Really?
Others had been sent on discovery missions to the Vermont mega-resort of Killington, molehills of the Midwest, venerable Aspen in Colorado, and Washington’s Mt. Rainier— North America’s almost perennial record-holder for snowfall. These places all had well-known histories and hardcore habitués: “the known,” if you will. I’d been sent to what was, in 1992, “the unknown,” the big empty: Alaska.
With too many mountains to name and too few people to care, the outpost of Alaska had suddenly come onto the global snowsports radar as both a destination and newly minted ethos. The state’s endless ranges and endless snow suggested endless possibilities for exploration, and my frequent photographic collaborator Henry Georgi and I were there to plumb the zeitgeist.
Bearded, boisterous, and stentorian, Henry had started his photographic career shooting rock concerts in Toronto and rafting on the Ottawa River, but his was the heart of a skier. Raised by German-speaking parents in the Toronto suburb of Downsview, he had spent his watershed ski-bumming and ski-photography season in the party-addled Austrian resort of St. Anton. We met in the early eighties through Ontario’s nascent telemark scene, where I dressed in Norwegian period costume to forerun races that he’d been hired to document. Soon, I became one of Henry’s models, and our photographic collaborations filtered onto the continent’s newsstands. Our first real joint triumph, however, resulted from a trip to Le Massif in Quebec’s Charlevoix region, a unique operation that employed school buses to ferry guided groups to the top of a 2,300-foot escarpment overlooking the St. Lawrence River where ships and whales bobbed among the ice floes. It snowed more than two feet while we were there, and Henry’s photos of waist-deep powder skiing in the typically low-snow East were a sensation, forming the basis for my first-ever powder feature. We’d sidestepped into a career of adventuring together at the magazine’s behest, as reliable to the editorial braintrust as the team of Bard and Carter that preceded us—mostly, as we would later learn, because we likewise worked cheap and would (foolishly) go anywhere.
On the “soul of skiing” mission, naturally, we were eager to embrace whatever powder’s editors threw at us, aware of the growing gravity of our destination and that something important was brewing there. In some sense, what was burgeoning in Alaska honored the Euro “extreme” movement of big, bold, off-piste descents in the high-alpine vertical world of the otherwise human-choked Alps; in another way, this push was a typically American attempt to outmuscle that small, dedicated scene with vast wilderness, a fleet of helicopters, and a few tons of film.
Although the “idea” of Alaska was steep, deep, and unexplored, skiing was hardly new there. Hundreds of local alpine, cross-country, and ski-jumping areas had been founded in the early twentieth century by waves of immigrant miners, loggers, and fishermen. At least one legitimate destination resort drew and was owned by the Japanese. So there was more than just the loam of noisy aircraft and harebrained competitions (like the pie-in-the-sky World Extreme Ski Championships held in the Chugach Mountains outside beat-down, oil-soaked Valdez the previous year) in which to dig for soul here—there were real grass roots.
Thus, while our media peers leapt from helicopters onto massive, never-skied Alaskan faces, our first experience in the new frontier was the home hill of 1992 Olympic women’s downhill silver medalist Hilary Lindh. Tiny Eaglecrest Ski Area lies outside the somnolent town of Juneau, the only U.S. state capital to which no road leads: in true Alaskan style, the island-bound town can only be reached by sea or air.
Juneau was a wild place where ravens ruled the streets and grocery-store windows advertised bear repellent and ammunition. Life was dominated by commercial fishing, gold-rush nostalgia, and tourists disgorged from ships cruising the Inside Passage. Half the population lived near the weathered toe of the Mendenhall Glacier, and the enormous, steep chutes on the face of Mt. Juneau provided the biggest urban avalanche disaster potential outside of alpine Europe (they had, in the past, released to engulf part of town).
Despite its state-capital status, Juneau was still unpretentious enough that visiting journalists might be eagerly introduced from the floor of the state legislature in the midst of a critical vote to override a governor’s veto. It was a place that, long before Sarah Palin appeared on Saturday Night Live, reflected the fact that Alaskans didn’t take themselves too seriously, where monster trucks had license plates like OVRKILL, and a woman with a voice like Irish Cream liqueur might keep your attention while Woodstock was being re-created onstage in the Alaskan Hotel, then press a napkin into your hand with a phone number and the inscription “call or die wondering.”
It was an apt metaphor for the Siren call that Alaska was putting out to the ski world: go or die wondering.
IN THE RED DOG, Matt Brakel, fisherman, extreme skier, paraglider, video star, and self-professed glory hound, snapped open the lid of a large plastic bucket filled with the morning’s catch of plump shrimp.
“Have one,” he said.
Above him a stuffed bear slithered up a pole after a pair of human legs that dangled from the ceiling.
We barely had time to bolt down a crustacean before the bartender, standing under frontier folk hero Wyatt Earp’s gun (which was mounted over an inscription that read “checked but never claimed”), informed us of the “no shrimp” rule and tossed us a bag of peanuts.
And so Henry and I sat, shelling nuts and talking cliffs, chutes, and cornices with Matt, our designated ski model, and some management-types from Eaglecrest. It was glib. It was cool. But then it got serious.
“What do you guys need?” they wanted to know, as if we were a commando team compiling a list of weaponry for some vague assault.
“Snow,” I said, perhaps a little too earnestly.
“Sun,” countered Henry, neatly summing our respective personal missions and perpetual conflicts.
I was writing things down on a pad that was getting blurry. Maybe I was more tired than I realized after eighteen hours of traveling, or had miscalculated the sheer volume of an Alaskan mug, but my enthusiasm was draining like a burst appendix. In the dead of night, in the rain, amid a legion of cobwebbed Alaskan kitsch, this talk suddenly seemed so business-like. This wasn’t the nebulous “go hang out and see whassup” kind of assignment I was used to. Instead, the mission was clouded by specificity: find the soul of skiing, whatever that might be. But didn’t I usually end up with a sense of this no matter where I skied? Did I really need to hang on every word in hopes of being struck by a lightning bolt of insight?
Probably not. As my companions’ voices thinned in the barroom din, I took a deep breath, a swig of beer, and put the pad away. Before even getting started, I stopped looking for whatever it was I thought I was looking for.
RICK KAUFMAN jostled with the controls of the grooming machine as he spoke.
“I pity people who don’t ski, you know? I really pity them.”
He was trying not to sound elitist, I knew. And his voice carried no malice, no judgment, no scorn. Though pity came pretty close to all three.
“I mean, how do you explain sex to a virgin? You can tell them about it as much as you want, but they’ll really have to experience it to relate.”
His sincerity helped me ignore the fact that this analogy was the biggest cliché in the ski world, typically rendered to explain the orgasmic nature of powder skiing. But I knew what he meant. In fact, I probably knew more about what he meant than he did. It was, more or less, what you’d expect to hear from a hardcore skier. It was, more or less, what I’d heard from hundreds of diehards. Describing precisely why you did what you did was mechanistically impossible, because skiing is feeling versus understanding; the knowledge of experience.
It was 5 a.m., and we were trundling down Eaglecrest’s front side while it snowed in that snotty coastal way that straddled the freezing point and left