The Powder and The Glory

The Temperature in the room has passed 195 degrees. The rim of the sawed-off wine bottle is hot enough to hurt the lips. Surprisingly, the beer inside it is still cool, but the heat in the room is now solid and important. Respectful attention must be paid to it. We sit there in our skins, paying attention. We have begun to glisten and turn pink: two or three men in our late 30s or early 40s, tennis players, handball bulldogs and three-mile joggers, by the look of us; a boy of about 14; and a couple of chunky college girls. Nobody is wearing anything, except for one of the girls, who has a towel turbaned around her hair. She is the blonder of the two and has turned pinker. Sing ho for chunky college girls. Our mood is light and uncluttered, as far as I can tell. Each of us has wandered separately to the sauna, whose door lists no rules and no hours, poked his head in and thought, well, sure. The trace of sexuality in our happenstance is pleasant, partly because it is so faint as to be weightless. The white-pine chunks burning in the iron wood stove rule the room. I lie back on the hot cedar. The heat enters my shoulders and thighs and reads the day's history.

• • •

Seven a.m.: a profound breakfast, stretched to the limits of meaning. Then out to the helicopter for stupidity drill. Don't wander around the back of the aircraft, Ed Pruss, the pilot, is saying, because the tail rotor will kill you. Don't carry your skis on your shoulder, nor hold them vertically, because the main rotor of the big Bell 204 will hit them and they will fly around and kill you. He goes on to mention something else that will solve all your problems suddenly, but I miss it, because I am mooning about snow. I have been mooning all winter about the snow in this place. But we can't fly. Above 8000 feet, the mountains are socked in. I side-step up 100 yards and run some slalom gates, moodily and not well.

A cathedrallike lunch, then back out to the helicopter. This time, although conditions look no better, the thing is going to fly. Nine of us pack into its abdomen. Leo, who is running things, sits up front. We swing up into the weather. White, defined by dark green and shades of gray. Then, as we rise beyond the tree line, nothing at all but luminous white for seconds at a stretch. Astonishingly close, the gray of a rock wall. The gray drops behind again. What is there for Ed Pruss to brace his sight against? I strain to see through the fogged Plexiglas of the door and discover that I am looking at a motionless floor of snow a few feet away. We have landed. The door pops open; a shock of cold. Blown snow. Out into it, running crouched, the blades whuffing overhead. Kneel, the noise level rises, there is a blast of air. Blink, straighten, the copter is gone, a small diminishing noise in a light fall of snow.

Now no sound.

Leo yells. He has dumped the skis from the chopper rack and is sorting them. No time. The next team will be here in three or four minutes. We stamp out standing places in the new powder that has fallen. My legs are stiff. I can feel the chill through my down parka. I clamp my bindings and fall into line behind one of the other skiers as we shuffle up a slight rise.

Jumping off: Leo picks his line and yells for us to stay to the right of it. I have been in the mountains enough to know why: Our pitch is the uppermost fall of a glacier and the gentle shadow barely visible through the falling snow on the runout to the left is a big crevasse. Leo drops down the hang, curling slowly. He has 35 pounds of survival gear in a rucksack on his back and his skiing is strong, rather than beautiful. He handles the slope like a carpenter guiding a plank through a table saw.

Someone goes. Someone else. My turn: I am a tower of rust. Adrenaline has begun to work, but the effects have not yet reached my knees, where the joint mice play. One of the skiers ahead of me catches an edge and windmills, and it is obvious that the crusted ruts of last week's wretched weather lie under the softness of today's pretty powder. I revert to survival skiing and blast through my turns with too much force. I am still perpendicular when I reach Leo, a quarter of a mile below, but my track, as I look back to criticize it, is not a linking of smooth curves but a ridiculous jitter of zigzags.

By now, however, enough cold air has passed through my lungs to set my machinery in motion and skiing begins to look possible. "Gemma weiter," says Leo--Austrian mountain dialect for "Let's move it." Leo Grillmair and his partner, Hans Gmoser, emigrated 20 years ago from Linz, Upper Austria. They arrived in Calgary on top of a logging truck, frostbitten and broke. It is a matter of opinion, of course, but for several years now, a growing number of opinions have run in the same direction, toward the belief that this nest of mountains in Canada's Bugaboos, where Grillmair and Gmoser have set up their helicopter operation, is the best place in the world to do powder skiing.

We track down after Leo. Looser now, swing free, accept the snow. To some extent, we do. And don't. Most of us are fairly good skiers, but the mystery the amateur athlete never manages to solve has nothing to do with technique, which he knows cold. It is how to find and keep his edge. We ski tentatively. Each of us is waiting to hear a single sound, the beat of great wings as grace descends.

The helicopter waits at about 7500 feet. It has been warm all week, with a snow-eating chinook blowing out of the west, and below this level what covers the ground is unskiable mashed potatoes. The helicopter freights us back into the snowfall and we scuttle out into it, better now at the guerrilla routine.

Some orderly soul asks where we are. "Groovy's Ass," Leo says. He is not joking. There is another run here called Holy Shit. Groovy's Ass, although not especially fearsome, figures in one of the great guest-book inscriptions of the Western world: "I left my teeth in Groovy's Ass." Yah, says Leo, somebody wrote that in the Bugaboo lodge book last week, after cracking up on the run and breaking off a couple of teeth.

Everyone is mightily cheered by this information, and although grace cannot be said to have descended, the group experiences a lively attack of competence. It is a mild version of a reaction I have noticed before in the mountains: The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling for you but not for me. Mountaineers are mostly decent types and they are no less em-pathetic than valley people, but there are so many opportunities to get into bad trouble that even the news of some other party's fatal accident, if heard during a climb, sometimes releases an odd shudder of energy that is almost exhilaration: I am not dead, therefore I feel very, very quick.

We run with some style for an hour or so. No one minds that what we are doing is not true powder skiing--only about six inches of new stuff has fallen so far and it is still possible to ski on the snow, as if it were a floor, instead of in the snow, as if it were a sea. We splash about in the shallows. At just the point at which first-day fatigue would tatter our elegance, snow and fog interpose tactfully and Ed tells Leo that flying is finished for the day. We ski down to the lodge out of what is now the beginning of a true storm.

The sauna has driven me out. My feet tingle. Their heat melts the snow I am standing on and it re-forms as ice under my toes. Snow grains blow on the wind. They sting the skin of my belly and thighs. My head feels clear and sharp and a little crazy. The storm is going to blow all night and there must be a foot of new snow now up at 10,000 feet. Tomorrow morning there will be two feet, 30 inches, a full yard. We are rich.

• • •

Let us say that it is storming now at Zermatt, or Zürs, or Vail. Fine, light snow fills the streets to the height of a boot top and more of it is sifting down. Skiers hunching through the storm on their way to drinks at Gramshammer's or Rehrücken at the Walliserhof think about how it will be in the morning and their riches make them lightheaded. Yet there can be no knowledgeable skier at any of these great stations who would not prefer to be transported instantly to this small lodge in the Bugaboos, west of Banff.

The explanation lies mainly in numbers. The Bugaboos are spectacular, but they are not higher nor more splendid nor more snowed upon than the great peaks of the Rockies or the Alps. They are a good deal more private, however. Something like 300 square miles of the Bugaboos are easily reachable by helicopter from Hans Gmoser and Leo Grillmair's lodge. Beyond these miles are more miles, and in all of this vast area, in any given week, there are only 40 souls to make tracks in the powder. If you cross another skier's trail, it is because you want to.

There are other numbers bound up with the uniqueness of this place. The Bell 204 has places for a pilot, a guide, nine other skiers, ten pairs of skis tied outside the cabin in a rack on the landing gear and enough survival equipment and freeze-dried food to last two weeks. The price of so much lifting power is close to half a million dollars. It costs nine dollars a minute, or $540 an hour, or far too much, to run this most sophisticated of all ski lifts.

The high-season price of a week of skiing, with 70,000 vertical feet of helicopter transport included, is $610. This means that a skier from the East Coast, paying something more than $30 0 for his air fare to Calgary, must lay out at least $900 for his amusement. If he skis more than 70,000 vertical feet--and he can do that in two days if his knees and the weather are good--his expense can run to around $1300. It is senseless to pay this much and use second-rate equipment, so he buys a good pair of powder skis and a set of bindings for $225. Maybe--what the hell--he buys a pair of new, high-rise, plastic superskier boots for $175. This hemorrhage of cash is so absurd that the last bite seems almost sane. The Easterner hears that the only goggles that will not fog up when he is ear-deep in powder are a double-lens model turned out (as it happens) by a powder-skiing dentist named Smith. Smith's good goggles cost $20--cheap.

Disbursement on this scale limits the Bugaboos to the prosperous and the (continued on page 206)Powder And Glory(continued from page 112) fanatic. Most of my companions this week are successful business honchos in their 40s, old jocks. Several of the rest are orthopedic surgeons, cheerful, healthy men, slightly less fit than the honchos, amiably determined to complete the circle of their lives by plowing their bonesetting profits back into the snow. But not everyone here is loaded; a citizen whose mental moorings have been loosened by fantasies of powder skiing will cash in his life insurance or sell his car to get to where the powder is. There are men here, I am certain, who have made promises to their wives and their banks that can't be kept, and one or two women who have abandoned their men with a kiss and instructions for operating the drier.

With this assortment of hard cases I pass the evening. Yesterday morning, waiting in the lobby of the Calgary Inn. we went through the squinty-eyed routine with which every expedition begins, inspecting one another without delight and wondering which unrevealed character would be the casualty, which the complainer. Now everything is friendly and uncritical. We have agreed that we are splendid people. As the week progresses, there will be minor modifications of this view, but now we apply Bushmill's superior Irish liniment to unadmitted aches and exchange the comfortable fribble of ski talk. Smugness carries the night.

• • •

If it is agreed that the triple forward flip is a baroque excess, outside the classic canon, then the most spectacular maneuver in recreational skiing is undoubtedly the great-circle route by which a beginner at powder skiing gets down a mountain. The great circle offers speed, terror, unpredictable action, heartbreaking displays of courage and blood on the sand. It is as stirring as a good train wreck. A New Hampshire friend of mine, upon being excavated after his first great circle, which he performed on Bell Mountain at Aspen, said it all: "That was a pissah."

Picture your beginner, then, at the top of a big Steilhang. The German word means "steep-hang" and is expressive; the snow does not lie on the ground, it hangs on what is almost a cliff face and now and then lets go in an avalanche. Powder skiing is done on Steilhangs, because when the powder is really deep, the pressure of it on the skier's thighs and waist would bring him to a stop on a normal slope. The powder skier needs steepness for the same reason that a water skier needs a fast boat.

So the beginner, who is not a beginner but something of a hot-shot back home on the packed-down trails he is used to, adjusts his goggles and his white-silk scarf, brings his right thumb and forefinger together gallantly and steels his nerve. In addition, he steels his arms, his backbone, legs and feet, and clenches his jaw. Thus, he is totally rigid as he launches on the great circle. The reason is panic, for his instincts and training tell him that snow is a solid. This solid now entangles his feet and skis (he believes with fear and trembling) and will catch his edges and cause him to capsize over his ski tips, ripping out all the tendons in both legs. The only turn that can be made in deep snow in a condition of total rigidity is the stem. Given the steepness of the slope, the are of the stem turn made by the desperate beginner is fantastically large. It is, in fact, the dreaded great circle. The physics of a large arc on a steep slope mean that the beginner is moving at a sickening rate by the time he starts to pull out of the downhill phase of his dive.

At this point, the most insensitive on-looker turns away. Any variation in slope, snow texture, light or wattage of terror will cause the beginner to lose the balance he is lighting to keep and he will, as pilots used to say in World War Two, auger in. A high-speed fall in powder is not always disastrous, since the stuff is soft, but it is always messy and always tiring. It is incredibly hard, on a steep slope at 9000 or 10,000 feet, to find and dig out skis and poles, clean and reset bindings, scrape snow off boot bottoms, clamp the bindings and take a swipe at smeared sunglasses with the thumb of a wet ski glove. It is even hard to stand up before starting this salvage operation, because the powder offers no floor to push against. The capsized beginner rages. If his control is steady, he rages silently, and if not, he shrieks ragged curses. He apologizes when he reaches his friends, who are waiting in disgust on the flat below, but what is in his heart is murder.

As it happens, I am past all this, although one or two sufferers in our group are not. I no longer perform my celebrated interpretation of the great circle, because I have realized, after augering in more times than now seem necessary, that powder snow is not a solid but a fluid. I respond to it with whatever fluidity I can squeeze from a gristly, awkward body, and make uncalamitous turns. My skiing is workmanlike.

Workmanlike is not good enough, however. Look here: Sepp Renner, a big, laughing kid from Andermatt, one of the Swiss guides, is going down a Steilhang. He carries the usual guide's rucksack, packed with a tent, stretcher, food, stove and jointed probe to use when someone is caught in an avalanche. I have skied with a rucksack enough to know that it limits what you can do, no matter how strong you are.

But watch Sepp. He could ski like a stone, schuss the hang at flat-out speed, and in complete control, but that is not what is on his mind. What he does is to swash from side to side down the fall line, so slowly that it does not seem possible for motion to be arrested to that degree. It is a dance. He has filmed himself in slow motion.

The rest of us follow. Those who imitate well throw themselves down the hang without thought. The rest, and I am one of these, try to explicate the poetry with close textual analysis. Observe: This exceptionally strong man uses no strength at all, and no quickness, only balance and serenity. Watch now: He rises, falls ... I build serenity from these Tinkertoys of technique.

Beer in the sauna. An inordinate dinner. Chess. I have cased the talent, know I can win and do win--my kind of gamble. I ascend to my upper bunk at 10:01 and am asleep by 10:02.

• • •

Hans Gmoser has appeared. He has been skiing to the north, in the Cariboo Mountains, where he runs a second helicopter operation. He is thin, fairly tall; a tough, loose, acute man whose manner is quiet. He has a quality I have seen before in one or two other Austrian mountaineers I know, several race-car drivers and not many others. It is hard to say what this quality is. Perhaps it is that he and his conception of himself are more nearly congruent than is true of most men.

Gmoser (pronounced Gmoser; there is a run here called Gmadness) runs a climbing school in the summer here in the Bugaboos. He has never done any Himalayan climbing, but he did put a new route up Mount McKinley a few years ago. He tells a long, amusing, self-deprecating story about 0bivouacking on McKinley in an igloo whose tunnel entrance eventually stretched to several yards, because snow fell without letup for four days. Several of us are sitting after supper in the dining room of the Bugaboo lodge. It is warm and cheerful and someone has ordered more wine. It is very funny to think of Gmoser and his partner crawling farther and farther each day to get outside, and of the snow whistling past their bare bottoms at 100 miles an hour as they squat to relieve themselves. (The humor of mountain stories is a matter of viewpoint. Once some friends and I spent one night, not four days, in an emergency igloo that we had built to keep ourselves from freezing to death on a glacier in Switzerland. Not one of us thought that it was funny at the time.)

Heading out to the helicopter at 7:15 a.m., I stop, unzip my kidney pack and look inside. The Skadi is there. I take it out and hold it to my ear. It is beeping, as it should be. I knew it was in the kidney pack, beeping correctly, because I had checked both things ten minutes before. But the Skadi is comforting. It is the single most effective piece of survival gear ever developed for skiing or climbing in avalanche country.

The next-best safety measure, after a Skadi, is the forlorn system generally used in the Alps and in the rest of North America: You tie a long red string around your waist, let it trail behind you and hope that part of it shows after the avalanche has buried you. The Skadi is a little radio sender-receiver. If you are carrying one and are buried, your friends switch their Skadis to receive and track you down. The method is fast and accurate to about six inches. We proved this one morning by exhuming Sepp, whom the other guides had buried with snow shovels while we ate breakfast. Afterward Sepp mentioned, laughing and yelling insults in Schweizerdeutsch at his friends, that this was the second time he had been dug up by a party using Skadis. "Yes?" "Ja," said Sepp; the other time was last year. He was buried not by snow shovels then but by an avalanche, here in the Bugaboos.

• • •

I think I have it. We are at the bottom of an amiable escarpment named Ego by someone who turned around, looked at his tracks and found them good. Hot damn, I think, finding my track good, it looks just like the ski magazines!

It even feels that way: straight down the face, a kind of dancing fall, astonishingly slow, with never a surface to touch. I have heard the beat of great wings.

For the rest of the run it works, and for a few pitches here and there throughout the morning. Flight is not in my nature, nor physical grace, but for a short time I am an aerial being.

The gods smile. As a reward for skiing good snow more or less correctly, they send me a mountainside crusted with mean, ridged, rackety bad snow. I am an Eastern skier and this is the sort of briar patch I know and love. A few boulders and some frozen mud would make me feel even more at home, but the deep white-pine forest through which we are running is a good substitute. I run the big pine trunks as if they were slalom poles, then hare off on a wild series of jumps. One of the women skiers, a pretty Westerner with wind crinkles at the corners of her eyes, has fallen on the evil crust and is sliding down the hillside on her slick nylon parka and wind pants. She is helpless; her speed is not increasing, but it is not diminishing, either. Will she slide on until she is arrested by the Bugaboo lodge 1500 feet below? Will she miss the lodge and slide to the town of Spillimacheen, worn to a few nylon threads and a couple of eye crinkles? Not at all; the Green Hornet is at hand. He pulls jauntily out of a jump and stops her with his sinewy body, unhurt but angry and swearing like hell. There is no end to my splendor.

• • •

Ed, the pilot, is a mild, square-shaped man in his 40s. When he is not flying skiers in the Bugaboos, he flies oil geologists and drilling crews in the arctic. The drillers, he says, are a hairy-eared bunch, big-macho types, and some of them, on their first tours in the arctic, tend to think that safety rules are a bit candy-assed. "I had told this new guy," says Ed, "that you don't throw things near a helicopter. But he was a type who hadn't listened to anyone yet in his life and he wasn't going to start with me. What he threw, when we were unloading a drilling rig, was a five-pound package of dynamite. The package hit the rotor and detonated. The blast knocked a big piece of rotor off and the machine just about vibrated itself to pieces before I could get it shut off."

Ed does no downhill skiing, but he handles the helicopter the way a downhill racer would. Control is better at speed, he says. "I like to brake to a landing with a flare, because it uses less power. It looks flashy, but there's a reason. At sea level the Bell has 1100 horsepower, but at 12,000 feet it only turns about 800, and if you try to lower it straight down on nothing but the engine, you don't have much left to handle a wind gust."

• • •

It is Friday evening. Tomorrow is getaway day. The group is drawing apart and, by way of apology, its members are exchanging addresses. We have flown five and a half days out of a possible six, which is unusually good, and at least three of these days have been spectacular, unimprovable-on. Gmoser's reckoning is that I have skied 116,000 vertical feet, which is about averagefor the group.

It has been a good week, but the New England conscience--yes. thanks, another Scotch, and some more of those hummingbirds' tongues--worries about the huge cost of helicopter skiing. Is the Bugaboo circus merely a particularly excessive instance of the suburbanization of skiing? A sport that once was clean and hard and fairly simple is cheapened--thanks, just a touch more, and some ice--by glitter and glut. There are too many credit-card machines in ski country, and the ride holds: Anything you can buy with plastic is plastic. Is it organic to pay $825 for a week of helicoptering?

It's not an easy question and I am inclined to leave it open. Gmoser, who is a tasteful man, has taken the curse off conspicuous consumption by avoiding any egregious luxury in the lodge. His food is imaginative and good, but it is eaten on simple plank tables. The beds are comfortable, but they are bunks. You shave in a communal bathroom.

Gmoser, who grew up in thin times in Austria to a job as an electrician's apprentice, feels that the costs are out of proportion. He would like to run his operation without the helicopter, he says, but U.S. and Canadian skiers just won't walk up mountains with skis and skins in any great numbers. And, as I know well enough from ski-mountaineering in the Alps, if you climb 7000 feet in four active hours, you have very little energy left to spend on improving your deep-snow technique. If it is bad, it stays that way. The helicopter skier can ski like a Holstein for two runs and still have energy left to analyze his mistakes and ski like a Thomson's gazelle on the third.

I assuage the New England conscience--rare, please, and some of the Bordeaux--by meditating in this swampy fashion for 15 minutes and by going off in the morning with Gmoser on one of the ski-and-skin tours he runs each year, mostly to keep himself honest.

We start from Banff, where Gmoser's firm, Canadian Mountain Holidays, has its office, and ride a bus to Sunshine, a ski area nearby. It is tremendously satisfying to be climbing on skis again and to leave the prepared, mashed-down slopes of Sunshine in the direction of Mount Assiniboine, 20 miles away over a couple of passes. The day skiers watch us leave in horror.

We are a very mixed group of 14 climbers and among us is a beginner who has gone trustfully to the camping store. In mild weather, he wears a downstuffed vest, down parka and down wind pants. He carries a large variety of splendid gear, including a big still camera, a big movie camera and a bottle of whiskey. Within 250 yards of easy upward plodding, he is soaked with sweat and has turned dangerously red. We do what we can. We peel off his feathers and that night we lighten his pack by drinking his whiskey.

The journey to Assiniboine takes two days at our easy pace. Halfway there, we stop at a trapper's cabin. It is crowded and I decide to sleep in the snow. Since I have a bivouac sack with me--a large plastic bag, waterproof and wind-proof--the decision involves no risk, and no more discomfort than sleeping on the cabin floor and having my colleagues step on my face. But the beginner is much impressed. In the morning, he puffs out of the cabin, banging his hands together to keep from freezing, to view my frozen corpse.

Gmoser, it develops, admires Scandinavian cross-country wax. For an Austrian, this is heresy, but he is encouraged by a couple of old Norwegian Resistance fighters, now Canadian businessmen, who are making the trip on narrow cross-country skis. (The rest of us, of course, are using normal ski-mountaineering equipment--downhill skis, with bindings that let the heel rise when we walk.) The wax functions magically for Gmoser and the Norwegians but not for me. I do not believe, and to walk uphill with wax, you must be a true believer. I am used to skins--fibrous nylon pads that allow even skeptics to climb with ease. I slip back two feet for every three I ascend, like the frog in the riddle.

A warm log lodge, a frozen lake, a big, sharp-spired mountain, Assiniboine, rising on the opposite shore. We spend three days there, climbing for a couple of hours in the morning and a couple in the afternoon, and skiing what we climb. It is just strenuous enough to justify a lot of pleasant laziness.

On the walk out, at 8000 feet in Allenby Pass, I hear a wild humming that puzzles me. After a time, I understand. The wind has set the magnesium struts of my pack frame to vibrating.

For almost an hour one morning, we follow the fresh tracks of a running cougar and a rabbit. Then the tracks veer off. We never learn who won the race. A mile or so farther, crashed in Brewster Creek and weathered to scraps, is the carcass of an elk that did not survive the winter.

On our last night, a tough, elderly chemist who has made the trip produces a bottle of overproof Canadian rum. He is a hero; he has packed it all the way to Assiniboine and halfway back. He mixes it with lemon juice and magic herbs. We call the resulting potion the Allenby Pass, in honor of our stiff thighs, and we celebrate, of course, the Allenby Passover.