was born in 1923 in Ely, Minnesota, and was cross-country skiing by age four. His main interest, however, was ski jumping, which he did all over the Midwest. In 1943, he was drafted, joining the 10th Mountain Division ski troops in Colorado. His time overseas was short but eventful. After pushing through Italy’s Apennine Mountains, his division was about to thread the main passes of the Alps when the Germans surrendered. Back home, he earned a master’s degree in wildlife management. He and his wife visited Alaska—stop me if you’ve heard this before—and never left. Moving to Juneau in 1958, he began patrolling at the old Second and Third Cabin areas, which people had been hiking up to ski since the thirties. He retired in 1991 after thirty-two years of patrolling, but still maintained a serious addiction by skiing every day there was snow and writing poems about it. He passed away in 2008, and skied right up to the end.
“I hate to miss a day of skiing,” he told me. “To me, that’s the best incentive to get other things done.”
Lucy also hated to miss a day. Born in Montana in 1931, she married out of high school and raised a family in Sand Point, Idaho. In 1963, her husband talked her into free ski lessons; immediately hooked, she began teaching soon after. Moving to Juneau, Lucy became the first instructor at Second and Third Cabins.
“Having to put your boots and skis on a pack and hike in was quite a change from Sand Point’s chairlifts,” she recounted.
In fact, she set a record for hiking in, always refusing a ride on the snowmobile Sig used to pull the patrol sleds. And here they both were, years later, spouses deceased, best buddies sharing a zest for powder that knew few bounds. Five minutes with these two made you feel warm all over. With their sparkling eyes and impish grins they were, it seemed, eternally young.
Back on the hike, it took fifteen minutes to traverse the ridge. Another ten would have put us over Shit-for-Brains Chute ( . . . and finally, it seems, every ski area must baptize several runs as an ode to the ridiculousness of skiing them), but the sun and big snow lay on the rolling parabolas below. Everyone stopped talking. Some stopped breathing. Ten pairs of eyes bored holes into 1,000 feet of cold, fresh powder. Rick looked like he just wanted to hug everyone.
We took the lines on the steeper first pitch in small groups, adrenaline chasing away any butterflies. Whoops and hollers echoed around the valley, smiles tore at our cheeks. It got even sillier when we regrouped and kicked the last pitch en masse. And the squeals of delight weren’t those of jaded lifetime skiers, but those of children playing in a sandbox, splashing in a pool. Ponce de Leon should probably have been searching for the fountain of youth in the clean, fresh environs of winter mountains, not in the fetid mosquito-and-snake-infested swamps of Florida.
That was the warmup. After the usual kerfuffle of turning on and checking everyone’s avalanche transceivers (an electronic beacon with both transmit and receive functions worn by all when backcountry skiing), enumerating probes and shovels (more avalanche rescue gear), and calling in a helicopter (in Alaska, an aircraft was always at the ready), we were ferried up to Cropley in two groups. In one group were Henry and Rick; in the other, me, Al the Geologist, Matt Brakel, and Nancy Peel—Eaglecrest’s caretaker; ski-school director; snowboard, telemark, and cross-country instructor; off-season raft guide; powerlifter; bodybuilder, and basic human skiing machine. The summit we were dropped on was spectacular, with huge gleaming upper bowls overlooking the shimmering waters of Stephens Passage.
Matt, Al, Nancy, and I disappeared down the chute while the helicopter hovered off the face with Rick and Henry, who was bagging a few rare sunny shots. The untracked bliss got a little less blissful where the sun had been on it, and several point releases (slow-moving, wet-snow avalanches that start small and fan out) made their way down the main chute in our wakes; Matt had touched off the biggest.
Matt was getting careless, and indeed when we regrouped on a ridge he had broken away from the group, traversed the main chute, and climbed above some rock-and-tree-studded face to do God knew what. What he did was wipe out bigtime on some hidden debris before making a spectacular recovery and putting a reasonable line down into the chute.
“Goddammit,” Rick groaned, peeved at this breach of collective safety. “That’s why we call him ‘Break-all.’”
The other side of the ecstasy coin in skiing is getting carried away when you should remain vigilant. Matt had made me antsy days before when he was pushing it in the trees and in danger of goring himself. Big jumps, unscouted landings. He knew the mountain, yeah, but . . .
It got worse. Tense as we moved downward, I was glad to reach the bottom, but nobody was behind. They were all collected above the last ridge, which on one side rolled benignly into the lower chute and on the other dropped off precipitously.
Break-all was going to jump.
It was a big drop his ski tips hung over, but at least it was onto snow. He backed out of sight and when next I saw him, he was in the air—perfect body position, legs pulled up, arms in tight. A magazine cover. It would have been a good jump.
When he hit the rock under the snow, a loud crack echoed like gunfire, and Matt somersaulted crazily in a full-body ragdoll—head, air, feet, air, head. One ski stuck in the landing above and the other javelined toward the lake; it was the kind of wince-worthy highlight a sports channel might play over and over and over.
Miraculously, he was okay. And in that moment it was hard to equate this soft-spoken, big-hearted guy whose love of skiing went back to childhood backcountry trips with his mother and included teaching tots in the Mighty Mite ski racing program, with the human cannonball taking ill-conceived risks for the camera. He was a hell of a skier, but you just wanted to slap him. Eventually, I supposed, someone—or something—would do just that. Experience had taught me that luck was never to be counted on. Skiing required the acquisition of not just physical skills, but an entire panoply of judgment circuits that, properly applied, could keep you alive.
Sadly though, Matt Brakel’s luck would run out in 1999 on Mt. McGinnis near the Mendenhall Glacier, when he jumped a cornice onto a riskier route than the rest of his group was descending and was killed in a massive avalanche. “He always wanted to go big,” said his girlfriend, who’d witnessed the tragedy. But was there anything essentially wrong with going big—especially when that was soon to become what Alaska was known for? “I like to squeeze fear,” Matt had told me, “and I never feel more religious than when I’m skiing.”
Spirituality. Soul?
SKIING CROPLEY gave me plenty to think about. That single experience comprised most of the facets of skiing: elements of ecstasy and potential disaster, group-think and prudence, individuals and thresholds. Plus a taste of the newfangled Alaskan approach: DIY heli-lifts to big, unskied faces. The Mendenhall was just one of thirty glaciers flowing from the Juneau Icefield. Lofting over it one day in Al the Geologist’s homemade plane, circling spectacular vertical towers, knife-edged arêtes, and crevasses so large they could swallow the Queen Mary, I recognized the distinct outlines of several heli-accessed peaks from popular videos and realized how much of an impact Alaska had already had on the greater snowsports consciousness.
On that 1992 trip, it was clear that skiing’s soul derived from something beyond the resort experience that went back to little other than mountains, terrain, snow, and the basic adventure of sewing these together—something that Alaska excelled at delivering. It seemed, however, that it went even farther to answer a suite of basic human desires concerned with risk. As Arnold Lunn suggested in The Mountains of Youth, “Ski-ing belongs to a great family of sports which owe their appeal to the primitive passion for speed. Mere speed is not enough . . . To secure the fine unspoiled flavor of pace you must eliminate mechanism, retain the sense of personal control, and preserve the ever-present risk of a fall.”9
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