with the Austrian accent, who always gets in a shouting match about the fairness of the singles line. Anonymous tall dude rolls up alone with a beaten pair of fat skis and peers conspiratorially over the rim of a coffee that he hopes to stretch until the lift opens. Finally, a skein of painfully sleepy, dreadlocked dirt-bags drift in from parking-lot vans and hippie hovels after a long night of drumming and incense.
This crowd, as stickers announce from the surface of several snowboards, is the Creekside Crew, a frontline phalanx of powder mavens that guards the gates to the kingdom when there’s even a whiff of potential face-shots (in ski-bum parlance, snow deep enough to fly up your nose when you turn in it). Some have assembled here for over twenty years; to them, those of us who’ve joined the fray in the last few anni are mere tourists. But we’ve nevertheless formed a bond, sharing the anticipation as a family—a family that meets only very early on certain mornings and likely will not see each other after the ride up. Like other family gatherings and the ski world in general, it’s hard to discern where the various airs of obligation, ritual, and tradition begin, end, or overlap.
Obligation. We all know that the eight inches of new snow being reported is, due to wind-loading, likely double that on the upper mountain, three times that in the favored stashes we’ll each head to.
Ritual. Predictably, no one shares the exact location of those stashes.
Tradition. In the communal, hedonistic world of the ski bum, where few things are sacred, one aphorism rings loud enough to merit cliché: there are no friends on a powder day.
This last is the loudest of skiing’s many paeans to obsession—and contradiction. There’s nothing quite as fun as navigating the preternatural world of powder with friends, but when push comes to shove—literally, in lift lines or along some traverses—it means that getting to your line, your turns, your face-shots will take precedence over anything. And if you have to barge ahead, losing your friends in a cloud of cold smoke only to find them at the bar at the end of the day to celebrate your respective triumphs, well then, that’s the way it’s got to be.
One can never be bored by powder skiing because it . . . only comes in sufficient amounts in particular places, at certain times on this earth; it lasts only a limited amount of time before sun or wind changes it. People devote their lives to it “for the pleasure of being so purely played” by gravity and snow.
DELORES LACHAPELLE, Earth Wisdom, 1978
THR EE HOURS earlier I’d been asleep on a bunk in a Christchurch youth hostel. Now I stood atop a ridge overlooking the steep, snow-choked bowls of New Zealand’s Mt. Hutt, the once so-called “ski field in the sky.” Hovering 6,000 feet above the town of Methven and the green and brown patchwork of the Canterbury Plains, I watched as surf-raised punk Maoris bedecked in wetsuits and zinc warpaint zigzagged through swinging T-bars (drag lifts on which two riders are pulled uphill on an inverted “T”) on waves of Southern Alps snow. On the lodge decks, sheep farmers in generations-old gear tipped back quarts of Steinlager amid the screams of obnoxious keas, the eagle-like mountain parrots best described as green ravens with even more attitude and smarts. Visible from Mt. Hutt’s precipitous ridges were several small ski areas lodged in surrounding high-alpine cirques. These “club fields”—thrown up and populated by the most core of NZ’s hardcore ski families— were places you couldn’t even imagine placing a lift, though each was strung with a single T-bar, poma, rope, or, in some cases, cable that you wore a belt to hook into and that was locally referred to as a “nutcracker.” I blinked, filing away the exotic tableau, and dropped into two feet of the only kind of snow that really matters.
My final ski-bumming stint (discounting, many would argue, my current job) was another summer sojourn between university degrees. This time I’d gone looking for powder on the neglected side of that initial coin toss. Alone again, burdened by less and lighter gear (I was now exclusively a telemarker), I’d landed on the South Island one September and hitchhiked, bused, and ferried my way around the country. I skied volcanoes on the North Island, spent a hungry week in a mountain hut waiting out weather in an attempt to climb and ski NZ’s highest peak, Mt. Cook, and traipsed through most of the nation’s major ski areas. But oddly— or perhaps not—my biggest adventure came on the road.
After news of a big snowfall in the resort hubs of Queens-town and Wanaka, I hitchhiked south from Christchurch, catching my first ride through the folded-cardboard landscapes of the South Island with a sheep rancher. He dropped me in the middle of nowhere, then headed west on what seemed barely a road toward a vast sheep station in the foothills of the Southern Alps. How big was his holding? He rounded up his sheep with a helicopter. I watched the diminishing dust cloud marking the retreat of his rattling pickup for a long while.
After an hour, a car finally materialized on the horizon. It appeared to be bouncing down the road at high speed. It was a dirty-gold, American-made station wagon (most cars in NZ were British or Japanese); the back was stuffed with ski bags, duffels, and assorted gear; random items like a boot, a glove, or a beer bottle were pressed against the windows like a storefront sale. The two occupants seemed to be fighting with each other over the steering wheel as they blew past at well over sixty miles per hour. But just as I dejectedly dropped my thumb, the car screeched to a halt, then backed up, burning rubber. A couple of long-haired, smiling faces beamed out.
“Sorry mite, didn’t see ya skeeez theea . . .”
“Yeeh, we wuz wristling . . .”
“. . . but then Jiff heea sees ’em lyin’ in the greevel, heh?”
“. . . yeeh, and so I scream ‘skeea!’, and Geerrett heea . . .”
“. . . pulls over, so . . .”
“. . . hop een!”
There’s a fine line between the ride you’ll never forget and the ride you wish you’d never taken. That line was somewhere in Geoff and Garrett’s car, but as with everything else in the vehicle, no one quite knew where.
The hyperkinetic pair were speed skiers on the NZnational team. Of skiing’s numerous insane disciplines, speed skiing is by far the most certifiable. In the sport’s equivalent of drag racing, racers squeeze into aerodynamic suits and helmets, don long, heavy skis, then hurtle down a steep, straight track until they reach maximum velocity and pass through an electronic speed trap. Where the track flattens—the beginning of the long glide to a stop—skiers are often going so fast that their bodies can’t handle the sudden compression. So they crash. Sometimes they catch an edge on the track. And crash. Sometimes the air gets under their skis and lifts them off the snow like a hydrofoil so they lose control. And crash. Sometimes they crash . . . just because. In any case, skiers can be torn apart, breaking bones that only the tight suit (similar to motorcycle leathers) keep in place.
Conversation revealed that these guys were friends with speed skier Steve McKinney, one of my favorite powder mag heroes. Where thrills were concerned, McKinney had done it all: first to break the 200 km/h barrier (125 mph; it has since pushed past 250 km/h, or 150 mph), summited Denali, paraglided off Mt. Everest.
“The faster my body travels, the slower my mind seems to work. In the crescendo of speed, there is no thought, no sound, no vision, no vibration. It is simply instinct and faith,”6 McKinney famously offered of the womb-like calm inside his self-designed Darth Vader helmet.
Recalling this might have told me what I was in for. Geoff and Garrett were drinking beer and showed me how they made the car bounce by simultaneously jostling up and down in their seats. Then some high-powered NZmarijuana appeared. I tried not to imbibe,
