by Tim Cahill
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.
"Actually," Barney said, "I think most of them wear snorkels so they can tell someone else they did it."
In several respects, Bridger Bowl is not particularly unique. There are good powder slopes at many other Rocky Mountain ski resorts. The tree runs above Jackson Hole are probably hairier than anything at Bridger. A few American mountains offer more vertically: Jim
Conway has skied some of them, including the north face of Longs Peak, in Colorado, and Maroon Bells, outside Aspen. The most famous, and deadly, extreme ski runs in the world are located near Chamonix, in France. During the two weeks Jim Conway spent skiing there last year, four skiers died.
The athletes of France literally ski down the face of mountains. "It takes massive balls," Conway told me. "One fall and they're dead."
Because the snow above Chamonix tends to be wet, it sticks to steeper slopes. The hottest skiers of France, men like Patrick Vallencant, manage to run sixty-degree faces. The technique most often used is called a windshield wiper turn. It involves one hop-around after another, and the skier is always looking down the fall line over one shoulder or the other. "The thing about the French," Conway told me after his trip, "for them, it isn't considered difficult unless the run is death-defying. Consequently, they're more daring than we are at Bridger. On the other hand, they're more cautious in terms of technique, because a single mistake can kill them."
What makes the ridge above Bridger unique is the number and narrowness of the avalanche chutes. There are nests of couloirs all over the West, but you have to climb half a day or rent a helicopter to get to them. At Bridger, the chutes can be had for the price of an avalanche beeper and
a tough twenty-minute climb. This accessibility has spawned a kind of specialized excellence.
Like river rats, the chute divers at Bridger are interested in making first descents down the most difficult couloirs. Once when Jim Conway and Tom Jungst were scouting the ridge for new chutes, they noticed a ski patrolman following them, from a distance, like an inept spy. The guy seemed nervous about something. Conway downclimbed into a couloir he had always passed by before because it seemed to narrow down and fall over a cliff. (Downclimb-ing is a combination of rock climbing and side-slipping.) Part way down the chute, Jim saw a way of skiing it.
"Hey," he shouted, "this goes."
Apparently, Conway had discovered one of the patrolman's favorite runs, and the man screamed at them in anger and frustration. Tom named the chute for the words they heard hurtling down on them from above. You Fuckers remains one of his favorite runs.
Each couloir offers its own set of problems. Skiers have to downclimb into You Fuckers. On Tease Me Dear, they resort to the esoteric sport of tree jumping. The run is actually a ridge between two chutes with a drop-off on either side. It starts off with six nice, tight powder turns: get too wide on those turns and you go screaming off the cliff. The run seems to end at another steep drop-off of thirty or forty feet. There is, however, a tree that grows just below the cliff. Jungst and Conway discovered that they could lean out over the drop, grab one of the branches, and lower themselves to the ground by falling through supporting branches. Below there is another run of five or six tight powder turns, ending at another cliff where there is another good jumping tree. And so on. Tease me, dear.
Some couloirs narrow down to shoulder width in places, some have boulders strewn across the fall line. Each one is special. While the extreme skiers of Chamonix can be compared to rock climbers who work big walls, the chute divers of Bridger do what amounts to bouldering, which is to say they ski runs of intense difficulty but short duration where a fall is not fatal. The sport is not nearly so dangerous as the
French variety, and technique, rather than brute survival, is the goal. People who merely windshield wiper through a couloir at Bridger are not respected.
"Everyone has his own ideas about technique," Tom Jungst told me. "There's one group we call the stable-gorilla family. The best skier is a guy who's built like a linebacker, and he skis in this massive, straddle-legged style. There's a petite woman who skis with him, and she gets down some pretty radical chutes the same way. So you watch them, and after a while you realize that sometimes, in some chutes and some snow conditions, stable gorilla is the way to ski."
Jungst and Conway prefer a more graceful, fluid style. "It's a takeoff on World Cup skiing," Conway told me. "It's carving into the turns, knowing when to release the edge and get the energy out of your skis so you can make the tightest turns possible. You finish one turn, dive downhill, and immediately transfer your weight to the new outside ski. While diving, you apply a subtle pressure to the outside ski. As it comes around to the fall line, you angulate your hips and kne
es, which applies more pressure to the ski and gives it a reverse camber. If you release right, the energy in the ski should snap your legs around. The upper body is leaning downhill as the skis cross in front of you. Simultaneously, you should be diving downhill again."
Tom Jungst, like many of the chute divers, is a former ski racer. He placed in the top twenty in NCAA Division I slalom two years running, but he now thinks ski racing is "very tame." To get up for races, Jungst would "go to the top of whatever mountain I was on and ski the wildest thing imaginable: a chute, a tree run. I'd come into the start of the race rushing on adrenaline, exploding with energy." Soon enough, Jungst gave up racing for the ridge. "Standing above a chute is a strange feeling," he told me. "I'm usually extremely calm and most interested in details like snow-flakes and pine needles. Then I focus on the run I am going to create." Jungst thinks mental imagery and visualization are essential to a good run. "I see myself and every move I will make beforehand." When Jungst dives into the chute, "My eyes don't focus but take in everything as a whole." As
in ski racing, "Things come at you far too quickly to make conscious decisions." When the boulders and walls and drop-offs explode into the field of his vision, Tom Jungst is not really there. He sees himself as from above, like a disinterested spectator.
Listen, forget about technique and visualization: the best way to get down the ridge is my way. Ski the shallowest sections until your speed gets uncomfortable, then bail out. Try to fall across the slope and dig up a lot of snow so that you can roll out and slide slowly down the mountain. This exercise in world-class cowardice earns about one hundred vertical feet per slide.
I was dug in below the chute Tom Jungst called the Fourth Virtue. From the top, the chute looked like a cliff, but there was snow on it, and I couldn't believe that the incline was only a little over fifty degrees. There was room for two narrow turns before the chute narrowed down to twice shoulder width and veered off to the left. Sunlight glittered off sheer ice in the throat of the couloir.
I took a wide traverse around the chute, slid down below it, and sat in the snow, waiting for Jungst. He came barreling out of the narrow turn and banked off snow piled against the wall, because using the terrain is important to him. Tom planted his pole, sprang into a turn, and sideslipped slightly through an icy patch before carving into his next turn and a dive that took him beyond the looming walls of the canyon. He was heading directly for a pile of crusted snow deposited by yesterday's avalanche. Jungst snapped into a tight turn. The slope was so steep, he purposely bounced his inside shoulder into the snow, which cut his speed so that he skirted the upper edge of the mound of avalanche crud.
Steve Ault came down next, and I could hear him grunt with the effort his grace was costing him. He scraped over the ice, caught an edge, did a shoulder roll, and came back
up on his skis just in time to plant, hop, and windshield wiper once to avoid the crud pile. A small slide—a layer of snow perhaps six inches deep—rolled down behind Ault.
We gathered at the top of the long powder slope called the apron. It was the gentlest slope I'd seen all day, and I tried to ski it with a little dignity. On the fifth turn I took a header, did a one-hundred-yard endo, twisted my knee, and broke the binding of my left ski. The words "no business on the ridge" kept echoing in my mind. While fear may give sudden instincts of skill, it doesn't give skill itself. Just so. Pain gives sudden instincts of our limitations.
My knee was swelling against the fabric of my pants, and I decided that, should I decide to ski ever again, I'd confine myself to lower slopes. Let the psychopaths stabilize the ridge for me.
Barney Hallin, on his second run of the day, was barrelling down the apron above. He stopped where I lay in a pile of pain and offered what he must have imagined were words of encouragement. "Hey, I think it takes a lot of guts for a beginner to try to ski the ridge," he said. Then he was gone, skiing so beautifully that a wave of goose flesh rippled up my back.
moved the gun a little lower, Gurnsey would roll and fire. He was willing to take a hit anywhere but the face.
"Ah'm watchin' your eyes and you don't even want to think what you're thinkin'," said Simpkins. He never wavered. "Take your hand off the gun, real slow." Gurnsey did as he was told. "Now move away from the gun."
As Gurnsey inched away from his Nel-Spot, Simpkins lowered his own. Then, in a swift, unexpected motion, Simpkins lurched forward. He struck Gurnsey on the stomach with the palm of his free hand. That hand came away red, bright red, and there was a larger spot of color smeared across the belly of Gurnsey's camouflage suit.
Gurnsey looked down at the red streak in disbelief. He had been wasted by hand, eliminated from the game by a man whose gun, quite obviously, didn't work.
I received my invitation to the first annual Survival Game sometime last April. I accepted, but too late, as it turned out—all twelve positions in the contest filled quickly. Evidently I wasn't the only one who felt the unmistakable urges of the competition.
The invitation said the game had been devised with "your participation in mind, in order to make this world a better place to live." There were five pages of rules, but in essence the game seemed to be a grandiloquent version of capture the flag. A hundred acres of New Hampshire wood were to be divided into four quadrants: blue, red, green, and yellow. Somewhere within each quadrant was a station hung with twelve flags corresponding to the color of the quadrant. The object of the game, as explained in the letter, was to capture a flag from each station. The first player to emerge from the woods and arrive at one of two home bases in possession of the flag from each of the four quadrants would be the winner.
It was, all in all, a simple-enough orientating exercise, until you took the Nel-Spots into account. These large pistols are manufactured for marking cattle during calving
season. They shoot small pellets of dye powered by a C0 2 cartridge. The guns are (somewhat) accurate up to about thirty yards. Any of the twelve competitors could fire at any other. A player marked by dye was out of the game.
The last page of the letter was an answer form with two boxes to check. The first box was an acceptance. The second read: "The idea of this thing terrifies or horrifies me. Or both. I think you're all a bunch of sickies."
This turned out to be the response from a number of people who chose not to play. In general, negative responses came from cities, especially New York, and the organizers were often labeled "macho" (at the very least). Several women had been invited to play, but for various reasons they said they were unable to compete. More elaborate responses, both written and verbal, contained such words as "sick," "twisted," "perverted," "puerile," and "fascist."
The men behind all this—the organizers of this mayhem—were writer Charles Gaines and a New York stock trader named Hayes Noel. For years, Noel had contended that in such a simulated survival situation a city boy, whose nerves are raw, whose responses are quick, might hold an advantage over a good woodsman whose tranquil life has left him unable to cope with more visceral human challenges.
The game had merely been a matter of discussion until photographer George Butler discovered the Nel-Spots in a farm catalogue. "The guns made the game possible," Gaines told me. "The dye pellets raise a welt, but if you are wearing safety goggles, as we require, they cause no serious injury. Secondly, the guns are much more symbolically weighted than, say, a thrown tomato."
It was, of course, that very symbolic weight that generated the firestorm of negative response. It was that same symbolic fact that got the animal juices flowing in each of the competitors.
On the morning of the competition everyone assembled at Charles Gaines's home. Each entrant had chosen to wear full camouflage gear. (The rules insisted that each player wear only a single layer of normal-weight clothing, perhaps because an over-zealous competitor had made a suit of foam padding after ascertaining that dye pellets invariably bounced off the foam without bursting.) Aside from the camouflage, each competitor wore a heavy holster containi
ng the ominous-looking Nel-Spot. God knows what the neighbors thought. It looked as if Gaines and his cohorts were on their way to invade Dominica. The competitors were dispersed separately, in various parts of the woods, and all were started at ten sharp.
As a nonplaying observer, I stumbled onto the first sustained Nel-Spot fire fight a half hour into the game. Gaines and Simpkins were banging away at each other when Simp-kins lost the charge on his CO z cartridge. Just then, Gaines hit him fairly with a pellet that didn't burst. "You got me."
"No, you're not marked." The writer stood three feet from the turkey caller. "Give up," Gaines said. "I don't want to shoot you at this range. It'll leave a welt for a month." Simpkins, who knows Gaines for the savage competitor he is, assumed the writer's gun had jammed. He turned and escaped into the deep woods. Gaines stood there with a perfectly functioning pistol. "You learn a little about yourself in this game," he told me later. "I guess I'm a little softer than I like to think."
Of course it was Gaines's lack of killer instinct that allowed Simpkins to eliminate Bob Gurnsey later with the hand-held dye pellet. The game carried its share of fate.
Different competitors had different strategies. Hayes Noel, for instance, was doing very well, proving his point about city boys by making the most of being a good runner in excellent condition. His idea was to sprint from flag
station to flag station and depend entirely on his reflexes and marksmanship, when the noise he made drew another competitor into his range. He had three flags and was on his way to the last when somebody wasted him.
Other players, notably Bob Carlson, a doctor from Alabama who eliminated two players he had bet on heavily to win, blasted away at any and all comers.
