ wept for the sad heart of the human race.”

Advent brings joy, too; Guite includes his sonnets “written in response to the seven Advent prayers known as the ‘O Antiphons’” addressing Christ “by the mysterious titles found in the Old Testament, particularly in Isaiah: ‘O Wisdom!’ ‘O Root!” ‘O Key!’ ‘O Light! ‘O Emmanuel!’” For December 19, Christ is the “root of Jesse,” but more: 

“For now is winter, now is withering/ Unless we let you root us deep within,/ Under the ground of being, graft us in.”

“Nothing Gone Missing”

Ridge-area novelist Brian T. Marshall takes the reader to London and Berlin as two unlikely friends track down “Nothing Gone Missing” ($12 in paperback from missppelled press; also for Amazon Kindle). Which turns out to be really Something.

First up is Errol Walker, a cop, “a DI for London Metro,” who is a little too free with his fists. Suspended, he introduces himself as “Error.” “Well,” he tells Trile Chandry, a Pakistani man who will become his buddy, “it was supposed to be Errol—Errol Flynn and all—but who wants a name like that? And then with the way I was always screwing things up, flunking out at maths, somebody came up with Error and it just seemed to stick.”

Now to Trile. “Actually, back home,” he explains to Error, “it is two syllables, not one. Tree-Lay. But once I moved here, I got tired of telling people they were saying it wrong. And so I decided, along with a new home, I would have a new name too.” So, yes, Trile and Error.

Trile works in Receiving at a mysterious firm called Tyler-Downs. What does Trile “receive”? “None of us really know.”  One day he happens to see something very strange changing hands. Shortly thereafter his boss is fired. Something isn’t right.

Meantime, Error quietly drops in at the station and finds a fellow cop going through the missing persons files. Error notices Christian Matterly is missing. Matterly, he’s told, is “some high mucky-muck over at the Tate. Apparently he’s some genius at fleecing the rich, getting them all to contribute.”

Somehow Tyler-Downs, Matterly, and the Tate gallery are all connected. Before it’s over Trile will find and hide the something that is Nothing (to gaze at it is to almost lose oneself in darkness) which will then go missing again, and Trile will be incarcerated (“Outside it is the day called Thursday. Inside it is just now. A day that is just like all the rest, so it doesn’t deserve a name”). Error must put the plot pieces together which turns out to be an art.

It's a delightful romp proving once again that he who has a Tate’s is lost.

“The Golden City: A Story Of Love, Loss And Triumph Spanning Generations”

Anthony (Tony) Colburn, who ran track and field under coach Larry Burleson at Chico State, graduated in 1974. Now living in North Carolina, Colburn has turned his love of the Bay Area, Lake Tahoe and the old goldfields of Nevada into a historical novel focusing at first on San Francisco around the start of the twentieth century.

But that’s not the end of the story. His characters, intertwined with real events, leave a legacy that is only realized very much later. “The Golden City: A Story Of Love, Loss And Triumph Spanning Generations” ($14.95 in paperback from Luminare Press; also for Amazon Kindle) refers not only to San Francisco but to a massive ferryboat. 

As Matthew and Julia discover in our own time, “There were a number of boats built right in the city along the water front south of where the Bay Bridge is now. The ‘Golden City’ was one of those vessels; a classic double ender with a coal fired steam engine, side paddle wheels, with a large ‘walking I beam’ transferring power to the wheels via a huge single piston.”

Our hero, Matthew Donohue, is born in Carson City, Nevada, in 1885, of an Irish immigrant father and a mother who is a housekeeper to a womanizing US Senator. Matthew has periodic visions of horrific scenes yet to come but, after working as a ferryman at Lake Tahoe, decides to make his fortune in San Francisco. There he meets Julia, the young daughter of parents who own a music store. 

The first part of the book seems sweetness and light, as Matthew is determined to impress Julia’s parents (who hold working-class Matthew, part of the Golden City’s crew, in low esteem) and ask for Julia’s hand in marriage, planned, it turns out, on the day of the big quake.

The novel turns dark in its description of the subsequent fires and the loss of life, and there’s a mystery about the fate of a gold bar Matthew possessed, with many more hidden aboard the ferry. Only a hundred years later is the truth revealed—by another Matthew and Julia. 

It’s 24-carat fun.