First turns

It was somewhere around the third of this season’s first turns. One second I was bouncing through powder, soaking up the fall line and savoring that illusion of flight. The next, my daydream literally fractured.

The white room was in full effect on that day a few weeks ago. The craggy ridge was absorbed by cloud, snow was falling in thick sheets and the storm was blowing in furiously from the southwest. I’d made my way through the sideways blizzard to one of my favorite shots at Wolf Creek, cruising up the quick hike to the high point before jumping in. “Skiing shouldn’t be this good in November,” I said aloud as I cut the first turn on the exposed slope. Everything seemed right during those first moments, and I was rapidly falling back in love with winter ... until the old man decided to give me a good shake.

Out of nowhere, the snowpack gave way under my weight, a fracture ripped open a few feet uphill of my skis and the hillside started moving. “Oh, no,” I told myself. “Not again.” But old man winter would go easy on me this time. The avalanche stopped moving almost as quickly as it started, and it was a baby of a slide.

I’d triggered a few inches of wind load and set off an avalanche with a meager footprint – about the size of a Cadillac Escalade. Best of all, the slab stopped just a few feet from where it began, and I easily skied out the other side. Nonetheless, I’d been rattled, and I gingerly picked my way out of The Glory Hole and happily spent the rest of the day cruising corduroy.

I was really rattled the next morning when a Wolf Creek news release landed in my inbox. The storm dropped another foot over the course of the evening and high winds continued to batter that ridge. Early the next day, another slide rolled down the Glory Hole. This time its rider was not so lucky.

On Nov. 22, Ski Patrol Director Scott Kay skied into the Glory Hole and set off a much larger avalanche. Over night, my inches had grown into feet, and Kay went on the big ride we’re all trying to avoid. The crown face on Kay’s slide was more than 3 feet deep in places, and he was carried several hundred feet before being sealed inside a 4-foot tomb of snow and ice. Like we know, Kay didn’t make it. A man who’d gone out that morning to safeguard the public had fallen into the wrong kind of white room.

The news shook me – not merely because I’d gotten a little taste of the Glory Hole the day before, but because my own dad was a ski patrol director. When I got home that evening, I poured a stiff drink and raised my glass to those left behind – Kay’s wife and his 6- and 8-year old sons.

I also gave myself a stiff kick in the ass for skiing into harm’s way the day before. Sure, it was in-bounds at the ski area and should have been

When I was a kid, snow safety and avalanche avoidance were the stuff of dinnertime conversation. Let’s just say my ski patroller dad took a fairly dim view of chasing powder beyond the ski area boundary. In our house, getting caught in a slide would have been worse than stealing an El Camino, loading it with high-end call girls and several bricks of cocaine and pointing it for Vegas. It simply wasn’t done. More than a couple lashes would have been in store.

Apparently I was a slow learner. I did just that (triggered an out-of-bounds avalanche – not stole the El Camino) as a know-it-all 10th-grader. Yep, I set off a small slide in the Telluride backcountry and rode that white beast down a short slope. When it all settled out, I had the good fortune to be buried only to my waist, was doubly blessed to have friends on hand to dig me out and triply blessed that none of them narced me out to Pop. Ah the bliss of ignorance.

But I remained a slow learner. More than a decade later, I managed to take the ride again while backcountry skiing in the West Elk Mountains. This time, I was equipped with beacon, shovel, a handy bit of snow science and two able ski partners. But drawn by the lure of early season powder, I blindly skied into a rogue pocket of windslab, a fracture ripped open and the slope exploded. During the course of the slide, any avalanche theory went out the window and was replaced by the simplest kind of human struggle. But good fortune smiled again. I managed to backstroke off the large slide and lived to ski another day. I also learned a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous.

After more than three decades playing in these mountains, the truth is, I really only know a couple things for certain – there is always a great unknown lurking in the Colorado backcountry and nobody is immune. Even the most seasoned backcountry experts and decorated snow scientists go for the ride, and some of them don’t make it home to tell the story.

So do we stop exploring and venturing out into the beyond? Never. Do we do so on tiptoe and with whispered voices? Absolutely.

I don’t know about you, but I plan on exploring these corners of the San Juans for many years to come. But I’ll be bringing judgment and caution along as companions. I don’t ever want my day’s to be my last.

– Will Sands