Back at my desk five days later, I got an e-mail from McLean: “Utah had its first avalanche fatality the day after you left”—the first, that is, of the season. It had occurred at Wolverine. He sent a photograph of the accident site, with a diagram of our route and the victim’s. They weren’t far apart. “It turns out there was one other fatality, two other people missing, and one person who was buried and dug out.” Also, he said, a place called the Meadow Chutes, where we had spent my last morning, going up and down, rapturously, during a snowstorm, had avalanched—“ripped out wall to wall”—right after we were there.
My aunt, whose name was Meta Burden, was skiing alone when she died. She had had an argument, so she did a rash thing. She skied into Cristy Gully, which in 1972 lay outside the area boundary at Aspen Mountain. Half a foot of new snow had fallen atop ten inches of two-day-old snow, and apparently there had been a great deal of avalanche activity in the area that morning. But she was a headstrong woman, confident in her abilities. She had lived in Aspen for four years, and was intermittently deranged by anger over the encroachment of more and more people into terrain that she liked to consider her own.
That evening, her husband reported her missing, and at half past six, ski patrollers began a search in the dark. They followed her tracks into Cristy Gully. There is an account of the search in The Snowy Torrents, a volume assembled by government avalanche forecasters, with evaluations of avalanche accidents in the United States. The rescuers, it says,
probed and scuffed in the runout zone, and within 45 minutes they found one ski and one pole. Coleman lanterns were set up at the points where Burden’s tracks ended and where the clues were found…. At 2230 hours, Burden was found on the first pass of the probe line 60 feet above her ski and pole. Efforts at resuscitation and heart massage were unsuccessful. Her body was buried in 3 feet of snow.
It appeared that she had died of suffocation. The report noted that she was an experienced skier, and concluded, “Burden knew the dangers involved and ignored them.”
The novelist James Salter wrote about my aunt’s death, some years ago, in an essay called “The Skiing Life.” Like many men, he seems to have been somewhat smitten by her. He called her a “goddess.” “There was a woman I knew who used to ski every day, all season long, whatever the weather, whatever the conditions,” he wrote. “Later someone told me that she died on the very same day her father had, years before. I never bothered to confirm it, but I think it must be true; I think it was part of the pact.” It was not true. The pact, though, I could understand.
Her father had died while skiing alone, too. The night before, he had remarked to his sister that he’d witnessed a lot of avalanches that afternoon and that he’d have to be careful. (His family was back home in Philadelphia; he had wanted Meta and her twin sister to cut school and spend the winter with him in Austria, but my grandmother had said no.) Still, the next afternoon, after a day out with a friend, my grandfather decided to take one last run by himself. An avalanche caught him in a gully between the Osthang and the old Kandahar downhill course; when rescuers found his body, they concluded, from the tranquil look on his face, that he had broken his neck.
This winter, I stumbled on a third account of my aunt’s accident, a 1987 poem called “The Death of Meta Burden in an Avalanche,” by Frederick Seidel. It is a difficult poem, as impenetrable as The Snowy Torrents is precise. “You are reborn flying to outski / The first avalanche each spring, / And buried alive.” Seidel, who, it turns out, also met and admired my aunt, seems to imagine what it feels like to be entombed in snow: “I cannot see. / I will not wake though it’s a dream. / I move my head from side to side. / I cannot move.” Later, he writes, “Everything fits my body perfectly now that I’m about to disappear.”
It is, not surprisingly, a grim way to go. If you trigger an avalanche, there are measures you can take to avoid burial, or at least to improve the odds of surviving. The first thing to do is attempt to ski out of it, although as the slab of snow breaks from the layer beneath it and begins to move, accelerating down the mountain face like a book sliding off a tilted table, it becomes impossible for a skier to generate enough speed or change direction. Within seconds, the slab degenerates into a whirlwind. The snow has astonishing power, and as it rips off your gear and throws you into a tumble you should thrash and swim, in order to stay near the surface. Any attempt to get one good last breath will likely result in a mouthful of snow. Snow crams into your ears and under your eyelids. You may be dashed into a tree or a rock, but the force of the snow alone can break your leg or neck. As the slide slows, you are supposed to cup your hands in front of your mouth to create a pocket of air. Your chances improve if you are head up and face up—and if some part of you is visible to others, if there are others—but this choice is not yours. As the snow comes to a stop, it is like cement. The weight of it can press your last breath out of you, like a python. Your little breathing pocket, if you have one, will soon become carbon dioxide or a block of ice. After five minutes, the odds of survival drop swiftly. You pray that someone digs you out.
Every year nearly two hundred people are caught in avalanches in the United States. On average, about thirty of them die. The fatality rate has risen steadily since 1991. An increasing percentage of the victims are snowmobilers, who engage in a practice called high-marking, competing to see who can cut a track highest on a steep slope. Still, with improvements in gear and a trend toward backcountry exploration, more and more skiers and snowboarders are venturing out into terrain where survival depends, to a certain degree, on luck.
“Nobody goes out to die,” Jill Fredston, an avalanche specialist in Alaska, told me. “Everyone goes out in pursuit of life. We make a ton of mistakes, but we usually get away with them. Luck is negative reinforcement. And you have probability and complacency working against you.”
Last winter, Mike Elggren, a forty-one-year-old friend of McLean’s, was caught in a slide while backcountry skiing in British Columbia. He was skinning up a slope with ten friends and three guides. At one point, one of the guides decided that she didn’t like where they were. She took two steps, and the whole slope jigsawed above them—a molten acre. Elggren was shoved forward and sucked downhill, head first. His skis pulled him deeper. “I looked up to see where I was, and the lights went out,” Elggren told me. “I got crushed. The pressure was tremendous. As the snow stopped, it made a real squeaky sound.” His hand was in front of his face, but he couldn’t see it. His nose and mouth were choked with snow. He was indignant at first, incredulous that this should happen to him. “That gave way to utter panic. I was screaming. I remember not being embarrassed to be screaming like a little girl. I wanted to flail, but I was pinned.” After a moment, he regained some composure. “My brain wouldn’t allow me to have any hope, the situation was so dire. I was rebreathing my carbon dioxide. My diaphragm and lungs were crushed. And then I started going away. I made my peace with the world. I was sad for the people up top and for my family. I was thinking of my parents and my brother and sisters, and my dog. Then I just went away. It felt like fading into black velvet.”
Elggren’s friends, some of whom had been partially buried and had dug themselves out, picked up his beacon signal. They were extraordinarily efficient, taking turns digging, but he was buried head down, six feet deep. When they got to him, ten minutes had passed, and he wasn’t breathing. It took twenty minutes to resuscitate him by mouth-to-mouth. He remembers coming to and wondering why everyone was making such a fuss. They built a sled out of their backpacks, and towed him a mile or so back to a hut, where a helicopter was waiting. Aside from ligament damage to both knees, he seems to be fine. He has gone backcountry skiing regularly this winter (although not with McLean: “Andrew’s on a different plane. He’s so damn badass”). After the accident, Elggren’s mother pleaded with him to give up backcountry skiing, but, he said, “Luckily, she came around to a more rational point of view.” A few weeks ago, he returned to British Columbia to repeat l
ast year’s trip—same guide, same friends, same hut.
One spring day, when I was eleven, my father and I were skiing off-piste (off the marked trails) in Verbier, Switzerland. The conditions were exquisite but dodgy—a half meter of fresh snow warming in the sun—and my father, realizing abruptly that we were in a place we shouldn’t have been (always this belated moment of recognition), decided that we would traverse, one at a time, to more moderately pitched terrain. I stayed behind on a ridge, as he started across the top of a gully. Then the whole slope seemed to explode, and he disappeared. In those days, I had no experience with avalanches, only a dim sense that they killed Paumgartens, so I failed to keep an eye on him or to take any precautions of my own. Avalanche safety equipment wasn’t widely used back then; anyway, we didn’t have any. For several minutes, I assumed that he was gone (it seemed fitting that he would be) and sat crying in the snow until I heard him calling my name. I made it down in time to see a snow-splattered ghoul stumbling out of a vast field of debris. The avalanche had carried him a few hundred yards, and then, as it slowed, poured over a bump in the terrain, which caused him to pop up to the surface. The slide was a big one: he was lucky; we were lucky. He was beaten up but all right. When Meta’s twin heard about the accident, she wrote him an angry letter. Except for my father, my mother—whose feelings about all this are rather complicated—and their two sons, the family had quit this kind of skiing. My uncle, for example, tends to ski in blue jeans and stick to marked trails. (“I like the groomed part, the avenues,” he says.) But my father did not give it up, although he did resolve always to hire a guide if he was going to ski off-piste. In the years since, I have been more than happy to accompany him.
Skiing, McLean wrote me once, “is like some form of religious practice or martial arts discipline.” Years of devotion lead to proficiency, which yields a sense of ease and a chance at transcendence. McLean started on the path at Alta; he was born in Salt Lake City. One of his earliest ski memories is of a man breaking his femur on the rope tow at the Alta Lodge. In his recollection, the bone ripped through the man’s pant leg, but he was laughing, because he was drunk. McLean’s father was an ophthalmologist and a devoted sailor, and the family spent several years trying to find a town where he could both practice medicine and get out on the water. Salt Lake was not the place. They moved around for a few years—Vermont, Connecticut, Florida, Haiti—and then settled in Seattle. McLean’s mother taught skiing nearby, at Alpental, in the Cascades. McLean quickly progressed to a point where she had to make a deal with him: She’d buy him a season pass if he promised to ski one run with her a year. He tended to wait until the last day.
As a kid, McLean was an experimental prankster, a troublemaker of the promising kind. He owned a welding torch and used it both to build go-carts and to fill bread bags with oxyacetylene gas, which he and his younger brother would then place in mailboxes and blow up using fuses made of paper. “We eventually worked our way up to Hefty trash bags, which were deafening,” he recalled. “Come to think of it, that might be a good idea for do-it-yourself backcountry avalanche bombs.” (Explosives are commonly used at ski areas to set off controlled avalanches.)
He went to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied to become an industrial designer. His roommate there happened to be an avid rock climber from Oregon, who began teaching McLean how to climb. Rhode Island is not known for its mountains, but the two of them made the most of the available terrain. On one occasion, they were arrested for trespassing when the police found them dangling from a rope on an abandoned railroad bridge. On another occasion, campus police caught McLean on the roof of the museum (“It had this perfect chimney”) and mistook his bag of climbing chalk for cocaine. While at RISD, he fashioned a device that he called the Talon, a three-pronged steel-plated climbing aid, which he eventually sold to Black Diamond, a climbing-equipment company. Six years later, after jobs designing medical equipment and boats, he was hired by Black Diamond, and he moved back to Salt Lake, where the company was based, and began designing technical gear—cams, carabiners, crampons, ice axes. Many of his inventions, including the Talon, are still widely used.
McLean left Black Diamond a few years ago in order to focus on skiing—a job does get in the way—but he still designs equipment for a number of companies on a freelance basis. When I visited him, he was working on avalanche safety products and ice climbing equipment; he was also helping a friend design giant dish antennas for the military. Then there’s the money he gets from speeches and from writing for climbing and skiing magazines. Last year, he worked as an avalanche forecaster for the Forest Service but found the job constricting. His superiors disapproved of steep skiing, and he felt called upon to preach a gospel of caution that he did not wholeheartedly subscribe to. Now he pursues what he calls a “low-cost lifestyle.” He said, “I haven’t heard of any other professional ski mountaineers.”
Black Diamond, in the early nineties, was a breeding ground for amateur ski mountaineers, foremost among them Alex Lowe. It was Lowe who introduced McLean to a mode of skiing that employed the tools and techniques of climbing, as European alpinists had been doing for decades. “More than anyone, he opened my eyes to what was possible on skis,” McLean said. Their first outing together was to Main Baldy Chute, before Alta opened for the year. They started out at 5 A.M. and descended at dawn, in thigh-deep powder. When they were done, they were set upon by ski patrolmen on snowmobiles, who informed them that the patrol was bombing the chute that morning, to make it slide, and that Lowe and McLean were lucky not to have been blown to pieces by a Howitzer shell. McLean was hooked.
In a foreword to The Chuting Gallery, Lowe describes “a loose group of twisted individuals” who several days a week would convene in his kitchen at three in the morning and, to his wife’s dismay (“Is this normal!!?”), head off to climb a chute or a peak, then ski down at sunrise and go to work, glowing with accomplishment and stinking of sweat. This regimen, which McLean still adheres to (minus the going-to-work part), was known as dawn patrol.
“You could always spot another chute or two in the distance that needed to be skied,” McLean said. “I kept at it for a few years, thinking that I had almost ticked them all off, before realizing that there was no end to them. Some were bigger, steeper, or more classic than others, but there were hundreds of them in the Wasatch and then a few million more around the world.”
“The skiing consumed us,” Mark Holbrook, a former Black Diamond engineer, told me. “That maybe led to our divorces.” (McLean’s first marriage, to a graphic designer from Long Island whom he met at RISD, ended eight years ago.)
McLean would like, on his deathbed, to be able to look at a globe and know that he had been everywhere. “It’s getting harder and harder to find big classic lines that haven’t been skied,” he said. “They’re a precious commodity.” The conquest game can get competitive. Exotic places—the Kamchatka peninsula or Ellesmere Island—catch on, and the athletes pour in. It is difficult to stay ahead of the Scrubbing Bubbles. Sometimes a team spends years planning an expedition to an obscure peak, only to find another team there upon arrival. When I was in Utah, McLean said that he and a nineteen-year-old acolyte named Dylan Freed had recently found a chute in the Wasatch that had never been skied. They had christened it Project Schnozzle. He revealed the location to no one, not even to Polly Samuels. “It takes four hours to get there, and it’s only five hundred feet of vertical,” he said. “You’ve got to really want it.” Last month, McLean went and did it by himself. “The Schnozzle has fallen,” he wrote me.
In 2002, McLean and a Black Diamond sales rep named Brad Barlage journeyed to Baffin Island, west of Greenland, on a hunch that there were chutes there. McLean had built giant kites, based on a Dutch modification of NASA technology (he’d come across some kiting Dutchmen in Antarctica). McLean and Barlage used the kites to sail across the frozen fjords—at speeds of up to forty miles an hour, on skis, towing gear-laden sleds. They discovered soarin
g chutes everywhere. McLean told me, “We ticked off nineteen first descents, of which ten were the best lines I’ve ever been in—three-thousand-to-five-thousand-foot screamers that came straight out of the frozen sea ice, surrounded by monstrous walls, stable creamy powder, wolf tracks, twenty-four hours of daylight, and surreal scenery.” The skiing magazines took note, and the athletes poured into Baffin.
On a trip like that one, the salient requirements, besides being first and having fun, are imagination and ingenuity, as opposed purely to danger and death defiance. McLean has learned, he told me, that “fatalities are always a good way to ruin a trip.” Holbrook said, “We’ve toned things down a little. That’s a good thing for him, with the problems we’ve had in the past, with the deaths.”
Clearly, the deaths have weighed on McLean. “You go to a funeral,” he told me. “You know these people as ski buddies, and you see they have moms and dads and fiancées. It gives it all a human face.” And it can give him pause. Thus the toning down. “I’m more conservative, in terms of risking big falls. No more cliff hucking”—skiing off cliffs. “I give avalanches a lot more leeway than I used to,” he said. “On the other hand, each thing you ski tends to be a little bit harder. The ambitions keep getting bigger. Foraker may be as hard as anything I’ve ever done.”
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