Going to Extremes
"If you fall, you die" -- that's one way to define extreme skiing. 
Sometimes, it's true.

By ALEX MARKELS

"More to the left!" called a faint voice.

It was March 29, 1993, and Ruff was perched on a narrow ledge above Thunder Bowl-a natural amphitheater capped by 9,000-foot peaks on the backside of Kirkwood Ski Resort. Still tied to the rope he'd used to belay himself from above, the 29-year-old extreme skier leaned out and strained to catch sight of his friend, Joe Gebhardt, standing far below. It was no use: The rope, secured by one of two Kirkwood Ski Patrol members who'd gone with him to the site, was just too short.

When he'd looked up at this piece of mountainside two weeks before, Ruff had thought it looked perfect. He told his friends it would make for close to 200 feet of "monster air"-easily the biggest cliff jump anyone had ever attempted-with a clear shot from top to bottom. But now, after climbing to the summit, roping himself in and sidestepping down 150 feet, he discovered he couldn't safely get close enough to the edge to see past the jagged rocks and snowy chutes that angled out below him to open snow.

He knelt down, scrunched up another snowball and, with a lurch, fastballed it over the edge. "That's better, man," yelled Gebhardt, after watching the second snowball explode, like the first, on a patch of protruding rocks above him. "But you gotta chuck it farther out!" Ruff let another one fly, then another.

Gebhardt had watched Ruff jump many times before-he'd even followed him over a cliff or two-but those leaps were nothing compared to this. Cliff jumpers typically took off from obvious overhangs or sheer cliffs, but Gebhardt could see nothing obvious about this steep, rocky face. A jumper falling nearly 20 stories would hit 70 miles an hour. His skis might act as wings, pushing him out of his aerodynamic tuck. Even if he could keep himself upright, he would still need plenty of momentum to clear the rocks, which extended 30 feet beyond the takeoff point. And he needed a clear line of vision from launch to landing: Basic cliff jumping technique called for him to be able to focus on the touchdown virtually before he took off.

But as each snowball came flying down the mountainside-one crashing on the rocks, another on snow and another on rock again-it became frighteningly clear, to Gebhardt at least, that accurately predicting this jump's trajectory would be impossible. His stomach muscles tightened and his hands began to sweat. He had never intended to direct the jump; he was here only because Ruff had asked him to help coordinate its filming.

Ruff had it all planned out. To record the jump, he'd recruited seven photographers, including Gary Nate, a veteran cameraman for ski-film producer Warren Miller, and Robbie Huntoon, an experienced cliff jumper in his own right, who ran a small local production company. Nate, Huntoon and the other cameramen would spread out around the massive bowl, staking positions up to a quarter-mile away. They would get close-ups and wide-angle shots with still cameras, on film and videotape, and once the jump was nailed, they would shoot Ruff chugging soda and wolfing down candy bars. The filming was all on spec, but Ruff had a lot riding on the outcome. He had told his fiancee, Kim Wiebe, that this would be his last big jump; he hoped to market the footage to ski-filmmakers and advertisers for more than half a million dollars.

As the photographers skied into place, Gebhardt wasn't the only one who was shocked by the size, scale and layout of the jump. Standing above the cliff in his bright magenta and violet ski suit, Ruff appeared in the photographers' viewfinders as a tiny pinpoint of color on a marbled background of white snow and black rock. "It couldn't have looked more extreme," Nate said later. "It was like watching Evel Knievel jumping the Grand Canyon."

It had snowed six inches the night before, and though the morning dawned crystal blue, the weather was rapidly deteriorating. Broken clouds flew overhead at airplane speed, casting huge shadows across the bowl. Cold gusts whipped against the cliffs, causing the fresh snow to slip like sand through the cracks in the rocks. More than one of the group prayed that Ruff would call off the jump.

"This is a bad scene, Joe," one of the photo assistants scowled to Gebhardt. "I don't want to be here, man."

Still, no one called Ruff back. In the unwritten protocol of cliff jumping, once the skier is in position the decision to go is his alone. To warn him off, or even suggest a negative outcome, would violate one of the cardinal rules of the sport: Don't psych out the skier. It could break his concentration, and should he get hurt, everyone would know who to blame. "If I rattle him and he dies, then I'm responsible," Nate thought to himself. "If I say nothing, then I'm not."

Besides, Ruff was already famous for pushing the limits, and he had always landed safely before. He was cocky and confident, but no one thought he was stupid. Ruff was proud of his ability to case out a jump, evaluating the launch, figuring his trajectory, visualizing the landing-even when he was using snowballs rather than his own eyes. "Whether it's 20, 30, 60 or 110 feet," he boasted to the camera after a 110-footer in Warren Miller's 1990 film "Extreme Winter," "everything is calculated to perfection-the takeoff, the air time, the landing, the run-out-so that we can go off with a calculated confidence that there's no way we'll get hurt." Then, putting on a half-serious Clint Eastwood stare as the camera pulled in, he said, "Cuz dying's not much of a livin', boy."

Now Ruff sidestepped back up the mountain, calling across the bowl to Huntoon, asking for more advice. Huntoon yelled back: "You need to go higher," figuring that Ruff would need all the speed he could muster to clear the rocks. Ruff moved back another 10 steps, but Huntoon yelled for him to go higher still. Ruff took two more steps, then dug himself in.

"Did he hear you?" asked Ruff's roommate, Jim Mathews, who was standing by Huntoon's side.

"I don't know," said Huntoon. "But he sees something totally different than I do."

A hundred yards away, Nate was standing with Ruff's brother, Frank, who had skied over to the cameraman's position to watch. "Isn't there anything we can do to stop this?" Nate whispered. Frank shook his head.

At a little after 11 a.m., the sun poked through the clouds scudding over Thimble Peak and Ruff gave the signal, pointed his tips downhill and skied for the drop-off. But just before he reached the edge, he turned suddenly to his right-perhaps a line readjustment, maybe a too-late premonition-then shot into space. By the time he was halfway down, he was moving so fast that the photographers watching through their viewfinders had lost sight of him.

Their cameras, however, caught the sequence. One, equipped with a motor drive that could reel off four photos per second, captured 16 frames from the edge of the cliff to the bottom. In the first five, Ruff was in fine form-a loose, cannonball tuck. But by the sixth, he began to lose it. He waved his arms in wide swoops, trying to keep himself in balance. Two frames later, he was falling back-first. In the 12th shot, he slammed into the rocky outcropping and bounced 30 feet in the air, his skis exploding off his heels and his limbs flailing. His momentum carried him down the hill, where he landed on his back, sliding head-first another 100 feet.

Forty-five minutes later, Ruff was dead.

Press on the picture to see a photo of the jump.

MOUNTAINEERING PURISTS WOULD BRISTLE AT CALLING PAUL RUFF AN EX-skier. He was a stuntman, the alpinists would argue, a ski-model, more interested in mugging for the camera than practicing the art of extreme skiing. Likening him to the sport's French originators, whose death-defying technical descents of 50- and 60-degree inclines stretched skiing to its physical limits, would be like equating a bungee-jumper with a mountain climber.

The term, the purists would say, should be reserved for skiers like France's Sylvain Saudan, Patrick Vallencant, Jean-Marc Boivin and Bruno Gouvy, many of whom had cut their teeth in the early '60s logging les premieres, first ascents, of the 15,000-foot peaks that surround Chamonix. But by the late 1960s, with thousands of climbers looking to make their mark in the Alps, the remaining premieres made a short list. The only way to go, it seemed, was down.

Saudan, dubbed "Le Skieur de l'Impossible," made a series of les premieres descentes on sheer faces others had only climbed before. Getting to them required technical mountaineering skills and the level of difficulty was almost unfathomable. The descents, twice as steep as the most challenging double-diamond trails at today's resorts, followed super-steep chutes known as couloirs, sometimes no wider than a king-size bed, that plummeted thousands of feet. A slip would almost certainly send the skier sliding out of control to the bottom, where monstrous cliffs and 1,000-foot crevasses threatened. The sport's definition was as simple as it was morose: Si tu tombes, tu meurs-"If you fall, you die."

Until his final jump, Paul Ruff had never pushed the limits that far. He was no mountaineer but a skier, first and last. And yet he had more in common with the French extremists than his purist critics might care to admit. For one, all but Saudan are dead. And all of them were tempted by a force perhaps greater than gravity itself-fame.

First, Vallencant. He pushed the definition of extreme further than Saudan and reaped the rewards with sponsorships, his own clothing line and the need to keep pushing. He fell to his death in 1989 during a training climb. Next was Boivin, who added parachutes and hang gliders to radical skiing descents. His end, in 1990, came far from the ski slopes, though. During a 3,000-foot parachute jump from the top of Venezuela's Angel Falls, filmed for a French television adventure series, he smashed into a rock outcropping and bled to death before rescuers could reach him. Gouvy, who reportedly had dressed himself in a Marlboro-logo'd jump suit, fell 3,000 feet into a crevasse during an extreme snowboard descent on Chamonix's Aiguille Verte in 1990. (Saudan, now nearly 60, still trades on his past exploits-with a heli-ski business, a Chamonix restaurant and other interests that market his reputation.)

Whatever the commonalities, the essence of American-style extreme skiing is as different from the European original as Bartles & Jaymes is from Chateau Lafite Rothschild. The first distinction is setting. The Alps are filled with unrelenting steeps that are close to villages and ski areas. But most of America's accessible terrain is comparatively benign-the mountains aren't as tall, the steeps not nearly so long.

And while in the '70s extreme and highly technical descents seemed a natural outgrowth of Europe's classic mountaineering tradition, the Zeitgeist in Ski Country U.S.A. at that time was embodied in the flashy, downright kooky discipline known as hot-dogging. When the French started polishing their reputations, the mainstream American ski heroes were guys like Wayne Wong and John Clendennan. Specialists in contorted aerials, back flips and helicopter jumps, they were acrobats, not mountaineers. And though their routines were demanding, they were far from life-threatening.

Then in 1983, a young Squaw Valley skier named Scot Schmidt climbed to the top of the resort's 70-foot-high Palisades cornice and jumped off. Though he wasn't the first to pull the stunt, he was the first to have it featured in a Warren Miller film, "Ski Country." Its wide exposure marked a defining moment in extreme skiing's American evolution. Suddenly, a long jump off a high place, preferably recorded on film, seemed to really define the word extreme.

Like hot-dogging, this was pure spectacle, stunts made for Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Over the next decade, cliff jumps became a mainstay of American ski movies, photography and advertising. Naturally, the bigger the jump, the greater the fame. By the '90s, a new Zeitgeist had taken hold.

The Tahoe ski resorts were the perfect place for this spirit to blossom. Situated on some of the steepest mountains in the Northern Sierra, they are pummeled by fierce winter storms that roll in off the Pacific packing 100-mile-an-hour winds and carrying up to six feet of moisture-laden "Sierra Cement" in a single shot. Far above the lake, mountainsides mutate into monstrous cornices hundreds of feet high-excellent for jumping.

The area boasts the nation's only 24-hour ski town-South Lake Tahoe. From virtually anywhere on the nearby mountains, you can easily spot the South Shore casinos, jutting up into the horizon like a small slice of Manhattan skyline. With their flashing marquees welcoming everyone from Jerry Garcia to Wayne Newton and advertising bawdy late-night reviews, cheap buffets and million-dollar slot payoffs, the casinos are at the center of a town that owes its existence to fast living and risk taking.

It's not surprising, then, that in 1985, Paul Ruff joined the mass of immigrant ski bums who land in South Lake Tahoe every year. Ruff was a bartender, a born ham and a skiing maniac. He had been jumping off snow-covered bumps in the Northeast since he was 7-the wildest, craziest speed demon at New Hampshire's small King Ridge skiing area, one of the countless boys hooked on adrenaline, delighted by danger.

One of his teen-age buddies penned a school paper about Ruff's exploits. "I like jumping with my friend Paul," reads the 1977 essay. "One time, Paul went over this huge jump. He must have gone 40 feet. . . . I'm surprised he's alive today."

FOR A TIME, IN THE WINTER OF 1989-90, on billboards along the highways that lead skiers out of the coastal California cities, across the Central Valley and up into the High Sierra, Paul Ruff's blond good looks, his fireplug thighs and his flashy skiing form seemed to be everywhere. He was the Heavenly Valley poster boy, exploding through a field of powder, larger than life, an armchair-skier's fantasy and a marketer's dream. It was Ruff's dream, too.

The seventh of eight children in a religious Catholic family, Ruff grew up in Reading, Mass., one of Boston's northern suburbs. When he graduated from high school (he was a Reading High tight end and the captain of the wrestling team), he moved to Atlantic City, where his older brother was bartending. Ruff followed his lead and learned the trade. During the winter, he fit in skiing day trips to Hunter Mountain in New York. But the five-hour drives and the mediocre conditions eventually found Ruff itching for something better. When a former girlfriend invited him to Park City, Utah, he packed his gear and drove west. Utah, however, with its strict liquor laws, was no place to make a living as a bartender, and after a few weeks, Ruff decided to move on to Tahoe.

He got a job at the Cornice Cafe in Kirkwood and later tended bar at the Cantina Los Tres Hombres there. The same outgoing personality that had him leading his high school friends, lemming-like, over ski jumps at King Ridge earned him a following among the local pub crawlers. He'd do Pee-wee Herman's "Tequila" dance on the bar and perform a hilarious karaoke version of "I'm Too Sexy." Just about the only thing he took seriously was his skiing. He'd decided to try to break into ski-modeling, and he knew he had to be an expert on the slopes. But with his high-school-jock, go-for-broke style, he was quickly humbled by locals who could ski circles around him.

While trying out for a job on Kirkwood Ski Resort's squad of ski instructors, Ruff got noticed by two of the resort's staffers, Michael Allen and John Wagnon. "He was very young and very fired up," remembers Allen, Kirkwood's race director and another extreme skier. Allen and Wagnon skied with the kid from Boston, showed him the local ropes and helped him polish his bravado into skill.

Backed up against the Pacific Crest, Kirkwood, with its many cornices, is a favorite haunt of extreme skiers from around the lake. Jumping usually landed skiers in trouble at Eastern resorts, but at Kirkwood, where there are plenty of good jumps in bounds, the atmosphere seemed to encourage it. This was, after all, home turf for gonzo skiers like Mohawk-haired Glen Plake, whose outrageous coif and radical stunts had won him fame and lucrative gear endorsements.

Ruff improved quickly, and when it came time to shoot photos for Kirkwood's new brochure, Wagnon asked him to pose. That led to other modeling jobs for ski magazines and promotional appearances at the annual fall ski shows. Still, the big time meant getting a role in a Warren Miller ski film. Trouble was, breaking in was akin to being discovered by Hollywood. There were literally hundreds of young skiers willing to do whatever it might take to catch the filmmaker's eye. Undaunted, Ruff bartered beers for videotape and persuaded two local videographers to follow him around for a day as he bounced through the moguls and jumped off his favorite cornices. He synced the video to James Brown singing "I feel good" and sent a copy to Miller's production company.

To everyone's surprise, the gambit paid off. A month later, Miller sent Ruff a plane ticket to ski in a film he was shooting in Canada. Shortly after he arrived, however, bad weather shut down the filming. While the crew waited for blue skies and sunshine, Ruff skied, and one day, heading toward a chairlift, he took a freak fall and tore a ligament in his right knee. He returned home without appearing in a single Warren Miller shot.

"He was really bummed out," remembers Allen, "but Paul wasn't the type to stay down for long."

After reconstructive surgery and a summer of aggressive rehab water-skiing on Lake Tahoe, Ruff was back on the slopes, and when the Miller camera crew came to Kirkwood in February, 1989, he was ready. On the fourth day of shooting, he watched as another local skier, John Tremann, made a 105-foot jump off the top of a huge cliff. Not to be outdone, Ruff launched himself from the same spot moments later. He landed in a puff of powder-110 feet from the takeoff-and skied away in delight. His friends dubbed it Ruff's Revenge, and the jump ensured him a feature role in Miller's fall release "Extreme Winter." Miller captioned it a world record.

That was the season of the billboards, and Ruff became the toast of South Lake Tahoe. Posters of his jumps filled the walls of restaurants all over town, and sponsorships began to trickle in. He was invited to appear at the big ski shows and everyone started calling him Captain Kirkwood. Though the money was still pretty meager-he had to stay on at Los Tres Hombres-it seemed that the Miller feature had given him the break he needed.

But King of the Hill is a game of one-upmanship, and Ruff's reign was short. Two seasons later, while recovering from another ski injury-this time to his other knee-Ruff learned that Tremann had broken his record. On a mountainside close to nearby Donner Summit, he had bagged a 140-footer, outdistancing Ruff by 30 feet.

Ruff hated to lose; he wouldn't allow even his closest friends to keep pace. Just weeks after his second knee surgery, he was on his mountain bike-knee brace and all-pedaling up a Tahoe mountain trying desperately to stay ahead of Wiebe, whom he'd met at Kirkwood's Cornice Cafe where she waited tables. The thought that a girl might beat him, says Wiebe now, irked Ruff no end.

After silently persevering to the top of the hill, Ruff unfastened the brace to find blood dripping from the surgical incision.

"Are you OK?" Wiebe asked.

"Sure," he replied with a tense smile. "It doesn't hurt at all."

He was still on crutches when he began to plot his comeback.

WHEN THE GROUP GATHERED AT Kirkwood on March 28, Ruff seemed as confident as ever. He had borrowed a condo right at the mountain so that the photographers and the others who would be in attendance at the next day's jump could get the earliest possible start. After cooking up a batch of pasta and passing beers around, Ruff spread out a topographical map on the dinner table and handed out photos he'd taken of the cliff. "This is the spot right here," he said, pointing to a section of the map where the topo lines ran together like fine wood grain around a knot.

He had been looking for the right jump for months-it had to be accessible, long and, of course, doable. He'd pumped other skiers for information on jump areas up and down the West Coast. He had also looked around in his own back yard, poking around near Donner Summit, where Tremann found his record-setter, before friends told him about the spot in the Kirkwood outback.

That night, Ruff psyched himself up for the jump by watching the video of Tremann's 140-foot effort. Tremann had barely landed the big jump, struggling with the forces of wind resistance and gravity. His skis whisked out from beneath him as his lower torso sought the fastest way to the bottom. (Luckily, he touched down safely in six feet of powder.) Ruff was determined not to make the same mistakes; he wanted to land cleanly and ski away. He stared intently at the video as he explained how he would hold himself in a tuck to compensate for the oncoming wind.

Of course, nailing the jump was just the first part of his plan. The second, and perhaps most important, part was marketing it. For all his modeling and stunt-skiing success, Ruff was lucky if he saw more than a few thousand dollars in residuals annually. And with all those other wanna-bes waiting in the wings, there wasn't much chance of gaining any leverage with filmmakers or advertisers. This stunt, however, would be his baby from start to finish. In contrast to the negligible modeling fee he got for appearing in Miller's films, Ruff worked out a 50-50 split with his team of photographers. He alone would sell the rights to advertisers and ski-filmmakers.

Joe Gebhardt was going up the mountain with him specifically to help shoot some of the post-jump hype. He would bring along Power Bars and Mountain Dew, for example, for the star to consume just after the big event. Another plan was to shoot footage for a Disney World commercial. Ruff would land the jump and ski to a stop. "Hey Paul Ruff! What are you going to do next?" a voice would ask. "I'm going to Disney World!" he'd grin.

Not that Mountain Dew or Disney World had bought into this-Ruff had no contracts or even vague promises from any sponsors. He had, however, talked it all over with a talent agent who told him that if he played his cards right, he might walk away with as much as half a million dollars. His friends were skeptical of such pie-in-the-sky figures, but Ruff tuned out their negative talk.

Ruff knew it had to happen now: His days as Captain Kirkwood were coming to an end. After all, he had celebrated his 29th birthday in February; a few months earlier he had asked Wiebe to marry him. While he expected to continue his ski-modeling career, he'd seen the worried look on Wiebe's face when he talked about a new record, and it had already caused friction between them. "Don't give me any negative thoughts," he'd tell her. With all the money this jump would bring in-money that could set them up and pay off his Jeep, his overdue credit cards and doctor bills-he promised he would hang up the record-setting stuff for good.

The season's end was fast approaching and the huge dumps of February had already yielded to the March sunshine and, sometimes, rain. Ruff set one date for the jump, but bad weather caused him to call it off. Then a few days later, it was back on, and this time, he got Miller's cameraman Gary Nate to sign on. Nate just happened to be at Tahoe; Ruff spent one evening cajoling him into adding the attempt to his shoot schedule. Once Ruff had settled on the Kirkwood site, his roommate Jim Mathews said, he was "like a runaway train."

ON THE DAY OF THE JUMP, KIM Wiebe was working her regular morning shift at the Cornice Cafe, trying to keep busy while she waited for her fiance. "I'll be in for a martini," Ruff had told her the night before. She didn't want him to jump-she had always been clear about that-but she didn't consider him reckless and she couldn't help but be proud of him: "I thought it was pretty neat," she would admit later, "He was going to push through and do it despite the obstacles."

By 11 a.m., when there was no sign of him, she thought, "No news is good news." But then the phone started ringing, and people at the lodge started rushing around.

When the helicopter landed outside the base lodge, Wiebe figured the outlook was either really good or really bad. If he had been injured, she thought, the helicopter would be on its way to the hospital. When the helicopter doors swung open and paramedics, not Ruff, stepped out, she almost fainted.

What Wiebe didn't know was that, for a while, back on the mountainside, the news had been good. When Joe Gebhardt got to Ruff's still form right after the fall, Ruff was unconscious but still breathing. Gebhardt ripped open Ruff's suit to check his heartbeat. Miraculously, there wasn't a scratch on him. And after a few minutes, Ruff awoke with a start and tried to get up. Worried that Ruff might injure himself further, Gebhardt, Huntoon and the two ski patrol members who had rushed to his side held him down.

"Where are you?" Gebhardt asked him, checking to see if Ruff was in shock.

"Kirkwood!"

"What's your name?"

"Paul! Let me get up! I'm OK!"

His friends moved him to a flat spot they'd carved out in the snow. The helicopter was called on the ski patrol's walkie-talkies, and Frank, high on the ridge above the bowl, tried to console his brother over the airwaves. "Hang in there buddy, you're going to be OK." But the color began to drain from his face and the group watched in horror as his ears turned a deep purple. His aorta torn and bleeding internally, Ruff came to only because his body had been pointing downhill. Now he lost consciousness for the last time.

Frank got back to the base lodge as quickly as he could. He and Wiebe huddled together, crying uncontrollably, as the technicians wheeled Ruff's body into the resort's emergency clinic.

Finally, a nurse asked Wiebe if she wanted to be alone with Ruff for a few minutes. The woman led her into a doctor's office and closed the door. Ruff's body was lying on the examining table. Wiebe walked over to him, put her hand on his shoulder and stood in silence. She thought about how he had told her to be strong like him and she remembered how he had always said he was made out of steel.

"Hey there, Man of Steel," she would say.

"That's twisted blue steel," he'd grin as he flexed his biceps.

ON A BRILLIANT SUNDAY MORNING last April, Robbie Huntoon set up a trampoline in the back yard of his Tahoe cabin. He began to bounce, and with each landing, he sailed higher and higher-three, five, seven feet. At the apex of each jump, a wispy tuft of auburn hair levitated momentarily above his forehead, his eyebrows arched, his toes pointed straight down and his mouth opened in a boyish half-smile.

"I just feel so free," he said after a half-dozen bounces. "I feel better in the air than I do on the ground."

After a few more leaps, Huntoon got the height he wanted, and flung his feet above him. Upside-down, he fell toward the mat. But just before he landed on his head, he tucked his chin into his chest, curled his body around and hit safely on his butt. "That's the most important move in ski jumping," he said. "If I go too far forward, I can always just bail out with that move and land safely. We used to call it the suicide stall, because as the jumper almost hits his head, he quickly tucks his chin down to his chest and spins forward. If Paul had planned to land that way he might still be alive, maybe hurt, but at least alive."

It was an old argument between Huntoon and Ruff. Huntoon favored landing as square on his skis as possible, which kept his weight forward and allowed for the alternative of the suicide stall. Ruff, with two bad knees, believed in the hip-check landing-where you land with your weight a little back, roll onto your hips and let more of your torso take the force.

And that was only one of Ruff's fatal mistakes that Huntoon played over and over again in his head. Almost everything had been wrong, he thought now: The cliff wasn't sheer enough, the landing was too flat, the snow was too heavy and Ruff had broken the rule of always knowing where the landing was, from the top, before you jump.

At 36, Huntoon is one of the oldest of Tahoe's extreme skiers, but his receding hairline and sun-weathered face hardly give away his age. His yard is strewn with boy-toys-motocross cycles, mountain bikes, the trampoline-and his house, with its '70s-vintage hot-dogging posters and old skis cluttering every corner, remains the skier's crash pad it's been for a decade or more. Friends say he's mellowed over the years, but Huntoon still takes 60-foot-plus leaps with the best of them, and he was back on the snow within a week after Ruff's accident, scouting big air during a trip to Mammoth Mountain.

To be sure, Ruff's death had shaken him up. At the memorial service, he could barely bring himself to look at the open casket. And when Ruff's father, trying to make sense of his son's death, asked Huntoon why people jumped, the skier didn't know quite how to respond. What was there to say? Why do people climb mountains? Why do they race cars? How could he explain the rush of confidence he felt after facing his fears and overcoming them. It was more than just a power trip, more than the adrenaline rush. It was a whole way of living, a way of squeezing all he could from life, of experiencing it to the fullest.

Huntoon, too, had a girlfriend to think of, and parents who worried about him. Of course their concerns mattered to him. But other people's worries had never stopped him from doing something he knew he could pull off. Besides, he told himself, Ruff had made those serious mistakes. He'd let outside pressures push him over the edge. But Huntoon knew better. His body might not be as nimble as it once was, but his mind was razor sharp.

After the doctor at the clinic officially pronounced Ruff dead, Huntoon had to hike back to the bowl to retrieve some photo equipment he'd left on the hill. It was a long slog through the melting snow, but after all the hysteria back at the clinic, the silence of the backcountry was a welcome relief. When he finally reached the bowl, he felt a ghostly calm come over him. He could see Ruff's tracks leading down from the summit, then nothing. From below, the jump looked amazingly doable, a clean, straight shot. This must have been how Ruff first scoped it out, he thought. "I could go up there and do that," Huntoon said to himself. "I could do it for Paul."

END

return to Alex's resume

In Search of Big Air
Snow-filled days, mosh-pit nights and a taste of teen-age freedom.

By ALEX MARKELS
03/05/95
Los Angeles Times
Home
PG 16

Cars idle in the Los Alamitos High School parking lot as the tour bus pulls in. Trunks snap open, and groggy-eyed teen-agers emerge, grabbing snowboards and skis and racing to the partly filled bus in hopes of staking out a good seat. Parents mill about, looking on with either worry or outright anticipation of their own upcoming freedom.

One mom tries to give her daughter a goodby kiss, but it's no use. Keenly aware that the kids on the bus are within eyeshot, the girl squirms free from her mother's arms.

"No mom," she says sternly. "Just say goodby."

"I'll kiss you," her best friend tells the mother.

Another parent is suspicious of the chaperon's youth. "I'm Courtney's mom," she says sternly. "This is the first year we've let her go."

"Oh, we'll be gentle with her," responds Matt Miller, a 21-year-old UC Irvine student who has volunteered in exchange for a free ski trip.

"No!" the woman exclaims. "Whatever you do, don't be gentle. They'll go wild."

A father points to his disheveled son, a wild-haired 16-year-old named Eli. "Last time he came back with green hair," the man says with a scowl.

"Maybe he swam in an over-chlorinated pool," offers Miller.

"I don't think so."

The big day is here. All over California, teen-agers are boarding buses for a defining ritual: the high school ski trip. This one's the coolest and the biggest: 3,000 kids from 200 high schools packed onto 59 buses bound for Salt Lake City; four days and nights partying with friends, mosh dancing at a rock concert, and snowboarding and skiing at resorts most have only seen in magazines.

Best of all, no parents! No one to make them clean up their rooms. No one to tell them what to eat or who to hang out with or what clothes to wear.

There are, of course, rules against drinking and smoking pot and staying out past the 11 p.m. room curfew, but the volunteers who supervise the trip, along with a parent or two, are a far cry from typical high school chaperons. Most are 21 to 25 and former fraternity boys from Southern California colleges; to their edicts of "don't do it" they are likely to add, "and if you do, don't get caught."

Kids are still boarding at "Los Al," the bus's last stop, when a beer bottle crammed inside a boot bag shatters and begins leaking all over the luggage compartment. Miller decides not to bust the owner. But since the bag is full of broken glass, he climbs on the bus and addresses the kids.

"I'm not going to open it," he announces. "Because if I find something, I'll have to kick the person off the bus. But whose ever it is, please take it somewhere and clean it out or it's not going on the bus."

The kids look around at each other, then at Miller.

"S'not mine," says one. "I wouldn't be stupid enough to bring bottles. I only brought cans."

"I only drink vodka," snaps another.

After a few minutes, a red-faced girl shuffles forward accompanied by a friend. She grabs the bag and the two scamper off to the school bathroom.

When they return, Miller takes a final roll call and signals the driver. The bus pulls onto the freeway and the kids settle into their seats, fidgeting with backrests, spreading blankets and plugging in CD and tape players.

The coach is no run-of-the-mill school bus. There are 47 seats, and all but the rear bench are velour recliners. Huge plate-glass windows provide seat-to-ceiling views of the passing landscape, and video monitors hang from the overhead compartments.

Miller has come prepared. When he heard his bus would likely have a VCR system, he grabbed half a dozen titles from his video library. He pops in his favorite, "Caddyshack," and the bus falls silent.

"Greatest invention since Ritalin," says one of the adults, pointing to the screen. Adds Miller: "On buses with just stereos, everybody fights over the music. And they get bored, and they start to party. This totally mellows them out."

Nineteen hours, 60-something Big Macs and about 100 dead bodies later ("Menace II Society," "Scarface" and assorted other blood-drenched flicks are in Miller's collection), we arrive at the Embassy Suites in downtown Salt Lake City. The ride was thankfully uneventful, especially compared to the bus behind ours.

It seems a bunch of rowdy boys from El Toro High School were paired with a group from Rosary, an all-girls Catholic school. Things got off to a bad start when a boy in the back mooned the Rosary parents just as the bus pulled out of the parking lot. During the ride, a chaperon thought he saw beer cans thrown from the bus, and a Rosary girl complained the boys were pinching girls' butts as they tried to get to the bathroom.

Turns out a Rosary parent is a police officer. Phone calls are made to the Salt Lake City Police Department, and by the time the bus arrives at the hotel, two cops are waiting. They board the bus and search for beer cans but find nothing. After chewing out a sassy El Toro boy, they march off and drive away.

Later, the El Toro boys are hanging out in the lobby with Shannon, one of the Rosary girls they'd allegedly grabbed.

"It didn't bother me," she says earnestly.

Tony, Joel, Todd, B.J., Jeff and Randy, ages 16 to 18, have all the trappings of a gang. Most sport shaved heads, blue satin flight jackets and ultra-wide pants with chain-linked wallets. Their talk is in code and littered with profanities. They've got enough attitude to last Mick Jagger a lifetime, but they say they aren't skinheads. Far from it. Tony and Jeff say they started shaving their heads for football, Joel did it for motorcycling. The others thought it was cool, so they did it too.

"I guess long hair's kinda played out," one explains.

Sunday, 7:30 a.m.

It's a windy, crystal-blue morning as the bus snakes up Little Cottonwood Canyon toward Snowbird ski area. Most of these kids have never skied outside of California, and they ogle the surrounding peaks as they step into the parking lot.

They claim snowboards and skis, then amble toward the lifts.

Once at the resort, they can go wherever and with whomever they want until the bus picks them up at 4:30. Cliques have already formed, most notably around Melissa, a sweet-natured 17-year-old who earned a free trip by recruiting 15 schoolmates.

She started snowboarding in eighth grade, though she's skied since she was 3. A senior this year, she says she wants to go to Boulder, Colo., for college. That is, if she can persuade her parents. "That would be soooo sweeet," she coos. "I hope to go there and, like, take classes and work at the ski lifts to help pay for school. That means I can board and go to school. Purrrrrfect! And no parents. Yes!"

Tomboyish, with blond braids falling from a black knit cap and a snowboarder's trademark baggy duds, she's perfectly at home with the boys. "They just push it to the limit," she says as she rides up the chair, half a dozen snowboarder dudes in tow. "I watch the guys take air and I say, `All right, I'm going to try it.' I like the adrenaline rush. My boyfriend rips," she continues. "He's one of those guys who doesn't care what happens to his body. He'll just charge it and do the most insane things. You're, like, `Whoa!' He inspired me a lot."

The group takes a few cruising runs to warm up, then it's off to search for big air. Scouring the hillsides, they fling themselves off rocks, moguls and just about anything else in unending pursuit of one tingly taste of weightlessness after another.

Snowboarders have a reputation for being obsessed with jumping and riding out of control, but their penchant for thrills is more a factor of their age than what they choose to attach to their feet. Not only are teen-agers more apt to push the limits until they push back, most are fledglings in a fledgling sport.

Snowboarding was invented in the late 1970s, but its popularity has recently mushroomed. Snowboarders, or "riders" as they prefer to call themselves, make up only about 17.5% of the total skiing population, but three-fourths of them are under 24, which lends the sport a decidedly rebellious character.

Skateboarders and surfers, finding much in common with the sideways stance and jibbing steering techniques of their own sports, have quickly adopted snowboarding as their own. That's infused it with a hip social culture that's part beach bum, part street kid and wholly miscreant.

But for all its smartass attitude, snowboarding is remarkably inclusive. Anyone riding a board is immediately accepted into the fraternity, regardless of garb or talent or age. Take our group: At the front of the pack there's Aron, a pimple-faced surfer dude who wears a firefighter's jacket. Next is Jon-Paul, a stubby former wrestler with jet-black dyed hair and a magnetic attraction for "hospital air," a.k.a. jumps that might land one in the infirmary.

Melissa, by far the most graceful rider in the group, holds her own, but a couple of the other kids are pretty green, one literally. He's Tom, a friend of Melissa who decided to celebrate his 21st birthday on the trip because its $329 price sounded like a "cool deal." Sporting a goatee and bright green hair, he picked up the nickname "Booger" during the bus ride.

About half the kids here are snowboarders. And like many, Tom has yet to get the hang of it and spends as much time on his butt as on his feet.

Unlike skiers, few snowboarders have ever bothered to take lessons. Nearly everyone holds recent memories of their own foibles and most are willing to offer a hand. "Your friends can teach you, so you don't have to take some stupid class," one school-phobic rider told me. "It takes two hours to learn." But it's not simply that snowboarding's easier to learn. The sheer lack of defined rules and established techniques means there's no clear hierarchy. No one to tell you you're doing it wrong.

"Skiing is, like, a more serious sport," says Eli, as he pauses on his duff. "Snowboarding is, like, you just go to have fun. Everyone pretty much has their own style. There's no certain rules to it like there is in skiing. You can ride your board forward, backward, sideways, every which direction. You do whatever. You don't care how you look. You just try to get as big air as you can. But you try to be unique. Make your own moves."

To be sure, if style and precision are integral to skiing, the antithesis is true of snowboarding.

The clothing is potato-sack baggy, and the tricks performed seem awkward in the extreme. But for a generation yearning to express itself, snowboarding may be the perfect canvas. New moves with names like 540 McTwist, Backside Disaster Revert and Fakie2Fakie are constantly being invented. Riders cover their $400 boards, which look like oversized skateboards, with graffiti art and stickers, giving each a homemade quality. And the clothing, ranging from goofy Cat in the Hat to East L.A. gangsta, screams for attention.

"Skiers still l wear those tight stretch pants, like back when my grandparents were skiing," says Aron, whose bright yellow firefighter's jacket could very well turn into next year's latest fashion. "Snowboarding is constantly changing, which is why teen-agers like it."

To many skiers, however, the change is unwelcome. With a lexicon in which the F-word works as an adjective, verb and noun-often in the same sentence-snowboarders have earned reputation for rudeness. Rumors of gun-toting snowboarders and gangs on the slopes have helped polarize the skier-snowboarder rift. But truth be known, packs of wily snowboarders bear closer resemblance to "Our Gang" than to "Boyz N the Hood." And while adults may interpret their thug-like attire as a show of solidarity with inner-city kids, snowbarders reasons are far less philosophical.

"It's more comforatable," says one, standing in a tent-size jacket. "It's totally for freedom of movement."

Sunday, 7:30 p.m.

Time for the main event: a three-band lineup starring Offspring, a thrash band now in heavy rotation on MTV. Frisked at the door, the kids file into a long hall with balconies on either side and a stage at one end. The music begins to pump. The emcee takes the stage and advises dancers against raising their elbows.

"Mosh in peace!" he exclaims.

The first band, Sublime, breaks into a grungy reggae, and the floor vibrates with stomping feet. By the second song, a swirling mosh pit springs up 20 feet from the packed stage. Boys pace around a 30-foot circle, crashing into each other like bumper cars, then recovering and continuing on. The pounding occasionally lands someone on the floor, but he's immediately scooped up and pushed back into the crowd.

Like their rule-wary snowboarding, moshing is a sort of dancing anarchy, free from the constraints of defined steps or rhythm. "It's legal fighting," says Tony, whose hulking frame downs at least a dozen dancers by the end of the night. "If you get knocked down, you look stupid in front of the whole crowd. If you knock them down, you're the baddest guy around."

Others see it in gentler terms. "Yeah, you push people, but you don't try to fight," says a longhaired boy from Santa Monica. "You just take that person's energy and you give it to someone else. And when they fall down, you pick them up. It's like they're your brother."

By the time the second band takes the stage, the scene looks more like a riot than a concert. The singer, a Madonna clone who fingers the crotch of her baggy pants as she struts around the stage, leads the girls in the audience through a version of her latest song, "Sixteen."

"A-B-C-D-E-F-G, don't you want to sleep with me?" they sing as the band blares.

When the band leaves the stage, a group of kids congregate in the middle of the hall. Lizzy, a doe-eyed 16-year-old, is dressed in her best grunge attire: knit cap, plaid shirt, baggy jeans and Chuck Taylor sneakers. But, like most of the other girls, she's stayed far from the mosh pit, unimpressed with the boys' antics.

"Jon-Paul got hit," she says with disdain. "He's at the back near the men's room." Flanked by two medics, J.P. slumps in a chair, a three-inch gash over his right eye.

"My mom's gonna be pissed," he says with a lightheaded shrug. He points to a bruise under his other eye. "Last time she bummed heavily."

The injury count eventually rises to a dozen. Tonight's includes an epileptic seizure that temporarily halts the concert, a few sprained limbs and a concussion.

By room check, the kids have finally mellowed, but whether it's from exhaustion or intoxication is hard to say. In this hotel full of high-schoolers, almost everyone who wanted to has smuggled in some kind of alcohol, and the faint smell of marijuana wafts through the corridors.

At 2:30 a.m., Miller-who has logged maybe four hours of sleep in the last 48-gets an emergency call from one of the girls' rooms.

Shannon is choking and can't breath. Paramedics soon arrive. They ask her roommates if she's taken any drugs. The girls say they don't think so. Shannon, who's taking medicine for chronic asthma and bronchitis, refuses to go to the hospital. Her parents are called, and the next morning Miller announces on the bus that she's been sent home.

But she's in the lobby that afternoon, indignant over her treatment: "This is what I've heard about what happened to me: My lung collapsed, I OD'd on drugs, I was dead and came back to life, I choked on a marijuana seed, I mixed my drugs and my medicine because I wanted to kill myself because I couldn't handle the skiing up here."

She crosses her arms and frowns: "Pissed me off. It's so lame. I just choked on my gum, and my asthma worked up. And when your asthma works up, your bronchial tubes close. So, of course, I couldn't breathe.

"They called my parents at 3 a.m. telling them I was under the influence of drugs, but they didn't even know. You can't sit there and lie about me and tell them I'm on drugs. I could totally sue."

As it turns out, the tour's 32-year-old operator is the first to support her. "I believe in innocent until proven guilty," he says the next evening. "She said she wasn't on drugs, and they didn't find anything, so we let her stay."

Unfortunately, his subordinates had already begun a deliberate campaign of misinformation. Having run high school trips since 1979, he and his cohorts have long since figured out the best way to keep a lid on trouble: Ugly rumor. Clamp down on them hard, or at least give that impression, and you control 99% of the trouble that might follow.

"We don't always send them home, but we give the other kids the impression they're gone," he says. "That's why we have the detention center: When a kid gets busted, we say, `Look, we're giving you the biggest second chance you've ever had. You'll stay on the trip, but you'll never see your friends until the bus ride home.' " Supervisors then quarantine the naughty youths in one hotel room, letting them out only to ski.

The tactic occasionally backfires, as in Shannon's case, but it succeeds in casting a clear "Here's the line. You cross it, you're out" message while avoiding the inconvenience of shipping large numbers home early.

Monday, 7:30 a.m.

The bus is half empty. After last night, many have decided to spend the day in front of the TV or hitting the nearby shopping malls. Those who do go are treated to six inches of fresh powder, though most are exhausted by noon.

"This is what it's all about," says Melissa, a serene smile lighting up her face as the day draws to a close. "It's that intense feeling. It's, like, one with the trees. Just you and a buddy cruising the woods."

Tonight there'll be a dance party, but nothing like last night's mosh fest. Most kids choose to hang in their rooms, relishing the freedom of partying late without threat of mom and dad returning home early. Red-eyed kids occasionally appear in the hallways. A few are busted for smuggling beer and hauled off to the detention center. But all in all, everything's mellow.

Wednesday, 6 p.m.

The bus roars out of the Flying J truck stop and onto I-15 south. The kids have ravaged the shelves of the mini-mart, inspiring the manager to high-five his cashier. Thanks to this and six other buses, the just-opened store sets a record for sales in an hour: $3,000.

After making last turns at Brighton ski area, the kids are exhausted and easily sedated with a flick. Miller plugs in "Stand by Me."

Everyone's swapped seats, and there are a few new couples sitting beside each other. As the night progresses, they slowly move closer, intertwining fingers, then arms, legs and, finally, lips. All in all, though, their shy make-out sessions are a far cry from the X-rated talk of the last few days.

"Used to be, we couldn't pry them apart with crowbars," says bus driver John Pfening, who chaperoned Emery's first outing 15 years ago. "All the girls and boys wanted to sleep together. Nowadays they could care less. The guys only want to party and the girls don't want much of anything to do with them."

Pfening figures it's probably the AIDS thing. But all in all, he thinks this generation of California kids is a lot less troubled than the mass media portrays.

"It got to a point in the mid-1980s that the kids were very destructive. They were throwing TVs out the window, causing thousands in damage to the hotels and buses. This year, out of 44 kids, this bus had a pillow missing. And for all their messiness, the entire group caused less than $100 in damage at the hotel. That's amazing."

Pfening has four kids, one of whom will soon be old enough to come. But will he let her?

He smiles. "Not without me as the driver."

END

Los Angeles Times Magazine
Times Magazine Desk

Grated Expectations

04/02/95
Los Angeles Times
PG 11

"In Search of Big Air" (by Alex Markels, March 5), chronicling a four-day high school ski trip to Salt Lake City, left me gasping. Tour companies that organize such trips assure parents that there will be strict rules, curfews and a no-nonsense approach to discipline. Reading the article made me, as a parent, feel misled. I allowed my daughter to go on the trip, but I obviously made the wrong decision.

It's hard to identify an activity not sanctioned by the high school when solicitation for it is conducted at the school and the bus pickup point is the school parking lot. After the article appeared, we got a call from the office at Los Alamitos High School telling us that the trip was an "underground activity" in no way sanctioned by the school.

Carla Graham Los Alamitos