It wasn't until the last day of the trip, however, that we achieved schnitzel nirvana. We'd been working on the idea all week. It began with the realization that, in deep powder, the feeling of purest bliss doesn't come while carving but instead occurs during that moment of transcendent weightlessness when you're completely off edge. You're simply floating there, in the middle of the snow, with mistlike powder streaming off your board's nose and blowing in your face. As the week progressed, we began turning less and less, and the straighter we got, the more schnitzel we felt. Finally, in the end, the six of us decided to dispense with turns altogether—we were going to straight-run everything.
The final day was a perfect one for lizard lines, as we dubbed our turnless tracks. It was the only blue-sky day of the trip; Mount Robsin, with its slanted, Citicorp building-style summit, towered over its fang-topped neighbors. We pledged allegiance to two credos, first Don's—"To turn is to admit defeat!"—then Ken's—"I will go straight until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death!" And straight-run we proceeded to do, flying down the glaciers, buzzing by jumbled serac fields, flashing past translucent blue ice floes, winging aside striated cliff bands. The skiers couldn't understand. "What a waste of powder," they said, run after run. What they didn't comprehend was that we had stripped snow-sliding to its bare essentials, to its beautiful and wondrous core. It was like reading Hemingway: I realized exactly how less can be more.
The trip ended on a long, open face called Raymond's Glacier. I pointed my board straight down it and felt the wind hum through my hair, felt my eyes water, felt the tears stream up my forehead. I was flying; fear and joy tussled in my head. More than 120,000 vertical feet of powder had passed beneath my board in the last few days, and instead of prolonging the inevitable, I rode the final thousand the way they should be ridden: fast and free, skimming through the powder, hands hugging the wind, ebullient all the way back down to the waiting helicopter.
Article © Michael Finkel, 2000. Photo © CMH, 2000
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