In 1972, David and Jake Moe, Seattle brothers living in Sun Valley, Idaho, set out to capture the new vibes flowing through ski country with an experiential, literary, and visual homage called powder: Journal of the Other Ski Experience. Despite bad poetry, stream-of-consciousness writing, and a surreal cover depicting skiers tracking up the moon, the magazine would redefine the sport in the eyes of many. As Steve Casimiro, powder editor from 1987–98, put it in his introduction to the twentieth anniversary issue:
powder embodied the soul of skiing and the spirit of those fighting commercialism and searching for lost ideals. To understand its impact in 1972, you have to understand what came before: not much. Other ski magazines were boring and bland—establishment publications that mirrored the mainstream and painted the world in black and white. powder ripped the lid off. All of a sudden there was a world in Technicolor, a world of backcountry lunacy, of powder so deep you choked, of speeds so fast you could die. It was a world alive, a world that existed in the acts of madmen and idiots, a world that seethed and surged and finally found legitimacy in a weird little publication from Sun Valley.1
Leafing through a copy of what had since become powder: The Skier’s Magazine, I was captivated by its unique ethos, embodied literally and figuratively in the title. The issue’s cover featured a close-up of a wool-toqued hippie, snow crystals constellating his hat, ice clinging to a beard encircling open-mouthed joy that clearly said “best run ever.” It was unusual fodder for an action-sport magazine but brilliant and effective: I instantly wanted whatever it was the dude had just experienced. I was also impressed by the magazine’s focus on the unexpected places (both mental and physical) that skiing could take you, including, in another issue, a colorful story about climbing and skiing Mexico’s highest volcanoes by the infamous (I was soon apprised) American ski-adventuring duo of Tom Carter and Alan Bard. Whoa.
The long-buried seed began a silent, stealthy sprouting.
AFTER A YEAR at southern Ontario’s University of Waterloo— undertaken mostly to convince our parents we were serious enough to possibly return—Merl and I executed a familiar ritual for young eastern skiers: heading west for a winter in the Rocky Mountains. We spent the first part of the ski season cringing at –40°F on the slopes of Banff, Alberta, then road-tripped in our converted van around the western states well into spring. Following our freestyle heros in cutting a swath of beer, bongs, babes, and bumps (our passion was moguls at the time), we had the adventure we’d hoped for and more. But after landing dutifully back in school, we found our newly minted alpine savvy constrained by funds and time. To continue our love affair with snow, we took up cross-country skiing and telemarking— the latter an arcane but rapidly re-popularizing downhilling technique that uses Nordic-style freeheel bindings in which your boot is anchored only at the toe. (Alpine bindings have lock-down heels.)
Freeheel alpine skiing, as this combination is more correctly referred to (the telemark is simply a drop-kneed turn accomplished on any freeheel ski), was suddenly the new freestyle, attracting skiing’s always edgy and inventive fringe. Ski freaks flocked to it in droves, tweaking, reinventing, and putting a twentieth-century stamp on the genre, propelled by powder and the growing popularity of ski videos. Freeheel equipment was light, maneuverable, and versatile, turning tiny hills of any stripe into challenging— albeit wobbly—descents and allowing skiers to climb freely (physically and financially) up the slopes at commercial areas and ski down. It was, however, a rural backcountry knob that became the center of our nascent freeheel universe: a mere grassy pimple rising from surrounding cornfields, an oblong blip on a 1:25,000 topographic map, Killer Hill nevertheless loomed large in local mythology.
KILLER HILL POPPED up about ten thousand years ago, when the retreating terminus of a continental glacier hesitated long enough for meltwater to deposit a load of silt into a massive ice cavern. When the glacier moved on, a mound remained where the cavern had been. Geologists called it a kame; local ski-touring guru Chris Hart used another name.
No one had actually died there, but several people had seen God—and there wasn’t always smoke or wine involved. We were hard-pressed to squeeze three turns down its miserly, sixty-foot flanks, and yet Killer Hill held its own innate challenge. The icy boilerplate snow of the perpetually scoured windward side could send us rocketing out of control, legs akimbo, at the slightest provocation. The more desirable and usually powdery lee side was overhung by a massive cornice, and the bottom of the hill ended in an electrified barbed-wire cattle fence that, depending on snow depth, stood ankle- to knee-high, incapacitating more than a few unfortunate skiers.
Starved for downhill turns in this soporific landscape, we’d taken—with trepidation—to these skinny cross-country boards and their three-pin bindings (three upright metal pins fit into three holes under the boot’s toe, clamped together by a pathetic metal bail). However, on my first outing with Hart one November, he’d climbed me up all 300 feet of Mt. Chicopee, the still-shuttered regional ski area, linked my arm through his for balance, said “just do what I do,” and led me on a hitherto unheard-of telemark descent through the pulsating mists of snow guns.
“That, grasshopper,” he’d intoned didactically at the bottom, “is where it’s at.”
And so it was. We dug into old ski literature to learn more about the technique, analyzing grainy photos of pipe-smoking gentlemen in tweed jackets genuflecting over heinously long and heavy wooden planks. Then we set out to plumb the paltry powder stashes of the countryside on our “pins”; our thirst for vertical undiminished, we merely added it up in smaller denominations. Maybe we were drawn to Killer Hill’s isolation, appearing as it did on the horizon no matter from which direction we approached. Or maybe it simply represented the essence of skiing as we’d come to understand it: getting out there and manufacturing fun with some element of risk—even if the danger was only a couple of strings of rusted barbed wire.
I’d also learned from Hart how folks crouched atop Killer Hill in every season, the burning-hay incense of homegrown marijuana curling skyward while they watched maples bud into spring, sway green through the torpid days of summer, morph into fall’s familiar colors, then drop the entire palette in a clamor of wind and rain to leave silver branches naked and frosted and reaching. Waiting, as we all were, for snow.
There was a collective belief—of the type exacerbated by incense—that truth and beauty dwelt on Killer Hill. Or that its vistas of farm, forest, and fence somehow formed a crucible of creative realization—like the shallow summit depression we mythologized as a meteorite crater. Atop it, picnicking with a date on a halcyon summer day, I’d find myself anticipating a winter that couldn’t return soon enough. Daydreaming of downcast TV weather forecasters visibly unhappy over the arrival of Arctic outflows they were reporting, I joyously imagined those same air masses bearing down, plucking moisture from the Great Lakes (proving these polluted water bodies were still good—er, great—for something), forming flakes, and enveloping this very spot. I thought about the phone call that would inevitably come on a crisp morning after a heavy snowfall.
“Hey,” Hart would mumble in the low, conspiratorial tone that was his wont, “I know you’ve probably got work to do, but why don’t you blow it off and we’ll go out to Killer Hill?” Inevitably, the girl I lay in the grass with would catch my preoccupation.
“What are you thinking about?” she’d whisper.
Whiteout. A swirl of flakes blowing drifts across a cornfield and obscuring my vision. Cold air stinging my nostrils.
Squinting along fence rows, straining through the blizzard for Killer Hill’s looming, lopsided form. It was always there, hovering in the howling distance.
“Nothing,” I’d reply with a grin that started somewhere back in the Pleistocene era of high school ski trips and stretched into whatever adventure the future held. “Just hills.”
CHASING GR AVITY WAS our food; finding it the flavor. Being only a bite-sized thrill, however, Killer Hill kept us hungry, and our appetites increased in kind. By autumn 1983, a year into a master’s degree, I’d photocopied the volcano from my parents’ book and mailed it to Merl, labeling it with one word: December.