Steep Thrills

It’s one of the most breathtaking venues imaginable, a lone snowy peak sparkling under an impossibly blue sky.

You can see for miles, and for miles the Chugach Mountains rise and dip, seemingly endlessly, unspoiled and spectacular, pure and white.

Yet, as beautiful as this panorama is, there’s another kind of beauty unfolding on the daunting, near-sheer face of the lone snowy peak.

Sixteen of the world’s top big-mountain freeskiers, 12 men and four women, are launching themselves off the summit, catching air, choosing their lines, artfully working through narrow chutes and around jagged boulders, ultimately reaching a vast clearing and carving giant turns as they wind up their runs at blistering speeds.

“These people here, they’re not just athletes, they’re poets,” says Michel Beaudry, head judge of the Red Bull Snowthrill of Alaska, an invitational run this year out of Cordova. “Every time they ski down the mountain they write a poem on that mountain.”

It becomes clear immediately that big-mountain freeskiing, on natural terrain in a wild setting instead of the groomed slopes of lift-serviced resorts, is about expression. There are no set courses, no gates and no clocks. Athletes are judged on choice of line, fluidity, technique, aggressiveness and control.

But it also becomes clear, after a day or two, that the world’s top freeskiers who participate in events like this, are not your typical ski racers. They’re driven more by a love of the pristine winter wilderness, of uncharted peaks and first descents than they are by victory and glory.

Theirs is a world totally removed from traditional racing, in which corporate-minded organizers, seemingly sadistic coaches, stand-offish cliques and Jupiter-sized egos come with the scenery.

“We’re back to the roots of what skiing is all about,” says Beaudry, 47, a former competitor and coach who became “disillusioned” with organized racing several years ago. “It’s about big mountains, a love of big mountains and just being together.”

*

Nobody knows this better than Wendy Fisher, a former Alpine racing star who hit rock bottom mentally, only to be reborn as a big-mountain freeskier.

Fisher, 29, began racing at 5, as a freckle-faced kid growing up in Incline Village, Nev. Nearby Squaw Valley was her playground.

Though deeply affected by the death of one of two brothers, Mark, who broke his neck during a fall after a jump, she took to the hill with more determination--in honor of her brother.

She was 6 then, he was 13. When she was 13, she enrolled at Vermont’s Burke Mountain Academy, a college-prep school for elite skiers.

She eventually made the U.S. ski team and, at 20, won the overall Alpine title at the national championships--and a spot on the Olympic team as a downhill and slalom specialist.

She was a day away from competition at the 1992 Albertville Games when her world was pulled out from under her. Fisher fell during a downhill training run at Meribel, France. She suffered a concussion, broke her thumb and sprained both knees.

She remained on the team and competed on the World Cup circuit the next season, her sights set on the 1994 Olympics at Lillehammer, Norway. She reasons now that a more serious injury might have given her some needed time off, but she never regained the drive a top-tier skier needs. She felt herself drifting away.

“The girls were nice and all, but not really your friends,” Fisher recalls, during an interview in an office at Points North Heli-Adventures, headquarters for Snowthrill. “There definitely were some girls who did have good bonding going on, but none of it was with me.

” . . . I started daydreaming about when I was 5, skiing at Squaw with my brothers and how fun it used to be--and I couldn’t figure out where it all went.”

Fisher began suffering from depression, which led to an eating disorder and subsequent weight loss.

“I also stopped talking to people,” she confesses. “I stopped sleeping. All I wanted to do was work out. I couldn’t have cared less about racing, but all I wanted to do was work out.

“Eventually, I went to my head coach and said, ‘Something’s wrong with me and you guys aren’t even paying attention. I keep telling you I need some time off and you just blow me off.’ They just didn’t believe me. I’d been pushing for the ’94 Olympics, but I was just burnt to a crisp.”

Fisher ultimately quit the team and decided to advance her education. She enrolled at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village and was admitted on a skiing scholarship. She did well but realized after the first few events that organized racing, even at a lower level, was no longer in her blood.

She faxed her father and slipped a note under the door of her coach, telling both that she had quit school and had given up racing.

She then packed her bags, got in her car and just started driving.

In the back of her mind was an offer extended earlier, during a celebrity event at Squaw Valley, by Kim Reichhelm, a U.S. ski team member turned freeskier, to visit her in Crested Butte, Colo., and stay as long as she liked.

Fisher phoned Reichhelm to see if the offer still stood. It did, she drove east and instantly fell in love with the Rocky Mountain hamlet and an atmosphere that reminded her of the carefree days she had so enjoyed as a child.

Reichhelm, a two-time World Extreme Skiing champion, persuaded Fisher to enter the 1996 U.S. Extreme Skiing Championships at Crested Butte. Fisher responded by winning the event and becoming a freckle-faced kid again.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, this is so cool,’ ” she says. “I just fell in love with skiing again.”

She went on to win the World Extreme Skiing Championships at Valdez, Alaska, and repeated in ’97. She won the South American Extreme Skiing Championship at Las Lenas, Argentina, in 1997 and was the overall champion of International Extreme Freeskiing World Cup circuit in 1998.

*

It’s one of the most peculiar venues imaginable, a former salmon cannery on picturesque Orca Inlet in Prince William Sound, transformed into a wilderness encampment that specializes, during winter and spring, in some of the most remarkable helicopter skiing on earth.

Otters are frolicking in the water and a small white goat is running around with two dogs, sporting a blotch of yellow left by a skier-paintball warrior who couldn’t resist.

Points North Heli-Adventures owner Kevin Quinn and his girlfriend, Jessica Sobolowsi, are running the office. The staff is scrambling in the kitchen, not used to accommodating so large a group. It includes only 16 athletes, but a support crew of more than 100.

With one of two days of competition complete, Hugo Harrison of Canada is leading the pack after using his two runs to draw lines in the snow others refused to follow. Aleisha Cline of Santa Barbara, a former Olympic speed skier, is leading the women’s division. Fisher is second.

This is a “no-fly day,” because of low-level clouds and snow, and the scene in and around “Camp Cordova” is downright tribal.

Daisuke Sasaki of Japan, Ryan Oakden of Canada, Todd Windle of New Zealand and Guerlain Chicherit of France have sunk into a couch in front of a television inside the cavernous mess hall.

Kaj Zackrisson and Sverre Lilliquist, big-mountain stars from Sweden, are smashing Ping-Pong balls back and forth on a nearby table. Behind them, a game of Foosball rages.

Grabbing the ear of anyone who’ll listen, handing out hunks of smoked salmon, is longtime Cordova resident Ed King, 88, a fisherman and hunter, wearing a bearskin coat and matching cap.

The paintballers are out in the snow.

That all the competitors are getting along so well should come as no surprise, says Chris Davenport, 27, the defending Snowthrill champion from Aspen, Colo., who, like Fisher, began his career as an Alpine racer.

“One of the coolest things about the sport of freeskiing is that it has really become like a global family,” Davenport says. “All around the world, there is an enormous group of people that know each other, know of each other, see each other in events. And they’re not just the riders. They’re filmers and photographers and ski industry people and people at ski resorts. And everybody kind of speaks the same free-ride language.

“You can show up at some teeny little resort in the middle of Austria and see some other kid on fat skis and you can just tell by looking at him that he speaks your language.”

Big-mountain freeskiers take credit for the development of those fat, or “shaped” skis, which not only enhance their performance in deep powder, but the performance of everyday skiers on groomed slopes. The skis have helped re-energize a sport that had stagnated in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, taking a back seat to snowboarding.

“A lot of weight is now put on what athletes and riders have to say,” says Davenport, who has his own line of Solomon skis. “It’s pretty cool that the sport has come 180 degrees from when freeskiing was stagnated and dead in the early ‘90s, and now it’s on the forefront with things like the X Games and Gravity Games.”

The “industry people” he refers to are mostly skiers. Shane McConkey, known as the father of freeskiing, founded the International Free Skiers Assn. in 1996. With divisions in Park City, Utah, and Europe, it now boasts a worldwide membership of more than 1,000 and sanctions dozens of events every year.

Its competitive disciplines also include big-air, slopestyle and skier-cross, enabling “mogul skiers, racers, aerialists and other specialized skiing disciplines . . . to compete without specific training, but rather on their whole skiing ability.”

The events are run by Mountain Sports International, founded by world-class skiers Adam Comey and Dave Swanwick, further ensuring an athlete-controlled environment.

Taking a shot at the International Skiing Federation, IFSA Vice President Lhotse Merriam points out, “It wasn’t going to be a bunch of organizers who never skied, and not a bureaucratic nightmare. They wanted structure created by athletes that could be changed by athletes if it needed to be changed.”

*

It’s the most X-rated mountain imaginable. That’s the name of the ominous-looking peak facing the 16 freeskiers, featuring more than 2,000 vertical feet and a preposterously steep slope of 50-plus degrees.

Whereas others might faint, they relish the opportunity to negotiate its precipitous face and all the trouble spots along the way, to “manage the risks,” as Davenport says.

The no-fly days have piled up like powder on the slopes above this small fishing community. There have been four in all, and the skiers have had their fill of movies, Ping-Pong and Foosball.

They’ve gone halibut fishing, battered themselves on the skateboard ramp, climbed a glacier and visited the haunted house.

They’ve been “drinking the skies blue” by night, and it finally appears to have worked.

Helicopters have been thumping all morning, ferrying people to the peak.

Harrison, 23, is enjoying another spectacular day, skiing dangerous lines with precision and grace, catching air and nailing his landings. Nobody will steal his thunder, or his $6,000 winner’s check.

The women’s competition is equally intense. Anne Cattelin of France, has made the most of her second and final run, launching into the steepest sections, landing her jumps cleanly and scoring 37 out of 50 points to push Cline into second place.

Fisher has survived a high-speed fall, from which she cartwheeled briefly before somehow emerging still on her skis, able to complete her run.

It’s not the poem she had hoped to write, but it has a happy ending.