Vanilla Winter

There are three types of time one experiences in life. The first is normal time, that’s when you’re at the grocery store looking for the canola oil; it’s where most of us live our lives. It’s also what makes postal workers bring guns to work and corporate executives swan dive from their balconies. Which is why I have a strict policy against more than 40 hours per week of normal time, it just isn’t healthy.

For this reason I decided to skip out on school for a few days and take a ski vacation. Unfortunately ski resorts on powder days turn into slalom races. Not the good kind of race, where you’re dodging gates at 60 mph and racing against a clock that doesn’t care about excuses; it’s the kind of race where you’re dodging the upper crust of society in $1,000 ski suits with bored New York attorneys. With this in mind, my friend Josh and I had set out to hike a few miles into the backcountry and earn some turns.

Skinning and hiking are really quite nice; peaceful actually. It's much cheaper for a college student, as well as a hell of a lot more work. During the hike I realized that the serenity and peacefulness are two things you tell yourself you enjoy, but you’re really only there for one reason: untouched powder.

With the goal of skiing a particularly narrow and steep couloir, Josh and I had skinned out to its base. Upon arriving we met up with another group of three skiers who had planned on the same couloir. After a brief conversation and some lukewarm gas station coffee, we agreed that the other party should set off ahead of us; but wait to begin their descent until we had reached the top as well. The reason for this was two-fold. Having people hiking up while you’re trying to ski a steep technical descent is an obvious hazard; more importantly though, avalanche danger for the day had been rated as considerable, and having more than one skier descending the couloir at a time was an obvious risk. As Josh and I had hiked out to our destination we had stopped to evaluate the snow pack in more than a few locations and decided that our route, due to its south eastern exposure and shelter from the winds was relatively safe.

We gave the other group a bit of time to begin their ascent, which we used to warily snack on some frozen Cliff bars and drink more tepid coffee. For those who have never tried, eating a Cliff bar when it’s 10° out tastes like sawdust with a texture akin to gravel. Considering our alternative, a block of frozen cheddar cheese, which bent the knife we’d brought to cut it, the Cliff bars were the only option. Once the granola-cum-gravel had been swallowed we looked at each other warily, having spent enough time together in the backcountry, the words were unnecessary; I glumly volunteered to lead. We agreed that Josh should remain about 40 feet behind, just in case something was to go wrong.

Slow time is what you feel when you’re hiking up a mountain, or in this case, a narrow couloir. You put one foot in front of the other one. Then you do it again. Hours pass and all you’ve been doing is putting one foot in front of the other one. Your legs start to burn; it’s hard work hiking through two feet of fresh snow. Three steps and turn, three steps and turn; the snow is too deep to go straight up, you have to zigzag back and forth. It feels like hours pass between glances at your watch. Then you look again and it says twenty minutes have passed.

Hours later my watch told me forty-five minutes had passed and we were approaching the crux of the climb. The couloir was shaped like the letter Y split down the middle. The crux of the climb was the point where the couloir’s angle changed from nearly vertical to up and slightly to the left, below it the top is out of sight, above it the bottom is out of sight. In it, both the top and bottom are visible, but one is terribly exposed to any dangers from above, unless quite close to the inside wall. When I was just below the crux, I waited for Josh to catch up with me. Assessing the progress of the group ahead of us, we decided to continue.

An hour after resuming my ascent, through the miasma of slow time, I heard Josh shouting my name. Turning to look down I saw him waving frantically and hollering at me, all while ridiculously floundering through the snow towards the southern wall of the couloir. Baffled, I turned to see what he was pointing at. What I saw was a wall of white rushing towards me; the group above us had felled the cornice which had triggered an avalanche.

The last kind of time one experiences is fast time. It is when your limbic brain takes over. That genesis of instinct, the gift of our ape ancestors: deeper, wider, and beyond reason. The intellect, the overactive gland which piggybacked onto the reptilian brainstem, is merely along to document the occurrences; it’s no longer in control. In disasters the brain switches to survival mode; it has no time for logic and reason.

Inside fast time my thoughts accelerated; everything I had ever learned about avalanche safety came rushing back. The first priority was to begin moving. To do so my limbs needed to begin responding to the frenzied commands my brain was sending. Realizing I had only a few seconds I decided on some priorities; I needed to get my backpack off; it had my skis attached to it and could batter me to death within the avalanche. I focused all of my energy on the backpack; frantically pawing at the straps as the idiot dexterity of my gloved hands impeded me. As the backpack strap finally slid off my shoulder I pushed the pack as far away from myself as possible. Facing the oncoming avalanche I wondered for a moment how long the batteries in my avalanche beacon would last. A silly worry in hindsight, I would suffocate long before the batteries in my beacon died.

The next thing I knew I was within the color white; everywhere I looked was white. Not the white that you see when you’re supposed to reach towards the light and find serenity; this white was chaotic and shadowed, full of menace. My brain pleaded with my limbs to continue trying to swim as the snow grew heavier. The heaviness told me that the avalanche had begun to slow down; this prompted a priority adjustment. With all of my strength I floundered within the suffocating pillow. Continuing to flounder my brain rudely informed me it didn’t know which was up. The ride in the avalanche had disoriented me so thoroughly that basic ideas such as up and down were as jumbled as quantum mechanics.

As the avalanche stopped I could feel the snow solidify around me and struggled to clear a space in front of my face to breathe. Meanwhile, my brain switched back into slow time. Suddenly instinct yielded to intellect; instinct had done all that it could. My intellect used its newfound control to remind me that the kinetic energy from the snow’s slide downhill would translate into heat as the mass of snow stopped. This energy would cause the snow to solidify into concrete-like firmness and entomb me.

As I lay entombed, I reflected on my ride down the mountain. Rather than a deep reflection upon my life, I was concerned with why I was now trapped under the snow, confronting death. Continuing to reconstruct what I had seen in the frenzied moments before being swept away, I wondered how long I had, and how long it would take them to find me. A moment later I realized that my hands were incredibly cold, somehow in the ride I had lost my gloves.

As the hours passed, my hands grew colder and colder, while my rage built, even to my slow time perception it seemed to boil over immediately. Furious at the lethargy of my rescuers I began cursing everything which had contributed to my circumstances. I recited a litany of insults, some nasty enough that I offended myself. When that catharsis was exhausted I tried explaining to God his own flaws, arrogance only impending death can lend. Then I heard the beeps of avalanche beacons in search mode. I began shouting Josh’s name and, for lack of any better material, insulting him and his family. An hour later they had dug me out and I was sitting at the base of the large hole they had dug to free me. Looking at my watch, it informed me that only 25 minutes had passed since Josh and I resumed our climb in the crux. I stared at the watch dumbfounded for an eternity before unclasping it and hurling it as far down the mountain as possible.

It was time for a new watch anyway.