It is no longer completely in our hands. Due to the lack of snow on the western slopes we climbed, the teacher opts for a different descent. He tells me that on weekends its not unusual to find two hundred skiers from the valley up here. They all go down the same way. I expect him to wager an educated guess about the conditions, but experience has taught him that a guess, even an educated one, is just a guess.
Life begins with dust on crust.
The sun, approaching the bed of the horizon, accents our northerly line with golden light. The teacher yodels several bars of a traditional song, a gesture that strips him of the bifocals and bunions five decades of life have given him. He is no longer a graying teacher but a boy who has always loved the freedom of the mountains, a boy who has always used snowy slopes and slippery boards to do the impossible - fly. Fly he does. With sweeping GS turns he interconnects jumps between snowed over rocks.