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Publication: Powder Magazine
In Tahoe, some of the best lines get dropped under a full moon.
The sun is a powerful force, its light and warmth responsible for the existence of life on Earth. A few days every month this light hits our closest celestial neighbor and lights it up like black fire. Spiritual scientists believe the transmuted rays bouncing off the moon are morphed energy beams — concentrated doses of physical and emotional power. Less scientific folk know it’s just a good time to get especially playful on nights when the moon leaves little white trailers in their vision. Skiers traditionally have bonfires in snowy meadows and maybe have a trippy schuss for the novelty. Really opportunistic skiers look at this as the best time to ski lines that resorts have designated as unsafe, or closed. While ‘closed’ is an objective term, the words ‘unsafe’ and ‘unskiable’ are not. The eye of the beholder decides what the body can do, and the moon provides the light with which to get it done.
Back in the ’70s at Squaw Valley, in the midst of the wildest decade since the year of the VIII Olympics, a posse claimed a number of early descents around Tahoe — the north face of Donner Summit and the Union Pacific RR snow shed, Squaw’s Mainline Pocket, Main Chute, and the Chimney. Rick Sylvester skied with this crew and he thought there was one closed area at Squaw that needed to see some tracks. Under the legendary KT-22 double-chair stands a tall fortress of rock with a blind rollover across the top. Back then it was known as Powderhorn. Today it’s called the Fingers. Sylvester wanted to hit it, though without losing his ski patrol job. His answer — do it under a full moon.
“I brought a bota bag of wine because I wanted to be a little inebriated to take the edge of fear off,” he recalls. He hiked under the Exhibition lift to an area above the Powderhorn then skied through one of its narrow chutes, sideslipping for much of the way. Afterwards, fired up like a raging Hahnenkahmer, he barged into the instructors’ locker room. Reeking of booze, “I unlocked the door and was singing ‘I did it! I did it!’ and woke up an instructor who was sleeping on the tuning table because he had just gotten evicted from his house,” Sylvester remembers. “That’s what made it for me — I was half drunk in full ski equipment at 1 a.m., singing at the top of my lungs.”
Many people today share the same sentiment about laying tracks during bright nights. In Tahoe, the aptly-named Mt. Rose avalanche chutes had been on the lunar hit list for years before finally being annexed by the resort this year. At one resort there’s even a hallowed line so steep, guys and girls have to rope into each other to drop it.
“It’s kind of funny,” says one such skier, who prefers to remain anonymous. “You’ll be at a party and get to talking with some buddies about how sick the snow is. Then you look up and see the peak glowing under the moon. Next thing you know, it’s two hours later and you’re all looking down the face with your skis on, dropping into one of the gnarliest spots around.”
Lines like this will likely remain in an access purgatory almost as strange as the convoluted light of the moon itself: “Kinda OB.” But relegating impressive and dangerous terrain to being skiable only under a full moon strengthens its mystique and leaves the rest of us something to dream about.
© 2001 alex west writing and photography