The snowfield began to move. Despite our training hours in mountain safety and winter camping, half of the class had bunched together on this slope that’s beginning to slide underfoot…

The winter after I finished college, I used the money from my elementary school car accident to pay my tuition to a wilderness emergency medical technician course in upstate New Hampshire. My classmates were preparing to lead cross country bike trips, rafting expeditions, kayaking adventures up the Canadian coastline. At the time, I had an offer to work at Carlsbad Caverns. For a month my classmates and I spent our days in the classroom learning anatomy and first aid, or doing hands on practice of backcountry leadership, safety and wilderness rescue. Some afternoons we’d snowshoe out into the woods to perform search and rescue for our “injured“ classmates lying in the snow with pretend broken limbs, to bind and sled them back to safety. Is it wrong that my favorite parts of those days were the “energy cookies”, so filled with chocolate, m&m’s, nuts and fruit? Man, I love cookies. 

Near the end we hiked up a mountain, camped in handmade shelters for the night to put our winter survival skills to the test. Of all the beauty and wonder of that trip, one of the most indelible memories is Ted, the course coordinator, who seemed to us a “grizzled wilderness mountain guide“ but was in reality probably in his early 40s, trudging up the trail, like a machine. He was the living embodiment of the “I think I can” train or the  tortoise from the fable where it races the hare. He set out with a deliberate pace from the vans that never changed for the entirety of the hike to the summit, no matter how steep the slope or deep the snow. Us young pups took off into the snow and then exhausted ourselves. We’d rest and along would come Ted with his great big bushy beard and his mummy-like strides and gallumph past. We would gulp in more oxygen and take off after him, with our ears flopping behind us, once again too fast for our own good. Time and again it would happen, and each time Ted went about his business like he’d been hiking this snowy hill his whole life, which he had. It was enlightening and humiliating at the same time. Though we were too young and stupid to emulate him at the time, I can say in all truth that with every single road race I embody Ted’s philosophy, knowing that I’ll catch up to many of the younger runners who take off from the starting horn too fast.

At the summit, the group was standing on a snowfield near a cliff, taking in celebratory views of the White Mountains (both the name of the range and a literal description) when we set off the avalanche. Good news: the whole slab only moved about a foot. I’m not gonna lie though, that was a scary ass moment. After that vivid reminder of snow safety, we built our igloos before the sun set and temps plummeted into the negative numbers, and settled in for a night of breathing in our own exhaled moisture, getting dripped on by the melt/freezing ceiling, and peeing into our empty water bottles to avoid having to leave the igloo. In the morning we descended while classmates “broke their legs” periodically to further test our skills.