Steep

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John Muir said it really beautifully.

He said, ""Go to the mountains

and get their good tidings. ""

What he meant is

that there is so much out there

that you can receive from that environment.

We receive these amazing feelings

when we're up there

and we feel so strong and

sometimes you do bring those things back.

And it's special.

It's like you've been blessed.

I'm not sure what that is right there.

Ice or rock or something. Yeah.

Nice though. I like the deep of it.

I'm sure the snow will be good in there.

Magical.

It's got a nice start.

The snow looks perfect at the top.

You know, not too steep.

Get a little few warm-up turns

before we drop into this thing.

I didn't choose my life in the mountains.

It just happened.

I tried to become a normal person

and have a normal job, but that didn't work.

As soon as I got out of jail, I went skiing.

As soon as I got out of broken legs,

I went skiing.

That's where I had to go

to make it all right again.

The rest of the world is total chaos.

We're mountain people. This is what we do.

This is how we live.

The risks are very high.

But I think most of us have decided

that the risk is worth it.

For me, as soon as the winter stops,

I get a week off.

I'll start dreaming about skiing.

This concept of just strapping

these boards on your feet.

You know, if you actually sit down and think

about it, it"s like, ""What a concept. ""

You know, that's great.

A couple of 2" x 4"s on your feet,

sliding down the mountain.

You know, how much fun is that?

The idea is simple.

Ski where no one thought to ski before.

Ski the backcountry, away from the resorts

and the rules and restraints

that go with them.

Ski where the sport of skiing

can still be an adventure.

A simple idea, but 35 years ago,

only a handful of people saw

big, wild mountains as a place to ski.

One of the first who did was Bill Briggs.

Skis are appropriate on mountain sides

and all kinds of mountainsides.

In June 1971, Briggs,

a skier and mountain guide

from Jackson Hole, Wyoming,

became the first person to ski

from the summit of one of

America's greatest peaks, the Grand Teton.

The idea wasn't, for me,

that I would be the only one

that would ever do this.

My idea was everybody

should be doing this.

At the time nobody was,

but this is something...

It's too much fun to pass up.

The Grand Teton,

it really is an iconic mountain.

You drive into Jackson Hole

and the first thing you see is

that gigantic, jagged thing

looming up there,

and it looks like it would be

tough to climb, let alone ski.

And in 1971, the concept of skiing

those kind of mountains

was very far from even

most skiers' point of view.

There's nobody out there with signs.

There's no ropes. There's no signs.

There's no patrolmen.

There's nobody, like,

taking care of you on the slopes.

It's not a ski area. You"re on your own.

You know,

you have to make decisions on your own.

Bill Briggs skiing the Grand Teton

was so far ahead of its time.

No one had even come across the idea that,

"Oh, hey, let's go ski that big rock

"with a little bit of snow on it

and call it a ski run."

What Bill Briggs did

was open people"s minds.

People in Jackson told Bill

skiing the Grand was impossible.

There were avalanches and falling rock.

Sections were too steep.

He would have to ski along cliffs

that dropped off for thousands of feet.

The smallest misstep could be fatal.

And Briggs was climbing and skiing

on a surgically fused right hip

that caused him to limp when he walked.

If there's no risk, there's no adventure.

I think adventure is a great part of life.

For me it's, "Why am I living?" You know?

Gee, it's to have some adventure.

Before dawn on June 16th,

Briggs, and three friends he had convinced

to help him climb up the Grand,

Ieft their camp at 11, 000 feet

and began the push to the top.

The route Briggs planned would

take them up the Stettner Couloir,

up the avalanche-prone snowfield

on the east face

along the Petzoldt Ridge

and then the last few hundred feet

to the summit of the Grand.

I expected those guys to break trail for me.

Breaking trail is physically exhausting.

So I get up to the top of the Couloir

and I find they are all right there

and they say, "We can't do it."

Oh, that means I have to do it.

They took one look at the top of the Couloir

and it's a thousand-foot drop, and sheer.

And that was just too much.

Well, at that point I didn't want to quit.

At least I was going to see

how far I could go.

I think the biggest thing

is that he was alone.

You have this internal dialog

up there all the time.

You don't have your friend to talk to.

"You think we should go around

to the left a little?"

Or, "Boy, it's getting steep now."

You know, that's all in your brain.

You can't relay it to anyone else.

And it's fall-you-die terrain.

Where if you get avalanched, you'd be gone.

It's tough when you're alone.

His friends watched Bill pull himself up

onto the steep, snow-covered east face

of the Grand

and disappear from view.

No one saw Bill Briggs

when he reached the summit of the Grand.

No one saw him begin his ski descent.

No one saw him fall

and recover just below the summit

or ski the high snowfields.

Hours after he left them,

Bill's climbing partners waiting below

witnessed an avalanche tear past them.

They are sure that I was in it

and I had gone off this precipice

down a thousand feet.

""Well, that's Briggs

and he"s finished, right?""

Well, I drew a big turn

and I ski right up to my friends.

And they turn around and,

"Where did you come from?"

They didn't see me come through that at all.

They figured I was dead anyway.

And, all of a sudden, I reappear.

Bill descended more than 6,000 feet on skis.

It took him almost five hours

to reach the valley floor.

When I got to the bottom, I'm really tired.

I'm really physically beat

and...

Overjoyed.

I did it. Okay?

Man. This is...

This is the biggest thing I'll do in my life.

There were no witnesses

to Bill Briggs" achievement.

But the next day the proof was still etched

in the snow.

The editor of the local paper flew

with Bill around the summit.

She took four photographs.

And one of them was just a classic.

The beauty of the mountain,

enhanced a bit by human contact.

It was fabulous.

I don't know.

You dream up

what you want to accomplish

in your life and...

I don't know that many people get a chance

to fulfill that.

What that was...

I had at that point fulfilled a dream.

Totally.

I knew that someone had skied the Grand,

but I didn't know

what the Grand looked like.

So it just sort of, "Oh, yeah,

somebody skied the Grand."

And it was, you know, big news.

But I didn't really know what it was.

Doug Coombs was a teenager

growing up in Bedford, Massachusetts

when Bill Briggs skied the Grand.

The quote in his high school yearbook said,

"There is no such thing as too much snow. ""

Even when I was just a little tiny kid,

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