Читать книгу White Planet - Leslie Anthony - Страница 14
ОглавлениеEverything is an experiment.
Red Bull Snowthrill of Alaska book, 2003
AN INTERESTING set of circumstances had led to the Red Dog Saloon in Juneau, Alaska, where I stood in Birkenstocks, my rain-soaked socks caked in sawdust and peanut husks.
The trail had started in Toronto, bouncing through L.A., Seattle, and totem-poled Ketchikan before landing in Juneau. And now, surrounded by bad taxidermy, orange life-preserver rings, and beer mugs the size of pitchers, it seemed I might find whatever it was I was looking for.
Certainly the concept was evolving. Already there’d been the blind girl with a broken ankle on the plane who was content to tap her way onboard without help, the senator’s aide at the former brothel we were bunking at who’d handed me a self-penned story about a surfer’s life in landlocked Fairbanks, and the bales of salmon jerky the town seemed constructed from. Disparate images to be sure, they all pointed to something that ultimately embodied a spirit of self-reliance and wildness that seemed very Alaskan and not altogether unrelated to, well . . . say, skiing.
POWDER, where I was now a contributing editor, had sent me to Alaska on a quest. In fact, five writer/photographer teams had shown up at airports around the continent to receive envelopes stuffed with air tickets and these instructions: find the soul of skiing.
Really?
Others had been sent on discovery missions to the Vermont mega-resort of Killington, molehills of the Midwest, venerable Aspen in Colorado, and Washington’s Mt. Rainier— North America’s almost perennial record-holder for snowfall. These places all had well-known histories and hardcore habitués: “the known,” if you will. I’d been sent to what was, in 1992, “the unknown,” the big empty: Alaska.
With too many mountains to name and too few people to care, the outpost of Alaska had suddenly come onto the global snowsports radar as both a destination and newly minted ethos. The state’s endless ranges and endless snow suggested endless possibilities for exploration, and my frequent photographic collaborator Henry Georgi and I were there to plumb the zeitgeist.
Bearded, boisterous, and stentorian, Henry had started his photographic career shooting rock concerts in Toronto and rafting on the Ottawa River, but his was the heart of a skier. Raised by German-speaking parents in the Toronto suburb of Downsview, he had spent his watershed ski-bumming and ski-photography season in the party-addled Austrian resort of St. Anton. We met in the early eighties through Ontario’s nascent telemark scene, where I dressed in Norwegian period costume to forerun races that he’d been hired to document. Soon, I became one of Henry’s models, and our photographic collaborations filtered onto the continent’s newsstands. Our first real joint triumph, however, resulted from a trip to Le Massif in Quebec’s Charlevoix region, a unique operation that employed school buses to ferry guided groups to the top of a 2,300-foot escarpment overlooking the St. Lawrence River where ships and whales bobbed among the ice floes. It snowed more than two feet while we were there, and Henry’s photos of waist-deep powder skiing in the typically low-snow East were a sensation, forming the basis for my first-ever powder feature. We’d sidestepped into a career of adventuring together at the magazine’s behest, as reliable to the editorial braintrust as the team of Bard and Carter that preceded us—mostly, as we would later learn, because we likewise worked cheap and would (foolishly) go anywhere.
On the “soul of skiing” mission, naturally, we were eager to embrace whatever powder’s editors threw at us, aware of the growing gravity of our destination and that something important was brewing there. In some sense, what was burgeoning in Alaska honored the Euro “extreme” movement of big, bold, off-piste descents in the high-alpine vertical world of the otherwise human-choked Alps; in another way, this push was a typically American attempt to outmuscle that small, dedicated scene with vast wilderness, a fleet of helicopters, and a few tons of film.
Although the “idea” of Alaska was steep, deep, and unexplored, skiing was hardly new there. Hundreds of local alpine, cross-country, and ski-jumping areas had been founded in the early twentieth century by waves of immigrant miners, loggers, and fishermen. At least one legitimate destination resort drew and was owned by the Japanese. So there was more than just the loam of noisy aircraft and harebrained competitions (like the pie-in-the-sky World Extreme Ski Championships held in the Chugach Mountains outside beat-down, oil-soaked Valdez the previous year) in which to dig for soul here—there were real grass roots.
Thus, while our media peers leapt from helicopters onto massive, never-skied Alaskan faces, our first experience in the new frontier was the home hill of 1992 Olympic women’s downhill silver medalist Hilary Lindh. Tiny Eaglecrest Ski Area lies outside the somnolent town of Juneau, the only U.S. state capital to which no road leads: in true Alaskan style, the island-bound town can only be reached by sea or air.
Juneau was a wild place where ravens ruled the streets and grocery-store windows advertised bear repellent and ammunition. Life was dominated by commercial fishing, gold-rush nostalgia, and tourists disgorged from ships cruising the Inside Passage. Half the population lived near the weathered toe of the Mendenhall Glacier, and the enormous, steep chutes on the face of Mt. Juneau provided the biggest urban avalanche disaster potential outside of alpine Europe (they had, in the past, released to engulf part of town).
Despite its state-capital status, Juneau was still unpretentious enough that visiting journalists might be eagerly introduced from the floor of the state legislature in the midst of a critical vote to override a governor’s veto. It was a place that, long before Sarah Palin appeared on Saturday Night Live, reflected the fact that Alaskans didn’t take themselves too seriously, where monster trucks had license plates like OVRKILL, and a woman with a voice like Irish Cream liqueur might keep your attention while Woodstock was being re-created onstage in the Alaskan Hotel, then press a napkin into your hand with a phone number and the inscription “call or die wondering.”
It was an apt metaphor for the Siren call that Alaska was putting out to the ski world: go or die wondering.
IN THE RED DOG, Matt Brakel, fisherman, extreme skier, paraglider, video star, and self-professed glory hound, snapped open the lid of a large plastic bucket filled with the morning’s catch of plump shrimp.
“Have one,” he said.
Above him a stuffed bear slithered up a pole after a pair of human legs that dangled from the ceiling.
We barely had time to bolt down a crustacean before the bartender, standing under frontier folk hero Wyatt Earp’s gun (which was mounted over an inscription that read “checked but never claimed”), informed us of the “no shrimp” rule and tossed us a bag of peanuts.
And so Henry and I sat, shelling nuts and talking cliffs, chutes, and cornices with Matt, our designated ski model, and some management-types from Eaglecrest. It was glib. It was cool. But then it got serious.
“What do you guys need?” they wanted to know, as if we were a commando team compiling a list of weaponry for some vague assault.
“Snow,” I said, perhaps a little too earnestly.
“Sun,” countered Henry, neatly summing our respective personal missions and perpetual conflicts.
I was writing things down on a pad that was getting blurry. Maybe I was more tired than I realized after eighteen hours of traveling, or had miscalculated the sheer volume of an Alaskan mug, but my enthusiasm was draining like a burst appendix. In the dead of night, in the rain, amid a legion of cobwebbed Alaskan kitsch, this talk suddenly seemed so business-like. This wasn’t the nebulous “go hang out and see whassup” kind of assignment I was used to. Instead, the mission was clouded by specificity: find the soul of skiing, whatever that might be. But didn’t I usually end up with a sense of this no matter where I skied? Did I really need to hang on every word in hopes of being struck by a lightning bolt of insight?
Probably not. As my companions’ voices thinned in the barroom din, I took a deep breath, a swig of beer, and put the pad away. Before even getting started, I stopped looking for whatever it was I thought I was looking for.
RICK KAUFMAN jostled with the controls of the grooming machine as he spoke.
“I pity people who don’t ski, you know? I really pity them.”
He was trying not to sound elitist, I knew. And his voice carried no malice, no judgment, no scorn. Though pity came pretty close to all three.
“I mean, how do you explain sex to a virgin? You can tell them about it as much as you want, but they’ll really have to experience it to relate.”
His sincerity helped me ignore the fact that this analogy was the biggest cliché in the ski world, typically rendered to explain the orgasmic nature of powder skiing. But I knew what he meant. In fact, I probably knew more about what he meant than he did. It was, more or less, what you’d expect to hear from a hardcore skier. It was, more or less, what I’d heard from hundreds of diehards. Describing precisely why you did what you did was mechanistically impossible, because skiing is feeling versus understanding; the knowledge of experience.
It was 5 a.m., and we were trundling down Eaglecrest’s front side while it snowed in that snotty coastal way that straddled the freezing point and left you guessing whether skiing was going to be pain or pleasure right up until you stepped into your bindings. By the strain on the groomer’s wiper blades, I was guessing pain. But with four days of decent powder under my belt, I was more interested in Rick’s musings anyway.
Rick grew up in Pontiac, Michigan, and didn’t start skiing until age twenty-one. When, shortly thereafter, he moved to Alaska, he had no specific intention of getting into the ski business; as he accurately observed, few do— they just kind of back into it as a way to keep skiing. He applied for a lift operator’s job at Eaglecrest in 1977. The manager at the time told him he wouldn’t fit in very well, a point of particular glee for Rick, who was now in his fifteenth season as operations manager.
Outside, the sky lowered and the snow glomming the windshield thickened, wipers whining against its weight.
“It’s that feeling when you hit your turns and your line just right; you don’t get winded—I mean you feel better after the run than when you started. Communing with the terrain. You know? God, when you have a really good day on skis it changes your whole outlook on life. It just makes you . . .”
And then together, as if rehearsed, our voices infused with our own heavy hindsight:
“Want to go out and get shitfaced!”
CROPLEY CHUTE drops 2,300 feet from the summit of Mt. Ben Stewart to spill onto a lake. For three days we’d etched lines through the accumulating snow of West Bowl (the ubiquity of ski areas naming bowls for compass points never ceases to amaze me . . .) and dodged malevolent trees above Waterfall ( . . .nor the ubiquity of names evoking ninety-degree plunges . . .), while staring up at Cropley’s gaunt face. The wide-open forty-degree expanse was as inviting as it was scary. It hardly ever slid they said, but when it did, it went big. That morning, as the ocean fog spilling over the ridge was atomized by the rising sun, it felt stable, and we decided to go for it.
A fair-sized gang disembarked from the top of the Hooter Chair: patrollers, instructors, managers, and hangers-on. Shouldering our skis, we headed up the ridge above Eagle’s Nest ( . . . nor lofty, bird-related places . . .), a route that seemed trammeled by at least half of Eaglecrest’s skiers on any given day. Men, women, children, dogs—no one here thought twice about hiking for their turns, despite the vast amount of terrain available from the summit chairlift. The current train of skiers snaking up the ridge channeled the famous grainy photo of gold prospectors crossing Alaska’s Chilkoot Pass. And weren’t we, after all, looking for White Gold? I watched as venerates Sigurd Olson and Lucy McPherson, two of the nicest humans I’d ever met, peeled out of line toward their own secret stashes.
Sig was born in 1923 in Ely, Minnesota, and was cross-country skiing by age four. His main interest, however, was ski jumping, which he did all over the Midwest. In 1943, he was drafted, joining the 10th Mountain Division ski troops in Colorado. His time overseas was short but eventful. After pushing through Italy’s Apennine Mountains, his division was about to thread the main passes of the Alps when the Germans surrendered. Back home, he earned a master’s degree in wildlife management. He and his wife visited Alaska—stop me if you’ve heard this before—and never left. Moving to Juneau in 1958, he began patrolling at the old Second and Third Cabin areas, which people had been hiking up to ski since the thirties. He retired in 1991 after thirty-two years of patrolling, but still maintained a serious addiction by skiing every day there was snow and writing poems about it. He passed away in 2008, and skied right up to the end.
“I hate to miss a day of skiing,” he told me. “To me, that’s the best incentive to get other things done.”
Lucy also hated to miss a day. Born in Montana in 1931, she married out of high school and raised a family in Sand Point, Idaho. In 1963, her husband talked her into free ski lessons; immediately hooked, she began teaching soon after. Moving to Juneau, Lucy became the first instructor at Second and Third Cabins.
“Having to put your boots and skis on a pack and hike in was quite a change from Sand Point’s chairlifts,” she recounted.
In fact, she set a record for hiking in, always refusing a ride on the snowmobile Sig used to pull the patrol sleds. And here they both were, years later, spouses deceased, best buddies sharing a zest for powder that knew few bounds. Five minutes with these two made you feel warm all over. With their sparkling eyes and impish grins they were, it seemed, eternally young.
Back on the hike, it took fifteen minutes to traverse the ridge. Another ten would have put us over Shit-for-Brains Chute ( . . . and finally, it seems, every ski area must baptize several runs as an ode to the ridiculousness of skiing them), but the sun and big snow lay on the rolling parabolas below. Everyone stopped talking. Some stopped breathing. Ten pairs of eyes bored holes into 1,000 feet of cold, fresh powder. Rick looked like he just wanted to hug everyone.
We took the lines on the steeper first pitch in small groups, adrenaline chasing away any butterflies. Whoops and hollers echoed around the valley, smiles tore at our cheeks. It got even sillier when we regrouped and kicked the last pitch en masse. And the squeals of delight weren’t those of jaded lifetime skiers, but those of children playing in a sandbox, splashing in a pool. Ponce de Leon should probably have been searching for the fountain of youth in the clean, fresh environs of winter mountains, not in the fetid mosquito-and-snake-infested swamps of Florida.
That was the warmup. After the usual kerfuffle of turning on and checking everyone’s avalanche transceivers (an electronic beacon with both transmit and receive functions worn by all when backcountry skiing), enumerating probes and shovels (more avalanche rescue gear), and calling in a helicopter (in Alaska, an aircraft was always at the ready), we were ferried up to Cropley in two groups. In one group were Henry and Rick; in the other, me, Al the Geologist, Matt Brakel, and Nancy Peel—Eaglecrest’s caretaker; ski-school director; snowboard, telemark, and cross-country instructor; off-season raft guide; powerlifter; bodybuilder, and basic human skiing machine. The summit we were dropped on was spectacular, with huge gleaming upper bowls overlooking the shimmering waters of Stephens Passage.
Matt, Al, Nancy, and I disappeared down the chute while the helicopter hovered off the face with Rick and Henry, who was bagging a few rare sunny shots. The untracked bliss got a little less blissful where the sun had been on it, and several point releases (slow-moving, wet-snow avalanches that start small and fan out) made their way down the main chute in our wakes; Matt had touched off the biggest.
Matt was getting careless, and indeed when we regrouped on a ridge he had broken away from the group, traversed the main chute, and climbed above some rock-and-tree-studded face to do God knew what. What he did was wipe out bigtime on some hidden debris before making a spectacular recovery and putting a reasonable line down into the chute.
“Goddammit,” Rick groaned, peeved at this breach of collective safety. “That’s why we call him ‘Break-all.’”
The other side of the ecstasy coin in skiing is getting carried away when you should remain vigilant. Matt had made me antsy days before when he was pushing it in the trees and in danger of goring himself. Big jumps, unscouted landings. He knew the mountain, yeah, but . . .
It got worse. Tense as we moved downward, I was glad to reach the bottom, but nobody was behind. They were all collected above the last ridge, which on one side rolled benignly into the lower chute and on the other dropped off precipitously.
Break-all was going to jump.
It was a big drop his ski tips hung over, but at least it was onto snow. He backed out of sight and when next I saw him, he was in the air—perfect body position, legs pulled up, arms in tight. A magazine cover. It would have been a good jump.
When he hit the rock under the snow, a loud crack echoed like gunfire, and Matt somersaulted crazily in a full-body ragdoll—head, air, feet, air, head. One ski stuck in the landing above and the other javelined toward the lake; it was the kind of wince-worthy highlight a sports channel might play over and over and over.
Miraculously, he was okay. And in that moment it was hard to equate this soft-spoken, big-hearted guy whose love of skiing went back to childhood backcountry trips with his mother and included teaching tots in the Mighty Mite ski racing program, with the human cannonball taking ill-conceived risks for the camera. He was a hell of a skier, but you just wanted to slap him. Eventually, I supposed, someone—or something—would do just that. Experience had taught me that luck was never to be counted on. Skiing required the acquisition of not just physical skills, but an entire panoply of judgment circuits that, properly applied, could keep you alive.
Sadly though, 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.
