No boundaries

IT’S ANOTHER CROSSROADS MOMENT OF LIFE, hovering between terra firma and the unknown ether ahead. Except this one is particularly low on terra of any grippable sort. I’m on skis, gaping over the edge of a 45-degree slope that looks closer to a takeoff for, say, sky diving than downhill skiing.

Specifically, I’m awaiting my first descent of the Chutes, a long-forbidden out-of-bounds slope at Tahoe’s Mt. Rose. More specifically, a run by the cozy name of Nightmare.

Beside me is Randy York, an obliging volunteer ski guide who’s shown me the entire mountain save for one glaring exception -- the Chutes.

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted to go in there,” he says. “We’ll just take it slow.”

He places a black vest over the top of his guide jacket to conceal the Mt. Rose logo. As a volunteer guide, he says, “I’m not permitted to take you down the Chutes as a representative of Mt. Rose,” adding unneeded gravity to the situation.

York turns to me and utters that ominous word: “Ready?”

Plenty are. The Chutes -- a precipitous set of avalanche-carved slopes on the north face of Mt. Rose-Ski Tahoe -- are now in play by popular demand. Fueled by the urge to escape manicured runs for untamed slopes, more skiers and snowboarders have been pushing deeper into the backcountry in search of bigger challenges. Where demand goes, supply follows. Mt. Rose joins a burgeoning group of resorts that have decided to cash in on the appetite for riskier terrain, bringing formerly maverick ski areas into the commercial fold. The move offers new thrills -- but also risks.

Ski luminaries have begun comparing Mt. Rose’s trove of steep bullet runs to Squaw’s KT-22, Alpine Meadows’ Palisades, even the infamous Corbet’s Couloir at Jackson Hole, with its nearly vertical, rock-wall-squeezed entrance that “flattens” out to a merciless 50-degree pitch. And then there’s Jackson Hole’s most recent opening, the Crags, a set of hair-raising chutes once declared “permanently closed,” now touted as a paragon of adventurous skiing.

“Out-of-bounds” has always been a murky term in the alpine world. What’s risky to one skier is an invitation to another. But that line has clearly been moved back, if not obliterated, in recent years by a surge of free skiers, Telemarkers, snowmobilers and X Games- and terrain park-schooled daredevils, forcing a reassessment of what’s risky by ski resort managers. That’s no small development in a lawyer-loose society.

“Opening the boundaries is certainly becoming the trend, especially over the last five years,” says Powder magazine Editor Tom Bie, who sees several factors -- advances in ski technology, higher levels of backcountry safety and evolving attitudes about accessibility and difficulty -- influencing many American ski resorts.

Mt. Rose-Ski Tahoe’s move to wilder runs reflects that evolution. The Chutes had been closed to the public ever since the resort opened in 1964.

“There was a time when the owners actually said, ‘No, this is not what skiers want,’ ” says Mike Pierce, Mt. Rose’s marketing director, who calls the Chutes one phase of a master plan to boost the mountain’s standing in the highly competitive Lake Tahoe area. “But

Management started its quest to get the Chutes on its trail map 10 years ago, and after a long bout with Forest Service red tape, the once-illicit rebel runs opened last month.

Ticket sales at Mt. Rose have risen this year, and anyone who has seen the large sign at Reno/Tahoe International Airport (“The Wait Is Over”), read the front page headlines of the Reno Gazette-Journal (“Chutes Terrain Ranked Among the World’s Toughest”) or picked up a local phone book (guess what made the cover?), knows why: the Chutes.

“Yeah, I bought a pass here this year because of the Chutes,” says one Reno skier, who told me he wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. “Who knows when I’ll actually bring myself to ski them though.”

Pent-up demand

For a taboo zone, the Chutes have been incredibly conspicuous -- even from downtown Reno. There are 16 of them, screamingly vertical expressways that spill down a bowl scooped out of the mountainside, the steepest one pushing 55 degrees and the longest vertical about 1,500 feet.

They have been coveted from afar -- and poached for years. Locals have put bumper stickers on their cars, worn Chute T-shirts and dialed the mountain each season with one unified message -- “Open the Chutes!” A few have ducked the rope and illegally skied the Chutes anyway.

In Reno a lanky ski shop clerk told me he did the Chutes last weekend. He caught a rock while heading down one of them and tumbled 400 feet before hitting another rock.

“But otherwise it was incredible,” he said.

At least one longtime Chutes devotee, though, isn’t raving about the end of the area’s maverick days.

“It’s not going to be as fun anymore,” says John L. Ascuaga, a Reno-based skier and legendary Chutes poacher who’s been busted so many times over the last few decades that mountain management used to keep his yanked passes as trophies. “Now everyone’s gonna do it.”

The Chutes are serviced by eight entry gates (for safety reasons, entering the Chutes from anywhere else is still illegal), with names that have marketing written all over them. There’s Chaos and Cardiac Ridge. Yellowjacket and Fuse. Hornet’s Nest and Detonator. Nine of the chutes are classed as double black diamond -- extremely difficult.

And, of course, there’s Nightmare -- a run on the east flank with a 1,000-foot vertical and 45-degree pitch.

Carving any of them until recently could have cost a revoked ski pass, a $1,000 fine and/or six months in jail. Or worse. The topography is dicey enough that, according to a senior staff member at the mountain, just clearing the area of rock and tree debris last spring racked up a tally of “three busted ribs, a wrecked knee and lots of stitches” for the work crew.

Two winters ago, three resort employees ducked the rope and did a late-night dash on the Chutes after a major snowfall. Only two came out. The third died in an avalanche.

“It was an extremely unfortunate waste and a very, very uneducated move,” says Pierce. “If you go into any backcountry terrain without assessing the snow and avalanche potential, you’re always gambling.”

Despite the risks of out-of-bounds slopes, skiers will always seek them out. “People have been ducking the rope and poaching the Chutes forever,” adds Pierce. “That’s actually one of the reasons we wanted to finally open them up. Not just to expand the ski resort ... but also to deal with the fact that an increasing number of people were diving in there in unsafe conditions.”

This raises the slippery question of just what is “safe” on slopes that could give a mountain goat vertigo.

“We stay away from the word ‘safe,’ ” says Pierce. “People ask, ‘Have you made it safe?’ But that’s a relative term -- and we always want to make that clear -- because it’s double-black-diamond expert terrain. It still has its inherent risks. Kirkwood [another ski resort in the Tahoe area] uses a big skull and crossbones sign on one of its signature extreme runs, the Wall. We haven’t gone to that extent, but that’s essentially what double diamond means. Don’t go in there unless you can ski double-diamond terrain.”

Managing risk

David BENSON had been itching to run the Chutes, so the day after it opened last month, the 41-year-old Reno skier was gliding alone through the trees on untracked snow between Nightmare and a neighboring run called Miller Time. He was ecstatic. Dodging a crater where some avalanche blasting had clearly occurred, Benson felt reassured that the area had been slide-proofed.

Then a 10-yard slab he was turning on suddenly cut loose.

“It happened very fast and immediately knocked me sideways,” recalls Benson, who was unable to “swim” out of the avalanche. Instinctively, he looked for the closest tree to hold onto. “I had that instantaneous feeling of, ‘OK, get ready, something very bad and painful is about to happen.’ ”

Benson knew that if he didn’t find a tree to break his fall in those first 10 yards, he wouldn’t want to. “If I hit one after that point, I would have been moving very, very fast and gotten seriously hurt,” he says.

After falling about 15 yards, Benson took a tree right in the torso and let the slide pin him to the trunk “like wet cement.” Several seconds later, he wiggled out of it, unharmed save for two missing skis -- one of which he never found. “At that point,” he says, “two skiers had come over and one kid said to me, ‘Dude, I saw that whole thing from above! That was wicked!’ ”

Later, Mt. Rose went on the record, calling the “200-foot, 18-inch deep” slide “moderate” and “non-life-threatening.”

“You can’t reduce the risk to zero,” says Benson. “I certainly don’t hold Mt. Rose liable in any way, and I probably wouldn’t have even if I’d been hurt.”

The incident hasn’t dampened his appetite for the Chutes in the least. “It’s wonderful terrain,” he says. “I just went in there with this security-blanket feeling that it’s now inbounds, it’s been blasted, so it must be 100% safe. They try to minimize the risk inbounds but, of course, they can’t eliminate it. I guess I’d momentarily forgotten about that.”

It may not be such an uncommon misperception at a time when greater access and extremes are the rule. “We ask it here all the time,” says Bie. “Is there a false sense of security when people assume that since there’s more traffic in these areas that we are now safe -- or at least much safer?”

Crowds at Mt. Rose can actually reduce avalanche danger, because increased traffic means better snow compaction -- one of the best slide preventatives.

“A great example of that is Highland Bowl at Aspen,” says Bie, “which just opened up two years ago. Locals are actually given the chance to earn free passes for boot-packing that entire bowl -- hiking up and down it with their ski boots on -- in order to pack it down. It’s something that the ski patrol used to do on their own and like a lot of these areas, they’d only open maybe a slice of it in the spring. Now the entire Highland Bowl is open to the public almost all the time.”

Mt. Rose’s notoriously steep Chutes aren’t exactly prime boot-packing terrain. Yet, opened under a permit with the U.S. Forest Service, the runs are now “stabilized” with a controlled gate system, a beefed-up patrol unit trained to deal with a new set of potential problems (i.e. evacuating skiers on steep terrain who are either injured or too scared to move) and intensive avalanche work that makes the area “suitable” for skiing, according to Mt. Rose executives.

Of course, no set of precautions can erase the fact that Mt. Rose has upped its fear factor several notches with the addition of the Chutes. Proudly so, says management. And rightfully too, believes Temple University psychologist Frank Farley, who sees a move like this as an example of the craving for greater risks that may actually be built into our culture.

“To me, it’s the essence of the American story -- creative risk-taking, exploration, engagement with the unfamiliar. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, always confront the things you are afraid of. These sorts of extreme experiences offer a chance to overcome fear by developing self-confidence, power and a belief that you control your destiny. People who engage in these things don’t want to die. They want to live.”

Since increasing the risk threshold is an individual choice, there’s a growing feeling in the ski industry that it should be accompanied by more personal responsibility. That’s the trend in Europe, where resorts are known for providing wider access and placing more responsibility on the individual.

Mt. Rose approached the decision to open the Chutes in the spirit of choice. Since the most difficult runs were going to be reserved for expert skiers, slope angle was not much of an issue.

“When we were going through the whole process, it was essentially deemed that nothing in there was ‘unskiable’ or ‘too steep,’ ” says Pierce. “I really don’t know if there is such a thing as too steep -- unless we’re talking about a cliff or a pitch that doesn’t hold snow. Where somebody draws that line otherwise, I don’t have an answer for that.”

Will skier responsibility fly in the land of the free and the home of the courthouse? Surprisingly, executives at the mountain say they don’t expect more liability problems. “Opening the Chutes has not affected our insurance policy,” says Pierce.

Taking the plunge

The most extreme Chutes -- El Cap, Jackpot, Fuse, Cardiac Ridge -- are closed today. Too many bare patches. But I have my Nightmare, which looks like bumpy white concrete from my lofty perch at the gate. The sun is shining; the sky cloudless; the air still enough I can hear my own heavier-than-usual breathing. I stand at the edge of the narrow run with York -- and then it’s my turn. I glide through the gate as if it were some portal to another planet, one with harsher laws of gravity.

The first turns are steep and blind. I take them slow, edging across some exposed rock as I try to avoid a pair of close-set tree lines, a hallmark of these tight slopes. This would be a very bad place to tumble 400 feet and hit another rock. Or wrap my torso around a tree trunk. Halfway down, the grade eases, and Nightmare evolves into the sort of diamond run I’ve done before. Ten turns later, and I’m feeling the jubilation that comes from having a run like this behind you.

Of course, there are nastier chutes. Fired up by Nightmare, I wonder if maybe I should take on another.

On the last run of the day, York takes me to Cutthroat, on the west side of the mountain. It’s open but lined with a series of red marker poles warning of a hidden rock face that you would regret encountering on any pitch, let alone this one.

“I just thought you might want to see it,” says York, who says goodbye and skis off down the main cruiser run.

Now it’s just me and Cutthroat.

Back at the crossroads.