Going to Extremes : “If you fall, you die”--that’s one way to define extreme skiing. Sometimes, it’s true.

PAUL RUFF SCOOPED UP A HANDFUL OF SNOW, PACKED IT INTO A BALL AND overhanded it into the abyss below Lake Tahoe’s Thimble Peak. Five long seconds passed, then came a reply.

“More to the left!” called a faint voice.

It was March 29, 1993, and Ruff was perched on a narrow ledge above Thunder Bowl--a natural amphitheater capped by 9,000-foot peaks on the backside of Kirkwood Ski Resort. Still tied to the rope he’d used to belay himself from above, the 29-year-old extreme skier leaned out and strained to catch sight of his friend, Joe Gebhardt, standing far below. It was no use: The rope, secured by one of two Kirkwood Ski Patrol members who’d gone with him to the site, was just too short.

When he’d looked up at this piece of mountainside two weeks before, Ruff had thought it looked perfect. He told his friends it would make for close to 200 feet of “monster air”--easily the biggest cliff jump anyone had ever attempted--with a clear shot from top to bottom. But now, after climbing to the summit, roping himself in and sidestepping down 150 feet, he discovered he couldn’t safely get close enough to the edge to see past the jagged rocks and snowy chutes that angled out below him to open snow.

He knelt down, scrunched up another snowball and, with a lurch, fastballed it over the edge. “That’s better, man,” yelled Gebhardt, after watching the second snowball explode, like the first, on a patch of protruding rocks above him. “But you gotta chuck it farther out!” Ruff let another one fly, then another.

Gebhardt had watched Ruff jump many times before--he’d even followed him over a cliff or two--but those leaps were nothing compared to this. Cliff jumpers typically took off from obvious overhangs or sheer cliffs, but Gebhardt could see nothing obvious about this steep, rocky face. A jumper falling nearly 20 stories would hit 70 miles an hour. His skis might act as wings, pushing him out of his aerodynamic tuck. Even if he could keep himself upright, he would still need plenty of momentum to clear the rocks, which extended 30 feet beyond the takeoff point. And he needed a clear line of vision from launch to landing: Basic cliff jumping technique called for him to be able to focus on the touchdown virtually before he took off.

But as each snowball came flying down the mountainside--one crashing on the rocks, another on snow and another on rock again--it became frighteningly clear, to Gebhardt at least, that accurately predicting this jump’s trajectory would be impossible. His stomach muscles tightened and his hands began to sweat. He had never intended to direct the jump; he was here only because Ruff had asked him to help coordinate its filming.

Ruff had it all planned out. To record the jump, he’d recruited seven photographers, including Gary Nate, a veteran cameraman for ski-film producer Warren Miller, and Robbie Huntoon, an experienced cliff jumper in his own right, who ran a small local production company. Nate, Huntoon and the other cameramen would spread out around the massive bowl, staking positions up to a quarter-mile away. They would get close-ups and wide-angle shots with still cameras, on film and videotape, and once the jump was nailed, they would shoot Ruff chugging soda and wolfing down candy bars. The filming was all on spec, but Ruff had a lot riding on the outcome. He had told his fiancee, Kim Wiebe, that this would be his last big jump; he hoped to market the footage to ski-filmmakers and advertisers for more than half a million dollars.

As the photographers skied into place, Gebhardt wasn’t the only one who was shocked by the size, scale and layout of the jump. Standing above the cliff in his bright magenta and violet ski suit, Ruff appeared in the photographers’ viewfinders as a tiny pinpoint of color on a marbled background of white snow and black rock. “It couldn’t have looked more extreme,” Nate said later. “It was like watching Evel Knievel jumping the Grand Canyon.”

It had snowed six inches the night before, and though the morning dawned crystal blue, the weather was rapidly deteriorating. Broken clouds flew overhead at airplane speed, casting huge shadows across the bowl. Cold gusts whipped against the cliffs, causing the fresh snow to slip like sand through the cracks in the rocks. More than one of the group prayed that Ruff would call off the jump.

“This is a bad scene, Joe,” one of the photo assistants scowled to Gebhardt. “I don’t want to be here, man.”

Still, no one called Ruff back. In the unwritten protocol of cliff jumping, once the skier is in position the decision to go is his alone. To warn him off, or even suggest a negative outcome, would violate one of the cardinal rules of the sport: Don’t psych out the skier. It could break his concentration, and should he get hurt, everyone would know who to blame. “If I rattle him and he dies, then I’m responsible,” Nate thought to himself. “If I say nothing, then I’m not.”

Besides, Ruff was already famous for pushing the limits, and he had always landed safely before. He was cocky and confident, but no one thought he was stupid. Ruff was proud of his ability to case out a jump, evaluating the launch, figuring his trajectory, visualizing the landing--even when he was using snowballs rather than his own eyes. “Whether it’s 20, 30, 60 or 110 feet,” he boasted to the camera after a 110-footer in Warren Miller’s 1990 film “Extreme Winter,” “everything is calculated to perfection--the takeoff, the air time, the landing, the run-out--so that we can go off with a calculated confidence that there’s no way we’ll get hurt.” Then, putting on a half-serious Clint Eastwood stare as the camera pulled in, he said, “Cuz dying’s not much of a livin’, boy.”

Now Ruff sidestepped back up the mountain, calling across the bowl to Huntoon, asking for more advice. Huntoon yelled back: “You need to go higher,” figuring that Ruff would need all the speed he could muster to clear the rocks. Ruff moved back another 10 steps, but Huntoon yelled for him to go higher still. Ruff took two more steps, then dug himself in.

“Did he hear you?” asked Ruff’s roommate, Jim Mathews, who was standing by Huntoon’s side.

“I don’t know,” said Huntoon. “But he sees something totally different than I do.”

A hundred yards away, Nate was standing with Ruff’s brother, Frank, who had skied over to the cameraman’s position to watch. “Isn’t there anything we can do to stop this?” Nate whispered. Frank shook his head.

At a little after 11 a.m., the sun poked through the clouds scudding over Thimble Peak and Ruff gave the signal, pointed his tips downhill and skied for the drop-off. But just before he reached the edge, he turned suddenly to his right--perhaps a line readjustment, maybe a too-late premonition--then shot into space. By the time he was halfway down, he was moving so fast that the photographers watching through their viewfinders had lost sight of him.

Their cameras, however, caught the sequence. One, equipped with a motor drive that could reel off four photos per second, captured 16 frames from the edge of the cliff to the bottom. In the first five, Ruff was in fine form--a loose, cannonball tuck. But by the sixth, he began to lose it. He waved his arms in wide swoops, trying to keep himself in balance. Two frames later, he was falling back-first. In the 12th shot, he slammed into the rocky outcropping and bounced 30 feet in the air, his skis exploding off his heels and his limbs flailing. His momentum carried him down the hill, where he landed on his back, sliding head-first another 100 feet.

Forty-five minutes later, Ruff was dead.

MOUNTAINEERING PURISTS WOULD BRISTLE AT CALLING PAUL RUFF AN EX-skier. He was a stuntman, the alpinists would argue, a ski-model, more interested in mugging for the camera than practicing the art of extreme skiing. Likening him to the sport’s French originators, whose death-defying technical descents of 50- and 60-degree inclines stretched skiing to its physical limits, would be like equating a bungee-jumper with a mountain climber.

The term, the purists would say, should be reserved for skiers like France’s Sylvain Saudan, Patrick Vallencant, Jean-Marc Boivin and Bruno Gouvy, many of whom had cut their teeth in the early ‘60s logging les premieres, first ascents, of the 15,000-foot peaks that surround Chamonix. But by the late 1960s, with thousands of climbers looking to make their mark in the Alps, the remaining premieres made a short list. The only way to go, it seemed, was down.

Saudan, dubbed “Le Skieur de l’Impossible,” made a series of les premieres descentes on sheer faces others had only climbed before. Getting to them required technical mountaineering skills and the level of difficulty was almost unfathomable. The descents, twice as steep as the most challenging double-diamond trails at today’s resorts, followed super-steep chutes known as couloirs, sometimes no wider than a king-size bed, that plummeted thousands of feet. A slip would almost certainly send the skier sliding out of control to the bottom, where monstrous cliffs and 1,000-foot crevasses threatened. The sport’s definition was as simple as it was morose: Si tu tombes, tu meurs --”If you fall, you die.”

Until his final jump, Paul Ruff had never pushed the limits that far. He was no mountaineer but a skier, first and last. And yet he had more in common with the French extremists than his purist critics might care to admit. For one, all but Saudan are dead. And all of them were tempted by a force perhaps greater than gravity itself--fame.

First, Vallencant. He pushed the definition of extreme further than Saudan and reaped the rewards with sponsorships, his own clothing line and the need to keep pushing. He fell to his death in 1989 during a training climb. Next was Boivin, who added parachutes and hang gliders to radical skiing descents. His end, in 1990, came far from the ski slopes, though. During a 3,000-foot parachute jump from the top of Venezuela’s Angel Falls, filmed for a French television adventure series, he smashed into a rock outcropping and bled to death before rescuers could reach him. Gouvy, who reportedly had dressed himself in a Marlboro-logo’d jump suit, fell 3,000 feet into a crevasse during an extreme snowboard descent on Chamonix’s Aiguille Verte in 1990. (Saudan, now nearly 60, still trades on his past exploits--with a heli-ski business, a Chamonix restaurant and other interests that market his reputation.)

Whatever the commonalities, the essence of American-style extreme skiing is as different from the European original as Bartles & Jaymes is from Chateau Lafite Rothschild. The first distinction is setting. The Alps are filled with unrelenting steeps that are close to villages and ski areas. But most of America’s accessible terrain is comparatively benign--the mountains aren’t as tall, the steeps not nearly so long.

And while in the ‘70s extreme and highly technical descents seemed a natural outgrowth of Europe’s classic mountaineering tradition, the Zeitgeist in Ski Country U.S.A. at that time was embodied in the flashy, downright kooky discipline known as hot-dogging. When the French started polishing their reputations, the mainstream American ski heroes were guys like Wayne Wong and John Clendennan. Specialists in contorted aerials, back flips and helicopter jumps, they were acrobats, not mountaineers. And though their routines were demanding, they were far from life-threatening.

Then in 1983, a young Squaw Valley skier named Scot Schmidt climbed to the top of the resort’s 70-foot-high Palisades cornice and jumped off. Though he wasn’t the first to pull the stunt, he was the first to have it featured in a Warren Miller film, “Ski Country.” Its wide exposure marked a defining moment in extreme skiing’s American evolution. Suddenly, a long jump off a high place, preferably recorded on film, seemed to really define the word extreme.

Like hot-dogging, this was pure spectacle, stunts made for Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Over the next decade, cliff jumps became a mainstay of American ski movies, photography and advertising. Naturally, the bigger the jump, the greater the fame. By the ‘90s, a new Zeitgeist had taken hold.

The Tahoe ski resorts were the perfect place for this spirit to blossom. Situated on some of the steepest mountains in the Northern Sierra, they are pummeled by fierce winter storms that roll in off the Pacific packing 100-mile-an-hour winds and carrying up to six feet of moisture-laden “Sierra Cement” in a single shot. Far above the lake, mountainsides mutate into monstrous cornices hundreds of feet high--excellent for jumping.

The area boasts the nation’s only 24-hour ski town--South Lake Tahoe. From virtually anywhere on the nearby mountains, you can easily spot the South Shore casinos, jutting up into the horizon like a small slice of Manhattan skyline. With their flashing marquees welcoming everyone from Jerry Garcia to Wayne Newton and advertising bawdy late-night reviews, cheap buffets and million-dollar slot payoffs, the casinos are at the center of a town that owes its existence to fast living and risk taking.

It’s not surprising, then, that in 1985, Paul Ruff joined the mass of immigrant ski bums who land in South Lake Tahoe every year. Ruff was a bartender, a born ham and a skiing maniac. He had been jumping off snow-covered bumps in the Northeast since he was 7--the wildest, craziest speed demon at New Hampshire’s small King Ridge skiing area, one of the countless boys hooked on adrenaline, delighted by danger.

One of his teen-age buddies penned a school paper about Ruff’s exploits. “I like jumping with my friend Paul,” reads the 1977 essay. “One time, Paul went over this huge jump. He must have gone 40 feet. . . . I’m surprised he’s alive today.”

FOR A TIME, IN THE WINTER OF 1989-90, on billboards along the highways that lead skiers out of the coastal California cities, across the Central Valley and up into the High Sierra, Paul Ruff’s blond good looks, his fireplug thighs and his flashy skiing form seemed to be everywhere. He was the Heavenly Valley poster boy, exploding through a field of powder, larger than life, an armchair-skier’s fantasy and a marketer’s dream. It was Ruff’s dream, too.

The seventh of eight children in a religious Catholic family, Ruff grew up in Reading, Mass., one of Boston’s northern suburbs. When he graduated from high school (he was a Reading High tight end and the captain of the wrestling team), he moved to Atlantic City, where his older brother was bartending. Ruff followed his lead and learned the trade. During the winter, he fit in skiing day trips to Hunter Mountain in New York. But the five-hour drives and the mediocre conditions eventually found Ruff itching for something better. When a former girlfriend invited him to Park City, Utah, he packed his gear and drove west. Utah, however, with its strict liquor laws, was no place to make a living as a bartender, and after a few weeks, Ruff decided to move on to Tahoe.

He got a job at the Cornice Cafe in Kirkwood and later tended bar at the Cantina Los Tres Hombres there. The same outgoing personality that had him leading his high school friends, lemming-like, over ski jumps at King Ridge earned him a following among the local pub crawlers. He’d do Pee-wee Herman’s “Tequila” dance on the bar and perform a hilarious karaoke version of “I’m Too Sexy.” Just about the only thing he took seriously was his skiing. He’d decided to try to break into ski-modeling, and he knew he had to be an expert on the slopes. But with his high-school-jock, go-for-broke style, he was quickly humbled by locals who could ski circles around him.

While trying out for a job on Kirkwood Ski Resort’s squad of ski instructors, Ruff got noticed by two of the resort’s staffers, Michael Allen and John Wagnon. “He was very young and very fired up,” remembers Allen, Kirkwood’s race director and another extreme skier. Allen and Wagnon skied with the kid from Boston, showed him the local ropes and helped him polish his bravado into skill.

Backed up against the Pacific Crest, Kirkwood, with its many cornices, is a favorite haunt of extreme skiers from around the lake. Jumping usually landed skiers in trouble at Eastern resorts, but at Kirkwood, where there are plenty of good jumps in bounds, the atmosphere seemed to encourage it. This was, after all, home turf for gonzo skiers like Mohawk-haired Glen Plake, whose outrageous coif and radical stunts had won him fame and lucrative gear endorsements.

Ruff improved quickly, and when it came time to shoot photos for Kirkwood’s new brochure, Wagnon asked him to pose. That led to other modeling jobs for ski magazines and promotional appearances at the annual fall ski shows. Still, the big time meant getting a role in a Warren Miller ski film. Trouble was, breaking in was akin to being discovered by Hollywood. There were literally hundreds of young skiers willing to do whatever it might take to catch the filmmaker’s eye. Undaunted, Ruff bartered beers for videotape and persuaded two local videographers to follow him around for a day as he bounced through the moguls and jumped off his favorite cornices. He synced the video to James Brown singing “I feel good” and sent a copy to Miller’s production company.

To everyone’s surprise, the gambit paid off. A month later, Miller sent Ruff a plane ticket to ski in a film he was shooting in Canada. Shortly after he arrived, however, bad weather shut down the filming. While the crew waited for blue skies and sunshine, Ruff skied, and one day, heading toward a chairlift, he took a freak fall and tore a ligament in his right knee. He returned home without appearing in a single Warren Miller shot.

“He was really bummed out,” remembers Allen, “but Paul wasn’t the type to stay down for long.”

After reconstructive surgery and a summer of aggressive rehab water-skiing on Lake Tahoe, Ruff was back on the slopes, and when the Miller camera crew came to Kirkwood in February, 1989, he was ready. On the fourth day of shooting, he watched as another local skier, John Tremann, made a 105-foot jump off the top of a huge cliff. Not to be outdone, Ruff launched himself from the same spot moments later. He landed in a puff of powder--110 feet from the takeoff--and skied away in delight. His friends dubbed it Ruff’s Revenge, and the jump ensured him a feature role in Miller’s fall release “Extreme Winter.” Miller captioned it a world record.

That was the season of the billboards, and Ruff became the toast of South Lake Tahoe. Posters of his jumps filled the walls of restaurants all over town, and sponsorships began to trickle in. He was invited to appear at the big ski shows and everyone started calling him Captain Kirkwood. Though the money was still pretty meager--he had to stay on at Los Tres Hombres--it seemed that the Miller feature had given him the break he needed.

But King of the Hill is a game of one-upmanship, and Ruff’s reign was short. Two seasons later, while recovering from another ski injury--this time to his other knee--Ruff learned that Tremann had broken his record. On a mountainside close to nearby Donner Summit, he had bagged a 140-footer, outdistancing Ruff by 30 feet.

Ruff hated to lose; he wouldn’t allow even his closest friends to keep pace. Just weeks after his second knee surgery, he was on his mountain bike--knee brace and all--pedaling up a Tahoe mountain trying desperately to stay ahead of Wiebe, whom he’d met at Kirkwood’s Cornice Cafe where she waited tables. The thought that a girl might beat him, says Wiebe now, irked Ruff no end.

After silently persevering to the top of the hill, Ruff unfastened the brace to find blood dripping from the surgical incision.

“Are you OK?” Wiebe asked.

“Sure,” he replied with a tense smile. “It doesn’t hurt at all.”

He was still on crutches when he began to plot his comeback.

WHEN THE GROUP GATHERED AT Kirkwood on March 28, Ruff seemed as confident as ever. He had borrowed a condo right at the mountain so that the photographers and the others who would be in attendance at the next day’s jump could get the earliest possible start. After cooking up a batch of pasta and passing beers around, Ruff spread out a topographical map on the dinner table and handed out photos he’d taken of the cliff. “This is the spot right here,” he said, pointing to a section of the map where the topo lines ran together like fine wood grain around a knot.

He had been looking for the right jump for months--it had to be accessible, long and, of course, doable. He’d pumped other skiers for information on jump areas up and down the West Coast. He had also looked around in his own back yard, poking around near Donner Summit, where Tremann found his record-setter, before friends told him about the spot in the Kirkwood outback.

That night, Ruff psyched himself up for the jump by watching the video of Tremann’s 140-foot effort. Tremann had barely landed the big jump, struggling with the forces of wind resistance and gravity. His skis whisked out from beneath him as his lower torso sought the fastest way to the bottom. (Luckily, he touched down safely in six feet of powder.) Ruff was determined not to make the same mistakes; he wanted to land cleanly and ski away. He stared intently at the video as he explained how he would hold himself in a tuck to compensate for the oncoming wind.

Of course, nailing the jump was just the first part of his plan. The second, and perhaps most important, part was marketing it. For all his modeling and stunt-skiing success, Ruff was lucky if he saw more than a few thousand dollars in residuals annually. And with all those other wanna-bes waiting in the wings, there wasn’t much chance of gaining any leverage with filmmakers or advertisers. This stunt, however, would be his baby from start to finish. In contrast to the negligible modeling fee he got for appearing in Miller’s films, Ruff worked out a 50-50 split with his team of photographers. He alone would sell the rights to advertisers and ski-filmmakers.

Joe Gebhardt was going up the mountain with him specifically to help shoot some of the post-jump hype. He would bring along Power Bars and Mountain Dew, for example, for the star to consume just after the big event. Another plan was to shoot footage for a Disney World commercial. Ruff would land the jump and ski to a stop. “Hey Paul Ruff! What are you going to do next?” a voice would ask. “I’m going to Disney World!” he’d grin.

Not that Mountain Dew or Disney World had bought into this--Ruff had no contracts or even vague promises from any sponsors. He had, however, talked it all over with a talent agent who told him that if he played his cards right, he might walk away with as much as half a million dollars. His friends were skeptical of such pie-in-the-sky figures, but Ruff tuned out their negative talk.

Ruff knew it had to happen now : His days as Captain Kirkwood were coming to an end. After all, he had celebrated his 29th birthday in February; a few months earlier he had asked Wiebe to marry him. While he expected to continue his ski-modeling career, he’d seen the worried look on Wiebe’s face when he talked about a new record, and it had already caused friction between them. “Don’t give me any negative thoughts,” he’d tell her. With all the money this jump would bring in--money that could set them up and pay off his Jeep, his overdue credit cards and doctor bills--he promised he would hang up the record-setting stuff for good.

The season’s end was fast approaching and the huge dumps of February had already yielded to the March sunshine and, sometimes, rain. Ruff set one date for the jump, but bad weather caused him to call it off. Then a few days later, it was back on, and this time, he got Miller’s cameraman Gary Nate to sign on. Nate just happened to be at Tahoe; Ruff spent one evening cajoling him into adding the attempt to his shoot schedule. Once Ruff had settled on the Kirkwood site, his roommate Jim Mathews said, he was “like a runaway train.”

ON THE DAY OF THE JUMP, KIM Wiebe was working her regular morning shift at the Cornice Cafe, trying to keep busy while she waited for her fiance. “I’ll be in for a martini,” Ruff had told her the night before. She didn’t want him to jump--she had always been clear about that--but she didn’t consider him reckless and she couldn’t help but be proud of him: “I thought it was pretty neat,” she would admit later, “He was going to push through and do it despite the obstacles.”

By 11 a.m., when there was no sign of him, she thought, “No news is good news.” But then the phone started ringing, and people at the lodge started rushing around.

When the helicopter landed outside the base lodge, Wiebe figured the outlook was either really good or really bad. If he had been injured, she thought, the helicopter would be on its way to the hospital. When the helicopter doors swung open and paramedics, not Ruff, stepped out, she almost fainted.

What Wiebe didn’t know was that, for a while, back on the mountainside, the news had been good. When Joe Gebhardt got to Ruff’s still form right after the fall, Ruff was unconscious but still breathing. Gebhardt ripped open Ruff’s suit to check his heartbeat. Miraculously, there wasn’t a scratch on him. And after a few minutes, Ruff awoke with a start and tried to get up. Worried that Ruff might injure himself further, Gebhardt, Huntoon and the two ski patrol members who had rushed to his side held him down.

“Where are you?” Gebhardt asked him, checking to see if Ruff was in shock.

“Kirkwood!”

“What’s your name?”

“Paul! Let me get up! I’m OK!”

His friends moved him to a flat spot they’d carved out in the snow. The helicopter was called on the ski patrol’s walkie-talkies, and Frank, high on the ridge above the bowl, tried to console his brother over the airwaves. “Hang in there buddy, you’re going to be OK.” But the color began to drain from his face and the group watched in horror as his ears turned a deep purple. His aorta torn and bleeding internally, Ruff came to only because his body had been pointing downhill. Now he lost consciousness for the last time.

Frank got back to the base lodge as quickly as he could. He and Wiebe huddled together, crying uncontrollably, as the technicians wheeled Ruff’s body into the resort’s emergency clinic.

Finally, a nurse asked Wiebe if she wanted to be alone with Ruff for a few minutes. The woman led her into a doctor’s office and closed the door. Ruff’s body was lying on the examining table. Wiebe walked over to him, put her hand on his shoulder and stood in silence. She thought about how he had told her to be strong like him and she remembered how he had always said he was made out of steel.

“Hey there, Man of Steel,” she would say.

“That’s twisted blue steel,” he’d grin as he flexed his biceps.

ON A BRILLIANT SUNDAY MORNING last April, Robbie Huntoon set up a trampoline in the back yard of his Tahoe cabin. He began to bounce, and with each landing, he sailed higher and higher--three, five, seven feet. At the apex of each jump, a wispy tuft of auburn hair levitated momentarily above his forehead, his eyebrows arched, his toes pointed straight down and his mouth opened in a boyish half-smile.

“I just feel so free,” he said after a half-dozen bounces. “I feel better in the air than I do on the ground.”

After a few more leaps, Huntoon got the height he wanted, and flung his feet above him. Upside-down, he fell toward the mat. But just before he landed on his head, he tucked his chin into his chest, curled his body around and hit safely on his butt. “That’s the most important move in ski jumping,” he said. “If I go too far forward, I can always just bail out with that move and land safely. We used to call it the suicide stall, because as the jumper almost hits his head, he quickly tucks his chin down to his chest and spins forward. If Paul had planned to land that way he might still be alive, maybe hurt, but at least alive.”

It was an old argument between Huntoon and Ruff. Huntoon favored landing as square on his skis as possible, which kept his weight forward and allowed for the alternative of the suicide stall. Ruff, with two bad knees, believed in the hip-check landing--where you land with your weight a little back, roll onto your hips and let more of your torso take the force.

And that was only one of Ruff’s fatal mistakes that Huntoon played over and over again in his head. Almost everything had been wrong, he thought now: The cliff wasn’t sheer enough, the landing was too flat, the snow was too heavy and Ruff had broken the rule of always knowing where the landing was, from the top, before you jump.

At 36, Huntoon is one of the oldest of Tahoe’s extreme skiers, but his receding hairline and sun-weathered face hardly give away his age. His yard is strewn with boy-toys--motocross cycles, mountain bikes, the trampoline--and his house, with its ‘70s-vintage hot-dogging posters and old skis cluttering every corner, remains the skier’s crash pad it’s been for a decade or more. Friends say he’s mellowed over the years, but Huntoon still takes 60-foot-plus leaps with the best of them, and he was back on the snow within a week after Ruff’s accident, scouting big air during a trip to Mammoth Mountain.

To be sure, Ruff’s death had shaken him up. At the memorial service, he could barely bring himself to look at the open casket. And when Ruff’s father, trying to make sense of his son’s death, asked Huntoon why people jumped, the skier didn’t know quite how to respond. What was there to say? Why do people climb mountains? Why do they race cars? How could he explain the rush of confidence he felt after facing his fears and overcoming them. It was more than just a power trip, more than the adrenaline rush. It was a whole way of living, a way of squeezing all he could from life, of experiencing it to the fullest.

Huntoon, too, had a girlfriend to think of, and parents who worried about him. Of course their concerns mattered to him. But other people’s worries had never stopped him from doing something he knew he could pull off. Besides, he told himself, Ruff had made those serious mistakes. He’d let outside pressures push him over the edge. But Huntoon knew better. His body might not be as nimble as it once was, but his mind was razor sharp.

After the doctor at the clinic officially pronounced Ruff dead, Huntoon had to hike back to the bowl to retrieve some photo equipment he’d left on the hill. It was a long slog through the melting snow, but after all the hysteria back at the clinic, the silence of the backcountry was a welcome relief. When he finally reached the bowl, he felt a ghostly calm come over him. He could see Ruff’s tracks leading down from the summit, then nothing. From below, the jump looked amazingly doable, a clean, straight shot. This must have been how Ruff first scoped it out, he thought. “I could go up there and do that,” Huntoon said to himself. “I could do it for Paul.”