Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [68]
“Yeah, I am. I’m living my dream.”
Mark was saying that he didn’t aspire to do winter solos, and it seemed like he was making sure I was doing them for the right reasons—climbing not for bragging rights, or the perceived admiration of others, but because it made me happy. It was a subtle check that I had cleared in myself a long time back, but I was grateful for his reminder.
Once Chadwick joined us, we posed for a group portrait with Elk Ridge behind us. Skiing off the rock-strewn summit, Mark led us back down the wind-packed ridge, a safe but unappealing ski descent because of the thin, icy snow. After I slipped and fell to avoid an exposed tree root, I called out to Mark: “Hey, this sucks! I’m gonna head over to the powder.” I had borrowed a set of new powder skis from the Ute in Aspen and was itching to try them out in the untracked bowl. It had been a year since I had first freed my heel and started telemark skiing. Chadwick had given me some of my first pointers on technique, and I was excited to show him how much I’d improved. Leaving the ridge, I skied out to my right onto the softer snow, which got deeper and deeper the farther I traversed across the top of the forty-degree bowl.
Mark stopped slightly downhill from me on the ridge. Chadwick was behind me, traversing to the right, parallel and uphill from my tracks. None of us called out to dig a snow-study pit to check the snow stability and the likelihood of an avalanche, but I felt confident in the snowpack from having been out climbing and skiing the backcountry all winter. Success on the fourteener climbs and providential salvation from the string of close calls had bred in me a cavalier attitude toward the real avalanche danger. We spread out in the standard routine to expose one skier at a time to potential slide terrain. I arrived at the top of the lowest-angle fall line that started at thirty-eight degrees and eased off to about thirty-two degrees above a cluster of twenty fully grown pine trees.
“I’m gonna ski here. Are you coming down?” I said to Chadwick, who was close enough that we could talk in normal tones. Mark was still a hundred yards away over on the ridge.
“I don’t know. How are you going to get back to the hut? It looks like you’ll have to skin back out.”
“I’m not going to go past those trees. I’ll stop there, then traverse back left to the hut.”
Mark shouted over that he wasn’t going to ski the bowl. He’d go down the ridge. I yelled out, “Okay! Watch me!” to let my partners know I was dropping into the bowl. I felt a little nervous but didn’t pause to pinpoint whether it was about the avalanche danger or wanting to ski well in the deep powder. Moments later, as I took my first three sweeping turns, the sweet sensations of plowing through billowing snow replaced my timidity. I sped up and quickened my rhythm, popping shorter-radius turns on the lower-angled slope, and hooting as I passed the uppermost trees on my right. With another 1,500 vertical feet of the bowl below the trees luring me to keep skiing, only the fatigue in my legs made me stop. I turned and yelled back to Chadwick, three hundred vertical feet above me, “Yaaa-hooo! That was great! The snow is awesome! Come on down!”
Lurching in the powder, Chadwick followed my tracks, falling twice on the steeper part near the top as Mark watched from the ridge. I had my camera out, taking pictures as Chadwick settled into the easier slope, matching his turns to my tracks. Breathing hard, Chadwick forced out his last turns and stopped next to me. “Wow, that was a lot of work. I could barely turn, the snow was so deep.”
“Yeah, but it was great, huh? You looked good on that last part. I got a couple pictures of you. Check it out, how our tracks slink down like that. It’s like we’re heli-skiing.”