White Heat: The Extreme Skiing Life

INTRODUCTION

Seventy miles per hour? That’s nothing. My Civic will do 110, you say.

Yes, purring like a kitten, and the centerline comfortably blurring by to your left. You might, at that speed, even lift your coffee mug from the conveniently engineered dash holder to sip at your Starbucks Mocha Latte.

But imagine now you are driving down a mountain road with no guardrails. The maximum grade of any highway in the United States is 6 percent or less, usually 3 percent. That means, at the most, for every hundred feet you travel forward, you drop no more than three feet—or, at seventy miles per hour, a drop of three to six feet every second, roughly. But now, change the pitch of the road to a 40-percent slope. Every second now, and every one hundred feet you travel forward, you are dropping forty feet. Realize, you are nearly halfway to freefall.

Imagine now, too, that you have no brakes. Your only braking power is to turn sharply, which reduces your speed, but which also sends you veering toward the thousand-foot drop-off to your right, or toward the trees to your left. Remove the body of the car, all of it. The wind is howling in your ears. The wind is so powerful at this speed that it makes the jacket on your chest ruffle and flap. You are no longer holding a steering wheel. You are steering with your legs. Your four wheels have become two longish, flat-bottomed skates, say, a pair of Nordica Dobermann K12 GS. You had them race prepped this morning, and are hoping that the shop did an ace job for you—if not, if the edges at the shovel of the ski are too sharp, they might grab when you initiate a right turn and toss you over the precipice, or if you turn left, hurl you into the trees. Add to this now that the road is bumpy, very bumpy, and at times the ice under you, not pavement, sends shock waves up your legs. Bolts up under you and drops away tens of feet, leaving you airborne. Here that old equation, force equals mass times acceleration, is hammered into every cell of your body. At this speed, when the race course under you rises over a short distance, it creates forces equivalent to having a Steinway grand piano strapped to your back—but only for a fraction of a second. Just now, and fresh up near the top, your legs absorb every last bit of this shock, though your lower back is complaining. You ignore it.

You approach an S section in the course. You are moving at one hundred feet a second now. That boring seventy miles per hour. You need to clear the next gate, hook left around it. You want your left ski to be riding inches from the outside pole of the gate as you pass it, your right ski bearing the bulk of the centripetal force and in the precise cambered arc to carry you beyond the gate where you will step onto your uphill, left ski, to set up for your next gate. But you aren’t past the gate yet. Moving at one hundred feet per second, this means as you approach the gate, you must be accurate to hundredths of a second—which means, literally, that you are skiing out of your mind. You cannot make decisions at this speed. No, it’s your fifteen years of racing speaking from deep within you, every turn you ever made, every time you fell, those mornings up at five and out to the mountain to ski innumerable gates, bombing down runs as a ten-year-old, jumping from cornices, wind-formed crests of snow, into canyon runs, all of that is stamped into your feet, legs, spine, and head. You set your edges a half second from the gate, angulate, steer with the carving ski knee, the outside ski, ride the carving ski in a deliberate arc, one that only your body understands, that exact amount of knee steering, edge set, and weight on the ski. If you miss your mark, cut wide, you lose hundredths of a second, which, gate to gate, accumulates, adding up to a losing time. But you are not a loser. You’re a winner, by God. So you cut it as close to the inside as possible. But if you are too far to the inside, the tip of your left ski will catch the gate, the ski hooking through the outside gate pole, the pole tearing your leg back—at exactly your present speed, one hundred feet per second. In the first hundredth of a second, your leg—and the tendons in your groin, in particular—will stretch (if the tendons don’t simply tear). But already your motion, which was down the hill, is being converted into combined linear and rotational motion. If you are lucky, the rotation will free the ski, and you will land—at seventy miles per hour—somewhere in the region of your backside, hopefully down by your hips, where the impact may only break your pelvis or a femur, or a tibia or a fibula. If you are not so lucky, you will contact the ice/snow around the region of your thoracic or cervical spine. Or worse yet, your head. Remember, you are still traveling roughly one hundred feet per second. If, at this point, you go off into those trees to your left, mentioned earlier, the forces of deformation from striking those trees will exact a terrible price for your speed. Those trees may kill you. Or they may just break every bone in your body as you ricochet through them. At the least you will have broken arms and legs, compound fractures. A broken femur, midshaft, can cause bleeding so severe that a skier injured in this way can bleed out in as little as three to five minutes. But you don’t go into the trees. No. There is the safety net to your right—and having caught your left ski, this is the direction the fall pitches you, if this happens.

But, like Bode Miller in the 2002 Olympics, you don’t go into the net, you only catch an edge, and in a fraction of a second you right yourself, and point your skis into the next gate, a right-hander, knowing the course is rutted.

You are breathing deeply now, and the burning in your legs is fierce. The lactic acid buildup is beating you, slowly, but will it beat you before you reach the bottom?

The gates flash by you like torn colored silk. There is no time, no world now, only the sweet, sweet arc around the gate going by your shoulder at one hundred feet per second, the hammering of the blood in your head, the burning in your legs, your thighs beginning to weaken, that voice in your head telling you focus, focus, focus—just the gate in front of you, the signs of danger, darker snow here—RUTS RUTS RUTS! Play it safe? Or go inside anyway?

Inside. It’s all or nothing for you. You catch air going over a rise, tuck to gain speed, rather than open up to scratch speed off. You are nearly doing eighty now. Gaining precious hundredths of seconds, you fall 150 feet onto the steepest section, risking coming hot (fast) into a more closely set group of technical gates, which you navigate, your legs getting sloppy, and dangerous. Even the slightest error in an edge set can kill you, or injure you for life—but you are only thinking about the sharpest, fastest, cleanest line down the remaining gates. The least bit of skidding—slowing, which you are sorely tempted to do because your legs feel like rubber now, and you worry about catching a gate and injuring yourself—will lose this race for you, and all that luck up top will be for nothing.

When the last gate is torn behind you, you tuck, skis squirreling crazily under you, in this last drop the snow packed so hard it is really just ruts and ice, and you flash by the finish line, skidding sideways in a spray of ice and snow to a stop, where you pull your goggles and helmet from your head. You watch the clock for your time and ranking in the tournament.

A minute and a half to two minutes have passed. Your time? Not fast enough.

But then it is never fast enough. Not even for Franz Klammer or Hermann Maier (known in skiing circles as the Hermanator).

There is always a cleaner run, a faster line, better luck.

You’ll get it just right next time, you think, exhilarated. You’ll go faster yet. You won’t chicken out on the technical section, play it safe. (Though, God knows, you almost ate it on the upper section, pulled a yard sale on that left sweeper.) No, next time you’ll burn that goddamned sweeper section down. You’ll show the whole damned course who’s boss.

But then again, it might show you.

The mountain shows skiers and riders (snowboarders) every day. And not just racers. We who love extreme winter sports, love the rush and run of it, the feeling of flying and darting down mountains, love that compressed, arced turning, push the envelope every day. On groomed runs and courses, and through trees and down chutes and bowls.

There are an infinite number of ways to shred the mountain. There’s riding down terrain parks and halfpipes and over tabletops. There’s jumping of all sorts, Nordic jumping, as seen in the Olympics, and freestyle jumping. There’s competition bump skiing, and Steep and Deep, powdery slopes so severe they can only be reached by helicopter. Each variation on extreme winter sport has its own special thrill, its own special rewards, and each its dangers. And there is always, in heavy snowfall country, the possibility of avalanches.

Avalanches can be deadly.

Patrolling from Jupiter Peak at Park City, you are required to wear a Pieps, or Skadie—an avalanche beacon. So if you are buried in an avalanche, while aiding an injured skier or rider, your fellow rescuers can triangulate your position and, with the help of rescue dogs, dig you out.

In minutes.

Minutes count. In all of it. Each second can count.

I know. At Park City Mountain Resort, where I am on Mountain Patrol, we rescue the injured every day. Racers suffering high-speed injuries, kids turning aerials and inverts on the terrain parks, pow hounds poaching out-of-bounds caches. And there are the beginners: skiers who suffer lower body injuries, boot-top fractures, spiral fractures of the tibia or fibula from general tumbles, and clavicle fractures from low-speed falls (the skier puts his hand out to cushion the fall and—pop!—the clavicle breaks). And there are the snowboarder injuries, a higher percentage of them to the upper body and head than there are with skiers, given the physics of snowboarding—when a board catches an edge, it tends to catapult the rider from the waist into the hardpack. We see a fair number of these injuries, given the white-hot phenomenon snowboarding has become.

Snowboarders presently account for a quarter of all traffic on the slopes, and at certain resorts that have become meccas for riders, such as Brighton and Breckenridge, they account for half. Riders are everywhere on the mountain, though they tend to concentrate around terrain parks, built specifically for them, which, oddly enough, have recently been co-opted by twin-tip skiers.

And, for skiers and riders alike, there are injuries from collisions with trees.

Up at the Summit Patrol hut, at nearly ten thousand feet, or at the King Consolidated hut, Payday, Jupiter Peak, or Jupiter Bowl Patrol huts, we play it cool. At any moment the radio strapped to our chest might spit out a 10-50. That’s radio protocol for an accident. Each patroller has a number. The Sunday patrol, which I’m on, has the prefix 12. My number is 12-28.

Waiting, we patrollers work the mountain. All mundane but pleasant enough labor: we raise safety pads to the proper height around lift towers; we police kids who are ripping down slopes recklessly; we offer directions to guests. We erect signs that warn of dangers, drop-offs, or jumps that are built where the jumpers, upon landing, will intersect with traffic. We move gear, oxygen tanks and backboards and toboggans, from Summit or Base Patrol huts to, say, Jupiter or Payday huts.

We try to take it easy.

The Summit Patrol hut, at the top of the mountain, is a beehive, perhaps five thousand square feet. Summit has a radio desk manned by two operators, while ten to fifteen patrollers circulate in and out of the building. There’s running water, a microwave, a stove, two gurneys for guests with AMS—acute mountain sickness, or altitude sickness. Usually we run these guests with AMS down to base on toboggans. Patrollers take hut assignments on rotation with teams, four to six patrollers in each team. (A number of the patrollers work on snowboards now, though the bulk do so on skis.) The other huts are simply six-by-eight shacks with heaters in them and good-sized windows in the walls so they are light, keeping us on our toes. In the huts we talk shop—new gear, racing news, and rescue techniques (for a broken clavicle, should you use an airplane splint, a figure eight, or a sling and swath? By the book, we’d all use the sling and swath, but sometimes, with this kind of injury, the guest is in less pain if the arm is positioned other than across her chest). We also talk about our other lives.

But then the call comes. (They usually start around ten, and intensify into the afternoon.)

Summit Patrol to Payday. We’ve got a 10-50 on Homerun where it meets Crescent.

Today I’m a first responder at Payday.

I take the call. Twelve twenty-eight to Summit. I’m on it, I radio back.

I stride from the warm hut and the other patrollers. I know a few things already. You can do sixty, if you want, on Crescent. So this could be serious. Not just a knee injury or a collarbone. This could be the real deal—so you don’t waste time. I’m carrying nearly twenty pounds of gear. In my head, skiing fast, but not recklessly toward Homerun, I worry I won’t be able to see the injured guest (the generic term we use for skiers and riders). There are over a hundred named runs at Park City. But I trust my—sometimes lousy—sense of direction to get me there. In my fanny pack, I have six blood stoppers, four plastic airways, scissors for cutting through clothing. I think through protocol: Hello, I’m Wayne with the Park City Patrol. Can I help you? Getting consent puts the Good Samaritan law in effect. I wonder what I’ll see down there. Injured guests I’ve worked on, and gotten to the bottom, have had fatal or near-fatal injuries. In my fanny pack I also have bandages, a mask for CPR, tape for securing an injured guest’s head to a backboard (if it is needed in addition to the gear we get in a trauma pack). Skiing, I’m thinking, MOI—mechanism of injury. Or it could be illness, some guy up from Florida having a coronary. Then OPQRST: onset, provocation, quality, radiation, severity, time. In my fanny pack I have rubber gloves for BSI—body substance isolation, for the bleeders. I have carabiners for attaching a toboggan towline to a snowmobile, if we have to go that route. I know the nearest helicopter landing pad is Base Patrol, so if it’s a life-threatening injury we need to take him down, all the way. Here, I am navigating moguls and my head is alight with information. In my fanny pack I have glucose, in case I have a diabetic. I have a flashlight to check the skier’s eyes, which should have PEARRL—pupils equal and round, regular in size, reactive to light. I have a portable pump to suck vomitus from the skier’s mouth, if he or she has broken a bone, has fallen supine and inhaled vomit.

But I always return to the first thing: ABC—airway, breathing, circulation.

Taking a hard, carving arc and cutting over a rise, I see the guest, a skier, his boot in his lap, a number of bystanders a short distance from him. A very bad sign. Minor injuries attract other skiers and their sympathy. They get in close then. Serious injuries repel.

Through my head runs this: Goddammit! Sonofabitch! And, Shut up! Get focused. This is going to be UGLY.

And it is. I do a scene survey. Skis off in two different directions. So, a high-speed fall. Significant MOI. Vomitus on the snow. Blood on the snow. But a little blood will color an enormous amount of it.

I slide to a stop twenty or so feet above the skier. Kick out of my skis. Everyone recognizes my uniform, crayon red and black, white crosses on the chest, back, and arms.

I set my skis in an X above the injured guest, indicating traffic coming down the run should steer clear.

I can see I’ve got a femur fracture, but from this distance I can’t tell where it is on the leg. Possible head injury. Possible loss of consciousness.

Mountain Patrol, I tell the bystanders around him. Move back, please.

I press the call button on my radio. Twelve twenty-eight to Payday Patrol, I say. I need a backboard, O2, traction splint, and a toboggan. We’ll need AirMed or Life Flight. A midshaft femur fracture is an automatic copter ride.

Payday to twelve twenty-eight, we copy. ETA five minutes.

That gives me five minutes alone with this severely injured skier. This one could be fatal. No fucking around up here.

I point to a woman across from me. Can you help?

Sure, she says, kicking out of her snowboard. I hand her a spare pair of gloves, glove up myself.

I stoop beside the skier. Here’s the big moment. Is he breathing? Yes. Okay. How responsive is he?

I’m Wayne, from the Park City Mountain Patrol, I say in a loud voice. Can I help you?

The skier, a boy of about twenty, only blinks. Not good. I pinch his earlobe and he flinches. Okay. Then he blinks and opens his eyes.

How long has he been out? I ask the group off to my side.

A few minutes, a woman in a green outfit replies.

Who are you? the boy says. What are you doing? But as soon as he says it, he becomes aware of the pain in his leg. Still, I think, great. Airway. Breathing. He’s conscious.

I instruct the woman I’ve asked over to hold his head. But even as I do that, he lurches up, bellowing.

Oh, Jesus! Fuck! It hurts! It hurts goddammit Jesus Christ!

Hold him down, I tell the woman. I motion another of the watching riders to her side. Skiers and riders are more than generous in these situations. Any one of us might at some time need this sort of help—asked for or not.

What’s your name? I ask the boy.

Cody!

Cody, I tell him, don’t sit up. I want you to stay put.

But he tries to sit up anyway, to see what’s wrong with his leg. Blood. Shit. The last of the ABCs to deal with—circulation. Here, bleeding. I dig into my fanny pack for my blood stoppers, tear the packages open. I get out my scissors, cut through his ski pants. Open wound. Bone through the thigh, ivory white. I apply the sterile blood stoppers, press down on them. We haven’t hit the artery, so it’s not so critical, but it’s bad. It could go critical. But I see from the pressure the bleeding has slowed and I bandage the leg and go to his boot, and, while he is literally screaming, apply traction.

Cody sighs, relieved.

Jesus, what did you do?

I’m applying traction, I tell him. As long as you don’t move, the pain won’t come back, all right?

I think I’m gonna be sick, he says.

You! I shout to yet another bystander. Please. Over here. To the woman holding his head, I shout, Okay, we’re gonna logroll him on the count of three! Hold his head in that position to his body when we roll him, got it?! To the two riders alongside him now, I say, "You, grab his shoulder; you, take his pants. One, two, and three!" And we roll Cody, and he vomits into the snow. Then vomits again, and a third time. Usually it is three times.

Had he inhaled the vomit, I might be doing CPR on him now, the whole situation gone critical.

We roll him back on three, and I apply traction again.

I am relieved to see Walt, a onetime pro football player for the Philly Eagles coming down Homerun with a toboggan, two other seasoned patrollers with him, Jared and Moose, on his snowboard.

Oooookay, Moose says, swinging around the group of us and popping off his board. Jared and Walt are out of their skis, too.

You get his vitals? Moose says, marching to Cody’s side.

No, I tell him. I just got him in traction and he got sick.

Yokay, Jared says. They’re both down on top of Cody. Walt’s got the toboggan set and secured, has the burrito out of it.

A burrito is a blanket, quick splint, pillow, and padding wrapped in a green canvas tarp. The toboggan is a Sun Valley, heavy and with a removable litter, one that can be directly lifted into a helicopter or ambulance.

Walt has the O2 pack off the toboggan now, kelly green and stuffed with gear. In it are plastic airways, non-rebreather masks and hose, a Bag Valve Mask, and a little D cylinder of medical oxygen. Moose swings the trauma pack around, zipping it open, rifling through the cervical collars, one of which he hands to Jared.

Jared takes Cody’s head and fixes the No-Neck plastic cervical collar on Cody.

"Don’t nod, just blink, Jared says, then asks, How’s that? Can you breathe all right?"

Cody blinks.

You want to use the BVM or the non-rebreather? Walt asks.

What’re your vitals, Jared?

Jared glances up at me. Shit again.

Pulse one forty. Resp forty.

Moose, who does EMT work with the fire department, says, Let’s go with the BVM, this thing’s midshaft.

Okay. We’ve gone from stable to unstable. Cody’s going into shock. Not unusual with the midshaft femur fracture.

I reach for my radio. My call. Twelve twenty-eight to Base Patrol.

Base Patrol here.

I give Base the air ambulance protocol info on Cody—gender, age, and the vitals from Jared.

What’s your ETA?

Eight minutes.

We copy that.

I bend down over Cody again.

Jared, I say, how about you get a blood pressure.

Gotcha, he tells me.

Walt’s come in from the side with the hare traction splint. Now’s the ugly part for me.

Cody, this is gonna hurt like hell, so hang on, okay?

When we straighten out his leg, Cody screams. But then I crank down the traction and he whimpers.

You fucker! he says, relieved, looking at me, and I see he’s joking. Injured skiers often joke. We joke with them, too. It helps.

That’s the spirit, I say, touching his shoulder. Just a bad hair day.

Asshole.

You or me, pal?

What do you think?!

Five minutes have gone by since our last set of vitals.

What you got, Jared?

Pulse one thirty, Jared tells me. BP’s one hundred over seventy.

The pulse is good. One fifty, the opposite direction, would be a nightmare. But the blood pressure’s questionable.

Let’s get him on the backboard, Moose says.

Again, on the count of three, we roll Cody on his side, and Walt slips the body-length backboard under him.

On three, we roll him back.

There’s a procedure for securing the injured skier to the board. First, we position him by sliding him down, then back up, centering him. The straps are fixed in this order: nipples, nuts, then knees. When he’s solid on the board, he won’t move if we roll him; if he vomits on the way down again, we fix his head to the board. Walt does that. We can hear the helicopter chuttering down to Base, then see it bank sharply to land.

Just when I think this is as good as over, Jared says, He’s out.

Got a BP?

Ninety systolic and holding, just that.

Get him in the toboggan! Moose says. We lift Cody, on the backboard, set it in the toboggan so his head is in the rear.

Moose straddles Cody with the BVM, pumping oxygen into him at 100 percent. He forces his knees into the space between Cody’s waist and the litter, prepared to ride down.

I got the toboggan, Walt says. He’s six-four, 220, the right guy for the job with two on for the ride. You just keep everybody out of the way, okay?

We good to go? Moose says.

I call it. The O2 cylinder is between Cody’s legs. Hare splint set. Cody on the backboard and head immobilized. Chopper’s at Base Patrol.

Let’s roll.

We have a rough section to travel, called Waterfall. Walt is big and a strong skier, but I take the safety rope at the rear, prepared to brake the motion of the toboggan for all I’m worth.

Walt pushes off. We pick up speed: ten, fifteen, twenty miles per hour. The toboggan, with Moose and Cody in it, weighs at least six hundred pounds. When we hit the Waterfall section, I swing braking turns behind the toboggan, Walt pressing down on the handles to use the braking chains.

YO! STOP! Moose shouts.

Walt and I skid to a stop with the toboggan. Moose leaps off, and we all three race to the side, and swing it up, Cody vomiting into the snow again.

As soon as that’s over, we right the toboggan, and Moose leaps on with the BVM, giving Cody pure O2.

Ready? Walt calls back.

Go! I shout, and we’re off.

Now down Homerun, fifteen, twenty miles per hour. Jared is in front blowing his whistle, then shouting, Coming through! Out of the way, coming through!

Base is just blocks from us. My legs are aching from slowing the toboggan. The chopper, AirMed, is in the Base lot. When we slide into the lot, the med techs rush out. Jared gives them the vitals. We detach the litter from the toboggan, and carry Cody over. He is looking around again, but is unable to move his head. The med techs secure the litter in the chopper, and the pilot gets it started. The chopper lifts, hovers, its rotor only ten feet clear of the Base Patrol roof. The chopper lifts, even with the roof; if a side draft hit the chopper, the chopper would veer into the patrol station, kill all of us standing there watching.

But that doesn’t happen. The chopper, as if magically, rises higher, then higher, then banks away, headed for the hospital downtown. The rotor wash blows dead brush in insane circles in the lot. Then it is quiet.

Moose holds up his hand. He’s been on the patrol the longest, seventeen years.

We high-five each other.

Fifteen minutes have passed from the time I left the hut. I feel thrilled, exhausted, empty, happy that we got it done right, worried for Cody, happy to have people like Walt and Moose and Jared to work with.

We all do this for free, every Sunday. All day.

Midweek, when we can, most of us ski, out of uniform and happy to do whatever.

But Sundays are the big days. It’s something that got wired into us, somewhere back in our childhoods.

Just skiing, unless it is racing, isn’t enough anymore.

AVALANCHE CONTROL

ON DUTY WITH DYNAMITE GIRL

It is shortly before 6:00 a.m., and you are sitting in the Park City Summit Patrol hut, waiting for Jackie, the Dynamite Girl.

All you’ve been told is, you won’t forget her, which is really no help, you think, given the skiers crossing the hut are wearing bulky red and black Patrol outfits, gear festooned all over those outfits, rope, carabiners, first-aid tape, Pieps, shovels, and, on their backs, packs stuffed with yet more gear to near bursting. You settle in on the bench against the wall, angling your recently blown-out ski boots—which, already, have begun to torment your feet again—toward the fireplace, warming them.

Here at Summit the hut is the size of a lodge, really, and is a swarm of morning activity.

There’s been a heavy snowfall, over three feet, a stiff wind from