I stood on the rim of a huge, perfectly formed bowl, deep with snow. I'd just skied over a pass which according to my map was 9,200 feet high. The peaks surrounding me were banked with snowfields that looked blue in the early March late afternoon high Sierra light. Massive clouds, the color of pearls, swarmed around the peaks. And I knew exactly what I was, this being on skis in the marrow of wilderness, a human body and nothing more. That was one thing Elizabeth and I agreed on, even in the last couple years, that the goal is to reach that stripped down state where your cells know everything there is to know, where you feel so deeply that emotion becomes one simple force, where sorrow and joy become the same thing.
How I missed Elizabeth.
I cut the metal edges of my skis into the ice-crusted snow for balance and then reached into my pocket for a few yogurt peanuts. We'd always saved the yogurt peanuts to eat at the tops of passes, and nowhere else. Next, I checked to make sure the batteries in my avalanche beacon still had juice. What a joke, carrying a beacon on a solo trip. Who would pick up its high frequency beeps if an avalanche buried me? I guess it was just habit.
Then I looked down into that steeply-sloped bowl below me. Its snowpack fed a long drainage that in the spring would fan out into half a dozen streams. My destination was the bottom of that drainage. I planned to camp at High Meadow tonight and then ski out tomorrow morning to my car. I scanned the slope for a safe route down. I figured it was about a 500 foot drop.
"Yahooooo!" Elizabeth's voice hollered in my head. I could see her spirit lean forward with that open-mouthed grin of hers that looked more like a shout than a smile. She shoved her ski poles into the snow and flew off the mountain. Elizabeth would have taken what she called the crow's route, straight down. Her tight telemark turns would have made a long, neat squiggle in the snow all the way to the bottom of the bowl. In the meadow below she would glide to a luxurious stop, then purposely fall in a heap, exhausted from her ecstasy.
"Oh, Elizabeth," I said, missing her foolhardiness with a pain as sharp as this bitter wind. How I longed to lecture her right then: "Listen, girl, we've had over a foot of fresh snow in the last week. Got it? The snow pack is weak. Add to that the fact that this is a leeward slope on a gusty day."
By now she would have quit listening already. Her face would be turned toward the valley and I'd know she was already flying, dead center in that rapture of hers.
And yet, I would go on with my lecture: "And look at that cornice!" I'd point to the one about ten yards below me right now.
"What cornice?" she might ask, because it really was a small one and nothing subtle ever figured into Elizabeth's world.
"Elizabeth," I spoke out loud now. "This is a prime avalanche slope in prime avalanche conditions."
I think my voice was an outside mantra for her, the droning noise against which she took flight. My caution was her starting blocks. If she were here, this would have been her cue. Off she'd sail. I'd watch her back for a few moments and then realize that being stranded on a ridge-top in the high Sierra in March, with a storm pending, was a greater risk than skiing an avalanche-prone slope. I'd be forced to follow.
