It’s not just art and science, but music and math as well.
When Canada’s prime ministerial enfant terrible Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously contemplated his (first) retirement while walking in an Ottawa blizzard one night, not a single Canuck of any political stripe thought it a stupid or unconsidered way to make a decision: we’d all been there, we all understood. Snowflakes both speak and listen. Making decisions in a snowstorm is our birthright.
Powder, then, is inarguably transformative to the human spirit. As skiers, powder is our medium, and the medium, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, is the message. Descending in powder offers an indescribable sensation that clearly speaks to a primitive pleasure center of the brain, for it instantly demands more in a classic addictive cycle. And yet, unlike water, powder is fundamentally changed when you pass through it: just as there is no concept of untracked water, so is there no concept of inviolate powder. This isn’t just philosophy, but morality as well; snaking someone else’s powder line—an irreplaceable commodity— is considered a contravention of skier decorum.
Let’s back up a bit. Powder wouldn’t exist if someone hadn’t figured out a way to ski it. It could just as easily have been a failed experiment, maybe not as bad as Evel Knievel’s attempted motorcycle jump across the Snake River Canyon, but still a natural phenomenon that no human tool or technique could conquer. Before humans deigned to sub-categorize it, in fact, the white stuff falling from the sky was all just snow. Even if they’re variously affected by the depth, weight, and water content of the snow that’s falling, mountains, forests, and waterways have no capacity to differentiate. Humans, however, can and do: the Inuit famously (or mythically) have many words for snow, to describe its worth in construction and travel and to predict whether you’re about to fall through it into the Arctic Ocean. And though skiers have no word for “snow mixed with the shit of a sled dog,” we’ve developed a similar snowcabulary. Simply put, skiers invented powder, imagining it into existence from the stacks of crystals piling up on mountainsides around the world.
Ironically, it was a ski racer from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, named Dick Durrance who, in 1940, started the modern powder ball rolling in Alta, Utah. Having opened a resort and started a ski school, he was dealing with the local overabundance of snow and a glut of terrain on which stemming (in which one ski at a time was pushed into a turn) wasn’t possible. It was clear that regular skiing— as practiced preferentially to this point on packed snow, pistes, and racecourses—wasn’t going to cut it here. Alternate techniques were required, so Durrance invented the short-swinging, up-down “dipsy-doodle” powder turn, which quickly became the resort’s signature export.
Meanwhile, a young Dolores Greenwell was skiing around Loveland Pass, Colorado, on a pair of six-foot-plus hickory skis. From 1947 through 1950, she taught skiing in Aspen, developing a nose and a preference for the untracked snow away from the lifts. In 1950 she made the first ski ascent of Mt. Columbia, second-highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, and the first ski ascent of Snow Dome, the continent’s hydrographic apex. After she married Ed LaChapelle, a Canadian geophysicist she met on that trip, the couple spent time at the avalanche institute in Davos, Switzerland, before moving to Alta, where Ed was stationed on the U.S. Forest Service’s avalanche and snow research team. Dolores, naturally, was there to ski. In 1956, she and Jim Shane were the first to dipsy-doodle down Alta’s infamous Baldy Chute—in powder so deep they disappeared.
FOR MANY PEOPLE, skiing is a sphere of perpetual freedom into which they can step at will, and the sweet spot—that which instantly expands the sphere in every dimension—is powder. Whether one is in it or simply wants to be, powder is a realm of constant challenge. It is about words, but being unable to speak; about telling, but being unable to describe. It is sensations and memories. Silence amplifying a heartbeat and the rasping of breath. Involuntary grunts of effort and unconscious squeals of delight. Inspiration. Bad poetry. Broken marriages. Magazines. Movies. Grins. Silliness. Frozen toes and ice cream headaches. Magical turns and occasional smacks off a hidden hazard. First tracks. Lost skis. Trudging, navigating, and skiing over, through and around boilerplate, sastrugi, crust, slab, crud, and other snow-junk just to get to the good stuff. A way of feeling. A way of thinking. A way of life. A way, period. Tao.
“Our culture has no words for this experience of ‘nothing’ when skiing powder,” LaChapelle put it in 1993’s Deep Powder Snow: 40 Years of Ecstatic Skiing, Avalanches, and Earth Wisdom. “In general the idea of nothingness or nothing in our culture is frightening. However, in Chinese Taosit thought, it’s called “the fullness of the void” out of which all things come . . . My experiences with powder snow gave me the first glimmerings of the further possibilities of mind.”8
She was onto something.
It has been said that if joy is the response of a lover receiving what they love, then this is the joy we feel skiing powder with friends. Overflowing gratitude indeed seems to paint the absolutely absurd grins flashed at the bottom of a run. You never see such grins elsewhere—not on a tennis court or a golf course, not on a podium or in a dance club. No flush of physical victory compares to the ineffable euphoria of a journey through powder. It isn’t just shared fun but, as LaChapelle also notes, a sense of life fully lived, together, “in a blaze of reality.”
In the end, powder isn’t about an outer experience but an inner one, a crucial intersection of mind and body where thinking and feeling cannot be teased apart. This is where immersion and affliction, submergence and addiction live, forever invoking powder’s unique spirituality as religion. Yet this sport’s recently canonized angel would loudly eschew any traditional doctrine in favor of making no distinction between the universe at large and anything within it; no distinction, for instance, between saints and sinners, powder snow and powder-snow seekers, the places you look for it and the places it is found.
When—as I’d found in my travels—you got right down to it, the essence of skiing is best summed by the equation: soul/X = people + places + powder. Surely there was some kind of heaven on Earth where this equation was always solved.
Everything is an experiment.
Red Bull Snowthrill of Alaska book, 2003
AN INTERESTING set of circumstances had led to the Red Dog Saloon in Juneau, Alaska, where I stood in Birkenstocks, my rain-soaked socks caked in sawdust and peanut husks.
The trail had started in Toronto, bouncing through L.A., Seattle, and totem-poled Ketchikan before landing in Juneau. And now, surrounded by bad taxidermy, orange life-preserver rings, and beer mugs the size of pitchers, it seemed I might find whatever it was I was looking for.
Certainly the concept was evolving. Already there’d been the blind girl with a broken ankle on the plane who was content to tap her way onboard without help, the senator’s aide at the former brothel we were bunking at who’d handed me a self-penned story about a surfer’s life in landlocked Fairbanks, and the bales of salmon jerky the town seemed constructed from. Disparate images to be sure, they all pointed to something that ultimately embodied a spirit of self-reliance and wildness that seemed very Alaskan and not altogether