I had the honor of going first this time and was determined not to repeat Merl’s fall on Popo. But Orizaba was a different story; its extra 1,000 vertical feet of glacier were steeper by far. My first few turns on its linoleum surface were on close to a fifty-degree incline that dropped me mockingly into a crevasse field. I made one heart-pounding hop turn, then two, followed by a quick but unsteady traverse to avoid a couple of crevasses. Legs shaking, I stopped to hang over my poles and catch my labored breath. Another vuelta and then . . . disaster. Setting up for the next turn, I caught the edge of my inside ski on a tiny, unyielding piece of rock embedded in the ice and was thrown off balance; before I could react, the weight of my pack carried my center of gravity past my feet and tipped me over, downhill. Just like that I was sliding headfirst out of control.
Damn, we should have been skiing on a rope here!
Of course it was too late for that kind of thinking—or any thinking, really. Instinctively I wormed my body around on the snow, working to get my head uphill and my feet below me. Even with that accomplished, the edges of my skis found no purchase on the slick surface. With no ice axe at the ready to self-arrest with, I struggled a mittened hand out of its pole strap and slid it down the pole’s metal shaft, grasping it above the basket with both hands, rolling onto my belly, and digging the metal point in with all the strength I could muster. My clothing bunched up, exposing my stomach to the abrasive ice and rock, but I could feel myself slowing, giving me impetus to dig even harder by pulling myself toward the pole basket with flexing elbows. And then, miraculously, I simply stopped and it was silent.
I lay hanging onto the pole, huffing lips pressed to the snow as if, somehow, more oxygen might be found there. I had the presence of mind not to try changing positions, pending evaluation. Looking down, I saw that my ankles and skis hung over the edge of the crevasse that, while not large enough to disappear into completely was big enough to snap a leg.
Merl skied down tentatively.
“Touché,” he said in the understated way naïve idiots often respond to anything of consequence. We were Dumb and Dumber before it was even fashionable: still alive in spite of ourselves.
After this incident, things improved. The slope mellowed below the crevasse field, the skiing became easier and our turns wider. The surface had softened enough in the muted sunlight to send small sprays off the tails of our boards as we arced slowly toward the toe of the glacier. Our frozen feet, pounding headaches, and dizziness evaporated at around 17,000 feet, and back at our starting point, we suddenly felt strong again. When we took off our skis and looked back at our tracks—kindergarten finger-wiggles through the soft icing of the lower glacier—a huge sense of accomplishment enveloped us. Bard and Carter may have been here first, but we were the first Canadians to descend Orizaba on freeheel gear, and second best was always good enough for us.
Back at the hut, Joaquín awaited, as promised, with cold beer. It was Miller time, Mexican-style. Bouncing toward Tlachichuca in the back of his truck, I stared after the massive form of Orizaba hunched on the horizon, and all I could see was Killer Hill’s gentle shoulders. Skiing really could take you from your backyard to something that approximated the moon. After a long, winding, snowy road of some ten years, the seed planted by my parents’ coffee-table book had come to fruition. A quest fulfilled.
Or had it only started?
What I really feel is that, if on a pair of skis . . . I forget everything except the joys of living . . . Well, why in God’s name not stay on skis? VISCOUNT ANTHONY KNEBWORTH in a letter to his father, Earl of Lytton, 1924
IN THE morning after a heavy rain, Santiago, Chile, was sort of like the basement of paradise. Its ubiquitous smog had been washed down gutters, the acrid smell of diesel exhaust replaced by musty garden scents and flowers. On downtown paseos, businesspeople rushed from coffee and morning papers toward whatever encuentro awaited. In surrounding neighborhoods, distant horns crowed over eager milkmen pushing ancient, squeaking carts and clanging bells to rouse customers. Towering above the city to the east loomed snow-capped heaven: when you could see them like this, the Andes formed a monolith of surreal scale.
It was usually magical anticipation that followed me out of the city on such a day, but that morning found me glancing over my shoulder at the sound of every footfall, certain I was being pursued. Shouldering my pack, I fought my way onto a bus and out to the police barrier that marked the start of most mountain roads in this country, seeking a ride up to Farrellones, the ski town I then called home. After my passport was approved by a couple of grim-looking carabineros, I joined a sightseeing Israeli couple in a collectivo taxi on the familiar heart-stopping ride up the canyon. Settling back in my seat, I shut my eyes and wondered how things could have got so crazy. What the hell was I doing there?
Part of the answer was easy: I was a ski bum in South America.
IN SOME WAYS, the previous few months had been a classic traveler’s saga; in others, the quintessential search for myself. Mostly, however, they’d served up a sensory overload.
Starting at the southern tip of the continent in late March, I’d hiked and skied alone through Patagonia’s Torres del Paine National Park, where I was followed by a puma for two days. I never saw or heard it but had only to retrace my steps a few hundred feet to see its eerily massive prints overlaying my own. Mid-May found me in the southern port of Punta Arenas on the Straits of Magellan, hunkered down in a bar. The soccer on television was interrupted by a report of massive snowfalls, road closures, catastrophic avalanches, and death in the Andes near Santiago. The bar patrons were universally horrified and glad they weren’t there—a disaster zone was the last place you’d want to be. But not me.
Ski bumming is a dedication to snow-sliding strong enough to make you ignore danger, shirk responsibility, eschew common comforts, and live near the bottom of the food chain, all in the name of making turns. I’d had my tastes of this time-honored rite of passage—skipping class in university whenever there was a big dump of snow, the overly freezing winter stint in Banff and subsequent tour of the Rockies with Merl in our van—but I’d always longed for something beyond the packed slopes and posh trappings of the home experience. The prospect of an adventure longer than the week I’d spent in Mexico had lured me to the Southern Hemisphere.
Upon completing my undergrad degree, I’d decided to reward myself with the delinquency of a summer of skiing. With only two reliable choices—South America or New Zealand—I’d flipped a coin that came up cabezas. So off I went, in the North American spring of 1982 (austral autumn), with more gear than the Austrian alpine team, alone, unilingual, and not just a bit naïve. After all, when you’re a twenty-five-year-old product of pampered Western culture, the world is still one big friendly place and you’re indestructible, the realities of life’s inherent fragility yet to sink in. A lesson that foreign ski bumming is unusually adept at teaching.
When the snow started falling in Chile, I headed north from Patagonia and eventually talked my way into a job at a ski area within a couple of hours’ drive of Santiago. Bunking in a large, wood-and-stone refugio high in the Andes with a happy-go-lucky crew of international instructors and patrollers seemed just what I was after. But all was not well in the area. Tension lingered from the 1973 American-backed coup that had ousted freely elected communist president Salvador Allende; military patrols of the infamous mass-murderer General Augusto Pinochet’s ruling junta ranged the slopes with unholstered guns (they were poor skiers and, so the locals said, even poorer shots). Whether or not they were simply maintaining a show of force or searching for subversives among a jet-set crowd dominated by wealthy Brazilians, diplomats, and Pan Am flight attendants was never clear, but they seemed oblivious