A Sphinx-Like State of Mind
In April, 2014, I got invited to ski for a Warren Miller film in Cordova, Alaska, at Points North Heli, which is where I had met my husband two years earlier. He was my ski guide—but that’s another story. This story is about getting to ski a peak called The Sphinx—a sustained 57-degree diamond of a face that was named one of the 50 Classic Ski Descents in the book by Chris Davenport. I had heard about it for years as a true test piece of Alaskan steep skiing.
When I arrived in Cordova, my friend Jessica, a co-owner of the guide company, had told me they had applied for a special permit for us to ski the Sphinx if the weather lined up. However, I also knew from ten years of previous Alaska experience it was pointless to start feeling nervous, excited, or really anything, since the likelihood of weather and conditions lining up for this to happen were about as slim as me getting to cuddle one of the otter babies out swimming in the bay.
We filmed a few runs over the course of four days in between clouds, and then, miraculously, the forecast changed to high pressure. The snow was stable. My mind went rapidly from, “Yay, we might get a chance to ski the Sphinx!” To “HOLY CRAP, we might have to ski the Sphinx!”
As we made a plan that night, the filmer said we should fly out by 11, as he thought the sun would be hitting the face by noon and he wanted to be ready. We thought that sounded early, but also didn’t want to argue with a legendary filmer like Tom Day.
The next day cracked blue and we tried our best to chill out all morning, doing yoga and chatting, checking our gear obsessively. Finally, we flew out and dropped the filmer and one skier, Chris Anthony, at the base. Anthony, a legend who had appeared in 20+ Warren Miller films at that point, chose to sit out this run, since he wasn’t feeling it 100% he wanted to let us have it.
Us womenfolk loaded up the heli: myself, Jess McMillan, a FWT champion and ripping skier from Jackson Hole, and our guide Kim Grant, a badass from Silverton and one of only a handful of women heli guides at the time. We landed at the top around 10:30am, high-fiving excitedly as the roar of the heli gave way to utter calm and silence. We were on top of the Sphinx! Now, we just had to make a dicey, exposed traverse across a thin ridge from our landing zone to the top of the actual face. We donned our packs and carefully knocked snow off our boots. Slowly, focused and quiet—for once not chatting incessantly—we slid carefully, one by one, to the adjacent peak.
The top of the Sphinx is like a peak from a storybook: a perfectly rounded summit with a massive rocky chute on one side, a knife edge ridge over cliffs to our right, and below—the run we were planning to ski—nothing but a smooth rollover of snow and then the flat glacier, 1800 feet below, where the helicopter looked like a tiny water skeeter on a massive white pond. The run was so steep and the rollover so pronounced that we couldn’t see a single turn we wanted to ski. We stomped out a little pad and started to wait, nervously chatting and trying to enjoy the amazing view of sunshine, mountains, and ocean spread out in every direction. An hour went by, and still we waited. The guys on the glacier assured us the sun was moving and the face would be lit up soon. We couldn’t see it, so just had to guess from the position of the sun in the sky. It still looked to me like it would be a bit.
Standing on top of a line, the longer one waits, the more time there is for nerves to build. If I look at a run and then go up and drop in, I’m generally in the right mode. But standing on top, especially without seeing anything, the waiting tends to really get in my head. We started talking about the snow stability, about how we would ski cut the top part on belay, and since it was already determined that I was going first, I asked a gajillion questions and second guessed everything. I didn’t even take one single picture, as I didn’t want to act celebratory before we skied. Also, my hands were shaky and I didn’t want to drop my phone down the face.
I hit peak nerves at about 2:45pm. The light still hadn’t hit the face and I’d worked myself into a tizzy. It didn’t help that breakfast was hours ago and there was no way I could stomach food at this point. My mouth was dry, my breathing shallow. We radioed Chris for the millionth time, asking how the light was looking. He calmly said it would be maybe 30 more minutes, the face looked great, we were going to do great. He must have sensed the nerves in my voice because the next thing we knew, our radios began blasting “A Beautiful Day,” by U2.
The sound was fuzzy at best—from Chris’s phone, over a walkie talkie. By 2014, that song had jumped the shark, long past its peak of cultural cheesiness, overplayed in grocery stores, elevators and commercials. But in this moment, looking out from our perch as queens on top of a blue and white world, nothing had ever sounded better nor felt more true. We started cheering and dancing, singing along at max volume. We immediately got our stoke back, and were able to sink into the reality of the moment, to realize where we were and to know that we had this.
We had a little snack, sipped some water, took just one more scenic pee, and then it was time to drop. I skied the Sphinx at 3:30pm, followed shortly by Jess and Kim, and it was one of the steepest and most scenic, floaty, memorable runs of my life. We hugged at the bottom, and Chris was so happy for us, genuinely stoked.
That day meant a lot of things, but one of them that stands out is how Chris sat back from the action yet stepped up and did what he could to support the success of the whole team. That and the magic mood-changing properties of one perfectly chosen song.
A few links from this week:
When digging up info on The Sphinx, I came across this video that I never knew existed, from Chris Anthony at the base while we were at the top. Gives a little insight on the moment! (Youtube, one minute video)
An episode of the 50 Project by Cody Townsend in which he and his ski partners climbed and then skied this same line a few years ago—very impressive. (Youtube link, 15 minute video).
Our cherry trees that we planted ten years ago made their first usable crop this year! We got half a grocery bag full and I am now making a second double-batch of this very easy cherry jam which I highly recommend: David Lebovitz Cherry Jam recipe
In the cool human news department, here is experimental archaeology at work—scientists re-create a voyage in a hollowed out canoe to test navigation strategies. (NYT, unlocked article).
Thanks for reading!
—Ingrid
Amazing post, Ingrid! And what an insane line. So impressive.
Chris nailed it in his YouTube vid—you demonstrated incredible patience.
Thank you for the insight to what filming is really like! I appreciate my ski movies even more now. :)))