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Snow, although normally a soft and fluffy material becomes a penetrating projectile when blowing at high speeds. When it comes into contact with one’s face, the effect is not only pain, but cold.
The knife edge ridge was nothing short of daunting; a 50 foot drop to the right and a sheet of steep ice on the left. I was only three minutes into the hike up the glacier before I realized that it wouldn’t be as easy as it had initially looked. My older brother was trailing behind me by about 50 yards and I turned back to see him struggling just as I was. I had been informed of the differential between the thickness of sea level air and mountain air, but did not anticipate such a drastic difference. I swung my skis back and forth, planting them in the snow in an agonizing rhythmic motion known as bootpacking. As I neared the hole in the rocks at the top, I noticed that my brother had caught up to me and was right behind me. We paused a minute and took a rest and began talking – why were we up here anyways? We finally reached the top, and in a dizzy blur of cold wind and gasping breath I let out a shout of triumph. As we strapped on our skis and looked over the precipice down the maze of rock outcroppings guarding a few narrow couloirs, the question resounded, “why were we here?” I turned to my brother and gave him the silent nod and grin – an adrenaline junkie’s first tell. We both jumped out from the cornice, and began our descent into each of two different couloirs. Two turns in the knee deep powder and I fell right off of the face of the earth, I was in the zone, a nirvana of white haze and smooth motion.