powder turn, which quickly became the resort’s signature export.
Meanwhile, a young Dolores Greenwell was skiing around Loveland Pass, Colorado, on a pair of six-foot-plus hickory skis. From 1947 through 1950, she taught skiing in Aspen, developing a nose and a preference for the untracked snow away from the lifts. In 1950 she made the first ski ascent of Mt. Columbia, second-highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, and the first ski ascent of Snow Dome, the continent’s hydrographic apex. After she married Ed LaChapelle, a Canadian geophysicist she met on that trip, the couple spent time at the avalanche institute in Davos, Switzerland, before moving to Alta, where Ed was stationed on the U.S. Forest Service’s avalanche and snow research team. Dolores, naturally, was there to ski. In 1956, she and Jim Shane were the first to dipsy-doodle down Alta’s infamous Baldy Chute—in powder so deep they disappeared.
FOR MANY PEOPLE, skiing is a sphere of perpetual freedom into which they can step at will, and the sweet spot—that which instantly expands the sphere in every dimension—is powder. Whether one is in it or simply wants to be, powder is a realm of constant challenge. It is about words, but being unable to speak; about telling, but being unable to describe. It is sensations and memories. Silence amplifying a heartbeat and the rasping of breath. Involuntary grunts of effort and unconscious squeals of delight. Inspiration. Bad poetry. Broken marriages. Magazines. Movies. Grins. Silliness. Frozen toes and ice cream headaches. Magical turns and occasional smacks off a hidden hazard. First tracks. Lost skis. Trudging, navigating, and skiing over, through and around boilerplate, sastrugi, crust, slab, crud, and other snow-junk just to get to the good stuff. A way of feeling. A way of thinking. A way of life. A way, period. Tao.
“Our culture has no words for this experience of ‘nothing’ when skiing powder,” LaChapelle put it in 1993’s Deep Powder Snow: 40 Years of Ecstatic Skiing, Avalanches, and Earth Wisdom. “In general the idea of nothingness or nothing in our culture is frightening. However, in Chinese Taosit thought, it’s called “the fullness of the void” out of which all things come . . . My experiences with powder snow gave me the first glimmerings of the further possibilities of mind.”8
She was onto something.
It has been said that if joy is the response of a lover receiving what they love, then this is the joy we feel skiing powder with friends. Overflowing gratitude indeed seems to paint the absolutely absurd grins flashed at the bottom of a run. You never see such grins elsewhere—not on a tennis court or a golf course, not on a podium or in a dance club. No flush of physical victory compares to the ineffable euphoria of a journey through powder. It isn’t just shared fun but, as LaChapelle also notes, a sense of life fully lived, together, “in a blaze of reality.”
In the end, powder isn’t about an outer experience but an inner one, a crucial intersection of mind and body where thinking and feeling cannot be teased apart. This is where immersion and affliction, submergence and addiction live, forever invoking powder’s unique spirituality as religion. Yet this sport’s recently canonized angel would loudly eschew any traditional doctrine in favor of making no distinction between the universe at large and anything within it; no distinction, for instance, between saints and sinners, powder snow and powder-snow seekers, the places you look for it and the places it is found.
When—as I’d found in my travels—you got right down to it, the essence of skiing is best summed by the equation: soul/X = people + places + powder. Surely there was some kind of heaven on Earth where this equation was always solved.
Everything is an experiment.
Red Bull Snowthrill of Alaska book, 2003
AN INTERESTING set of circumstances had led to the Red Dog Saloon in Juneau, Alaska, where I stood in Birkenstocks, my rain-soaked socks caked in sawdust and peanut husks.
The trail had started in Toronto, bouncing through L.A., Seattle, and totem-poled Ketchikan before landing in Juneau. And now, surrounded by bad taxidermy, orange life-preserver rings, and beer mugs the size of pitchers, it seemed I might find whatever it was I was looking for.
Certainly the concept was evolving. Already there’d been the blind girl with a broken ankle on the plane who was content to tap her way onboard without help, the senator’s aide at the former brothel we were bunking at who’d handed me a self-penned story about a surfer’s life in landlocked Fairbanks, and the bales of salmon jerky the town seemed constructed from. Disparate images to be sure, they all pointed to something that ultimately embodied a spirit of self-reliance and wildness that seemed very Alaskan and not altogether unrelated to, well . . . say, skiing.
POWDER, where I was now a contributing editor, had sent me to Alaska on a quest. In fact, five writer/photographer teams had shown up at airports around the continent to receive envelopes stuffed with air tickets and these instructions: find the soul of skiing.
Really?
Others had been sent on discovery missions to the Vermont mega-resort of Killington, molehills of the Midwest, venerable Aspen in Colorado, and Washington’s Mt. Rainier— North America’s almost perennial record-holder for snowfall. These places all had well-known histories and hardcore habitués: “the known,” if you will. I’d been sent to what was, in 1992, “the unknown,” the big empty: Alaska.
With too many mountains to name and too few people to care, the outpost of Alaska had suddenly come onto the global snowsports radar as both a destination and newly minted ethos. The state’s endless ranges and endless snow suggested endless possibilities for exploration, and my frequent photographic collaborator Henry Georgi and I were there to plumb the zeitgeist.
Bearded, boisterous, and stentorian, Henry had started his photographic career shooting rock concerts in Toronto and rafting on the Ottawa River, but his was the heart of a skier. Raised by German-speaking parents in the Toronto suburb of Downsview, he had spent his watershed ski-bumming and ski-photography season in the party-addled Austrian resort of St. Anton. We met in the early eighties through Ontario’s nascent telemark scene, where I dressed in Norwegian period costume to forerun races that he’d been hired to document. Soon, I became one of Henry’s models, and our photographic collaborations filtered onto the continent’s newsstands. Our first real joint triumph, however, resulted from a trip to Le Massif in Quebec’s Charlevoix region, a unique operation that employed school buses to ferry guided groups to the top of a 2,300-foot escarpment overlooking the St. Lawrence River where ships and whales bobbed among the ice floes. It snowed more than two feet while we were there, and Henry’s photos of waist-deep powder skiing in the typically low-snow East were a sensation, forming the basis for my first-ever powder feature. We’d sidestepped into a career of adventuring together at the magazine’s behest, as reliable to the editorial braintrust as the team of Bard and Carter that preceded us—mostly, as we would later learn, because we likewise worked cheap and would (foolishly) go anywhere.
On the “soul of skiing” mission, naturally, we were eager to embrace whatever powder’s editors threw at us, aware of the growing gravity of our destination and that something important was brewing there. In some sense, what was burgeoning in Alaska honored the Euro “extreme” movement of big, bold, off-piste descents in the high-alpine vertical world of the otherwise human-choked Alps; in another way, this push was a typically American attempt to outmuscle that small, dedicated scene with vast wilderness, a fleet of helicopters, and a few tons of film.
Although the “idea” of Alaska was steep, deep, and unexplored, skiing was hardly new there. Hundreds of local alpine, cross-country, and ski-jumping areas had been founded in the early twentieth century by waves of immigrant miners, loggers, and fishermen. At least one legitimate
