Here on the tundra, winter comes early. The chill winds blow in from Manitoba, rattling the reeds and bearing clouds of honking geese. Overnight, the leaves drop from the trees and the ground turns to iron. In the watery, late-afternoon light, the deer anxiously prick up their ears. Those of us tundra-dwellers who have had the foresight to leave buckets of water outside our sod huts now begin to study these vessels every morning, looking for the all-important signs: first the moment of imperceptible thickening, when the water seems to cloud with the syrupy density of vodka left overnight in the freezer, and then the moment of transformation, when floating there, reflecting your rime-crusted beard, is a lens of ice. Time then to get out the toques and the sweaters, the skates and the sticks. As we say on the tundra, time for a little shinny, eh?

I should explain that this particular stretch of tundra is in New Jersey–northern New Jersey. My sod hut, as it happens, contains three bedrooms and a two-car garage, and the deer out here have more to fear from the truck traffic along Route 17 than from any natural predator. But the ice is real. Thanks to a miracle of zoning, I live next to an 80-acre marsh that was farmed for peat during the Revolutionary War, and the remaining ponds and ditches, for some microclimatic reason, freeze at the drop of a hat. They freeze so solidly and sometimes with such clarity that while skating you can look down through the blackness and see fat golden carp slowly cruising beneath your feet.

We get more ice time on the Jersey tundra than I ever had in my native New England. I've skated out here as early as the day after Thanksgiving and as late as Saint Patrick's Day. The ice, first a membrane, then a skin, then a solid, weight-bearing sheet of glass, usually locks in a few days before Christmas and, barring thaws, stays there till mid-February. And for those precious seven or eight weeks we actually play pond hockey out here-shinny, the Canadians call it: a now-vanishing game that is to the indoor, rink-bound version of hockey what that sheep-pasture game played by ancient Scottish shepherds is to golf. It's the real thing–the better, purer version.

Like a lot of pond players, I also play rink hockey. I play year-round in a nearby rink with a team of aging diehards who once a week put on the full, chivalric rig-stockings, shorts, helmets, pads for elbows, shins, and shoulders. We're part of that legion of late-night warriors whose numbers, thanks in part to the new, marketing-conscious NHL, are growing yearly; there are now more than 4,000 amateur adult teams in the United States alone. There are even instructional leagues for grown-up novices. Indoor hockey has an appeal all its own–the magic, for example, of walking through the rink door on a humid summer night and suddenly seeing your breath cloud up in front of your face. And rinks have something ponds do not: locker rooms–smelly, tape-littered havens where you can rag endlessly on friend and foe alike. Half the fun of the indoor game is playing it over afterward, while you're taking off your stuff.

But I would trade a month of those nights for each hour on the pond on a good-ice day, and in a decade of living out here on the tundra I've come to know dozens of people who feel the same way. Sometimes we call one another on a Saturday or Sunday morning to trade weather information, but mostly we just show up automatically, bringing along our skates, our sticks, a snow shovel, if necessary, and maybe a jug of water and a peanut-butter or baloney sandwich that will be hard as a stone by the time we remember to eat it, hours later. Among our regulars are former high-school hotshots and even a few old college stars, including a guy, now in his sixties, who was an All-American. There's a stockbroker who as a kid played roller hockey in Queens, a native Virginian and former baseball phenom who only started skating in middle age, and a high-school wrestling coach and phys-ed teacher who picked up the game in Ohio. My friend Paul learned his hockey in Czechoslovakia, as did his wife, Gigi, a splendid athlete and former ski champion; she wears white figure-skates and out-hustles most of us. We call her Mrs. Gretzky. At Christmastime there are the college kids and the grown-up children home for the holidays. There's a regular band of reverse commuters: players who live not on the tundra but in the canyons of Manhattan and who on weekends squeeze themselves and all their stuff into my friend Alec's tiny Toyota to make the journey out, swigging thermoses of coffee to wake up. On occasion we've been joined by a former all-pro linebacker (and schoolboy hockey player in Buffalo), who for a guy so huge has astonishingly small and nimble feet: He's sort of like a bus on casters. And on one memorable gray February Sunday we played with the best pond player I've ever seen, a swarthy, heavyset guy with jet-black hair and round, dark eyes. He came with his own caddy, a younger guy, who didn't play himself but lugged his companion's sticks and skates and kept him hydrated with Gatorade and the occasional Miller tallboy. This player was so good he was almost invisible; on the ice he invariably turned up at the right spot at exactly the right instant. I remember once sort of draping myself on him to slow him down, and he stepped inside and then around me as easily as someone shrugging off a coat. He talked almost not at all, and I never got his name. Sometimes I think I must have dreamed him.

Ice. It's a miracle, when you think about it, that the water you drink, the stuff that rains down from heaven in tiny droplets, can somehow knit itself into a substance so hard and so smooth that, sliding on it, you can defy friction itself. Quivering in the cold, six water molecules link themselves into a hexagonal crystal–and then keep growing, six sides at a time. (It's tempting here to divine a cabalistic significance in the number of players on a hockey team and in the NHL's longtime conviction that six was the final and appropriate number of cities to host professional teams.) The hexagons, yearning for solidarity, hook up to form a sheet, and the sheets eventually bind themselves together like pages in a book. And when the text of this book has not been distorted by rain or wind or melting snow, the naturally published version, dense and black, is immeasurably superior to the thin, milky, brine-cooled ice, often so brittle and air-filled, that's manufactured by the compressors. A friend of mine who grew up playing hockey in California, of all places–on the indoor rinks of Oakland–once came out to the tundra and, as soon as he had laced up his skates and taken a few cautious steps, dropped to his knees and rubbed a mittened hand on the glassy ice in wonderment. “I can't believe it,” he said. “We won't fall through, will we?”

Well, we might. Nature isn't perfect. Almost every year one of us goes through–a victim, usually, of overeagerness early in the season or after a thaw. I've taken the plunge several times, after ignoring the telltale cracks that with a boing or a pop launch themselves in every direction on ice that's too thin. One year, at the end of a sunny February afternoon, my friend Ed found himself alone, like Little Eva, on a tilting ice floe, and we had to tow him back with outstretched hockey sticks. Where we play is actually pretty safe–the water is seldom more than waist-deep–and the experience of falling through here is more surprising and annoying than truly terrifying. Nevertheless, it's hard not to believe that those cold fingers clamping themselves around your thighs, stabbing at your groin, are the steely grip of mortality itself. Presumably it was because of this, and because you can never really count on pond ice to be there when you want it, that they invented rinks.

Hockey itself was invented, depending on whom you believe, possibly by the Indians living in eastern Canada or maybe by British soldiers garrisoned there in the 19th century. (The name may come from hoquet, the French term for a shepherd's crook, or from a corruption of the Iroquois expression for “It hurts!”–a cry uttered, presumably, by some unwary brave struck by a whizzing rock or skimming slice of birch tree: a proto-slap shot.) Whatever its origin, the game grew fastest, and took its deepest hold, not so much in the more settled parts of the continent as in the northern villages and in the westward-expanding homesteads: in the ponds and sloughs and rivers of the Canadian prairie. Hockey, like baseball, is essentially a pastoral game, one that celebrates freedom from urban confinement and care.

Some of that pastoral quality still lingered even when I was growing up, outside Boston, in the 50s and early 60s. I may be one of the last generation of Boston schoolkids who never skated on artificial ice until I started playing hockey in high school. All through grammar school I played on reservoirs and frozen playgrounds and ponds; we would sometimes trek for hours from one spot to another, our feet and fingers numb, in search of better ice–a kind of wintery grail, always shimmering just a little farther on.

The arrival of Bobby Orr, and the subsequent growth of organized youth hockey, changed all that. Nowadays, kids in Boston, like kids everywhere else, start playing indoors, on teams, when they are five or six years old, and some of them never venture onto a frozen pond or river at all. Youth hockey has become the yuppie growth sport of the nineties, even in the Sun Belt; new rinks are opening up in parks and at malls everywhere, and urged on by the likes of Nike and by the growth of the in-line skating fad, hundreds of thousands of nonskating moms and pops are eagerly shelling out the four or five hundred dollars it takes to outfit a young player, and then piling their sons (and in many cases their daughters) into the Cherokee or the Caravan for the ritual predawn road trip. By the time my son was 14–the same age I was when I first stepped onto artificial ice–he had played some 350 indoor games in and around New Jersey: games with refs, scoreboards, stats, and screaming parent-fans. He, and lots of kids like him, knew half a dozen breakout plays and several forechecking systems, including the dreaded neutral-zone trap. He'd been to hockey camp, to power-skating clinics, to tournaments all over the East Coast.

Are these kids, reared indoors under the unhealthy, pallor-inducing glare of stadium lights and constantly sniffing Zamboni fumes, better players than we were, out there in God's fresh air? Probably. But many coaches are ambivalent about the growth of organized youth hockey. There's less ice time involved than it may seem, they point out: A game lasts only 45 minutes, and most kids play a third of that. And in teaching kids from a very early age all the systems of hockey–where to line up, where to sit on the bench, where to be on a three-on-two–we may have deprived them of some of the joy that comes from just playing, from fooling around and figuring things out on your own. Some coaches worry that a player with the individual skills of, say, a Gretzky or a Lafleur will never come from a car pool; he'll come up, if he comes at all, the way Wayne and Guy did, from a frozen backyard in Ontario or from some homemade rink in rural Quebec. Pro hockey lore is replete with admiring tales about families like the Sutters of Viking, Alberta, or the Mullens of Hell's Kitchen, in New York City, tales in which the kids played anywhere they could–on watering holes on the family farm or, on roller skates, on glass-littered schoolyards–and developed their skills far from the prying eyes of grown-ups.

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Pond hockey is like jazz–or like playground basketball. It's a game of solos and improvisations rather than of discipline and teamwork. You may start a game by saying, “OK, you guys play up. Bud here and I will stay back on dee,” but it never works that way for long. Pretty soon you and Bud are dashing up-ice, leaving the goal unattended, and on the way you pass your teammates, huffing and puffing now and wearily cruising back. A bad pond game is one in which, because of exhaustion or because the ice is now so chewed up and covered with snow, everyone sags back in front of his own goal; the offense gets a free ride, in effect, and then for the last 10 feet or so has to thread the puck through a forest of lumber, sticks whacking and chopping and tripping. (This must be where the name “shinny” comes from-from the part of your body that bears the brunt of such mayhem.) A good pond game is one that rewards crisp, strung-together passes (they have to be right on the money, though: a pass that goes awry means a delay, sometimes lasting a couple of minutes, while someone chases down the errant, still-sliding puck) and also individual heroics-rushes and spins and behind-the-back passes, if you can manage them; the old drawback (show it to him, take it away!) always earns style points, as does puck-handling with your feet.

In pond hockey, it's the journey, not the end, that matters. The goal, a pair of boots dropped on the ice a few feet apart, is merely a symbol, and who knows what the score is anyway? I remember most of my indoor goals with Proustian clarity and vividness: the five-holer I wristed in from the top of the circle on last September 19, for example, or the seeing-eye slap shot I launched from the point at about 11:45 p.m. on July 25, the day after my 49th birthday, thereby proving that there is life in the old dog yet. But my pond memories are longer and more capacious. They're about whole stretches of time, sometimes speeded up, so that an entire late-January afternoon is summed up in the image of a brief flurry of snowflakes glinting silver against the purple-streaked sky, and sometimes slowed down, so that I can replay in endless slo-mo a coast-to-coast rush I once made right along the pond edge, dodging overhanging branches and hopping over the occasional stone or log, tossed there by some more timid soul trying to test the thickness of the ice.

My favorite memories are of the early mornings when I used to skate for an hour or so before school with my son. We'd get up when it was still dark, and the sun would just be coming up, turning the marsh grass gray-gold, as my freezing fingers finished lacing his skates. We'd play one-on-one together or do little passing drills, and sometimes we'd just skate in parallel arcs and swirls–apart and yet together. He's off at college now, but I still go out in the early mornings. One of the best things about pond hockey is that you don't need anybody else; you can play all by yourself, listening to the rustle of the wind, the scrape of your skates, and once in a while the imagined commentary of Foster Hewitt, the voice of Hockey Night in Canada, shouting your name and crying, “He shoots, he scores!” Sometimes I'm joined out there by my friend Dave, usually in his hooded red sweatshirt, working on his backward crossovers. My son is always there, too, in recollection, and now and then literally, when he's home on vacation. And in recent years I've been joined on occasion by a tall, taciturn man in a brown leather jacket and gray fedora, wielding an old straight-bladed Northland Pro hockey stick wrapped in electrician's tape–the ghost of my father, who first taught me how much fun this was. All the time I was growing up, he was a notoriously late riser. I'm glad that he's changed his ways.

Charles McGrath is the editor of the New York Times Book Review.

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Mount Washington is the windiest place in North America, with notoriously unpredictable weather, so for greater accuracy you might want to train an electric fan on your chamber pot—or maybe a couple of fans, for the scale-model equivalent of 200-mile-an-hour gusts—and periodically you could brush off some of the freezer gunk and watch it crash to the bottom. For the rest, you’ll have to perform a little thought experiment: Imagine an army of trained ants crawling up the slick porcelain sides of your pot and then sliding down again, some of them on skittering legs, some of them tumbling abdomen over thorax. If you do this experiment correctly, your first thought is likely to be the same as it is in real life when you stand there gazing upward in New Hampshire: Those ants must be out of their minds!

In real life, the ants, when you climb up the ravine itself, turn out to be human beings of a varied yet singular sort, all embarked on what has become a curious New England ritual—part Woodstock, part Outward Bound, part spring break. They come from all over the East and from Canada, too, as soon as the weather warms up enough, in April and May, to reduce the risk of avalanche: little kids and geezers and all ages in between; stoners, slackers, hard-chargers, and working stiffs; college dudes and high-school dropouts; gays, straights; huffers and puffers and the preternaturally fit; equipment junkies clad in chartreuse-colored synthetics, guys in cammies, babes in bandannas and tank tops, old guys in blue jeans and ratty turtlenecks; skiers, boarders, snowshoers, and telemarkers; also people carrying inner tubes, snow coasters, and just plain old plastic trash bags—anything that will slide. Their goal is to ascend the ravine, as far as their strength and courage and good sense will take them, and then, God willing, come down again in one piece. On a good weekend a couple of thousand people or more will show up, and you can witness some of the best extreme skiing this side of a Warren Miller video; you can also see some appalling wipeouts.

Some people participate in this ritual for the scary thrill of it; others, for bragging rights—so they can say they’ve done it. People have been known to ski the ravine in costume—tuxedos and Superman suits and the like—and in no costume at all, just their boots and their birthday suits. (A nearly naked turbo-hottie was said to be in evidence the weekend I visited, but, alas, I never saw her.) Some people go just to hang out. They spend the day on the “lunch rocks”—tiers of greenish, lichen-covered boulders at the bottom of the ravine that form a natural grandstand and provide a safe (or sometimes not so safe) refuge from which to watch.

Some people, New Englanders mostly, have been coming to the ravine for so many springs that they probably don’t even know why they do it anymore. But for a lot of people who make the annual trek, the reason is something close to romance. They’re drawn by the stern, forbidding beauty, by a love of skiing itself, and by the purity and simplicity of the Tuckerman ski experience. No tickets, no lifts, no lines, no beginners.

The ravine is an ongoing reminder that skiing, though in some ways very old, is also something quite new. The first chairlift in North America was built in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1936, and not many more went up until after the war. In the beginning, which was barely a lifetime ago, people skied the way they still do at Tuckerman Ravine. They walked up, carrying their own gear, and came back down, savoring every turn. They got in one, two, maybe three runs a day—each more precious and hard-won than the last.

EDWARD TUCKERMAN never skied the ravine that bears his name. He was never there in the winter. He was a botany professor at Amherst College, and in the late 1830s, along with a few other intrepid botanists, he began trekking to the White Mountains in the spring and summer in search of lichens. In the vast semicircular glacial area just below the summit of Mount Washington he discovered some prime habitat: The weather was so severe, the winds so fierce, the snowpack so deep for much of the year, that lichens were about the only thing that grew there.

The crowds didn’t show up until the next century, after the arrival of the Atlantic and Saint Lawrence railroad had made New Hampshire’s Presidential Range a popular tourist destination. The ravine soon became a favorite and picturesque spot for adventurous campers and climbers, but the first skier didn’t appear until April 1914. He was John Apperson, a famous Adirondack explorer from Schenectady, New York, and it’s doubtful that he knew how to make a downhill turn. Nobody in America did back then. The way you made a descent was by picking up speed until you fell down; then you brushed yourself off and repeated the process.

In the 1920s, after the highway department began wintertime plowing of the road from Jackson, New Hampshire, to Pinkham Notch, at the base of Mount Washington, skiers found it easier to get to the ravine and more of them began turning up. The pioneers were Joe Dodge, the legendary huts manager for the Appalachian Mountain Club, and, a few years later, the early members of the Dartmouth Outing Club, those hardy and intrepid young men, bright-eyed, square-jawed, who did so much to further skiing as a sport in this country. In 1931, two Dartmouth skiers, John Carleton and Charley Proctor (who had skied in the 1924 and 1928 Winter Olympics, respectively), were the first to go over the ravine’s headwall. To understand what this means, let’s go back to our model. Before Carleton and Proctor, skiers had stopped well short of the chamber pot’s steep-sided rim. Carleton and Proctor climbed up and over this rim—or the headwall, as it’s called, a 45-degree slope—and then skied all the way back down, which is considerably harder and a great deal scarier. When you come over the lip, the snow seems to fall away beneath your feet and all you see is sky.

In 1933, Carleton also skied in the first of the three American Infernos—races, modeled on a famous Swiss competition, that went from the summit of Mount Washington, over the headwall and through the ravine, and then down a newly created fire trail to just above Pinkham Notch, a distance of almost four miles. The third and most famous Inferno took place in April 1939. Forty-two skiers competed, but the one people still remember was Toni Matt, a 19-year-old Austrian. Matt, who had been to the ravine only once before, planned to make three turns as he came through the steepest part of the bowl and then to straighten out for the run down to Pinkham. But he made his three turns on the snowfields above the headwall and was already bombing over the lip when he realized his mistake. He schussed the whole thing, reaching a speed of 85 miles per hour. Afterward, all Matt said was that he was lucky to be 19 and stupid, and to have strong legs.

MY MOTHER SKIED the ravine in the early forties—or at least she said she did. She claimed to have done it on the Fourth of July, which, though technically possible, is a little bit of a stretch. Without a doubt, though, both my parents were enthusiastic members of the pioneering generation of New England skiers. Her letters to my father during the war, when she was working in Boston and he was in Hawaii with the Navy, drove him crazy. They were full of accounts of winter Sundays at a nearby country club that had just installed a rope tow and, even more maddening, of weekend ski trips to New Hampshire. My mother and her friends would take the train from Boston after work on Friday, and before mid-night they’d be in Franconia or Jackson. Logging trucks would meet them at the station and drive them to local inns that had been turned into dormitories. They’d ski all day Saturday, squeeze in a run the next morning, and then take the train back through the Sunday twilight. Somebody might break out a “jug,” and there would be jitterbugging in the aisles. When the war was over and my parents finally married, they spent their honeymoon skiing in North Conway and brought back a little booklet of snapshots, which years later I used to pore over. They looked young and glamorous, like John Payne and Sonja Henie in Sun Valley Serenade.

And then they never skied again. Kids, illness, money problems. But their stuff lingered in the basement and cast a kind of spell—the bamboo poles with leather-wrapped handles, the long, heavy wooden skis with spring bindings, the boxy, square-toed leather boots with a groove around the backs of the wooden heels. When I was growing up outside Boston, I used to wear these boots—first my mother’s and then, as my feet grew, my father’s—to school on snowy days.

But I didn’t seriously take up skiing until I was a grown-up, with kids of my own, and by then it was too late for me ever to become really good at the extreme stuff. After helicopter-skiing in Idaho a couple of years ago, I decided that I no longer had anything to prove—to myself or anyone else—and I resigned myself to a sensible life of happily cruising the blues. But for some reason, the idea of the ravine would never go away, and after having heard about it all through college and from friends in the seventies and eighties, I began to think about skiing it myself. I put it off two years in a row—because it would take too much time away from golf, or so I said—and then last spring I finally took the plunge.

MY COLD-WEATHER friend Dave Marsh was my guide and companion. I e-mailed him beforehand and asked what I needed to bring. He e-mailed back one word: “Pampers.” It’s also customary for Dave to bring along a special kind of trail sausage that his friends call (for obvious reasons) “the horse wang.” Every winter for the past 20 years, Dave, a former coach and now a school administrator, and I have skied and hiked and played countless hours of pond hockey together. Sometimes he doesn’t even call; he simply shows up at my house when the mercury plummets and in his booming voice yells for me to get a move on.

It was early spring when we left my house in Allendale, New Jersey. In northern New Hampshire it was still the back end of winter. The deciduous trees were just barely in bud; the aspens were as bare as whisk brooms. The mountains, now coming into view around every bend, looked gray and flinty.

The gloom lifted later that evening at the Red Parka, a local pub in Glen, where we hooked up with the rest of our party: Adam and George, Dave’s two sons; Dave’s old friend Gus, a Hanover, New Hampshire, native who has been skiing the ravine since he was a teenager; and Gus’s son, Jeff, and his friend Mike. We enacted a ritual that was no doubt taking place in other roadhouses and in campsites and motel rooms for miles around. Dozens of Long Trail beers (the vin du pays) were drunk, old times remembered, and various Tuckerman horror stories retold. We heard about the guy who was propelled from the lunch rocks a hundred feet in the air by a cannonball of ice (miraculously, he survived), and about the girl who missed a turn up top, slipped through a crevasse carved by a waterfall, and was never seen again. Toni Matt was invoked more than once. Gus recalled a Harvard-Dartmouth race in 1947, when, still a high-school student, he went down as a forerunner and, turning around at the bottom, saw the entire course get wiped out by an avalanche.

THE NEXT MORNING we headed up the mountain. (We did this twice, actually—once on a Friday, when the ravine is usually less crowded, and again on Saturday, to get the full, festival-like experience.) The 3.1-mile hike from Pinkham Notch to the ravine is an arduous climb in itself. The trail starts gently enough, easing up through the hardwood forest and switchbacking over the swollen Cutler River, but it gets steeper as it ascends. About a mile up, toothpaste-squirts of snow started to appear under my feet. The last third or so was completely paved in snow and ice. You can make it in sneakers (if you don’t mind wet feet), but most people prefer sturdy boots, and even nonskiers tend to carry ski poles for leverage and balance.

The trip typically takes two hours. I went up “like a scalded dog,” in Dave’s words, and made it in half that time. I wasn’t showing off. Having taken rueful note of a memorial in the trailside lodge listing the 126 people who have died in the Presidential Range since they started keeping count in the mid-19th century, I was propelled by anxiety. I was also unused to lugging a 30-pound pack, with my skis sticking up like antennas overhead, and was afraid that if I stopped for very long I might never get started again. Even in my haste, though, I was startled by the fierce and dramatic landscape, and I marveled at my fellow hikers. Snaking up the mountainside, we climbed in purposeful procession, like medieval pilgrims on our way to Canterbury or Santiago de Compostela.

I passed a pair of orthopedic surgeons talking about hip replacements—other people’s, not their own. I overheard two guys planning to climb Aconcagua, in the Andes, and two others talking about skiing the Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt. I declined a swig offered by a bunch of college kids who were starting in early on the wineskins—”lightening the load,” as one of them put it. And I chatted briefly with a Massachusetts schoolteacher and self-proclaimed “medical and biological miracle.” At age 44, still recovering from knee surgery and carrying some extra weight, she was determined to make it up in shorts, sweatshirt, and plastic-bagged running shoes. She made it, too. I talked to her again on the way down, and though she had turned her ankle and cut her knee, she whizzed right by me, sliding on one of those little plastic snow seats.

The chamber pot was shrouded in fog when I began to look for it, and then, as the wind blew stronger, it hove into view. A Pampers moment. The ravine is bigger and steeper and more forbidding than even your most careful imagining and model-building will have led you to believe; it’s some 800 feet tall, with 45- and 50-degree slopes in places, and stretches roughly half a mile across—a huge hollow gouged into the side of the mountain. The summit, a few hundred feet up to the right, sits amid some snowfields that pour down into the ravine.

I saw some people hauling up inner tubes, and I asked a ranger with the U.S. Forest Service, “Do you really encourage that?”

“We don’t encourage anything,” he said. “Or discourage it, either.” Then he pointed directly overhead, to the left of the ravine, where the slope was even more sheer and more perilous. “Last year a guy went up there with an air mattress,” the ranger said. “God must have been watching, because a gust of wind came along and blew it out of his hands. Otherwise that guy would be dead.”

In general, the Forest Service and the Appalachian Mountain Club, which runs the base lodge and a shelter farther up, take a fairly hands-off approach to skiing (or sliding) the ravine. On our second day, a volunteer at the bottom of the slopes was gently warning people of falling ice. (Remember our freezer gunk? The big danger in spring is that ice that has formed high up on the headwall comes crashing down in chunks that, as the locals take great delight in pointing out, are often as big as cars. I didn’t see any sedans, or even any compacts as it happens, but I did spot some tumbling chunks the size of home entertainment centers.) Even in spring, avalanche is a real and ever-present danger in the ravine, and every now and then somebody dies in one.

Climbing the ravine is a chastening experience. The surface is mushy in places, icy and unyielding in others, and higher up there are rock chutes and faces protruding through the snowpack. Step by step, you’ve got to get yourself up there and then figure out a line coming down. I saw one guy with a pair of kitchen knives duct-taped to his mittens; he was pulling himself up hand over hand. For much of the way, the ravine is probably no steeper than your average double-diamond slope, but it feels steeper because you are doing the work, not the chairlift, and the slope is at times literally in your face, your ski tips digging into the snow overhead.

On my first trip up I was not encouraged by the sight of a solitary ski descending on its own. A little while later a snowboarder came flying down and wiped out in spectacular rag-doll fashion. At the bottom he jumped up and raised both arms to acknowledge the cheers coming from the lunch rocks; only after a minute did he seem to notice that his right hand was hanging from his wrist at a completely unnatural angle. Most serious falls at the ravine are caused by overaggressiveness; in places the terrain is wide enough that, if you’re so inclined, you can traverse in gentle swooping arcs. One guy made it down, for example, with only two turns—one less, as Gus pointed out, than even Toni Matt, though Matt’s weren’t half a mile apart.

The hardest thing is finding a place flat enough to let you put on your skis, and after that the secret is to take a deep breath and not think too much. If you really contemplate what you’re about to do, you can hang up there for hours. You make a turn—and wish that you had practiced a little more during the winter. You make another—so far, so good. And another, and before you know it your held-in breath comes whooshing out. You’re going to live after all!

How high did I go? Well, not as high as Gus, but then he was so bushed from his ascent that he called it quits after a single run. “That’s it,” he said. “You don’t come here to get a lot of skiing in.” And I certainly didn’t go as high as Adam, George, Jeff, and Mike, superb skiers all, who went up so far it hurt my neck to look at them and then came down through chutes requiring heart-stoppingly narrow turns. But on three runs I went high enough to get the pump racing, the palms sweating, and the nerves jumping; high enough that when I fell once, I had a nice long time to savor my missile-like descent (and to appreciate those woolen ski clothes my mother and father wore, which gave the snow something to grab onto); high enough that when I got to the bottom I felt great. I wasn’t out of my mind, exactly, but I was still a little bit out of my body, and I had that dumb but profound thought you have at moments like this—that just to be alive is indescribably sweet. I wasn’t all that unhappy at how I had skied, but I was already thinking about how much better I could do, and before I knew it I was making plans with myself to come back next year. I also found myself wishing something I hadn’t wished in years. I wanted to call my parents and tell them where I was and what I had done.

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