Waiting for Sluffman

I’ve heard the “Must be present to win” idea from a handful of big mountain skiers I look up to. Not big mountain like fast, but big mountain like big mountains. If you don’t step up to the plate, you can’t swing at the ball.

Last fall, at a slideshow, Adam Fabrikant described the snow surface he found in the Karakorum to be generally “big mountain variable” in my mind, kind of the best you can hope for at 8,000 m. I think I was right on the hoping for part. His definitely not professional video did not make the snow look charming. Adam’s wheezing and muttering were strange, too. Otherworldly. Not quite as weird as the snow, though. Every problem under the sun and a few under the wind. And he was psyched about the terrain and the snow. Best it gets there.

My limited experience in the big mountains has yielded much the same. We’ve found horrible breakable crust, refrozen wet slide bed surface, and brand-new wind slabs in one day in Alaska last spring. The bed surface stuff was cool. It kind of looked like a water park for weasels, all swoopy. But the skiing was bad, so bad, at least by my taste. But I managed. I was present and I won, whatever that means in the context of a pointless, selfish pursuit. I got on the plane home, too. Double win.