Rick grew up in Pontiac, Michigan, and didn’t start skiing until age twenty-one. When, shortly thereafter, he moved to Alaska, he had no specific intention of getting into the ski business; as he accurately observed, few do— they just kind of back into it as a way to keep skiing. He applied for a lift operator’s job at Eaglecrest in 1977. The manager at the time told him he wouldn’t fit in very well, a point of particular glee for Rick, who was now in his fifteenth season as operations manager.
Outside, the sky lowered and the snow glomming the windshield thickened, wipers whining against its weight.
“It’s that feeling when you hit your turns and your line just right; you don’t get winded—I mean you feel better after the run than when you started. Communing with the terrain. You know? God, when you have a really good day on skis it changes your whole outlook on life. It just makes you . . .”
And then together, as if rehearsed, our voices infused with our own heavy hindsight:
“Want to go out and get shitfaced!”
CROPLEY CHUTE drops 2,300 feet from the summit of Mt. Ben Stewart to spill onto a lake. For three days we’d etched lines through the accumulating snow of West Bowl (the ubiquity of ski areas naming bowls for compass points never ceases to amaze me . . .) and dodged malevolent trees above Waterfall ( . . .nor the ubiquity of names evoking ninety-degree plunges . . .), while staring up at Cropley’s gaunt face. The wide-open forty-degree expanse was as inviting as it was scary. It hardly ever slid they said, but when it did, it went big. That morning, as the ocean fog spilling over the ridge was atomized by the rising sun, it felt stable, and we decided to go for it.
A fair-sized gang disembarked from the top of the Hooter Chair: patrollers, instructors, managers, and hangers-on. Shouldering our skis, we headed up the ridge above Eagle’s Nest ( . . . nor lofty, bird-related places . . .), a route that seemed trammeled by at least half of Eaglecrest’s skiers on any given day. Men, women, children, dogs—no one here thought twice about hiking for their turns, despite the vast amount of terrain available from the summit chairlift. The current train of skiers snaking up the ridge channeled the famous grainy photo of gold prospectors crossing Alaska’s Chilkoot Pass. And weren’t we, after all, looking for White Gold? I watched as venerates Sigurd Olson and Lucy McPherson, two of the nicest humans I’d ever met, peeled out of line toward their own secret stashes.
Sig was born in 1923 in Ely, Minnesota, and was cross-country skiing by age four. His main interest, however, was ski jumping, which he did all over the Midwest. In 1943, he was drafted, joining the 10th Mountain Division ski troops in Colorado. His time overseas was short but eventful. After pushing through Italy’s Apennine Mountains, his division was about to thread the main passes of the Alps when the Germans surrendered. Back home, he earned a master’s degree in wildlife management. He and his wife visited Alaska—stop me if you’ve heard this before—and never left. Moving to Juneau in 1958, he began patrolling at the old Second and Third Cabin areas, which people had been hiking up to ski since the thirties. He retired in 1991 after thirty-two years of patrolling, but still maintained a serious addiction by skiing every day there was snow and writing poems about it. He passed away in 2008, and skied right up to the end.
“I hate to miss a day of skiing,” he told me. “To me, that’s the best incentive to get other things done.”
Lucy also hated to miss a day. Born in Montana in 1931, she married out of high school and raised a family in Sand Point, Idaho. In 1963, her husband talked her into free ski lessons; immediately hooked, she began teaching soon after. Moving to Juneau, Lucy became the first instructor at Second and Third Cabins.
“Having to put your boots and skis on a pack and hike in was quite a change from Sand Point’s chairlifts,” she recounted.
In fact, she set a record for hiking in, always refusing a ride on the snowmobile Sig used to pull the patrol sleds. And here they both were, years later, spouses deceased, best buddies sharing a zest for powder that knew few bounds. Five minutes with these two made you feel warm all over. With their sparkling eyes and impish grins they were, it seemed, eternally young.
Back on the hike, it took fifteen minutes to traverse the ridge. Another ten would have put us over Shit-for-Brains Chute ( . . . and finally, it seems, every ski area must baptize several runs as an ode to the ridiculousness of skiing them), but the sun and big snow lay on the rolling parabolas below. Everyone stopped talking. Some stopped breathing. Ten pairs of eyes bored holes into 1,000 feet of cold, fresh powder. Rick looked like he just wanted to hug everyone.
We took the lines on the steeper first pitch in small groups, adrenaline chasing away any butterflies. Whoops and hollers echoed around the valley, smiles tore at our cheeks. It got even sillier when we regrouped and kicked the last pitch en masse. And the squeals of delight weren’t those of jaded lifetime skiers, but those of children playing in a sandbox, splashing in a pool. Ponce de Leon should probably have been searching for the fountain of youth in the clean, fresh environs of winter mountains, not in the fetid mosquito-and-snake-infested swamps of Florida.
That was the warmup. After the usual kerfuffle of turning on and checking everyone’s avalanche transceivers (an electronic beacon with both transmit and receive functions worn by all when backcountry skiing), enumerating probes and shovels (more avalanche rescue gear), and calling in a helicopter (in Alaska, an aircraft was always at the ready), we were ferried up to Cropley in two groups. In one group were Henry and Rick; in the other, me, Al the Geologist, Matt Brakel, and Nancy Peel—Eaglecrest’s caretaker; ski-school director; snowboard, telemark, and cross-country instructor; off-season raft guide; powerlifter; bodybuilder, and basic human skiing machine. The summit we were dropped on was spectacular, with huge gleaming upper bowls overlooking the shimmering waters of Stephens Passage.
Matt, Al, Nancy, and I disappeared down the chute while the helicopter hovered off the face with Rick and Henry, who was bagging a few rare sunny shots. The untracked bliss got a little less blissful where the sun had been on it, and several point releases (slow-moving, wet-snow avalanches that start small and fan out) made their way down the main chute in our wakes; Matt had touched off the biggest.
Matt was getting careless, and indeed when we regrouped on a ridge he had broken away from the group, traversed the main chute, and climbed above some rock-and-tree-studded face to do God knew what. What he did was wipe out bigtime on some hidden debris before making a spectacular recovery and putting a reasonable line down into the chute.
“Goddammit,” Rick groaned, peeved at this breach of collective safety. “That’s why we call him ‘Break-all.’”
The other side of the ecstasy coin in skiing is getting carried away when you should remain vigilant. Matt had made me antsy days before when he was pushing it in the trees and in danger of goring himself. Big jumps, unscouted landings. He knew the mountain, yeah, but . . .
It got worse. Tense as we moved downward, I was glad to reach the bottom, but nobody was behind. They were all collected above the last ridge, which on one side rolled benignly into the lower chute and on the other dropped off precipitously.
Break-all was going to jump.
It was a big drop his ski tips hung over, but at least it was onto snow. He backed out of sight and when next I saw him, he was in the air—perfect body position, legs pulled up, arms in tight. A magazine cover. It would have been a good jump.
When he hit the rock under the snow, a loud crack echoed like gunfire, and Matt somersaulted crazily in a full-body ragdoll—head, air, feet, air, head. One ski stuck in the landing above and the other javelined toward the lake; it was the kind of wince-worthy highlight a sports channel might play over and over and over.
Miraculously, he was okay. And in that moment it was hard to equate this soft-spoken, big-hearted guy whose love of skiing went back to childhood backcountry trips with his mother and included teaching tots in the Mighty Mite ski racing program, with the human cannonball taking ill-conceived risks for the camera. He was a hell