A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (37 page)

Still, because of the mountain’s unique shape, there is one area the ski patrol can’t stabilize between first light and the time the lifts open. Down under the cornice, below the steeply sloping pillows of snow, there are dozens upon dozens of short, steep, narrow canyons, the sort of avalanche chutes climbers and skiers call couloirs. Snow builds up in the couloirs over a season: enough snow to rumble down into the lower pillows and kick loose an avalanche on unsuspecting skiers smoking down the groomed runs below. Because there are so many of these chutes, with so much snow piling up in them after each storm, the patrol can’t possibly deal with every one of them, every day.

The couloirs are areas of instability, and they are controlled by the unpaid and unstable persons who call them Madman’s or Psychopath or the Orgasms.

“I
suppose I’ve been in over fifty avalanches,” Tom Jungst said. Tom was telling me about avalanches on our way up to the top of the mountain. Beyond the highest lift, there was a trail to the lowest point of the ridge. It was four hundred feet, straight up, and we had to walk it, carrying skis over our shoulders and kicking steps into a wall of snow that rose so vertically I didn’t really see the top until I was almost on it. Each shin kick into the snow provided a little place to stand, a platform to launch the next kick. This wasn’t skiing: it was twenty minutes’ worth of hard mountaineering.

I am a recreational skier, most comfortable on advanced intermediate slopes, and as such, I had no business being on the ridge. However, I was with Barney Hallin, a captain of the air patrol, and two chute divers, Jungst and Steve Ault, who all swore that they could get me down “in one piece.” The ski patrol checked us out before we started up the trail. We had to have designated partners and carry avalanche beepers. A sign at the bottom of the trail said that the ridge was hazardous: so steep that rescues are extremely difficult.
What the sign really meant is that folks are pretty much on their own up above the groomed slopes.

We crested the ridge, where the wind hit us like a symphony of rage and the land dropped away on both sides, forever. The expert slope below in the bowl actually looked gentle; my favorite intermediate run was a white flatland prairie. Wind-driven snow iced my beard so that I imagined I looked like a tough guy in a cigarette ad.

Tom Jungst and I checked out the Walkman-sized beepers. We set them for “transmit.” If the snow swallowed either of us, we’d switch to “receive” and search for the other, by sonar. The louder the beep, the closer the crushed and suffocating skier. At the point where the beeping is loudest, a searcher should take the basket off one of his poles and poke around for the buried buddy. Tom told me where I could find a “rescue stash,” with shovels and evacuation sleds.

Jungst said he’d guide me on an easy traverse of the ridge, where the avalanche danger was minimal. Even so, he thought I ought to know what to do in the event that something slabbed off and rolled over me.

Experience has taught Tom that the best thing to do in an avalanche is to “go with the flow.” Don’t fight it. Try to swim to the surface, get yourself oriented, and get your skis pointing downhill.

These aren’t the wet, heavy avalanches you get in California or the East: it’s not the sort of moving snow that sucks you down into it and imprisons you with its weight. The powder at Bridger is generally soft and light. If the avalanche doesn’t get much above Tom’s head, he can generally ski it. “In a slough or slide like that,” he said, “you want to turn out of it. Get away from it, off to the side. The best angle to take is forty-five degrees, downhill.” Tom has skied so many avalanches that he and partner Jim Conway refer to this maneuver as “doing a forty-five.”

In the chutes, however, with stone walls rising sixty and one hundred feet on either side, it is impossible to do a forty-five. At first the snow is only knee-deep, and it shoots by you, pushing at your legs, sliding on its ball bearings
while you’re scraping along on the same surface on the abrasion of skis. Keeping the boards under you in moving snow is a knack that can only be learned by surviving a dozen or more light powder avalanches. “Most of these chutes narrow down quite a bit in places,” Tom told me. “The snow piles up there.” I got the impression that it was a little like standing in a locked room during a flood that would crest at the eight-foot level. “It’ll get up to your neck,” Tom explained, “and probably lift your skis up above the hard surface. You want to spread your arms out, keep your hands above it, and you should be able to float on it, with your head up above the surface. When the chute widens out, the snow level will drop, your skis will hit solid snow, and you can do a forty-five.”

The cold smoke that falls on Bridger is so light that it doesn’t stick to slopes much steeper than fifty-two degree. Several of the chutes below the pillows get a bit more vertical than that. After a particularly big dump, these chutes are filled with a few tons of powder trembling on the brink of an avalanche that will empty the couloir in a sustained boreal thunder. But, just for a few hours, yesterday’s bare, rocky canyon is skiable.

“Won’t the first person through knock loose a slide?” I asked Tom.

“That’s why you want to be the first person through,” he said. “After the slide, you can’t ski that chute anymore.” He and Conway take these chutes together, one behind the other. “Mostly,” Jungst said, “the slide catches us at the narrow spot. If Jim’s leading, I can usually see his head above the moving snow. All of sudden, he does a forty-five, and I know exactly where my skis are going to hit.”

In effect, Jungst, Conway, and other chute divers like them are controlling the slopes, doing away with areas of instability. This is the reason the ridge is open to extreme skiers. “These guys do a large percentage of our control,” Joel Juergens had told me. “The more people who ski the ridge, the more stable our snow pack.” Juergens said that perhaps 250 people a day ski the top of the mountain: the exertion of the walk, the expense of the avalanche beepers,
and the hazardous nature of the slopes keep numbers down. “These are all good skiers,” Juergens said. “We only have to make a couple of rescues a year up there. Only a very few of the very best ski the steepest chutes. There’s two guys, we call them the Chuteski Brothers: the steeper and narrower the couloir, the better they like it.” The Chuteski Brothers sounded an awful lot like Tom Jungst and Jim Conway.

O
nly a small fraction of the ridge runners used the mountain’s verticality to fly.

Barney Hallin is one of those who like to jump. Call it flying. The Montana distance-hang-gliding champion, Barney loves the howling chinook winds that devil the eastern Rocky Mountains because they are perfect for “body flying.” This is a sport that requires a steady seventy-mile-an-hour blow. In a hard chinook, Barney can be found atop one of several high hills, hovering over a cliff, flying, held up by the caprice of the wind alone.

On the ski slope, Barney likes to catch “big air, clean air,” and the verticality of the ridge is perfect for the sort of ski soaring he likes, which mostly takes place ten feet or so above the snow.

I side-slipped a hundred yards down the shallowest section of the cornice and dug a sit-down position on the slope. Above, Barney edged up to the cornice, and I could see the tips of his skis projecting over a perfect perpendicular cliff that dropped about fifty feet before edging out into a long, steep slope. There was a small wisp of cloud between myself and the tips of those skis.

Barney wanted to take the cliff in “free fall,” but he just couldn’t help himself: he popped it, which is to say he put some leg into the jump in order to catch more air. It was fifty feet of good clean air, and Barney took it nicely, falling free against the face of the cliff with his skis folded back under him. In the history of the world, most people who’ve
fallen this far—it’s about the distance you’d plummet from a five-story building—have waved their arms and screamed all the way down before getting disagreeable bits of themselves into inaccessible cracks and crevices in the rock or pavement below. If Barney were to land on a flat, he’d break his legs, at the very least, but he expected to touch down where the mountain began to edge out under the cliff, in a place where the slope would rise up gently to kiss his skis.

This was his first run of the day, and Barney didn’t know what the snow would be like—he probably shouldn’t have popped it—and he landed in crud, an unexpected wind crust. His skis cracked through the crust into a soft slush below, and the hard upper layer of snow, the crust, yanked at his legs. Barney looked like a man trying to sprint through several shin-high strands of barbed wire. He pitched forward, and Tom Jungst, standing beside me, edged into position. If Barney began a long fast slide toward the cliff a quarter mile below, Tom would ski an intersecting traverse and throw a block tackle into his friend. This is one good way to stop an uncontrolled slide up on the ridge.

Barney, falling, tucked his head into his shoulder. He didn’t care to plow up a thousand-foot-long furrow with his face. His speed and the rolling motion put him in danger of cartwheeling down the slope, doing an “endo,” tumbling ass over teakettle all the way to the cliff. But Barney had fallen before, lots of times, and the kinetic computer in his muscles figured in the steepness of the slope, the condition of the snow, the terrain below—all this in an instant too short to calibrate—and he threw the skis over the top of his head, like a swimmer churning into a tumble turn. Properly oriented downhill, on a slope so steep Barney was very nearly standing up, it was only a matter of cocking the ankles slightly, catching an edge, and popping back up to the safety of skis. This maneuver is impossible on the shallow slopes I frequent, but Tom Jungst said that it is the thing to do on extreme terrain. “If you fall,” he said, “the thing that is going to save you, short of a block tackle, is getting back onto your skis.”

Tom couldn’t really describe how he decides what shoulder to roll on in order to get back up. “If you’ve fallen a lot,” he told me, “you say, ‘Oh, one of these,’ and your body just takes over from there.”

Barney, not shaken in the least, cut into a giant slalom turn the moment he was up. He began “arcing it out,” hitting a high-speed rhythm down the face of the mountain, moving on a slight angle to his left to avoid the cliff below. He disappeared into a stand of trees where he would have to pick up speed by narrowing down the arc in order to “weasel through.” High-speed tree runs on steep slopes have proved fatal on many slopes. Imagine driving into a Douglas fir at thirty-five miles an hour. You could total your car. Hit the same tree at the same speed without the protection of a car’s steel envelope, and you total your karma.

I was up and moving along the least-steep section of the traverse, finding a new position where I could watch Barney come blasting out of the trees, picking up maximum speed. He dove straight down the sort of slope I’d call a cliff, then popped it, hard, at the top of a ripple on the face of a mountain. The roller was shaped like a wave, a large oceanic swell, and Barney might have skied it easily, never losing the safety of the snow, but he wanted to catch some air.

Knowing precisely when to pop a roller is an art. It isn’t like going up for a basketball at the tip. You want to roll your hips forward and get out over your skis. Time it wrong, go straight up, and the tyranny of physics rolls you backward in such a way that you’re looking up at the sky through your skis. Competitive divers call this maneuver a gainer. Barney Hallin calls it “doing an upside-down Volkswagen.” He knows of one man who broke his neck in this way, simply by mistiming his pop at the top of a roller.

Barney didn’t suck up into a tuck. He took the roller like a ski jumper, leaning forward over his skis so that he could get wind under him and use his body as an airfoil. He caught another forty feet of clean air.

Below the roller, there was another wave of white, a
knoll, which is distinct from a roller because of the relative steepness of the downside slope. Barney popped the knoll for his biggest air of the day. He caught one hundred and fifty clean feet of it, soaring about twelve feet above the slope, flying over a couple of small trees and the photographer below. He might have popped it differently and gotten a full thirty feet of height, but there is a danger of stalling, of rolling back into a neckbreaking upside-down Volkswagen, when you go for the sky rather than distance.

Far below, I could see a spot of color that was Barney Hallin. He was arcing down the apron, a long, wide, talus slope where powder accumulates in absurd profusion after a big dump. Most folks who ski the ridge take the same relatively easy traverse I was on to the apron and the sensual caress of waist-deep cold smoke: powder that slows them enough to take a slope that would be suicidal, for most, in icy conditions.

Unlike Barney Hallin, who is interested in the physics of flight, the powder hounds who ski the apron at Bridger Bowl value the aesthetics of rhythm. They glory in skiing virgin snow, in being the first to mark the powder with the signature of their run. Their track should follow the fall line and not be jagged with stops or, God forbid, pockmarked with falls. The turns should be tight and symmetrical. Following a good powder run, the skier can see his rhythm written in one sinuous line upon the face of the hill. This is figure skiing, a form of self-expression in snow. The most artistic of the powder hounds use skis the way a painter uses a brush.

A few times a year, a blizzard will dump five or six feet of cold smoke on the apron, and the most avid of the deep-powder hounds hit the ridge wearing snorkels. “They use them to ski powder that’s over their heads,” Barney explained to me. “Someone skiing like that, all you can see is a rooster tail coming down the clean powder; maybe the flash of color of someone’s hat. Every time you breathe in powder like that, you suck in a lot of snow. It gives you one of those headaches you get when you’ve eaten too much ice cream, too fast.” Experienced deep-powder hounds position
the snorkel behind their heads, so they suck in less snow and have milder ice-cream headaches.