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Chapter Sixteen: Flight

Neither of us was in great shape. Maggy, coming off a double shift, hadn't slept in twenty-two hours. I'd had a little sleep, but my head still ached and I couldn't walk without pain. My diaphragm belt bruised, so I couldn't even draw a deep breath. But we wolfed down breakfast, planning to be out of town before dawn.

It was a good bet that Maggy had been followed from her apartment. Even if not, it was still too dangerous to go there for her gear. We liberated sweaters and long johns from Ralph's dresser. Maggy pulled on a pair of largish Horowitz ski pants and an even larger down parka. She had her own felt-pack boots. None of Ralph's footgear would be warmer than my ski boots, but I found pants to replace my shredded bottoms. The orange juice bottle, a half-dozen hard-boiled eggs, and about a pound of hard candies from the mantle went into my avvy pack. Maggy found a thermos bottle under the sink and filled it with hot sweet tea.

"Take more Darvon," Maggy advised. "It's gonna be rough."

"I'll fall asleep."

"Believe me, you won't fall asleep. Bring the bottle."

I wrote Ralph an IOU for the clothing and stuck it under a Garfield magnet on the refrigerator. The, just to give any watcher-in-the-dark a tougher time, Maggy snuck out the back door and I snuck out the front like Richard III, hoping not to be recognized as a ski patrolman risen from the grave. We linked up again behind The Gant condos.

"We don't have to hike up," I told Maggy. "There's a 'bile we use for towing toboggans parked over by the clinic."

"Wait here. I'll go get it. Don't want you seen there if anyone's still coming in from the search."

"What search?"

"The search for you, dummy."

Maggy was back in five minutes, riding a noisy headlight and grinning from behind Ralph's ski goggles. I bungied the Heads on the rack, and winced as I climbed aboard. Then I almost fell off as she gunned the machine in half a circle and aimed straight up toward Kleenex Corner and Spar Gulch.

"Had my choice!" she yelled over the whine of the two-stroke. "The were using all these sleds in the search. The guys must have come in less than an hour ago. The engines were still warm."

"How much gas have we got?"

"How much do we need?"

"We're going about thirty miles."

"Can we get gas on the mountain?"

"Up on top."

"We'll stop there and check."

I held on tight, right hand on the steel grab bar behind me, left arm around Maggy's heavily padded waist. On the groomed terrain of the ski area, we moved upward fast, blasting into the snowfall at a good forty miles an hour. The fat snowflakes dove up our headlight beam like demented moths. They were blinding, and I tried to look into the darkness on either side of the trail. Maggy stood up and hiked to the inboard side on each turn, and soon I was doing the same, except I took care always to land on my right buttock. It took less than five minutes before the lights of Sundeck came into view.

Tim and Josh, I thought. The summit crew has been awake all night because of the search.

"We're gonna be seen here," I told Maggy. "They've already heard us. Go straight to the maintenance shed and don't shut down. I'll grab a gas can and we'll go."

"Oil, too," she shouted. "It takes pre-mix." She fishtailed us past the Sundeck corner and on the hardpacked snow outside the garage did a neat broadside skid to a stop against the door.

I scrambled crablike into the unlocked building and flipped the light switch. My goggles fogged instantly in the warm air. I cursed and snatched them down around my neck. The red jerry cans stood stacked against the far wall. I hefted a full one, and dragged it sloshing to the door. A row of shelves held belts, bolts, springs, plugs, oil cans. I found a plastic quart bottle of two-stroke oil and shoved it in my parka pocket. Then back into the snow, perched behind Maggy again with the hard-edged jerry can on my lap. I pounded her shoulder and pointed south. "Go, go, go!" And we went.

Beyond the explosives magazine the packed trail ends. Beyond, the snow was bottomless, and the machine slowed as we sank deeper. Maggy kept her thumb hard on the throttle so the machine would plane as we rose gradually along the crest of Richmond Hill. The falling snow seemed to be thinning before the headlight, but I hoped that was because we had slowed in the softer snow. I wanted enough new snow, over the next few hours, to drift over our track. Tim and Josh were sure to report the passage of a snowmobile - and if Tug had been watching Maggy, he would soon come looking for us.

Meanwhile we wallowed upward, following the gently rounded back of Richmond Hill toward the 12,000 foot summit.

After ten minutes the engine revs rose and our speed picked up. We had topped out and were cruising on level terrain.

"We'll stop and gas up on the down-slope," Maggy yelled. "Easier to get going again, headed downhill."

"Where did you learn to power-slide these things?" I asked. Speaking directly to her ear, I didn't have to shout over the engine noise.

"Nurses who ski well sometimes get asked to run sleds," she bellowed back. "The guys at Squaw Valley always wanted me aboard. The things get squirrelly when you traverse a steep, hard-snow slope. You have to learn to skid it in control."

"You can do that any time?"

"Not in real deep snow. On roads or packed slopes. It's just like a car. You steer and punch the power and the tail slides. Cut the power and it just spins to a stop."

"Hey, hey, I got a pro driver. Now we want to stay high, with Ashcroft down on our right," I said. "It will be about five more miles. It we stay on the ridge we won't have to climb back up out of the Castle Creek valley."

"Yeah, boss."

So Maggy kept us pointed along the crest, and down its south shoulder we went. As our speed picked up, she backed off the throttle a bit. It's one thing to charge uphill into the bottom of a cliff, and quite another to roar downhill off the top of one. The trees thickened as we moved lower, and she snaked us slalom-style through the aspens peopling this south-facing slope. The gas can grew heavier as I leaned side-to-side to stabilize it in the turns.

Finally, Maggy slowed the machine to a halt and let it idle. In calm air it was obvious that the snowfall was diminishing and our track wouldn't fill in. She hopped to one side, sinking to the waist in snow that had never seen tracks.

"Don't set that gas can down in the snow or it'll sink to China," she advised. I horsed it forward along the snowmobile's seat, then climbed down into the snow opposite Maggy so we could both lift the can up.

We guesstimated the oil by dumping the whole quart into the jerry can, then manhandled the can up over the filler cap and began sloshing gasoline around. Working in front of the headlight, I cut the bottom out of the plastic oil can to turn it into a funnel. We spilled a lot of gas over the hood and into the snow, but some of the stuff got into the tank. I tied the emptied jerry can and the plastic funnel on the rear rack along with my skis and rubbed snow into Ralph's gas-spattered pants. Maggy was already back in the saddle.

"Give me a push and be ready to hop on as soon as we're moving," she said, so I heaved the grab bar and as the engine whined up scrambled into an awkward side-saddle. We were swinging through the trees again before I managed to hoist my hurt leg over and lean against Maggy's back.

"Can I sleep back here?" I asked.

"Better tie on first," she said.

The eastern sky grew pink as we picked up the Peari Pass trail rising out of Ashcroft, and began climbing again, following switchbacks southward.

"Just follow the trail signs now," I yelled. "We go to the Wilson hut, over the Pass to the Friends hut and down to Gothic."

The going was faster now, because under the eighteen inches of new powder lay a firm track. I hoped to reach the summit huts by full daylight and pass them before any touring skiers awoke. Maggy and I might be fleeing for our lives, but I was nonetheless embarrassed to be tracking out a cross country ski trail on a snowmobile.

But the ride was smooth and every ten minutes put another mile between us and Tug Moran. I closed my eyes and leaned my cheek against the cold, damp nylon of Ralph's parka, and with both arms around Maggy's waist dozed to the steady high drone of the Yamaha. Turns woke me but I drifted away again quickly. I was conscious that the snow had stopped falling, that the dawn was clear and lovely, that the dull aches in my head and body would fade with sleep.

Gradually the terrain steepened toward Pearl Pass, and the sky lightened. I came awake again in time to pass the Wilson and Tagert huts, warm lamplight glowing through the windows in the blue and rose dawn. We screamed past them in unneighborly haste, towing our now-visible rooster-tail of snow.

Full daylight came before trouble. The thousand feet to the pass was steep and heavily drifted. Maggy stayed hard on the gas and we labored slowly across obvious avalanche hazards. At switchback turns the machine bogged; five times we had to dismount, horse the machine around by its steering runners, then heave it into upward motion again. The avalanche danger was vast and crazy. We had no business crossing the bowl, but to reach the top we had to cross it again and again, zigging up toward the saddle. Beyond the top, it would be downhill all the way to Crested Butte.

But as we neared the crest, it came to look impassable. We were looking up the wrong side of a cornice. There would be no way to get the snowmobile up its sheer face.

"Cut it!" I told Maggy.

Overwhelmed by silence, I peered at the overhang, glowing pink and white in morning brilliance against the deep blue of the southwest sky. Fifteen feet high, as far as the snowmobile was concerned it might as well have been the Great Wall of China.

"We can't stay here and we can't go on," Maggy said. "Is there another route? Can we backtrack?"

"Not if we're being followed."

"I can backtrack. You go on on skis. You can climb over and ski out to Crested Butte."

"We can't split up. And I couldn't slog all that way with this leg."

"Well, then?"

"We'll have to get the machine over. I'll knock the cornice down."

"Can you do it?"

"Yeah." I climbed off into waist-deep snow and untied the skis. "Take the snowmobile back around the corner of the bowl so you won't get nailed when this slides. I'll need about half an hour." I hope we have half an hour, I thought.

On skis again, I began climbing. Breaking trail was agonizing. I had to crab upward to the right, because my left leg wouldn't bend well. I leaned on both poles when I had to stand on the left side, and in the soft snow both poles sank deep.

I wished I had more time. But I was afraid of pursuit. Anyone following our track would move a lot faster than we could, and the delay getting over the top could cost our lives.

If an avalanche didn't kill us.

I was scared. The bowl should have slid under the snowmobile. It still could slide under me. I labored upward, flogging myself, moving as fast as I could. Each breath burned my gut, each step burned my leg.

It took fifteen minutes to reach the bottom of the cornice. The overhang looked unclimbable, but I shoved the tails of the skis horizontally into the hard face. I could stand on one ski, put the other into the snow a couple of feet higher and sit on it, retrieve the first and shove it in higher, and move up slowly, ski to ski. It took five minutes to get over the 15 foot wall.

At the top I walked south a few yards and dug a horizontal trench. I tied my climbing line around the middle of my ski poles and buried them in the hole, packing the snow down hard. This was a crude deadman anchor. It might hold my weight. I went back to the edge of the cornice and tied into the belay with a bowline around my waist.

Then I put my skis back on and cut the cornice. A step, a jump with the tails. A little bit cracked off and tumbled. A step, a jump. A bit more. I gritted my teeth and jumped as high as I could, and a piece of cornice the size of a box car tilted into the void, sliding out from under me. I threw myself backward, tumbling into the gap that widened at the fracture, praying the rope would hold.

I landed on bare ground and skidded to a stop, held by the rope. I watched the whole bowl slide away below me, a vast climax avalanche, thundering 2000 feet down and 2000 feet across. Snowclouds billowed like steam from a volcano. The hiss of tumbling snow turned into a locomotive roar as the mass piled into the trees far below.

I hung onto tne rope, resting on my right hip, breathing as gently as I could to save my gut. Then I got to work with the shovel, cutting a ramp out of the crown line so we could drive the snowmobile through to the smooth, firm snow on the windward side.

Maggy had no trouble bringing the machine up the smooth hard surface left behind the slide. All the rough deposition lay far below. We drove and pushed the sled up the little ramp I had dug.

Pearl Pass lies between Pearl Mountain and Hayden Peak. The flat section on the saddle is narrow. We soon had to descend a stretch just as steep as the one we had come up. Maggy eliminated the switchbacks, pointing the sled straight downhill in the deep snow, light on the gas while we both leaned back to drive the tail of the machine deep.

Soon the trail levelled out and as we entered the woods again we passed the Friends hut, breakfast smoke curling from the chimney. I looked back toward the pass.

Two black spots sped along our track, each with its own plume.

"Shit, they're following us," I told Maggy.