(Please press play before reading)
I never wanted to write this column. I don’t aim to write about the deaths of skiers anymore. In 21 years of ski journalism, there have been too many obituaries, and I’m uncomfortable with how good I’ve gotten at them.
I don’t mean that to sound callous. A ski bum much older and wiser once told me it’s a numbers game: “The more people you know in mountain towns, the more likely you are to know someone who will die in the mountains.” At the time it felt like dark, jaded folklore. It became prophecy.
Eight years ago, bootpacking up a couloir in Chile, the pressure I’d been carrying broke loose as a panic attack. I told my group, “I have to go,” turned around, clicked-in, and skied back to the base. I sat alone at the bar while the weight of losing dozens of friends finally came out in tears. And then, over time, it got better. Not easy. But more livable.
There is no formula for how to square any of this. No clean way to make sense of nine backcountry skiers losing their lives on a guided trip from Frog Lake Huts. Calling it the second-deadliest avalanche in American history, the worst in California? Those statistics don’t help me. Please, friend, for your own sanity, don’t try to make sense of it. It won’t work.
I can only tell you what has helped me.
A few years ago, something shifted. Not because of any single loss, but because of the accumulation of them. I had to find a way to reconcile that making a life in the mountains—raising my family here—can be both beautiful and fucking tragic at the same time.
The late Powder Editor Neil Stebbins used to say that life is only beautiful because contrast exists. I’m beginning to understand what he meant.
My mother believes her sister came back as a cardinal after she died. I used to think that was sentimental, even silly. Birds? Come on. I am not sure how I bought into this idea, but over time, I’ve found comfort in the possibility that maybe the people we lose are not gone.
Many of the skiers we’ve lost appear to me in memories whenever I see black crows and ravens.
I don’t believe my friends are actually birds. But when I’m alone on a chairlift and I see a crow tracing a wide arc across the sky, I feel something steady inside me. The skiers we’ve lost this week across the Basin and beyond aren’t only with me in memory. They’re part of the wind, the trees, the silence between turns. Maybe nothing truly ends. Maybe it only changes form.
Their love was still real. Their turns were still deep. Their lives, though cut short by the mountains, were still lived.
I let the birds carry their memory. I carry them forward in how I live.
I am not a religious man. I believe in skiing. I believe in ski bums. I believe that if any community in the world can endure such an unspeakable tragedy, it's ours. No doubt about it. The ripples of these losses will be felt everywhere, but we will keep going.
We will remember. We will see them again in the mountains, in each other, in the sky above a ridge line before we drop-in.
You see, it is the contrast that makes the light visible.
Keep your heads up.
When in Doubt, Go Higher,
Mike Rogge, editor
