In reality, extreme or big-mountain skiers have been hiking into the backcountry to ski for decades. In New Hampshire, the headwall of Mount Washington’s Tuckerman Ravine has long stood as the Northeast’s ultimate challenge for having the fiercest weather conditions and most dangerous skiable terrain of any mountain range in the region. Skiing Tuckerman’s

headwall is as close to extreme skiing as the advanced skier may want to get. Given that it has claimed over twenty-five skiers’ lives, it may in fact live up to “you fall, you die.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that some of the country’s top extreme skiers of the ’80s and ’90s hailed from New England, where extreme technical skill combines with an ability to handle the extreme elements to forge skiers who might give even the most seasoned skiers out West reason for pause. Names like Doug Coombs, Chris Davenport, Ulmer, the DesLauriers brothers, and the Egan brothers would come to join leftcoasters such as Glen Plake and Scot Schmidt in defining the extreme scene, which was driven more by marketing and sponsorship than any “you fall, you die” incidents.

The Western style would be the sort of extreme skiing credited to European skiers, such as Sylvain Saudan, Jean-Marc Boivin, and Patrick Vallençant. The “real” thing, according to the European mountaineers, was born from dangerous landscapes, like that of Chamonix, France, where extremists had to climb and conquer rugged mountainscapes before skiing down them. The American version was more brash. As Peter Oliver summed it up in his Skiing magazine article, “Extreme Explained,” published in 1990, the “born-in-the-USA” edition of extreme consisted more of selling posters and movies, not to mention skis, clothing, and hairstyles.

“It’s not exactly extreme skiing—it’s just good for pictures,” said Eric Charamel, a leading mountaineer in Chamonix and one of the guides on the Degré7 Elbrus trip in 1990. “People here in Chamonix don’t have a lot of interest in it.”

Maybe. But, as Oliver wrote, “the French always have a way of getting touchy when Americans reinvent their inventions, or at least rebrand them into something perhaps more appealing to the masses.”

Case in point: Saudan, Boivin, and Vallençant weren’t exactly household names in thrill-seeking America, where films starring brightly colored daredevils, like the Egans, Schmidt, and Plake, took center stage in the extreme milieu.

“Everybody always wanted to say that extreme skiing was ‘you fall, you

die’,” Dan said. “I don’t think it ever was true. Yet, I preached it, of course,

as a marketing thing. But really, what we were doing was cliff jumping.

We skied a lot of radical stuff, for sure, but compared to Vallençant and

Jean-Marc Boivin and the early days of what they were skiing in Europe,

it really wasn’t the same. Extreme skiing in America was a marketing event

featuring great skiers.”

So, while there may not be one godfather of extreme skiing, East

Coasters often point to the extraordinary skiing of Brooks Dodge, a native

of North Conway, N.H., who clocked at least a dozen first descents in

Tuckerman Ravine. Dodge competed in the 1952 and 1956 Olympics (he

finished fourth in slalom at Cortina, Italy, in ’56), but he’s best known in

New Hampshire. By the 1950s he’d already established skiable routes in

Tuckerman Ravine, such as Duchess, Sluice, Cathedral, Icefall, and one

that came to be known as Dodge’s Drop.

“I set out to devise a different approach to skiing there,” Dodge told Sports

Afield magazine in a 1999 interview, explaining his technique for tackling

the ravine, which involved quick, two-pole turns at tight spots on the run.

It’s a common technique in today’s skiing, but was unheard-of back in the

1940s. It was a new way to descend the mountain, and it hooked Dodge with

its possibilities. When he began skiing Tuckerman Ravine in the ’30s, there

were seven established routes. Dodge added twelve more.

Saudan and other Europeans made their names similarly in the more

intense mountains of the Alps. It was 1967 when rumors started to circulate

around Chamonix, that somebody had attempted—and had prevailed—in a

descent on the Spencer Couloir, a treacherous, fifty-five-degree section on the

Aiguille de Blaitière. Local guides thought the story foolhardy, particularly

since they considered it an impossible stretch to ski without falling to your

death. Nevertheless, photos taken from the air captured the confirming set of

tracks. Saudan was immediately nicknamed “Le Skieur de l’Impossible.”

Much as Dodge had done in Tuckerman Ravine, Saudan also developed

a new technique in order to conserve his energy and stop himself from

accelerating too quickly between turns. Saudan would keep his weight on

both skis in a heavy snow and swivel on his heels, thrusting the ski tips back

and forth across the fall line. He called it the windscreen wiper turn, a way

to maintain balance not only in the deep powder but eventually into the thin

strips of snow beckoning from the Spencer Couloir.

Vallençant would also adapt his skiing as he attempted new descents,

inventing a technique he called “pedal jumping,” a skill that Oliver described

as “a combination of edging the uphill ski and planting the downhill pole to

gain leverage in order to flip the skis across the near-vertical fall line.” Today,

such implementations don’t exactly seem so—for lack of a better term—

extreme. But we need to remember the simplicity of the equipment fifty

and more years ago, and what it might be like to consider yourself a skiing

pioneer without the benefit of today’s advancements, such as shaped skis.

But, back in the United States, the Europeans’ feats of mountaineering

and first descents went practically unnoticed, as a rebellious, hotdogging flair was starting to catch on. It was here, in the 1970s, when freestyle skiing came

on the scene, which some argue was the real father of American extreme

skiing culture. “When you look at big-mountain freeriding today, you can

see it comes out of the roots of freestyle,” Dan said. “There’s always been this

thing about U.S. extreme skiers versus European extreme skiers. I’ve always

disagreed with the suggestion that we were part of the mountaineering

culture—no, we belonged with the freedoggers. What you see is the

Americanization of the sport. There’s nothing in America we don’t turn into

MTV. We are the glitz and the glamour. So, we took some mountaineering

and some freestyle skiing, and then we added extreme and we popularized it.

We sold it. We packaged it.”