A confession: I have never downhill skied. This fact sometimes surprises people. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and have spent most of my adult life here. I’m active and outdoorsy, and, while I’m no adrenaline junkie, I’m not averse to risk. Even I am sometimes surprised that I’ve never once buckled into a pair of big boots and let gravity drag me down a steep, snowy slope.

Or maybe the confession is this: I once felt abashed by this fact. But for the past five years, I’ve been a cross-country skier, and I no longer feel a need to apologize for or explain away my lack of downhill chops. Cross-country skiing, let’s remember, was once called, simply, “skiing.” It’s the primogenitor, the OG. For at least five or six millennia, people have been strapping sticks of wood to their feet to traverse snow-covered terrain. The Indigenous Sami people of northern Europe hunted reindeer on skis. Tenth-century Norse tax collectors cruised on skis. In the nineteenth century, Scandinavian-born miners and loggers brought skis to the mountains and meadows of the Pacific Northwest. Ski chairlifts wouldn’t arrive until the 1930s. For most of human history, everyone had to earn their turns.

I fell in love with the sport during graduate school in Missoula, Montana, where I could reach trails within minutes. While I’d been on cross-country skis a handful of times as a kid, I mainly remember falling, flailing, frustration. As an adult, I still fell, but I could right myself with more ease, and it wasn’t long before I got the hang of the basic stride. Cross-country skiing fit my limited grad student budget—the equipment is a fraction of the cost of alpine gear, and any trail use or parking fee is way less than a pricey lift ticket—while also relieving my busy grad student mind. The movement, rhythmic and repetitive, calmed my inner chatter. After skiing, my to-do list remained, but little seemed as dire or desperate as it had earlier.

For two winters, I skied once or twice a week. Whether I wanted a test of endurance or a leisurely tour, my skis answered. I found joy on overnights to fire lookout towers and century-old Forest Service cabins, marveling over and over again at the craggy magnificence of the Rocky Mountains. I competed, poorly but enthusiastically, in a so-called “citizens biathlon”: Rifles were provided, and volunteers in reflective safety vests kept careful eyes on the shooting range. A friend and I spent a spring break at Yellowstone National Park, breaking trail as sulfur-scented steam rose from the blanket of white. One afternoon, we rounded the corner on a herd of bison, their shaggy beards crusted with icicles and breath puffing hot in the air. 

Then I returned to Portland. It’s not as if the Pacific Northwest is a bad place to be a cross-country skier. To the contrary—the season here can stretch from November to May, and you round corners not on bison but on epic volcano views. But skiing, of any sort, is a commitment for Portlanders. It’s 90 minutes to Mount Hood on a good day; hit resort traffic and that figure can double. Compare that to Bend, where you can be out of the office and on the trail within a half hour.

After too much moaning my first winter back, I’m learning to embrace the mission of getting my annual fix. Though I like the glide of a groomed ski area, I often prefer untamed terrain. With my metal-edged skis, any unplowed logging road invites a tour. Sometimes that means pushing through piles of untouched powder to clear Cascade vistas. Other times it means bumping over icy snowmobile ruts and lumpy snowshoe tracks under socked-in skies. The variety, I remind myself, is part of the fun.

On winter weekends, I’ve launched myself to new-to-me corners of the Pacific Northwest. Last February, I skied to a yurt near Mount Rainier, part of a system of bargain backcountry huts, where I talked late into the evening with two retirees who’d recently begun dating (burgeoning relationship dynamics: fascinating). A few weeks later, a friend and I traveled to north-central Washington’s Methow Valley, which boasts North America’s largest continuous network of cross-country ski trails. The snow was meager—“dust on crust,” I heard the conditions described—but the nightlife strong. On Friday, we played vigorous tambourine at an open mic in Winthrop. The next evening, we peeked through the doors of the grange in neighboring Twisp, watching glittering bodies boogie after an all-ages drag show.

It’s doubtful that cross-country skiing will ever be as cool as alpine. Even the world’s best look a little dorky doing it. But it’s wonderfully quiet. There are no lift lines. While its hills may supply only modest thrills, the risk of injury is low, as is the barrier to entry: Rental gear can cost as little as $15 per day, and you don’t need a lesson (but they're out there if you'd like one). Sure, it can be a hell of a workout, cooking your legs and arms and core all at once; Olympic cross-country skiers are famous for collapsing at the finish line. But it’s only as strenuous as you want it to be. Pack a thermos and take an unhurried shuffle through the woods, and then keep doing it till you’re 90. In what strikes me as heartening evidence of the sport’s late-into-life accessibility and appeal, at 75 you earn a free lifetime trail pass in the Methow.

Winter will never be my favorite season: the darkness, the relentless gray of the rain-streaked city. Under constant cloud cover, perspective shrinks. But out skiing, I feel plucky, capable, free—reminded that I am small and that the world is vast. Sometimes, the sun even shines.