In My Hands

The author, hanging on

Admit it: sometimes it’s easier to let go.

Easier like the time you went climbing in the gym some months ago and all of your muscles were strained against gravity, fingers jammed inside the miniscule holds. There were perhaps 30 feet of drop beneath your climbing shoes, 12 more feet to go until you topped out, one manic explosion of strength needed to latch onto the holds up above your head — an explosion channeled vertically, precisely and without hesitation.

But you hesitated.

Every second you hung, a little bit more of the strength sapped from of your forearms. A slow ooze of lactic acid crept into your legs that robbed you of the spring you would need to execute the one tremendous move.

You thought about the line latched to your harness. The auto-belay would not seize you in the air the way that a climbing partner would; it would drop you slowly, delicately like a spider on a strand of gossamer.

If you let go then, you would have that sweet release. You wouldn’t have to know that your body had failed you before you even finished the motion. Nor would you have that tentative contact of your fingers on the next holds, followed by the second of weightlessness as you fell away from the wall. Y

ou could go back to your apartment, kill some time on the Internet and make sure to get to bed on time to be ready for a morning at the office.

And what if you actually made the move? Well congratulations. You would cling pathetically to tiny holds, a little higher on the wall now, with new ways to screw it up, lose your grip and fall.

Try the move or drop now? Quite the dilemma. And there you were hanging on with all the strength you had, just thinking about it.

Now I am several hundred miles from the climbing gym, at the bottom of a big-ass orange cliff just outside of Moab, Utah. This place is called Wall Street, but the people here are more likely to trade climbing stories than stocks. At our backs, the mighty Colorado River winds southward; at our front there is a nifty 5-9 climbing route that Andrew has just sport climbed.

Now it is my turn to go up, pop the quick-draws off the bolts and get clip into the chains at the top of the route where I would untie and set up my own belay to get back down.

I would like to note that this will be the hardest rated route that I have ever tried. I am already prepared to have my muscles fail and to drop.

Before I start the route, I become aware of something buzzing around my ears.

A wasp! Well isn’t that just dandy?

“Ugh! I’m allergic to bees!” I look behind me to where a young woman and a man have just pulled up in a battered VW bus. Great. Now there are witnesses. I already know I’m a sucky climber. Does everyone else have to know it too?

The wasp is having a fine time now, cutting tight loops around my head. In the next moment he lands on my forehead.

“Git outa here you sonofabitch,” I hiss between clenched teeth.

I know I’m supposed to stay completely still, but all I can think about is those tiny claws working their way across my face. I hold on for a second, then flip out, flailing my arms at the tormentor.

He buzzes away and I am safe for the moment.

OK. Breathe. Refocus.

I look at the rock in front of me for the tiny crevices I will need to hoist my weight.

Climbing is finger torture, I think. What’s so awful about doing a pitch where there are easy handholds? I’m sure could still get a decent arm and leg workout without having to hang my weight off of millimeters of rock.

“Climbing!” I shout.

I try hard to make it look like I know what the hell I am doing, feeling the spectators’ eyes on my back. With awkward jerking movements, I work my way up the tiny ledges along the wall until I am at the toughest part of the route.

 Here is the move. I scrunch myself down and thrust forward to seize a narrow wedge of stone.

Oh shit.

My fingertips lose their grip and I swing off the wall.

I drop for an instant and then yank to a stop. Andrew has halted the rope through his belay device so that it’s doubtful that I’ve lost more than a couple of centimeters worth of progress.

Refocus.

I don’t want the other climbers to see me give up and go down. Maybe I can convince myself that I really want the top this time.

I know that if I make it all the way, I will have to clip in with the nylon daisy chain attached to my waist. Then I will have to untie the rope from my harness and set up the belay. After I decide I’ve put all the rope in the right places, then it will be my responsibility to lower myself via the belay device.

This should be a small thing, but it makes me uneasy. If I screw something up, there will be no one to get me. It falls on my shoulders to make sure I got everything set up safely and don’t drop off the wall. And I’m the guy who regularly loses his car keys and forgets what day it is.

The funny thing is that I have no problem trusting myself with far more complicated things that would splatter me just as bad if they went wrong. I trust the brakes on my car to stop me from careening into an intersection or down a mountainside. By that same token, I will happily get into an elevator without worrying about what would happen if the cable snapped or eat food from the store that is hopefully not filled with pathogens and deadly chemicals.

Why is it so easy to defer responsibility and trust others, but so much scarier to put that trust into my own hands? Perhaps death itself isn’t as frightening to me as the idea of bringing it about by my own folly. Easier to sit back in the passenger seat at take off and think, “Well at least it won’t be my fault if the plane blows up.”

Now, I have that choice again. If I find that I can’t handle the next move on the pitch, Andrew will have to belay me off the rock and get me down safe. If instead, I find that I can climb past the segment and get up to the chains, I will be the one lowering myself.

“C’mon man, you can do it!” I hear from behind me.

The spectators are still watching the show. I don’t feel like going down yet.  I put my hands back on the rock and ready myself for the move.

My legs spring upward and then I make the grab. Every inch of my body is pressed into the rock, my fingertips sting with the pressure of my grip. I cannot hold this for long, so I start moving, shimmying my right leg up the stone. I find traction and hoist my way up to a solid hold.

My heart is surging in my chest. I can see the chains hanging off the rock above me and now I’m sure I can finish the route. This fact is exciting, but it makes me uneasy also because I know that I will have to belay myself back the way I came from.

I hoist myself from hold to hold until I arrive at the chains along the rock ledge. They are simple loops of metal bolted into the side of the rock, a solid hold if there ever was one.

Moving quickly, I unclip the ends of the daisy chain from my harness and attach myself to the bolts at the top of the chains. At this point, I should be able to lean back comfortably without having to place any of my weight on the rope. Somehow I can’t let myself do this. The nylon looks flimsy and insubstantial. There’s a long drop beneath me.

Remember the steps, I think as waves of adrenaline course through my veins. Intellectually, I know that everything is fine, but I feel the seeds of a deep instinctual fear within and a profound discomfort with the height. If those seeds of fear germinate, I will be hopeless.

I think of the lines that the Bene Gesserit mystics use in “Dune:” “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration…”

There is that buzz again. The wasp has come back for another pass.

“Jeezis Christ!”

I hold myself completely still as the little bastard wheels around me. He’s having the time of his life.

I try to block out the distraction and focus on the task at hand. My legs are already straining against the impractical situation that I am putting them in. Through a colossal effort of will, I force myself to untie the rope at my waist.

“Slack!” I shout down.

I begin to pull the rope up, feeding it through the chains and sending the working end down the other side to the bottom. The idea is to have the two ends of rope feed through the delay device and then reach the bottom, that would allow Andrew to take up the Fireman’s Belay and catch my fall if my own grip slipped for some reason.

Christ, my rappel looks fucked up now.

 Is it fucked up, or am I just psyching myself out?

There are two loops going through. That’s right. I unclip the daisy chain and start to lower. No, it definitely feels wrong!

I hoist myself back up and re-clip to the bolts then fumble to put the rope back through the belay device. It looks the same as what I had before. Should I trust this? It must be right.

It looks different than it should, I think.

I’m psyching myself out.

Just go for it.

Now I’m lowering and I’m committed.

It feels nice going back down through the air. My belay isn’t fucked up after all. A little bit of the fear that I had about setting up the rappel has dissipated but I know I will want to go back through the steps, so that I can do this thing through muscle memory and not worry about drawing a blank. I want to know that I won’t let fear override rational thought.

My feet touch the ground and I breathe out.

In the Master’s Chambers

 Somewhere above our heads, an unseen sun beat down over a moonscape of broken stone, its bare-rock hills and the few scrub plants tough enough to survive the central Utah heat.

The walls of Chambers Canyon filtered out both heat and light. I was wedged deep inside its recesses, feeling the cool, smooth of the stone pressed on my hands and squeezed against my back. My legs strained to maintain steady pressure on my climbing shoes. Right then, those points of contact were the most important things in my life. If I let go, I would drop into the darkness.

A wanderer on the surface above might never suspect this great crack in the earth, not until he stumbled right up to (or into) it. Andrew and I, we sought it out. 

Now, I craned my head to the right where I could still see the light from the north end of the crevice that we had walked into. Still not too late to turn back?

Eventually, we would cross the point where it would be impossible or damn near it for us to turn around. At that point, our fates would be wedded to whatever challenges the canyon had in store for us.

To my left, Andrew scouted for the best route.

“It’s getting wider here, I don’t think we can keep going this way.”

“Well, where well the hell do we go then?” I asked, already dreading the answer.

If there was a way, it was beneath our shoes, in the place we couldn’t see, down there.

In a minute, Andrew was already working his way down into the crevice and was swallowed up inside the dark. I heard the friction of the canyon walls against his clothes, the occasional grunt as he worked against gravity to descend safely. How far until the bottom?

It would be possible in theory for him to climb back up the way he came, though much harder. The choices we made in the canyon wouldn’t be reversed easily. Maybe we couldn't reverse them at all. It was different from most hikes that I’ve taken where I’ve been comfortable with the idea that it wouldn’t be too hard to turn around.

Canyoneering seemed to cut a little closer to the real truth about the way of the world: that we are always crossing thresholds. Every decision has permanent consequences, some more than others. Once we cross those thresholds, the only thing we can do is accept the new reality, try to adapt and keep moving forward.

Claustrophobia anybody? This was one of the wider places in the canyon.

I stayed squeezed between the walls for a small lifetime, finally heard Andrew’s voice from below: he had made the canyon floor. Now it was my turn.

I started scuffling downward, working to maintain steady pressure as I felt my way along the knobs and indentations on the surfaces. In one instance, my legs would be fully extended and I kept my arms behind me. In another place, I held myself up with my knees. The friction of the sandstone ground and bit at me, on my hands, through my pants and jacket. Finally, Andrew came into view, and then I was able to put my feet down on the sandy floor. It was the first time I’d had my feet on anything like solid ground since we had started on the canyon about 20 minutes earlier.

Going down 

We began our descent about a mile from where we had parked the car. The journey began innocuously enough, a sandy path between chest-high walls of stone. The walls themselves formed a curious ripple pattern that I can only liken to carton drawings of ocean waves, only laid out horizontally. The stone moved in smooth arcs and then abruptly turned into a new direction. There were about 18 inches between the walls at the beginning, forcing us to move awkwardly between the curves. Gradually, the space between the walls began to tighten and the floor began to drop out from us.

We put our feet up on the walls and continued forward, getting higher and higher above the crevice, until eventually we both needed to climb down.

Back at the bottom, the walls closed out the sky. It was dark, but still light enough that we wouldn’t need a headlamp to navigate. There was the sandy path again, a road through the dimness we could follow to the next challenge. Here and there, a space would open up. There would be a sunlit alcove or some other place where ages of water on rock had carved out natural splendor.

Water. Even here in this dusty canyon, that ambitious liquid had left traces of its presence. Every now and then, I would make out a branch or a knot of desiccated vegetation on one of the walls overhead, reminding me that floodwaters had climbed that high. It probably hadn’t been that long ago either. 

No one had forecast rain on the day that we were going down, but if they had, it wasn’t difficult to imagine how screwed we would be. The narrow slot we were walking down was essentially an enormous storm drain for the acres and acres of surrounding hills. Because most of those hills were mostly stone, they would sluice all that water to our location trapping us like rats.

The thought of getting in such a maelstrom kept me on edge.

Suddenly, I heard the sound of liquid trickling over sand.

“What the fuck is that?”

“Just taking a leak here,” Andrew said from around the corner.

The water has shaped some interesting passages in the rock

One thing I noticed going through the canyon was how little life there was. The environment consisted of bare rock and bone dry sand with an occasional glance into the cloudless sky. At least it was cool here in the shade and that was a mercy. Eventually, the canyon walls widened and a hot strip of midday sun cut down into the center of the canyon. Soon we had to climb up again to where the water had carved the stone into a convex hollow, with the widest portion at about 6 feet across, that tapered at the top and bottom. I felt as though I was navigating an enormous sewer drain.

There were plenty of other places where the water had worn out immense chambers that were probably the reason that the place has the name Chambers Canyon. Distant light from above created a soft illumination on the red rock. The stone was pleasing to the eye, lit up in warm color and defined by sensuous curves.

At the same time, everything in those chambers was utterly lifeless, like a tomb. The places reminded me of the elaborate ballrooms in “The Masque of The Red Death” by Edgar Allen Poe. Those rooms, like the chambers that we walked through, were arranged so that no one walking down the main corridor would suspect that they existed until they came upon them. Similarly, the only way to see the rooms in the canyon is to enter, and the only way to enter is to clamber down through the walls.

Abstract art

 There were more narrow sections of the canyon up ahead. In order to go forward, I got familiar with using my butt as a means of transportation. I would keep steady pressure on my hands, back and climbing shoes and shift my butt by degrees in order to get a new hold on the walls. It was slow, but it was progress.

My jaw stayed clenched tight in these sections. A fall at that point wouldn’t have just meant injury, it also would have meant getting stuck deep, out of sight and miles from where anyone could hear screams for help.

A similar predicament had befallen a young adventurer by the name of Aron Ralston only 20 miles or so from this place. Most people are probably familiar with the story of how he got stuck in Blue John Canyon with a rock crushing his arm and only escaped because he cut off his trapped appendage with his pocketknife. I didn't have a pocketknife.

I was amused to read a National Geographic story later about some Aussie canyoneers who had taken to calling the dangerous rocks in canyons rall stones as a dark homage to the amputated outdoorsman.

There were a few rall stones in the canyon, including a few that fell into the canyon and got wedged between the walls. I tried not to put any weight on these, but sometimes it was hard to avoid.

I watched with some discomfort as the floor dropped further and further away, but the canyon walls were still too narrow for me to get there.

Beware the rall stone

The sight of a light in the canyon up ahead was just about the closest I’ve come to having a religious experience.

I scuttled eagerly toward the brightness like a green tendril seeking sun. I executed a couple of last tricky moves and then I was out.

Or was I?

Gradually, I became aware that I was still closed in by walls, that I had to scramble around a house-sized, boulder.

After that boulder, we found a 20-foot drop we had to go down by wedging our backs into the stone. When we got to the bottom, we found another narrow canyon section. I opted to wedge myself up higher where there was a wider passage. Andrew opted for the low road, which worked out for him until he got stuck and had to wrench himself out.

The narrow section moved on to another chamber and an up-climb.

We crawled out dazed, into the bright sun. We were still closed in by canyon walls, but now those walls were about 100-meters apart. The zone between was lush and green There were cottonwood trees with impossibly green leaves, cacti and sedges, all drawing water from the canyon drainage. The passage through the weird dark of the canyon made it all the more exhilarating to be in this place.

I thought back to all the tomblike stone behind me, beautiful but barren. And yet that crack through the desert was the reason for the life here. It was the Nile in the Sahara, enriching the plants and animals with water, filling the visitor with an appreciation for strange beauty. 

View from the last section of technical canyoneering

The Arches

Two sides. Mighty. Locked in opposition. Brethren.

They meet each other in the air, bringing their immense weight together so that they are as one stone, an arch.

So it stands, and so it will stand for unknown ages above the desert.

Long before the Romans pieced their aqueducts together, the elements carved a series of arches in what is now Utah. Even as the stone and debris around these formations wore away, the arches remained, a series of unresolved arguments left standing because neither side would yield.

If one side conquered the other, both would crumble, shattering to so much rubble in the desert. The broken rock throughout Arches National Park is a testimony to one truth: all must fall, and even the immortal-seeming arches will not escape that inevitability. We certainly won’t.

Andrew going through a route

Dinosaurs left their footprints here. Now responsible human visitors must tread upon the maintained trails, or else limit their travel to the slick rock and washes where they won't disrupt the macrobiotic soil.

Amongst the massive stone landmarks, the soil holds life that can be crushed out by a single careless footstep. The grains of sand stay together because of a network of bacteria, fungi and algae — connections that can take as long as two centuries to build. That tiny, invisible cooperation makes it possible for trees and other plants to survive the desert.

Looking up at the enormous stone formations, I felt as puny as those microbes.  I was also exultant, exhilarated. The sight of the immense geologic forces told their own story, one that I was only a tiny part of.

I could try, clumsily, to understand the world sprawled out in front of me, but at its essence, the landscape had a meaning that had little to do with me. I was there to gape and pay homage to that immensity, to scramble antlike under sun and into the shadow of the red rocks.

The author trying out some canyon moves

Andrew and I took a path out to a series of arches then cut over to the slick rock. There were cracks in the stone, dark corridors where there was cool water, places to wedge our bodies between the walls and chimney-climb to secret chambers. We crawled in, took our pictures and crawled back out. The secret places in the rock were beautiful, but they were unnerving too and it was a relief to get back in the open air where there was no risk of falling off something or getting stuck between the rocks.

Far above our heads, the tallest stones in the park glowed in the late afternoon sunlight. It should be no surprise that we found ourselves climbing in that direction, just like moths headed toward the flame. 

We made our way by convoluted steps and random handholds in the stone. Every time we scrambled up to one prominence we expected to go no further. Then one of us would discover a convenient ledge and bring us that much closer to the goal.

After a final explosion of effort, it was all there: a desolated city, resplendent in the orange radiance of the sinking sun. The snowy peaks of the La Sale mountains were in the east.

We took a moment to hold in that majesty, but then there are some things that are so beautiful, magnificent and strange that you can never really hold them in. Finally, we turned back the way we came and scrambled down the slick rock to the trail.

We started running, sucked the dry air into our lungs, chased our shadows through the stone hallways,  abandoning the monuments to the dark and to the millions of years of crumble yet to come.

Barons of Backcountry

Andrew climbing up from Little Cottonwood Canyon

      The backcountry skiers were already packing up their cars by the time we got to the parking lot, going home from trips they had started in the wee hours. They had taken advantage of the best snow the day would have to offer. 

As for Andrew and I, we would need to climb fast if we wanted to climb to the top of anything important and get down before the sun went down and the snow froze up.

The 11,000-foot summits towered snowy-white above Little Cottonwood Creek, a skier’s paradise of alabaster ridges and monster-sized bowls, festooned with fearsome outcrops of exposed stone. Further down, the tundra gave way to lodgepole pines that shaded the snow from the late April sun.

What sun! It was hot enough that I started up the trail in a T-shirt with naught but a T-shirt and snowpants. Even so, I was dripping sweat within the first set of switchbacks. I kept taking my ski goggles off and on — off when the goggles fogged up under my exertions and on again when the bright light coming off the snow stabbed my eyes. I had the ski skins and Andrew was going up on snowshoes. We still hadn’t decided which peak that we would climb.

After about two hours of climbing we came out of the trees and had a view of the high peaks, two thousand more feet of snow and rock.

We opted for a peak to the northwest of us and then began a lung-busting climb for the summit. Once again, I found myself doing switchbacks following another route laid by a skier who had gone before. I gained a couple hundred feet on the switchbacks, getting closer to a steep section between canyon walls that were not unlike the canyon gullies we had gone down around Snowbird the other day.

As I climbed, I became aware of two things: the pitch was getting steeper and the snow was getting harder. I found myself using the left edge of my skis more and more in order to cling to the mountain. Up ahead, there was a small flat area beneath a rock face that might have offered a place for me to turn the skis around and start a new line.

But how was I going to get there without flopping over in a big-ass tumble? Round and round and round I’d go and where I’d stop nobody’d know.

I stomped down desperately against the snow crust, struggling for even a feeble purchase. I did not feel secure at all. It occurred to me that the ski boots would have much better purchase if they weren’t attached to the skis beneath them. I reached down, snapped the skis off and stepped into the knee-deep snow. It would be slower going, but now I didn’t have to worry about falling.

Meanwhile, the last traverse had taken me about two football-field lengths from where Andrew was climbing. Getting back to the main route required that I plunge my poles and then the skis into the crust, again and again. Pretty exhausting work. I figured I could just leave the skis and continue on to the summit without them. But Andrew was pretty sure he could get get up the mountain using my skis as poles.

“Are you sure,” I asked, mindful of the fact that if he carried them to the top, I would probably end up sking down the gnarliest part of the mountain.

Andrew clipped them to the pack and started over a boulder pile. I stumbled after in the heavy ski boots, looking for hand holds in the rock or punching my gloves through the crust in order to grip the snow. After a few more boulder wriggles and kick steps, we reached the place where we could go no higher without going down again. In front of us, lay another  — miles of snow, more peaks towering higher yet than the place where we stood.

I was still in my T-shirt, now I reached into my pack for a windbreaker and parka, preparing for the descent.

Andrew took the lead again, and I started with a couple swerves, on the gentle incline near the summit. I stopped at the top of the steep part and began a slow sideways skid on the iciest part of the snow and came to a second halt.

I was sick of fighting gravity. I pointed the skis down and went through a turn without falling. The second one dropped me and I went tumbling (glad I brought  the helmet) and then stopped. It took a couple of falls to make it out of the gully, and then it was just your basic skiing on a big, clear slope.

We reversed an hour of climbing in just a couple of minutes, then got into some tricky crust. Fortunately, the snow was softer by the time we got back into the trees. We pushed through a flat section of woods and then we flew back down through the forest getting down to the trailhead before the sinking sun cooled the warm snow back into ice.

The author standing on a Wasatch summit

Initiation

 There I was at the top of the snow-covered gully — a maw of gravitational doom flanked by jaws of orange stone.

As I stood in my skis looking downwards, I also looked inwards and I looked with extreme skepticism.

It had been over a year since I had last skied How sharp were my skills now? Keen enough to negotiate the quick series of switchbacks needed to avoid splattering myself on one of those walls?

Was I balanced enough that I wouldn’t cartwheel ass over broken teakettle down the abyss. Also, could I ignore the preservation instinct and all the whiny equivocations in my head, the doubts preventing me from just pointing the damn skis down the mountain already? 

Or was I just going to wet my snow pants and stand there shaking?

Andrew launched himself down the slope in a series of graceful turns, then looked a hundred feet up to yours truly.

“This shouldn’t be too hard,” he let me know.

I knew he wanted to kill me, I just wished he could have been more straightforward about it. Maybe he could have slipped poison in my water bottle, put an ice axe in my brain. But making me do it to myself? That was taking things to a whole new diabolical level.

Of course there was a possibility, albeit a doubtful one, that I could actually do this. It's all a head game I reminded myself.

I looked inwards to summon up some Jedi courage. And then it came: somewhere within myself, there was an ancient master, sitting in the lotus position by some subterranean pond. His was the voice of bravery and strength.

 “The only limitation is yourself,” he said. “First you must unshackle yourself from fear. When you trust yourself, what you can do with body and mind, the limitations will vanish.”

The words soaked into my brain, seeped down into my muscles and replaced uncertainty with confidence. I overflowed with gratitude to the old master.

“Well said, you old fart,” I told him.

He winked back.

“You can do this bro!”

Then he raised his emaciated arm into the arm with the thumbs-up.

I swiveled my skis and pushed forward.

The perilous suck of gravity grabbed hold, threatening to throw me down the canyon like the world’s unluckiest pinball.

Instead, I swung the skis hard to the right, started a new line toward the other wall then skidded to a stop 10 feet down.

I breathed, pointed my skis downhill once more, drove myself to the left. I wouldn’t stop this time. There were no limits, I was driving left again, and was in harmony with all the elements.

Except for that part where my right ski hit a bump and went wonky. Not so harmonious. Now I was going wonky, falling actually.

“Son of a ….”

I hit the snow.

The blue sky filled my field of vision, than I flipped and it was snow again, sky, snow, sky, snow. I dug in elbows and knees and stopped.

Luckily the surface was powdery stuff and the fall hadn’t injured anything.

I stood up, grabbed a ski out of the hill, clipped in and pointed down once more. I fell a bunch more times, but made it to the bottom feeling fine.

I skied and fell a series of runs for the rest of the day, including Baldy, where we walked out on a ridge to get to the edge of another steep canyon that made my stomach flop,

“Try not to hit any of the rocks there,” Andrew told me as I sidestepped my way down to the next death drop.

I tried my best to accommodate. If they had to pull the skis and boots off my mangled body, it would only be courteous of me to return them in good condition.

The lifts closed in the afternoon, but we werent’ done yet.

We drove up the road past Alta to a popular backcountry area. Andrew had recently grabbed some backcountry skis from a friend and I got the honor of taking on the hill in his back country skis with skins stuck to the bottom for climbing. It was somewhat like being on cross-country skis but without the easy grace. Andrew went up on his snowshoes.

As we set up the mountain, I offered to take his heavy pack.

He said he was good, and I carried on. Soon, I was sucking wind and my heart was racing. I let Andrew keep the pack.

By the time we reached the top of the ridge the sun was low enough in the sky to set the snowy Wasatch peaks aflame for miles, casting an orange glow up to our mountain perch.

Then the sun dropped behind the mountains and the temperature dropped with it. Andrew and I (mostly Andrew) fumbled with the backcountry skis to get the heels locked in place, and dug snow out of the moving parts with car keys until our fingers numbed.

Finally, we started the decent through the darkening pines.

What had once been soft, pliable snow had gone old, cold, crusty and mean.

I found that my skis would stay pointed downhill, and skitter helpless. I was just along for the ride.  I plunged my arms into the slope for balance. Sometimes I fell over anyway. Even Andrew took a couple falls.

The fading light knocked out many details from my vision, details like the bumps in the snow and how steep it was. Finally, we plunged into the gully. I tried to work with the crappy visibility and get down safely. The trouble was that when I went left or right to slow down, I went higher on the gully walls and sped up down the gully walls. It wouldn’t be a problem, if I, you know, knew what the hell I was doing. There were plenty of “oh shit!” moments that I could savor before I made it out of the thing. Finally, I saw the lights from some condos near Alta.

The gully spat me out onto an embankment of crusty snow near the parking lot, where I finally came to a stop, legs trembling.