After news of a big snowfall in the resort hubs of Queens-town and Wanaka, I hitchhiked south from Christchurch, catching my first ride through the folded-cardboard landscapes of the South Island with a sheep rancher. He dropped me in the middle of nowhere, then headed west on what seemed barely a road toward a vast sheep station in the foothills of the Southern Alps. How big was his holding? He rounded up his sheep with a helicopter. I watched the diminishing dust cloud marking the retreat of his rattling pickup for a long while.
After an hour, a car finally materialized on the horizon. It appeared to be bouncing down the road at high speed. It was a dirty-gold, American-made station wagon (most cars in NZ were British or Japanese); the back was stuffed with ski bags, duffels, and assorted gear; random items like a boot, a glove, or a beer bottle were pressed against the windows like a storefront sale. The two occupants seemed to be fighting with each other over the steering wheel as they blew past at well over sixty miles per hour. But just as I dejectedly dropped my thumb, the car screeched to a halt, then backed up, burning rubber. A couple of long-haired, smiling faces beamed out.
“Sorry mite, didn’t see ya skeeez theea . . .”
“Yeeh, we wuz wristling . . .”
“. . . but then Jiff heea sees ’em lyin’ in the greevel, heh?”
“. . . yeeh, and so I scream ‘skeea!’, and Geerrett heea . . .”
“. . . pulls over, so . . .”
“. . . hop een!”
There’s a fine line between the ride you’ll never forget and the ride you wish you’d never taken. That line was somewhere in Geoff and Garrett’s car, but as with everything else in the vehicle, no one quite knew where.
The hyperkinetic pair were speed skiers on the NZnational team. Of skiing’s numerous insane disciplines, speed skiing is by far the most certifiable. In the sport’s equivalent of drag racing, racers squeeze into aerodynamic suits and helmets, don long, heavy skis, then hurtle down a steep, straight track until they reach maximum velocity and pass through an electronic speed trap. Where the track flattens—the beginning of the long glide to a stop—skiers are often going so fast that their bodies can’t handle the sudden compression. So they crash. Sometimes they catch an edge on the track. And crash. Sometimes the air gets under their skis and lifts them off the snow like a hydrofoil so they lose control. And crash. Sometimes they crash . . . just because. In any case, skiers can be torn apart, breaking bones that only the tight suit (similar to motorcycle leathers) keep in place.
Conversation revealed that these guys were friends with speed skier Steve McKinney, one of my favorite powder mag heroes. Where thrills were concerned, McKinney had done it all: first to break the 200 km/h barrier (125 mph; it has since pushed past 250 km/h, or 150 mph), summited Denali, paraglided off Mt. Everest.
“The faster my body travels, the slower my mind seems to work. In the crescendo of speed, there is no thought, no sound, no vision, no vibration. It is simply instinct and faith,”6 McKinney famously offered of the womb-like calm inside his self-designed Darth Vader helmet.
Recalling this might have told me what I was in for. Geoff and Garrett were drinking beer and showed me how they made the car bounce by simultaneously jostling up and down in their seats. Then some high-powered NZmarijuana appeared. I tried not to imbibe, but it was useless: the car was seriously hotboxed and one hit was more than enough. Which made it that much more intense when, at the top of a several-mile downhill, with no warning, Garrett climbed out the passenger window and crabbed across the windshield to the driver’s side, reaching in to hold the wheel while Geoff slid across the seat and also went out the passenger window to lie on the roof facing forward. Garrett then positioned himself similarly on the driver’s side roof, with his left arm still holding the steering wheel. Both were laughing like hyenas. I was alone in the backseat of a car hurtling down a mountain.
Clearly practiced, the maneuver took wordless seconds to execute, and there was no time to be scared. I’d passed instantly through a state of terror into acceptance of whatever fate was in store. Kind of like falling off a building.
Were near-death experiences the way these guys pumped up for a speed-skiing meet, I wondered? I was aware of the absurdity of posing this question while hanging out of the car with one arm propped in the window and the other arm on the roof. I was also aware that neither of them was watching the road while answering.
“Ow, weea not gowin’ to anee speeed-skeeing thingie . . .”
“Now, weea gowin’ to Wanaka . . .”
“. . . to geet in a heelicopta . . .”
“. . . and skee some powda.”
Of course. Even skiing’s most depraved shared the thirst.
WHEN DOLORES LaChapelle died in Silverton, Colorado, in January 2007 at the age of eighty-nine, the hagiography began immediately. And why not? Sure, you wouldn’t find any cheesy dashboard figurines of the woman with the long silver braid and beatific smile offering blessings to acolytes in ski-town souvenir shops, but she was still the closest thing powder skiing would ever have to a patron saint.
Fêted and remembered everywhere, LaChapelle’s considerably charmed life was rewoven in obituaries around the continent. Suddenly, a lot of people who’d never heard of the author, mountain sage, and driving force in the deep ecology movement, knew who Dolores LaChapelle was. Equally suddenly, many who’d never had cause to ponder such things learned that “powder”—the catch-all euphemism for unconsolidated, preferably deep snow—was a relatively new concept.
Deep ecologists consider humans an integral part of the environment and value human and non-human life equally. In this view, skiers who claim, “It’s all about powder,” are referring not simply to a substance but to their movement through, and thus relationship to, that substance. LaCha-pelle, who was ground zero to the idea’s development and philosophized extensively on the subject, saw this relationship in purely Zen terms: the snow’s molecules over here, your little clump of molecules over there, no difference between you and a tree, you and a table, you and frickin’ Madonna.
Most ski stories begin with or center around the quest for powder, and once again, Arnold Lunn, in The Mountains of Youth, presciently describes why:
The true skier . . . is not confined to a piste. He is an artist who creates a pattern of lovely lines from virgin and uncorrupted snow. What marble is to the sculptor, so are the latent harmonies of ridge and hollow, powder and sun-softened crust to the true skier. By a wise dispensation of providence, the snow, whose beauty has been defaced and destroyed by the multitude of piste addicts, does not record the passage of the [racer]. It is only soft snow that records the movements of individual skiers, and it is only in soft snow that the real artist can express himself.7
Art and science are indeed inseparable when it comes to powder, for its every aesthetic is based in chemistry and physics: the basic shape and geometry of flakes; the loft and water content of newly fallen snow; the downy hoar crystals that grow on powder’s surface in cold weather; the sweep of a drift in a swirling wind; the shadowed compression of a ski track; the contrail of vaporized crystals billowing behind a skier.
Indeed, no substance on Earth is as transformative as snow, which, perhaps, isn’t surprising given that no other element has the chameleonic properties of snow’s precursor, water. And no other type of snow has the mutative capacity of powder. It is there and then it is not, settling, consolidating, moving with the breeze, deliquescing in the sun. Morphing all too quickly, it reminds us that the two-million-year-old blue ice on a glacier’s face was once the stuff of face-shots.
Nothing on Earth compares to walking