But later, when I passed along the additional piece of information that my great-aunt-my grandfather’s sister-a world-champion racer and fervent mountain girl, had been crippled in the fifties by a runaway ski, he said, “Maybe I should be a little concerned about skiing with you.” “Sounds like you’ve got skiing in the blood,” he said. You’re with the wrong guy.”) He seemed to home in on the infatuation, rather than on its consequences. “Don’t know what you think you signed up for here, Nick. It’s a fraught kind of bliss.Ī year and a half ago, I read a story in the magazine Skiing entitled “11 Excuses for not Skiing with Andrew McLean.” One was “He’ll dust you.” Another was “Tragedy dogs him.” Perhaps with that in mind, I found myself, within minutes of meeting McLean, telling him about my family, under the guise of trying to persuade him to take it easy on me. But in daylight disquiet gives way to delight, and I find myself doing things that may or may not be dangerous, half aware that at any second my situation, as well as that of my wife and children, could dramatically change. The anxiety that comes of tempting fate, especially in pursuit of such an indulgence, helps generate dreams of death by suffocation or falling. The weight of these opinions is such that every time I head out on a trip that involves the kind of skiing that can lead to trouble-glaciers, powder fields, steeps-a certain premonitory queasiness sneaks up on me. I hung by my arms over a void until two guides pulled me out.įriends and relatives treat this high incidence of snow trouble as evidence of a family curse, or plain idiocy. There was also a disturbing encounter with a crevasse-a snow bridge gave way, and I fell in. My father was nearly killed in an avalanche while I was skiing with him, and between us we have witnessed a fair number of slides. Since then, there have been a few other incidents. She had two children, ages seven and three. Twenty years later, one of my father’s sisters died in an avalanche while skiing. He was killed in an avalanche there in 1952, when my father, the youngest of five children, was six. He lived in Philadelphia during the war, but afterward he began spending his winters in St. In the summers, my grandfather went on expeditions to the Fairweather Range, in Alaska. He moved to New England to teach skiing, which is how he met my grandmother, a Philadelphia society girl who was among the early wave of modish flatlanders to take up the sport under the tutelage of the Austrians. He briefly held a job at a bank in New York (the story goes that on his lunch breaks he’d head out to Central Park, remove his suit, hang it on a tree, and go running in his underwear) before deciding that the office life was not for him. After the 1932 Games, in Lake Placid, he stayed in America. My father’s father, Harald, was a devoted alpinist, as well as a ski racer and jumper who competed for Austria in the 19 Winter Olympics. In all, McLean has lost more than a dozen friends to the mountains-“lost to the mountains” being a locution favored by alpinists, as though skiing or climbing were a sacrificial rite, instead of a voluntary act. The most famous was Alex Lowe, who was considered by many to be the best mountaineer in the world Lowe disappeared in a giant avalanche on Shishapangma, in Tibet, in 1999, when he and McLean and others were attempting to become the first Americans to ski a peak higher than eight thousand metres. Latta was the first of four men who have died while climbing or skiing with McLean. One of the runs described in “The Chuting Gallery” is named Roman’s, after McLean’s friend Roman Latta, who, on an outing with him there in 1993, set off an avalanche in which he was buried and killed. If you die skiing one of these, I promise it will be renamed in your honor!” I can’t say that the prospect hadn’t crossed my mind. He had inscribed it: “I’m looking forward to skiing with you this winter. Last fall, before he and I met, he’d sent me a copy of “The Chuting Gallery,” his self-published guide to the chutes in his home range, the Wasatch Mountains, which are just east of Salt Lake City. He is especially fond of skiing chutes-steep, narrow flumes of snow that plunge like elevator shafts through otherwise impassable terrain. McLean is a ski mountaineer he climbs mountains and then skis down them. The allure is great, but there’s always a possibility that the excursion will not end well. In the ski-bum brain, the chance to ski with a magus like Andrew McLean is the equivalent of an invitation for a night on the town with Don Juan.
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