Steep Way Down

2018 didn’t begin with a flying start. At the beginning of what was to be an epic winter in the Alps, I tore my anterior cruciate ligament. It was the first major injury I’d sustained through skiing, and I’ve been skiing almost full time for over a decade now. Needless to say, I didn’t take it very well but I had a burning determination to come back stronger. For six months of each year, skiing is an all-consuming passion for me, and guiding is my profession. I knew it meant a fairly lengthy break from both. My good ski buddy and prolific steep skier Jesper Petersson had been through the same gruelling recovery process the year before. Jesper’s support and encouragement was a big moral boost during my rehab process, and when he proposed a trip to Alaska for the following spring, I knew I was in.

It can be hard to leave the Chamonix ski scene, especially in spring when the more ephemeral lines come into condition. But I was hungry for a big adventure; the type of adventure that the Alps can’t quite provide. We invited Ben Briggs and Enrico Mossetti to round off an experienced team. Ben, Enrico and I had skied the first descent of the Caroline Face of Mt. Cook on our last trip together in 2017, one of the world’s biggest unskied lines. I knew a trip with these three friends – all of them strong skiers – would mean our sights would likely be set on some ambitious ski mountaineering objectives.

Travel to uncomfortable places is important in order to keep growing as an athlete and a person. The Central Alaska Range was the right place to take all four of us outside our comfort zones. Denali, the highest peak in North America, is a mind-blowingly huge mountain renowned for its extreme cold, harsh weather and thin air. Flying in from the remote outpost of Talkeetna on the edge of the central Alaska Range, our first glimpses of Denali filled us with awe and trepidation. Towering above the other colossal peaks, Denali is a freak geological phenomenon. Its 3000 metre south face has been a well-known ski mountaineering challenge, and is one of the very biggest steep ski lines in the world, cutting through an alpine face of mythical stature. We decided this was on the table to as an option to try. It was first skied solo by the ground-breaking Swedish skier Andreas Fransson in 2011, and since then we hadn’t heard of any other teams attempting it. Our other plan involved attempting a very complex but compelling line on the unskied north side of Mt. Hunter, which is conveniently in plain sight directly above basecamp.

Travel to uncomfortable places is important. It means you keep growing as an athlete, and as a person.

The skiing from the upper slopes was as demanding as any I’d ever done. Picking a line on 55 degree spines above an 800m drop, I was totally in the zone.

When we finally arrived in basecamp, we fried some eggs for lunch while staring at Hunter, and discussed what exactly we were going to focus on. The line on Hunter looked simply too dangerous, and the conditions were poorer than what we’d seen in photos from previous years. We decided to load our sleds with two weeks’ worth of supplies and start the long slog up Denali, hauling our gear up the mountain for three days. This was not something any of us were accustomed to. However, I secretly enjoyed the simplicity of the physical toil although, we all complained profusely to one and other. We felt as though we were moving up the mountain at a snail’s pace – until we realised we were moving at almost twice the speed of the large guided groups, and most other teams who cached supplies along the way.

After setting ourselves up at 14K camp, we waited out a couple of stormy days, passing the time playing chess. It was bitterly cold at first – a deep and raw cold – in the evening and before the first rays of sun hit the camp. I began to wonder if my time away would have been better spent somewhere a little warmer where we could actually do some skiing. Wrapped up in all my clothes inside my two kilo down sleeping bag, it was difficult to get out and eat breakfast before 10am. Everything froze solid – and we had mistakenly neglected to bring a cook tent. On the first day of good weather, we headed up the classic Orient Express couloir. Jesper and I pushed ourselves hard to get up to 5800 metres only five days after arriving at basecamp. The frustration of the previous days was soon ironed out by the intense physical exertion it took to climb up 1000 metres at that altitude, and then the bliss of a few perfect powder turns coming back down into camp.

The cold and high winds then continued, and I began wondering if my first trip to Denali would be my last. The stable weather we were counting on never came, and the enormity and logistical challenges of skiing the South Face weighed heavily on us. We knew it would be a long shot to pull off. Yet Denali is Denali, and regardless of whether we could ski the South Face I still had a burning desire to at least ski from the summit.

Our patience and food supplies began to run thin. At last it seemed as if our window had come and the four of us packed for a three-day round trip to attempt the South Face. Moving up the mountain, I instinctively felt our bags were too heavy and we weren’t moving fast enough. The wind whipped up well beyond what was forecast, and we ground to a halt.

Enrico soon came down to us. He tended to Jesper while I raced back to basecamp to round up a rescue party and to see if he could be flown out. I sprinted through basecamp and to our tents to grab Ben, who had decided not to join us that day. Together we skinned up the glacier as fast as we could with a sleeping bag and stove to warm Jesper. Behind us, a heavily laden team of volunteer rescue rangers brought up a sled and medical equipment. The heli eventually made it in through a break in the cloud cover, and it was with huge relief that we watched Jesper being flown away.

Ben, Enrico and I flew off the glacier the following day and back to civilisation. Jesper spent a few days in hospital near Anchorage before flying back to Sweden. He sustained a broken vertebrae and ribs, but nothing life changing.

I have an instinctive urge to seek out adventure and have to accept the risk it involves, yet this urge has been tempered over time with the numbing reality of losing many good friends in the mountains. I have a seven year-old son, and the need to seek adventure whilst not exposing myself to too much risk is a frequent mental struggle I’ve become accustomed to. Attempting these big, steep lines is the culmination of hard won experience and dedication to the craft; it requires a level of mental and physical mastery. Experience and skill can count for a lot, but the uncomfortable reality is that luck plays a huge part in it too.

The four of us all returned home, and we returned as friends. I my mind, that made the expedition a successful one.