Mountain Exposure: News and Views From the Backcountry: April 2012

Keith Garvey, lowering his client, La Voute Couloir

My first glance at La Grave, and its trademark peak, La Meije, was from the back seat of a very small and very cramped rental car, driving up a steep and winding valley road from Grenoble, France. We had three bodies crammed into a car designed primarily for two, and three sets of ski gear and clothing jammed into a space designed for only a few bags of groceries. It was one of those sensible, high-mileage hatchbacks that many Europeans favored, and one which three typical American skiers might have a tough time adjusting to. But these were not your average Americans. Indeed, they were not your average skiers. The driver was Keith Garvey, one of the world's best skiers and mountain guides, who had spent a good part of his career living and guiding in the French alps. The front seat passenger was Eric Larsen, an IFMGA certified mountain guide and avalanche forecaster from Telluride, Colorado, and a highly accomplished skier in his own right. The guy in the back seat was me, an aging ski bum from Jackson, Wyoming who rides a splitboard, has a wrecked knee, and was just along for the ride. I did have some experience in the guiding world, having recently completed a course in the American Mountain Guide Association's Ski Guide program in Utah. But I possessed just a cursory knowledge of the technical skill and expertise that the other two had accumulated over the years. I was however, just as avid an explorer and winter enthusiast as my guides. In fact, I had skied some pretty big lines over the years, some of which were unfamiliar even to them. Still, they were incomparable to what we would ski over the next few days.

"Jesus, there's no snow," I said from the back seat, trying to solicit a response. All I could see from the small window of light from which my position in the car offered were massive, thousand meter walls of rock on either side of the road, with towering waterfalls cascading down one side, and avalanche paths half filled with snow dividing the other. I could barely make out the jagged spire of La Meije, standing sentinel above an impossible web of receding glaciers and open crevasses, with huge cliff bands, and dripping seracs all around. What are we possibly going to ski, I thought to myself. Keith, not quite sure of himself, responded with something like, "Don't worry, there's plenty of snow...we'll find some tomorrow," and then, "I promise, you won't be disappointed." I was more than unconvinced and a little panicked, since I had already committed a week here, and many hundreds of dollars.

I had only known about La Grave because of my familiarity with one of its most celebrated former residents, Doug Coombs. He had lived and died here, almost six years ago to the day. Coombs was one of the best skiers in the world, having won two World Extreme Skiing Championships in Alaska in 1991 and 1993, and had proven his mettle to countless clients and observers in the years since. And, he was from Jackson. He made himself and Corbet's Couloir famous with his fearless, acrobatic leaps into it, and with his participation in the Jackson Hole Air Force, an underground fraternity of extreme skiers who consistently violated the resort's strict boundary policy. Coombs had pioneered Alaska ski guiding with the founding of Valdez Heli-Ski Guides in 1993, and he later put La Grave on the map with his participation in the Skier's Lodge guiding operation in town. He moved here partly because he had been famously banned from the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort for skiing one too many times 'out of bounds' and partly because he disliked the growing commercialism of Alaska's wild peaks. La Grave offered the best of both worlds: a wild, rugged place with only one lift, no boundaries, and mind-blowing, technically challenging terrain that demanded skill, caution and respect. At the time of his death, he was one of only a handful of American guides working, or qualified to work in the mountains of Europe, and he was considered one of the best. Though I knew very little about him at the time, I remember vividly the day (or the day after) he died. I was vacationing in Jackson for the first time, and was having coffee at the local shop in Wilson, very near my present home. I remember reading the news in the Jackson Hole Daily, and was shocked and saddened to hear about the loss of one of Jackson's own, especially a skier of his reputation. It was however, my first introduction to La Grave, and I have wanted to ski it ever since.

(To be continued...)