harebrained competitions (like the pie-in-the-sky World Extreme Ski Championships held in the Chugach Mountains outside beat-down, oil-soaked Valdez the previous year) in which to dig for soul here—there were real grass roots.
Thus, while our media peers leapt from helicopters onto massive, never-skied Alaskan faces, our first experience in the new frontier was the home hill of 1992 Olympic women’s downhill silver medalist Hilary Lindh. Tiny Eaglecrest Ski Area lies outside the somnolent town of Juneau, the only U.S. state capital to which no road leads: in true Alaskan style, the island-bound town can only be reached by sea or air.
Juneau was a wild place where ravens ruled the streets and grocery-store windows advertised bear repellent and ammunition. Life was dominated by commercial fishing, gold-rush nostalgia, and tourists disgorged from ships cruising the Inside Passage. Half the population lived near the weathered toe of the Mendenhall Glacier, and the enormous, steep chutes on the face of Mt. Juneau provided the biggest urban avalanche disaster potential outside of alpine Europe (they had, in the past, released to engulf part of town).
Despite its state-capital status, Juneau was still unpretentious enough that visiting journalists might be eagerly introduced from the floor of the state legislature in the midst of a critical vote to override a governor’s veto. It was a place that, long before Sarah Palin appeared on Saturday Night Live, reflected the fact that Alaskans didn’t take themselves too seriously, where monster trucks had license plates like OVRKILL, and a woman with a voice like Irish Cream liqueur might keep your attention while Woodstock was being re-created onstage in the Alaskan Hotel, then press a napkin into your hand with a phone number and the inscription “call or die wondering.”
It was an apt metaphor for the Siren call that Alaska was putting out to the ski world: go or die wondering.
IN THE RED DOG, Matt Brakel, fisherman, extreme skier, paraglider, video star, and self-professed glory hound, snapped open the lid of a large plastic bucket filled with the morning’s catch of plump shrimp.
“Have one,” he said.
Above him a stuffed bear slithered up a pole after a pair of human legs that dangled from the ceiling.
We barely had time to bolt down a crustacean before the bartender, standing under frontier folk hero Wyatt Earp’s gun (which was mounted over an inscription that read “checked but never claimed”), informed us of the “no shrimp” rule and tossed us a bag of peanuts.
And so Henry and I sat, shelling nuts and talking cliffs, chutes, and cornices with Matt, our designated ski model, and some management-types from Eaglecrest. It was glib. It was cool. But then it got serious.
“What do you guys need?” they wanted to know, as if we were a commando team compiling a list of weaponry for some vague assault.
“Snow,” I said, perhaps a little too earnestly.
“Sun,” countered Henry, neatly summing our respective personal missions and perpetual conflicts.
I was writing things down on a pad that was getting blurry. Maybe I was more tired than I realized after eighteen hours of traveling, or had miscalculated the sheer volume of an Alaskan mug, but my enthusiasm was draining like a burst appendix. In the dead of night, in the rain, amid a legion of cobwebbed Alaskan kitsch, this talk suddenly seemed so business-like. This wasn’t the nebulous “go hang out and see whassup” kind of assignment I was used to. Instead, the mission was clouded by specificity: find the soul of skiing, whatever that might be. But didn’t I usually end up with a sense of this no matter where I skied? Did I really need to hang on every word in hopes of being struck by a lightning bolt of insight?
Probably not. As my companions’ voices thinned in the barroom din, I took a deep breath, a swig of beer, and put the pad away. Before even getting started, I stopped looking for whatever it was I thought I was looking for.
RICK KAUFMAN jostled with the controls of the grooming machine as he spoke.
“I pity people who don’t ski, you know? I really pity them.”
He was trying not to sound elitist, I knew. And his voice carried no malice, no judgment, no scorn. Though pity came pretty close to all three.
“I mean, how do you explain sex to a virgin? You can tell them about it as much as you want, but they’ll really have to experience it to relate.”
His sincerity helped me ignore the fact that this analogy was the biggest cliché in the ski world, typically rendered to explain the orgasmic nature of powder skiing. But I knew what he meant. In fact, I probably knew more about what he meant than he did. It was, more or less, what you’d expect to hear from a hardcore skier. It was, more or less, what I’d heard from hundreds of diehards. Describing precisely why you did what you did was mechanistically impossible, because skiing is feeling versus understanding; the knowledge of experience.
It was 5 a.m., and we were trundling down Eaglecrest’s front side while it snowed in that snotty coastal way that straddled the freezing point and left you guessing whether skiing was going to be pain or pleasure right up until you stepped into your bindings. By the strain on the groomer’s wiper blades, I was guessing pain. But with four days of decent powder under my belt, I was more interested in Rick’s musings anyway.
Rick grew up in Pontiac, Michigan, and didn’t start skiing until age twenty-one. When, shortly thereafter, he moved to Alaska, he had no specific intention of getting into the ski business; as he accurately observed, few do— they just kind of back into it as a way to keep skiing. He applied for a lift operator’s job at Eaglecrest in 1977. The manager at the time told him he wouldn’t fit in very well, a point of particular glee for Rick, who was now in his fifteenth season as operations manager.
Outside, the sky lowered and the snow glomming the windshield thickened, wipers whining against its weight.
“It’s that feeling when you hit your turns and your line just right; you don’t get winded—I mean you feel better after the run than when you started. Communing with the terrain. You know? God, when you have a really good day on skis it changes your whole outlook on life. It just makes you . . .”
And then together, as if rehearsed, our voices infused with our own heavy hindsight:
“Want to go out and get shitfaced!”
CROPLEY CHUTE drops 2,300 feet from the summit of Mt. Ben Stewart to spill onto a lake. For three days we’d etched lines through the accumulating snow of West Bowl (the ubiquity of ski areas naming bowls for compass points never ceases to amaze me . . .) and dodged malevolent trees above Waterfall ( . . .nor the ubiquity of names evoking ninety-degree plunges . . .), while staring up at Cropley’s gaunt face. The wide-open forty-degree expanse was as inviting as it was scary. It hardly ever slid they said, but when it did, it went big. That morning, as the ocean fog spilling over the ridge was atomized by the rising sun, it felt stable, and we decided to go for it.
A fair-sized gang disembarked from the top of the Hooter Chair: patrollers, instructors, managers, and hangers-on. Shouldering our skis, we headed up the ridge above Eagle’s Nest ( . . . nor lofty, bird-related places . . .), a route that seemed trammeled by at least half of Eaglecrest’s skiers on any given day. Men, women, children, dogs—no one here thought twice about hiking for their turns, despite the vast amount of terrain available from the summit chairlift. The current train of skiers snaking up the ridge channeled the famous grainy photo of gold prospectors crossing Alaska’s Chilkoot Pass. And weren’t we, after all, looking for White Gold? I watched as venerates Sigurd Olson and Lucy McPherson, two of the nicest humans I’d ever met, peeled
