A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (38 page)

“Actually,” Barney said, “I think most of them wear snorkels so they can tell someone else they did it.”

I
n 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 verticality: 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 Vallençant, 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. (Downclimbing 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 knees, 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 snowflakes 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.

L
isten, 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 side-slipped 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.

B
ob Gurnsey stood stock-still, listening, his big Nel-Spot pistol at the ready. According to his map and compass, the blue flag station had to be a couple of hundred yards away, somewhere in among the closely spaced maples, birches, and poplars. There were eleven other men somewhere in the hundred-acre tract of New Hampshire forest. All of them needed a blue flag as badly as Gurnsey. All of them carried Nel-Spot pistols.

Gurnsey moved to a stone wall and vaulted it. He landed lightly on his hands and knees, the pistol on the ground under his right hand. He wasn’t alone.

“Now hold it
raht
there.”

The words came out in a soft, syrupy south Alabama drawl, and they pierced through to Gurnsey’s heart like a cold sword. He was dead, wasted, out of the game.

Gurnsey looked up into the barrel of a Nel-Spot held by R. D. “Ronnie” Simpkins. The gun was huge, immense, bigger than a .45, and Gurnsey could see that Simpkins was holding it rock-steady, drawing a bead directly on the bridge of his nose—dead square between the eyes. Gurnsey knew Simpkins by reputation—he hunted turkeys and could call all kinds of game birds up to his gun using a device he made from a crumpled snuff can and a diaphragm. (Simpkins, always a gentleman, referred to the last item as “a family saver.”) Gurnsey never doubted that the turkey hunter would pull the trigger. He looked down toward the gun under his hand. If Simpkins faltered for a minute, if he
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 CO
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.”