No one should ever venture into the backcountry alone. Backcountry skiing is of necessity a communal experience in which risk, responsibility and reward are equally shared. In the parlance of mainstream sports, there is no “I” in backcountry.
Backcountry skiers are most definitely their brothers’ keepers. The success of the individual depends on the success of the entire unit. Knowledge and awareness need to be shared, unfiltered by ego or self-importance.
Skiers don’t need to be in the backcountry to depend on one another. In a meditation entitled “Don’t Feed the Fear Puppy” in Snowbird Secrets, I recount a run on the jagged face of Snowbird’s Upper Cirque when a friend stepped on a barely covered boulder and lost a ski just as he tumbled into a rock-rimmed chute.
There was never a question as to what the situation required. Being the highest up the run, it was up to me to retrieve my buddy’s ski from where it was impaled near the top of what looked like a vertical wall of ice, loose snow and rock.
The story has a Disney ending, with a ski retrieved, a great ski companion hurt but not out of commission and my respect for ice climbers exponentially expanded. The point being, whether inbounds or out, skiers have a mutual responsibility to watch out for the other guy and step up when duty calls.
This is exactly the attitude that seems to be evaporating inside the ski area boundary ropes. Instead of an abiding sense of community we have a Hobbesian war of each against all.
In the immortal discourse on moral philosophy that is A Fish Called Wanda, Wanda Gershwitz informs her brilliantly idiotic brother Otto that, “The central message of Buddhism is not ‘Every man for himself.’” This attitude is equally out of place anywhere people are sharing a snow-slathered slope.
This is especially true at this time of year in those parts of the country where the natural cover is still sparse. Every skier of every stripe and skill level are obliged to share the same slender sinew of snow that barely manages to cover the raw earth beneath its adamantine surface.
A typical scan of the narrow slope ahead would show a posse of park skiers skiing switch through the throng, a small pack of ex-racers cutting around their slow-moving brethren as if they were gates, snowboarders scouting for any excuse to take air, fathers frantically trying to protect their fragile progeny as they crawl across the hill, strafed by several skiers on boards so wide they have minimal control over their trajectory. Half this population is helmeted and ear-plugged, cutting off at least one sense they could sorely use.
While this sort of skiing is an interesting experiment in social Darwinism – which of these species will live to reproduce? – it’s not a lot of fun and is flat-out dangerous if everyone embraces a me-first mentality. We need to import the spirit of the backcountry, of watching out for the other guy, until it’s adopted by all skiers, everywhere, whether on manicured, lift-serviced slopes or deep in the BC.
The holiday period is supposed to be a time of harmony, of praying for universal peace and mutual understanding. Let’s show a little love out there, people. The sport we all share will be safer for it.
– Jackson Hogen
