When The Thrill Is Gone

Our climbing skins crunch over the snow with each quick stride, cold and fast under the still and dark sky. Panting for breath, I ascend a small rise onto a cat track, the last in a group of four. There, the view opens of the clear sky, dark as pitch in the predawn, gleaming with endless stars beyond the silhouette of towering pines. But I take no time to look up for more than an instant. 

I plunge my poles into the snow behind me, helping propel me forward, trying to glide every inch I can on the mellower grade. We’re doing one of our time trials, after all. As we near the end of the cat track, the gondola comes into view, perpendicular to us, pointed toward the peak, silent and still. Every morning, the lifties start their safety checks at the same time, just as we start our tour at six sharp. And I had never made it to this point before they began their morning routine. I smile to myself in the starlight.

We round the bend and point ourselves up the last pitch, a thousand vertical feet of corduroy snow that is slick but tacky. Up we go, sweat dripping around my shuttered headlamp and into my eyes, even on a ten-degree morning. My three friends in front drop me and slowly disappear into the dark. But I keep pushing on, up the last incline where I dry heave. The gondola slowly comes to life directly above me, the towers and cars creaking as the first hint of day pierces the Eastern sky. 

And then there was nowhere left to climb. I look at my watch; a personal best. I smile as I double over my ski poles, gasping for breath, then clank them in celebration with my friends.

We transition to downhill mode and ski down the face, where I beam as I make tired turns down our ascent route.

My first time out on telemark skis was far from profound. I was in my late twenties, and, like a child, was in ski lessons again. I felt a sting of vulnerability. At the top of the first run we leaned into that discomfort by fiddling with our bindings and duckbilled boots until we were securely atop our skis. Though we still wobbled, even at a standing position. Then, we pushed off.

After years of skiing the modest cliffs and deep sidecountry powder of Steamboat’s Fish Creek Canyon, then an out-of-bounds utopia that now usually sits closed by ski patrol, I was simply trying to stay on my feet, sliding slowly down a mellow cat track on bindings I had never used before. Later on that day, on a broad run aligned perfectly with the winter sun, I linked my first telemark turns; one lunge into the other. They were the first two beats of a new rhythm. 

It was around that time I began touring up the resort with a coterie of friends before it opened a few mornings each week. I had rudimentary gear; I hiked in a waffle-pattern cotton Henley and baggy North Face pants, but I would wake at five in the morning, my gear already laid out, and rush to eat breakfast and shovel my car out if necessary. Skis on at six was our crew’s mantra. I learned to drive in ski boots to make my car-to-ski transition as seamless as possible.

A few times a week turned into as many days as possible until the whole practice became routine. Where before I had excitedly bought my first pair of skins online to pair with my heavy resort skis, a simple purchase that seemed to open an entire snowy world to me, I now acquired new gear in an almost detached manner, checking specs and weights as a baker precisely measures ingredients. I began timing my hikes and meticulously adding them to an Excel spreadsheet to measure not only my times but also the weather, temperature, and even what I had eaten. 

Once I was tired of that, most of my waking thoughts shifted to telemark skiing. I frequented seldom-visited forums, posting long-winded tomes on free-heel philosophy. I started a journal on the topic on an old MacBook Pro, and it ballooned to a hundred thousand words. I kept telemark skiing, practicing leading with my back foot and remembering to keep my weight on the ball of my foot. Until it all became rote.

I began purposefully pushing those thoughts aside. And in 2024, for the first time in a decade, I bought an alpine setup.

Years later I’m hiking up that same route on the same mountain. This time I’m ascending by myself, under a familiar sky and a welcome chill. I begin at a modest pace, loping past the still lit base area, and around the roving snowcats preparing the resort for the day. I am otherwise solitary.

A few minutes up I find myself on a perch giving way to a view to the left. Across the ravine is a top-level condo unit that in years past always had a decorated Christmas tree in the window, all winter long. It’s not there anymore, but I still always look.

I make my way to the first steep pitch of the climb, where I snake around a small swale before sneaking back to the side of the run. Like I have hundreds of times in the past. 

And again I’m on that cat track, slowly making my way, my head down, lost in my thoughts as satellites and shooting stars trace across the sky. Closer to earth, the gondola churns as invisible technicians ready it for the day to come. But I don’t notice as I make the familiar turn up to the last long pitch, where I plod upward, to the steepest section on grippy snow.

Instead of retching, I casually make my way up to the same high point and unceremoniously remove my skins and ski down the run, annoyed by those ascending behind me with no headlamp.

Later that spring, the snow was bulletproof, and I was worried. Not only for my seventy-year-old father, still a strong skier, but also for four-year-old Ted, my son, who had only recently graduated from his tethers, and was now on his own, barreling onward, down a trail still frozen from the night before that hadn’t yet enjoyed the spring thaw of closing day. My father and I flanked him in delta formation as he sped down the run, arms flailing to his sides.

Ted beamed. His curly hair fluttered over his face as he sped down the run. I raced up to check in on him, putting my poleless hands out to spot him as we zoomed onward. He just looked back and laughed wildly, and sped beyond my grasp.

We reached a series of small jumps on the side of the run, brought forth by the mogul run above. Ted darted down one, but couldn’t see that he was diving into a deep bowl made by the late season melt. He completely disappeared, and didn’t come out the other end.

I sped down to his last known location, and skidded to a stop. I found him nearly four feet below me, splayed in a heap, laughing. “Dada,” he said with glee. “I fell into a hole!”

On we went, around grass and shrubs poking out of the snow, past lifts that would soon close for the season, and around runs I had descended and ascended countless times from childhood to now. Inside the lodge, we met my mother, my wife, and my one-year-old daughter. There, Ted asked for his favorite après-ski delicacy, a kid’s-temp hot chocolate, hold the whipped cream.

There he tasted his beverage of choice for perhaps the fiftieth time that season. And without a thought, he sipped it and smiled.

About The Last Chair Column

This article was written by POWDER writer Jack O’Brien for his bi-weekly ‘Last Chair’ column. Click here or below to read the previous column.

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