Bottomless

IT’S EARLY OCTOBER. Fall storms have grizzled the high elevations of the Tetons, and the hard-core skiers are already in the mountains. Two people, a woman and a man, have died. They were climbing a long, steep chute of snow in Montana’s Madison Range when a weak layer in the snowpack broke and kept breaking all the way to the top. The avalanche ran down right on top of them. The man dug himself out of the snow and searched for the woman, his girlfriend, for three hours before marking the debris with his avalanche probe and hiking out to his truck. Then he drove to his home in Bozeman, wrote a note for the search and rescue team detailing where the woman had been buried, and took his own life.

While I wasn’t skiing this day, the Madisons are an hour and a half from my home in Idaho and are among the mountains I ski frequently. I read the local avalanche center’s report on the incident, which includes a photo of the peak the couple planned to ski. The avalanche path and the pile of debris at the bottom are visible in the picture. I find a map of the mountain and make a note to ski it in the spring. I know there is something wrong with this.

POPULAR IMAGES of snow paint it as marshmallow creme, homogenous from top to bottom, soft and forgiving and miraculous. In reality, it’s more like a skyscraper cobbled together with whatever the builder found lying around: some floors are constructed of steel beams; others, of Styrofoam. That’s snowpack: the piled-up remnants of storms conjoining with or warring against those that come after. Fragile and knotty and convoluted, and sometimes deadly.

I’m at a week-long retreat at a cabin in Teton Valley, Idaho. One afternoon, I take a break from writing and run up a narrow dirt two-track, into the mountains. Not a quarter-mile from the cabin, I hit the first patch of snow. The road narrows to a trail that follows a creek, then turns hard to the right. I follow it up a ridge, and now the snow is everywhere. The thin crystal