First Tracks

by Catherine O'Connell

  It’s the hard-pack icy days that keep us on our toes, running loaded toboggans down the hill and empty ones back up the gondola to strategically reposition for another pick-up on the hill. Warm, sunny hard-pack days are when people get too much confidence and gain too much speed, hurting themselves when they crash into an inanimate object like a tree or an animate object like a human being. Yep. Hard-pack days are the worst for patrol. Those are the days we end up doing double duty.

  But don’t get me wrong, powder days have their own particular injuries, more tears and sprains than breaks. And it was a powder day, the snow falling like crazy with no indication of stopping. Singh and I decided to make the best of it until we were called into duty. This was the sexy part of the job, getting to ski powder conditions before anyone else. We did some technical work, checked some closures, marked a few rocks that were now camouflaged by snow and opened some runs that had previously been closed. But mostly we just skied, ripping down the Dumps where the gulleys between the moguls had filled completely with pristine new snow, taking shortcuts on Bell Mountain past ‘shrines’ like Yankee Stadium and Marilyn Monroe, and hoping the entire time our radios wouldn’t spoil the fun by calling us to some emergency. We passed a couple of boarders in the woods lighting up a doobie and stopped to chastise them, stoned skiing being frowned upon, as common as it was. One of the boarders got belligerent with me, so I confiscated his lighter, and slipped it into the pocket of my inner jacket just to irritate him.

  On the Ridge of Bell, we spotted a skier who ejected out of his skis after coming off a big bump. Though he’d lost both boards, the snow was so deep he’d only found one of them. The other was nowhere to be seen. Our run of free-skiing good luck over, we stopped to help him. With the gondola passing silently overhead the three of us spent the next half-hour sidestepping up and down in the area of his fall, poking into the snow with our ski poles in search of his missing ski. We were just about to bag it, meaning a ride down on a snowmobile for him, when Singh cried out, ‘Got something!’

  ‘Dude, if it’s my ski, I’m buying at the end of the day,’ cried the now fairly exhausted skier.

  Singh extracted a ski from a mound of snow. ‘Kastle, right?’

  Despite his wearing a helmet and goggles, I could see the skier’s face fall.

  ‘Fuck no. Mine’s Dynastar. You gotta be shitting me.’

  A broad white smile cracked Singh’s dark face. ‘Just kidding man.’ With the ski in hand, he made two swooping turns and stopped within an inch of us. He handed the ski over and said, ‘Get back out there, dude. You’re missing the best.’

  Once the grateful skier was on his way back down the hill, we cut across the ridge to the shoulder of the mountain and swooped down on to the intermediate run at the bottom where Reininger and Winter were stationed behind ropes, waving at skiers to slow them down. Had to be the worst duty on the mountain.

  ‘Hey assholes, how about taking your turn?’ Stu Reininger called to our backs as we whooshed past them in glee.

  There was no line at the gondola, a harbinger of a powder day. People line up first thing in the morning to hit the powder before it’s been tracked. Then they tend to ski the higher elevations until they fold in exhaustion. Singh and I climbed into our cabin and he took off his helmet. His hairline was wet with sweat. Skiing powder was hard work. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a baggie of mini Snickers.

  ‘Lunch?’ he offered.

  I had a stash of my own, poached from a bowl in the ski patrol hut. I extracted my bag from my jacket pocket and displayed it to him. ‘Good to go.’

  Snickers were our chosen lunch on powder days. Sugar and nuts just kept us going. Quick energy that kept us light on our skis. A big lunch just bogged you down. We munched in silence, looking out upon the slopes and drinking copious amounts of water from our Camelbaks. Five minutes passed before the inevitable conversation ensued.

  ‘How you feeling, Greta?’ Singh asked, looking me steadily in the eyes, not allowing me any escape.

  ‘I’m fine. What do you mean?’

  ‘C’mon, Greta. You’ve been through some weird shit this week. You wanna talk about it?’

  There’s one thing I failed to mention about Singh. I’m pretty sure he’s gay. Which I would say doesn’t really mean anything in the larger scheme of things, but I’ve just always found gay men easy to talk to. I mean, now that everyone’s come out and everything and everyone is in complete understanding, it’s not a big thing, but I happen to think gay men have a certain sensitivity I can’t describe. Every gay man I’ve known has always been able to draw me out of myself in ways that my female friends or straight men just aren’t able to.

  I played with my braid, subconsciously wrapping it around my glove as if I were trying to hide my hand.

  ‘It’s just you and me,’ he urged.

  My eyes threatened to well yet again. This was the most salt water I’d expended in all the time I’d been in Aspen and it was getting tiresome. ‘Warren,’ was all I was able to say, my voice cracking as it tripped over his name.

  ‘He was a great guy, for sure, Greta. But he’s always been a risk-taker and we all know the risks that come from this sport. I think that’s the reason we love it so much. It makes us feel so alive.’

  ‘But you know we shouldn’t have been back there. Even he would have known that snow was set up and just waiting to go.’

  ‘Which makes me think, it must have been his idea,’ Singh volunteered.

  ‘But why? Why take the risk?’ I said, re-asking the same question that had been taunting me when I wasn’t able to bury it under something else. ‘You know Zuzana is pregnant. Why would he take a risk like that?’

  Singh’s eyes grew wide. ‘I didn’t know his wife was pregnant. I’m sorry to hear that. How did you take it?’

  ‘You mean how did she take his death? She’s devastated of course.’

  ‘No. I mean how did you take it when you learned she was pregnant?’

  This goes back to my thing about my relationships with gay men and how we understand each other. Singh knew. He’d always known, without me ever saying a word. I was in love with Warren.

  ‘I was happy for him,’ I lied.

  ELEVEN

  Once we were back up top, we racked our skis and went into the hut for a cup of coffee. It was good to see that Neverman wasn’t there. It was far too beautiful a day to have it marred with his misogynistic inferences. Meghan and Cole were having a good laugh over something, bent over at the waists, reveling in some private joke, it appeared.

  Meghan and I came on to patrol around the same time ten years ago, and as women we always felt we had to work twice as hard to prove ourselves. While we were both strong, capable skiers who worked out with weights to get even stronger, we were about as physically apart as two women can get. I’m five foot eight and an ectomorph who is capable of eating to my heart’s content without putting on any weight, while Meghan is an endomorph, short and stocky with dense muscle. She swears every bite of chocolate goes straight to her hips. Which doesn’t stop her from eating it, by the way. And while my looks evidence my Swedish heritage tempered by whoever claimed ownership over these dark eyes, Meghan is pure Anglo-Irish – frizzy red hair, freckles, green eyes, the whole package. I often get a laugh when she skies up to an injured skier with a toboggan trailing her. You can see fear on the faces of some of the men when they realize this firecracker is responsible for their safe transport down the hill.

  Cole, on the other hand, looks like a ski patroller. He has blond hair, serious blue eyes with just the right amount of character etched into the corners and a nose that starts right between his brows and drops from there in a straight line. He’s the type who instills confidence when he comes upon an injured skier, a sort of calm, placid guy, but tough without overdoing it. He and his wife came to Aspen straight out of school in Boulder and have a little guy five years old who is already in the process of becoming a skiing legend.

&nb
sp; Meghan and Cole were laughing harder than ever as I walked past them on the way to the coffee pot, the laughter of one feeding on the other.

  ‘Must be an inside joke,’ I said.

  ‘You should have seen it,’ Cole guffawed, barely able to hold himself together. Since Cole’s not the type given to histrionics, his laughter piqued my curiosity over what could possibly be so funny. ‘These two ski bunnies in designer outfits trying to get on the lift. I’ve seen a lot, but this one was special.’

  Meghan took over, tears of laughter literally streaming down her rosy cheeks. ‘It was like they had no clue what they were doing. I have no friggin’ idea how they even got to the chair without killing themselves. Anyhow, they were waiting to load and I think they thought the chair was going to stop for them and when it didn’t one of them fell and pulled the other down with her. They flattened themselves out on the ground and the chair passed right over their butts before the liftie could stop it. Cole and I were dope enough to bite our tongues as we picked them up, but I gotta tell you it was hard not laughing in their faces. The entire lift line was in hysterics. I actually thought the liftie was going to piss himself.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Cole, his laughter easing off as he wiped an eye with his little finger. ‘After they fired the lift up again, Meghan and I took the chair behind them, just in case something of the same flavor happened up top. Of course when they got off, they slid straight for the Mountain Club.’

  Which explained a lot. Aspen Mountain Club was the private club atop Ajax where the gazillionaires went to meet, greet and eat shellfish or Kobe beef with the Elk Mountain range as a backdrop. Last time I heard they were charging about $200,000 for the privilege of being able to pay for your lunch there. Then again, boot warmers are provided as well as slippers to wear while your boots warm up. Warren was a member and I have to confess to eating there a few times as his guest, but I can truthfully say it’s not a level I aspire to. I’ll never forget being in the ladies’ room and listening to two women speak between stalls about which plane they were taking to the ‘island’. The G4 or the G5. I never did figure out what island.

  Meghan and Cole were still cracking up over the snow bunnies nearly becoming doormats when Lucy, who was doing dispatch, stuck her head out the door of the dispatch room.

  ‘Need a toboggan on Kristi.’

  I looked at my partner. He was already getting up. ‘Singh and I will take it,’ I said, gulping down the last of my coffee. I followed Singh outside. Reininger was standing near the door after just racking his skis.

  ‘Wassup?’ he asked.

  ‘Need a sled on Kristi,’ Singh replied.

  ‘Hate those rescues on Kristi. Have fun,’ he said, brushing past us on his way into the shack.

  There was a toboggan tipped up against the building and Singh grabbed it and slapped it to the ground. I checked the sled for equipment, a couple of blankets, a quick splint, pillows. We also carried the basic first-aid essentials on our bodies – bandages, straps to make tourniquets, ketamine to ease pain. Once we were sure we had everything we needed, I took the toboggan by the fixed handles in front and snow plowed on to the hill. Singh followed behind.

  Kristi wasn’t located far from the top, but the entry is tough and it’s the kind of run even an expert skier has to be cautious about. Miss a turn and you can end up on the catwalk 700 feet below you. Well aware of this, I sidled cautiously on to the run with the sled at my back. From our high perspective, we could see the injured skier not far down the slope, in the middle of the run, a super dangerous place to be if he had taken the wrong kind of fall. Someone had set crossed skis in the snow above him to indicate an injury, and I could see Winter beside him, his skis off, his knees dug into the snow to keep from sliding downhill. Kristi is about as steep a run as there is on Aspen Mountain. You can practically reach out your arm and drop a ball and it would only bounce off the mountain a time or two. Which makes rescuing an injured skier on Kristi particularly hairy. So far I’ve only had to do it once, but let me tell you, it’s tricky trying to basically belay 200 pounds down a thirty-something degree slope without working up some serious sweat. In fact, that’s why the toboggans all have canvas straps trailing for the back-up patroller to use as drag. Even with that it’s tough. That’s why we all hate rescues on Kristi.

  I angled myself towards Winter and the crossed skis in the snow just above the injured skier, moving slowly and with care. The snow was deep and soft, helpful as opposed to hard-pack snow on such a steep incline. So guiding the sled towards them should have been no problem. But just as I came over the knoll above them, the sled shifted unexpectedly and it pulled me down. It all happened so quickly that any attempt at recovery was doomed. The next thing I knew the toboggan and I were a projectile headed straight for Winter and the injured skier. Winter’s goggles were up and I could see his eyes go wide. I had fallen on to my hip and was holding tight to the toboggan, trying to direct myself away from them, but gravity was pushing me in their direction. If that skier was hurt now, he was going to hurt a lot worse when I crashed into him with a hundred-pound sled behind me.

  Then I went over a bump and the next thing I knew both the toboggan and I had flipped over. Somehow there had been a change in direction and the toboggan was downhill from me now, my hands in a death grip as it pulled me along on my stomach behind it. The good news was the trajectory had changed and we were no longer threatening Winter and the downed skier. The bad news was I was now in a very hairy predicament myself. I was being dragged downhill by a fast-moving sled, face forward on one of Aspen Mountain’s steepest runs. If I stuck with the sled the end game was the flat catwalk below. Smacking that catwalk with the toboggan in hand meant I was looking at a broken neck at best. But if I let go of the toboggan there was a chance of it hitting a skier crossing the catwalk and you didn’t need to have a medical degree to figure out what that damage might be.

  My eyes darted to the right where Walsh’s, the adjacent run, fed into the catwalk. There were two boarders coming up the middle of the trail. Luckily, one of them looked uphill towards Kristi and saw my dilemma. He reached out and held the other boarder back. Despite my best efforts, I was losing my hold on the toboggan. A ‘God help me’ flicked through my brain as the toboggan slipped free from my grasp. I watched the tobaggan rip down the hill, hitting the catwalk squarely before banging upright. It hovered like a drunk for a split second and then flipped off the catwalk and down on to the roped-off out of bounds area beyond. It bounced a couple more times before planting itself straight up in the snow below the catwalk.

  My trajectory was still downhill head first, but now free of the toboggan I was able to maneuver my feet below me and dig my boots in for a self-arrest. I came to a stop just shy of the catwalk.

  ‘I ain’t never seen nothing like that,’ I heard one snowboarder say to the other. And then as if nothing had happened, the two slid on past, unfazed.

  ‘That’ll teach you it’s always a wise idea to look uphill, dude,’ said the other.

  ‘I guess,’ his friend agreed.

  I was still trying to catch my breath when Singh skied up a couple minutes later. He had retrieved both my skis and was carrying them under his arm. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yah. Just a little freaked out. I don’t get what happened up there. It was like the sled fell apart or something,’ I admitted, more shaken than anything. Physically that is. Psychologically was another thing entirely. Ski patrollers are not supposed to fall on rescues, much less let go of a toboggan. My eyes turned upwards to the steep ski run above us, toward the skier we had come to rescue. ‘What about the injury up there?’

  ‘He’s OK. It’s an AFK,’ he said, applying the vernacular we used for that most common of injuries – the ubiquitous ACL tears we see more than just about anything else. This was an AFK. Another fucking knee. ‘Winter’s utilizing a little morphine so he should be fine until we get another sled. Victim didn’t see your blowout by the way and we’re keeping it
on the down-low. I radioed in that our toboggan came in too low off of Walsh’s and we need a new sled.’

  Above me I could see Meghan and Reininger joining Winter high up on the slope where I lost control. They were pulling a fresh sled, their orange crosses spreading blessings across the slope. My head pivoted downhill, towards the catwalk and the ski area boundary ropes with the valley spreading out like a stage backdrop beyond. The runaway toboggan was sticking straight up on the other side of the boundary, its yellow draped head like a tombstone in the snow.

  ‘Neverman’s gonna have my ass for this,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, Greta. No worries over Never Never. He doesn’t have to know. I told you. I talked to Winter and we’ve got your back. No big deal. What happens on the mountain stays on the mountain, right?’

  Though I shouldn’t have, I felt a shudder of relief. Ski patrollers had been sent packing for a lot less. You can’t be having runaway sleds, empty or otherwise, banging down a hill unguided.

  I clicked back into my skis – a near miracle because I was so rattled my left leg was shaking. Singh pretended not to notice that it took me a few tries to get back into my bindings. He probably didn’t want to ruffle my psyche any more than it was already ruffled. Skiing is a highly psychological sport and a damaged psyche can be as bad as or worse than having burred edges on your skis.

  We cruised down to the catwalk and ducked the boundary rope to make our way down to the half-buried toboggan. It was excruciating work extricating it from the deep snow, but after some time we managed to pull it with all the supplies still attached back on to the catwalk. After sitting a while to catch our breath, we headed for the nearest chair, Singh trailing the sled behind him.

  We had just leaned the sled against the liftie’s hut to be transported uphill later via snowmobile when Winter and Meghan skied past the lift, dragging the toboggan with the injured skier behind them. Reininger was with them, but when he saw us he peeled off and joined us at the chair.