A wolverine is eating my leg

by Tim Cahill

  Except that execution trails perception. The inside tip of the lift ski doesn't quite clear the juniper. My forward motion causes the unweighted ski to swivel savagely, and the

  back edge bangs into the calf of my right leg. There is the sound of a snap, but I know it is just impact, and not a broken bone: I am tipped forward. I am about to fall. Golly, this is taking a long time. You can achieve the same sensation by standing on the bottom stair and leaning slowly, slowly forward until you lose your balance. Here it comes—Jeez, I'm halfway down White Lightning, flailing all the way, and all the people in line below are looking at me—and that's it, I'm going down. Head first.

  This, I reflect casually, promises to become even more unpleasant. I make first contact with the ground. Skis pop off and drag behind on the straps. Ass over teakettle one more time. Snow inside my parka. Everything is happening in slow motion: this is the agony of defeat writ large. I am coming slowly over on the third revolution and have no choice but to bite snow. I wonder if there is some formula to calibrate how long a body weighing two hundred pounds will slide on a 20-percent slope, given the friction of a nylon parka—whoops, over one more time—and I come to rest at the bottom of the hill. Just slide right into the last position in the lift line.

  "I'm okay," I announce to the world at large. No one has asked me. They are all too busy laughing. I have provided an example of comedy skiing at its best. But I made it. I'm the last person on the lift this day.

  And I am not in pain. Adrenaline, noradrenaline, and another substance secreted by the body in times of stress or pain—betaendorphin, the chemical structure of which resembles morphine—all combine to numb pain. In a ten-minute ride to the top of the mountain, these substances begin to be reabsorbed. What this means is that the body's natural painkillers have worn off. What it means is that I come off the lift and collapse, feeling like I've been trampled by a lot of fat people riding elephants.

  It takes over an hour to side-slip down the mouncain. The sun has set, snow is falling, and the world has entered another ice age. Time and motion, at last, are one.

  ADVENTURES

  IN THE

  ENDOZONE

  N

  They're up there now, on the ridge above the Bridger Bowl Ski Area, risking their lives, catching clean air, running the avalanches and the Orgasms, banging chutes, kicking the snow loose, packing it down, controlling the danger, stabilizing the slope. Most of those who ski below don't even know they exist, the powder hounds and pinheads, the air patrol and chute divers. Up above the beginners and intermediates and merely expert skiers, the Bridger Bowl extreme skiers are pounding down nearly vertical avalanche chutes whose very names suggest insane degrees of difficulty: Psychopath, Madman's, Cuckoo's.

  They embrace the concept of terminal wipeout and broken bones, of the face wash and the endo—not to mention the possibility of being buried alive under several tons of snow—like voracious lovers. The skiing can get kinky on the ridge overlooking Bridger Bowl. The runs that aren't named for psychological aberrations invoke the pleasure of sex: Mr. Creamjeans, the Tits Traverse, Tease Me Dear, and the Orgasms, which everyone calls the O's.

  And if they weren't on the ridge, these extreme skiers pounding up and down in their own psychopathic or pornographic frenzy, those of us confined by the limits of our ability to lower slopes would be exposed to one of the more unpleasant forms of death, white and cold, thundering down from above.

  The theory of geographical determinism supposes that

  the physical environment of a people influences its institutions and culture. This theory might hold, for example, that in America slavery was largely confined to the South because climate and soil conditions there conspired to produce labor-intensive crops, like cotton, while Northern agriculture was best suited to family farming. This may or may not be so—it seems a pernicious idea to me—but there is little doubt that the natural world determines the sort and quality of athletes. Does anyone doubt that there are more and better surfers currently living in Hawaii than in Kansas?

  In Montana, one small ski area, catering primarily to locals, produces some of the finest specialized extreme skiers in the world. Impossibly steep slopes falling through shoulder-width canyons of rock will produce both broken bones and excellence. "Fear," as Coleridge said, "gives sudden instincts of skill."

  The hill that gets all that adrenaline pumping is Bridger Bowl, located just outside Bozeman, Montana. The mountain is particularly prone to avalanches because of its vertically. While most ski areas are located on mountains with rounded tops, Bridger rises sharply to a narrow ridge. To get a sense of the mountain, imagine that the floor of your mouth is the bowl. The ski lifts begin at the root of your tongue and stop at the gum lines. Above the groomed slopes are the jagged teeth of the ridge.

  The bowl is sheltered from the wind, and the only place it really blows hard is up on top of the ridge. Snow sweeps up over the back of the mountain and forms a huge overhanging cornice that shadows the vertical cliffs below. For the most part, it is dry, powdery snow that falls here— called cold smoke—and it fills the canyons and forms pillowlike slabs on the steep slopes below the cornice.

  The pillows spawn avalanches. Given a bright warm day, for instance, the snow will form a sun crust. New snow atop the crust will have a different crystalline structure, due to inevitable differences in water content, rate of fall, and temperature, it is the interface between snow layers that causes problems. As falling snow compresses, the crystals

  round out, quickly losing their star shape. Now, with a great slab of new snow sitting atop a bed of icy ball bearings, which in turn is balanced atop hard sun-crusted snow, the pillow is unstable, and any little thing—a loud noise, a skier moving silkily over the surface—can cause hundreds of tons of ice to begin rolling downhill.

  Several years ago, one of the high pillows slabbed off on a warm spring day long after Bridger had closed for the season. The avalanche rumbled down into the bowl, pushing the air before it so that half a dozen one-hundred-foot-high Douglas firs were bent nearly double with the howling force of hurricane-level winds. When the mass of snow rolled by the trees, the wind stopped, at once, as it never does under ordinary circumstances. The trees snapped upward so violently in the sudden calm that they broke off about halfway up. You can see these fifty-foot-high stumps about three-quarters of the way down the mountain. They provide an uncomfortable feeling of claustrophobia under the Big Sky, a sense of massive weight hanging precariously above.

  No one has ever been seriously injured in an avalanche at Bridger Bowl since it opened in 1954, and this is because the ski patrol is particularly sensitive to the danger. Every morning at first light, before most of the day's skiers are even awake, seven to ten members of the patrol walk the ridge, knocking down the snow that overhangs the cornice. They toss hand charges—two and a half pounds of dynamite—into the pillows that form fifteen to twenty feet under the ridge.

  Meanwhile, other patrol workers fire a seventy-five-millimeter recoilless rifle into larger, lower pillows. The mounted gun throws a high-explosive plasticized tracer that knocks loose spectacular avalanches.

  Joel Juergens, the twenty-nine-year-old director of the Bridger Bowl ski patrol, calls this sort of work "control." After substantial snowfall, "a dump," Juergens will examine the twenty-four-hour pattern of winds and eyeball the slopes for areas of potential danger. "If there are areas of instability," he explains, "we deal with them."

  Still, because of the mountain's unique shape, there is one area the ski patrol can't stabilize between first light and the time the lifts open. Down under the cornice, below the steeply sloping pillows of snow, there are dozens upon dozens of short, steep, narrow canyons, the sort of avalanche chutes climbers and skiers call couloirs. Snow builds up in the couloirs over a season: enough snow to rumble down into the lower pillows and kick loose an avalanche on unsuspecting skiers smoking down the groomed runs below. Because there are so many of these chutes, with so much
snow piling up in them after each storm, the patrol can't possibly deal with every one of them, every day.

  The couloirs are areas of instability, and they are controlled by the unpaid and unstable persons who call them Madman's or Psychopath or the Orgasms.

  MM I suppose I've been in over fifty avalanches," Tom WW I Jungst said. Tom was telling me about ava-■ lanches on our way up to the top of the moun-I tain. Beyond the highest lift, there was a trail to I the lowest point of the ridge. It was four hundred feet, straight up, and we had to walk it, carrying skis over our shoulders and kicking steps into a wall of snow that rose so vertically I didn't really see the top until I was almost on it. Each shin kick into the snow provided a little place to stand, a platform to launch the next kick. This wasn't skiing: it was twenty minutes' worth of hard mountaineering.

  I am a recreational skier, most comfortable on advanced intermediate slopes, and as such, I had no business being on the ridge. However, I was with Barney Hallin, a captain of the air patrol, and two chute divers, Jungst and Steve Ault, who all swore that they could get me down "in one piece." The ski patrol checked us out before we started up the trail. We had to have designated partners and carry avalanche beepers. A sign at the bottom of the trail said that the ridge was hazardous: so steep that rescues are extremely difficult.

  What the sign really meant is that folks are pretty much on their own up above the groomed slopes.

  We crested the ridge, where the wind hit us like a symphony of rage and the land dropped away on both sides, forever. The expert slope below in the bowl actually looked gentle; my favorite intermediate run was a white flatland prairie. Wind-driven snow iced my beard so that I imagined I looked like a tough guy in a cigarette ad.

  Tom Jungst and I checked out the Walkman-sized beepers. We set them for "transmit." If the snow swallowed either of us, we'd switch to "receive" and search for the other, by sonar. The louder the beep, the closer the crushed and suffocating skier. At the point where the beeping is loudest, a searcher should take the basket off one of his poles and poke around for the buried buddy. Tom told me where I could find a "rescue stash," with shovels and evacuation sleds.

  Jungst said he'd guide me on an easy traverse of the ridge, where the avalanche danger was minimal. Even so, he thought I ought to know what to do in the event that something slabbed off and rolled over me.

  Experience has taught Tom that the best thing to do in an avalanche is to "go with the flow." Don't fight it. Try to swim to the surface, get yourself oriented, and get your skis pointing downhill.

  These aren't the wet, heavy avalanches you get in California or the East: it's not the sort of moving snow that sucks you down into it and imprisons you with its weight. The powder at Bridger is generally soft and light. If the avalanche doesn't get much above Tom's head, he can generally ski it. "In a slough or slide like that," he said, "you want to turn out of it. Get away from it, off to the side. The best angle to take is forty-five degrees, downhill." Tom has skied so many avalanches that he and partner Jim Conway refer to this maneuver as "doing a forty-five."

  In the chutes, however, with stone walls rising sixty and one hundred feet on either side, it is impossible to do a forty-five. At first the snow is only knee-deep, and it shoots by you, pushing at your legs, sliding on its ball bearings

  while you're scraping along on the same surface on the abrasion of skis. Keeping the boards under you in moving snow is a knack that can only be learned by surviving a dozen or more light powder avalanches. "Most of these chutes narrow down quite a bit in places," Tom told me. "The snow piles up there." I got the impression that it was a little like standing in a locked room during a flood that would crest at the eight-foot level. "It'll get up to your neck," Tom explained, "and probably lift your skis up above the hard surface. You want to spread your arms out, keep your hands above it, and you should be able to float on it, with your head up above the surface. When the chute widens out, the snow level will drop, your skis will hit solid snow, and you can do a forty-five."

  The cold smoke that falls on Bridger is so light that it doesn't stick to slopes much steeper than fifty-two degree. Several of the chutes below the pillows get a bit more vertical than that. After a particularly big dump, these chutes are filled with a few tons of powder trembling on the brink of an avalanche that will empty the couloir in a sustained boreal thunder. But, just for a few hours, yesterday's bare, rocky canyon is skiable.

  "Won't the first person through knock loose a slide?" I asked Tom.

  "That's why you want to be the first person through," he said. "After the slide, you can't ski that chute anymore." He and Conway take these chutes together, one behind the other. "Mostly," Jungst said, "the slide catches us at the narrow spot. If Jim's leading, I can usually see his head above the moving snow. All of sudden, he does a forty-five, and I know exactly where my skis are going to hit."

  In effect, Jungst, Conway, and other chute divers like them are controlling the slopes, doing away with areas of instability. This is the reason the ridge is open to extreme skiers. "These guys do a large percentage of our control," Joel Juergens had told me. "The more people who ski the ridge, the more stable our snow pack." Juergens said that perhaps 250 people a day ski the top of the mountain: the exertion of the walk, the expense of the avalanche beepers,

  and the hazardous nature of the slopes keep numbers down. "These are all good skiers," Juergens said. "We only have to make a couple of rescues a year up there. Only a very few of the very best ski the steepest chutes. There's two guys, we call them the Chuteski Brothers: the steeper and narrower the couloir, the better they like it." The Chuteski Brothers sounded an awful lot like Tom Jungst and Jim Conway.

  Only a small fraction of the ridge runners used the mountain's verticality to fly. Barney Hallin is one of those who like to jump. Call it flying. The Montana distance-hang-gliding champion, Barney loves the howling chinook winds that devil the eastern Rocky Mountains because they are perfect for "body flying." This is a sport that requires a steady seventy-mile-an-hour blow. In a hard chinook, Barney can be found atop one of several high hills, hovering over a cliff, flying, held up by the caprice of the wind alone.

  On the ski slope, Barney likes to catch "big air, clean air," and the verticality of the ridge is perfect for the sort of ski soaring he likes, which mostly takes place ten feet or so above the snow.

  I side-slipped a hundred yards down the shallowest section of the cornice and dug a sit-down position on the slope. Above, Barney edged up to the cornice, and I could see the tips of his skis projecting over a perfect perpendicular cliff that dropped about fifty feet before edging out into a long, steep slope. There was a small wisp of cloud between myself and the tips of those skis.

  Barney wanted to take the cliff in "free fall," but he just couldn't help himself: he popped it, which is to say he put some leg into the jump in order to catch more air. It was fifty feet of good clean air, and Barney took it nicely, falling free against the face of the cliff with his skis folded back under him. In the history of the world, most people who've

  fallen this far—it's about the distance you'd plummet from a five-story building—have waved their arms and screamed all the way down before getting disagreeable bits of themselves into inaccessible cracks and crevices in the rock or pavement below. If Barney were to land on a flat, he'd break his legs, at the very least, but he expected to touch down where the mountain began to edge out under the cliff, in a place where the slope would rise up gently to kiss his skis.

  This was his first run of the day, and Barney didn't know what the snow would be like—he probably shouldn't have popped it—and he landed in crud, an unexpected wind crust. His skis cracked through the crust into a soft slush below, and the hard upper layer of snow, the crust, yanked at his legs. Barney looked like a man trying to sprint through several shin-high strands of barbed wire. He pitched forward, and Tom Jungst, standing beside me, edged into position. If Barney began a long fast slide toward the cliff a quarte
r mile below, Tom would ski an intersecting traverse and throw a block tackle into his friend. This is one good way to stop an uncontrolled slide up on the ridge.

  Barney, falling, tucked his head into his shoulder. He didn't care to plow up a thousand-foot-long furrow with his face. His speed and the rolling motion put him in danger of cartwheeling down the slope, doing an "endo," tumbling ass over teakettle all the way to the cliff. But Barney had fallen before, lots of times, and the kinetic computer in his muscles figured in the steepness of the slope, the condition of the snow, the terrain below—all this in an instant too short to calibrate—and he threw the skis over the top of his head, like a swimmer churning into a tumble turn. Properly oriented downhill, on a slope so steep Barney was very nearly standing up, it was only a matter of cocking the ankles slightly, catching an edge, and popping back up to the safety of skis. This maneuver is impossible on the shallow slopes I frequent, but Tom Jungst said that it is the thing to do on extreme terrain. "If you fall," he said, "the thing that is going to save you, short of a block tackle, is getting back onto your skis."

  Tom couldn't really describe how he decides what shoulder to roll on in order to get back up. "If you've fallen a lot," he told me, "you say, 'Oh, one of these,' and your body just takes over from there."

  Barney, not shaken in the least, cut into a giant slalom turn the moment he was up. He began "arcing it out," hitting a high-speed rhythm down the face of the mountain, moving on a slight angle to his left to avoid the cliff below. He disappeared into a stand of trees where he would have to pick up speed by narrowing down the arc in order to "weasel through." High-speed tree runs on steep slopes have proved fatal on many slopes. Imagine driving into a Douglas fir at thirty-five miles an hour. You could total your car. Hit the same tree at the same speed without the protection of a car's steel envelope, and you total your karma.