White Planet. Leslie Anthony

Matt Brakel’s luck would run out in 1999 on Mt. McGinnis near the Mendenhall Glacier, when he jumped a cornice onto a riskier route than the rest of his group was descending and was killed in a massive avalanche. “He always wanted to go big,” said his girlfriend, who’d witnessed the tragedy. But was there anything essentially wrong with going big—especially when that was soon to become what Alaska was known for? “I like to squeeze fear,” Matt had told me, “and I never feel more religious than when I’m skiing.”

      Spirituality. Soul?

      SKIING CROPLEY gave me plenty to think about. That single experience comprised most of the facets of skiing: elements of ecstasy and potential disaster, group-think and prudence, individuals and thresholds. Plus a taste of the newfangled Alaskan approach: DIY heli-lifts to big, unskied faces. The Mendenhall was just one of thirty glaciers flowing from the Juneau Icefield. Lofting over it one day in Al the Geologist’s homemade plane, circling spectacular vertical towers, knife-edged arêtes, and crevasses so large they could swallow the Queen Mary, I recognized the distinct outlines of several heli-accessed peaks from popular videos and realized how much of an impact Alaska had already had on the greater snowsports consciousness.

      On that 1992 trip, it was clear that skiing’s soul derived from something beyond the resort experience that went back to little other than mountains, terrain, snow, and the basic adventure of sewing these together—something that Alaska excelled at delivering. It seemed, however, that it went even farther to answer a suite of basic human desires concerned with risk. As Arnold Lunn suggested in The Mountains of Youth, “Ski-ing belongs to a great family of sports which owe their appeal to the primitive passion for speed. Mere speed is not enough . . . To secure the fine unspoiled flavor of pace you must eliminate mechanism, retain the sense of personal control, and preserve the ever-present risk of a fall.”9

      Were we consciously seeking such things when we skied? Maybe not. As Sig had presciently put it, “You might not know exactly what it is you’re looking for when you go out for a day of skiing, but that’s okay because it usually finds you.”

      Soul as innocence. And that, I suppose, is what I found in the new frontier.

      TEN YEARS LATER, things in Alaska weren’t quite as guileless. Certainly not where I stood, at the main intersection in the port of Haines, where wan afternoon light illuminated a Fellini-esque diorama of art imitating life, life imitating art, and a mongrel cast of international skiers and image makers imitating, well . . . themselves.

      POWDER photo editor David Reddick lined up a shot of a shaggy, somnolent mutt guarding a chainsaw in the back of a pick-up; French sequence king Jean-Marc Favre caught Whistler’s Pierre-Yves LeBlanc lounging beside a wooden raccoon; Austrian Ulrich Grill snapped off Abbey Road–like stills of another Whistlerite, Hugo Harrisson, in a crosswalk; France’s Dan Ferrer captured a Warren Miller moment of countryman Guerlain Chicherit strolling the dusty street incongruously dressed in full ski wear.

      Searching for the perfect representation of something vaguely categorized as “AK lifestyle” (photographers were apparently still on specific missions here), the Euro shooters were rocking pure fromage, which was nothing new. What was new were foreign interlopers interrupting the time-lapse passage of vehicles that masqueraded as traffic, creating a spectacle that had townsfolk praying for the sun to go down early. A drunk stumbled out of the Fogcutter Bar and poked Chicherit in the chest.

      “Yer one of them extreeeem skiers, ain’cha?” he oozed contemptuously. “Well, my youngest is a snowboarder and he watches all the movies and he’s gonna own these hills and your ass soon enough. So . . .”

      But the thought, like the alcohol on his breath, had simply evaporated.

      Unaware he was being challenged, or simply insulated by trademark French insouciance, Chicherit nodded politely and turned back to an even cheesier shot with a gaggle of kids and a go-kart.

      “Come on, move along folks,” you could imagine a cop saying as he waved the crowd away. “Nothing to see here . . . it’s just the 2002 Red Bull Snowthrill of Alaska.”

      AS ALASKA’S springtime heli-ghettos of Valdez, Girdwood, Haines, and Cordova had come online over the past decade to blow up in the snowsports media, I’d returned on other assignments, marveling at the evolutionary changes barely evident on that first trip to Juneau.

      By now, Alaska—location and notion—held a special place in the pantheon of influences on global ski culture. So much so that riders from Vermont to Austria to New Zealand to Japan referred to it simply as “AK.” With a million ridable mountains and almost ridiculous snowfalls, the ski possibilities here were still endless; AK was a place of constant exploration that could never be fully tapped. The can-do businesses that opened the place up were easy to reach and relatively close to home for Americans; no wonder it became the magazine-and-video darling of the wild-and-wooly nineties. Bigtime helicopter-accessed ski and snowboard competitions had come, floundered, gone, and been reinvented. People had died, many more had been injured. Helicopter crashes had claimed some; falls and avalanches swept away others. Everybody and his brother had started a renegade heli-operation (unlike their early days, at least these now employed guides) replete with pro-skier spokesperson/co-owner(s) and Vietnam-vet rodeo pilots who would land riders atop anything. Wave upon wave of celluloid heroes had been thrown up—Kim Reichelm, Kristen Ulmer, Alison Gannet, Doug Coombs, Seth Morrison, Shane McConkey, Kent Kreitler, Gordy Peifer, and Jeremy Nobis to name a few on the ski side; Victoria Jealouse, Tex Davenport, Johan Olofsson, and Jeremy Jones as a tiny sample on the snowboard ledger. The shape skis, which were all the rage at the time of my first trip, had piled on the beef, fattening up largely with wide-turning AK skiing in mind (more on all this later).

      Of course, some things hadn’t changed: Alaskans still refused to wear seatbelts, and “frontier” still rang like a hollow cliché. However, when Red Bull, the always avantgarde energy-drink company announced the Snowthrill of Alaska, promising a big-mountain freeskiing competition (the new, less-extreme name for extreme-ski contests) with a twist, it was definitely time to buckle up. And the good people of Haines—fishers, loggers, and miners whose seaweed-salad days had long since disappeared into the perpetual mists of the North Pacific—could not have been more excited.