SNOWSCREEN: A Project Petrichor environmental thriller

Read the first chapters here

“Powder snow skiing is not fun. It is life, fully lived, life lived in a blaze of reality. What we experience in powder is the original human self, which lies deeply inside each of us, still undamaged in spite of what our present culture tries to do to us. Once experienced, this kind of living is recognized as the only way to live — fully aware of the earth and the sky and the gods and you, the mortal playing among them.

— Dolores LaChapelle, writer, skier, scholar, mountain-lover.

"The study of slides is a science, and the study comes pretty close to getting the answers but not close enough. About the only good rule, is not to go in a storm. They ask us how an accident could have been prevented in many slides. The best answer to that is—They should have stayed in bed.”

— Louie Dalla, longtime road supervisor for the Silverton District of the Colorado Department of Transportation. 

“I step into an avalanche. It covers up my soul.”

—Leonard Cohen

PROLOGUE

New Years Day, sometime in the not too distant future

The clients, two men, middle-aged, with accents their guide can’t place, brush off the snow the chopper’s rotors kicked up as it banked away from them and then adjust their new packs, new beacons, new skis, new boots. They do just about everything except move toward the objective. The guide, with thick black hair falling down to his shoulders from a hand-knit wool hat, rolls his eyes — a gesture obscured from the clients by a scratched pair of old glacier glasses he’d picked up from the Telluride Free Box a few years back and that he’d imagined had belonged to the late Charlie Fowler. “I’m going up ahead to dig a pit,” he says. “Just follow my tracks until you reach me and we can analyze the pit together. Do anything stupid and you’re dead.” 

The thud-thud of the helicopter fades into the gray sky, then Ingmar Nelson pushes himself across the new snow, over a rise on the ridge, and down to a copse of spruce trees, their branches gently cradling the new snow. He leans his tall frame against the trunk of a large tree, once again cursing himself for letting his boss talk him into coming out here in conditions like these. It is a holiday, for fuck’s sake. But these crypto-money dudes are VIPs, potential investors, and they had been waiting for a week for some fresh tracks when this monster storm moved in and dumped a good three feet more than was forecast. The clients were itching to get a piece of it, and Bobby insisted Ingmar take them. “Just make the gesture,” Ingmar’s boss had said. “Show them how dangerous it is, tell them they’ll die if they try skiing it, call Dan to come pick you up, take a nice, scenic chopper ride, and go back to that cute little lady of yours. You’ll be back before she wakes up.”

So here they are at 12,000 feet above sea level, hazard level high, at the top of both the Battleship and North Battleship slide paths. Nelson and his clients are here purportedly to ski the latter, which is also one of the best ski runs of the San Juans, so long as it doesn’t kill you. 

Ingmar Nelson doesn’t really need to dig a pit. He knows what he’ll find: a few feet of fresh, well-bonded powder atop a meter or so of rotten, faceted, depth hoar, the perfect recipe for catastrophic failure, otherwise known as an avalanche. He skis to the edge of the trees and gazes out across the steeply sloped field of snow ahead of him, its surface glistening as if it were crusted with diamonds. 

He futilely searches his hypoxic mind for a more accurate term for what he looks at. “Field” doesn’t quite cut it. Maybe “tilted plane?” No, no, no. It will come to him later. The important thing is that it is the loading zone for the North Battleship slide path and, when the conditions are right, a backcountry ski run. Today, after the bizarre storm, the conditions are all wrong. 

Nelson shuffles slowly up to the crest of the ridge. From there, he can take in the Silverton Caldera, a collapsed lava dome in the heart of the San Juan Mountains, which rise up dramatically from the Colorado Plateau and which were once described as “awful in their sublimity.” Nelson isn’t sure about sublime—he’s a snow safety guy, not a poet. But the notoriously unstable snowpack and the resulting avalanches that mimic the volcaniclastic violence that shaped these peaks and valleys some 27 million years ago can be awful, indeed. 

Last night’s storm seems to have broken, at least for a while, and there are hints of blue creeping out of the blanket of gray that has clung to the peaks for the last couple of days. He can see the southern edge of the tiny town of Silverton as well as the winding ribbon of asphalt leading into it, otherwise known as Highway 550, the most avalanche-riddled road in the lower forty-eight. Snow slides barreling down these slopes once buried miners with frightening regularity, crushed and splintered entire boarding houses, took out mining trams, killed snowplow drivers, and the Reverend Marvin Hudson and his daughters Amelia and Pauline as they drove over the pass to officiate at Sunday services in Silverton. Now the victims are more likely to be recreational skiers or snowmobilers or, like Nelson, ski patrollers and guides. 

Nelson takes off his pack and hangs it on a broken branch poking from a tree and pulls a long, icy draw off of his water bottle. He removes the little shovel from the pack, and then pauses as he watches a pine marten bounding across the fresh snow. He holds his breath and listens, hearing nothing but his pounding heartbeat and the gentle breeze caressing the light snow and ruffling the needles of the conifer trees. Nelson steps away from the tree, just to the edge of the clear area, and starts digging, methodically removing the snow in blocks so that he has a flat cross-section of the snowpack to analyze. Layer after layer of snow, with subtle differences between each—a timeline of the winter every bit as revealing as the geological calendar that is laid bare in deep road-cuts and river-gorges. Beneath the first several centimeters of new snow he observes a layer about a meter thick that has bonded well and in which major slabs could form. Admittedly, it would be sweet to catch some freshies in that layer. But it sits atop another meter of granular, faceted depth hoar with about the same bonding power as sugar. The upper layer slab has nothing to hold onto and, with the slightest encouragement, will slide atop the depth hoar like a greased pig down a slop-chute.

He looks back at his skin track along the ridge for signs of the clients. He wants to show them the cross-section, to explain why even being here is foolish. But they are nowhere to be seen—probably still fiddling with the thousands of dollars worth of gear they’re toting around. Ingmar scoffs even as he glances self-consciously at the strip of duct tape holding his jacket together. 

There may be nothing so tranquil, so pure-looking, as a vast field of untracked snow, all a homogenous shade of white: A blank canvas on which an aspen tree casts a shadowy self portrait and a tiny mouse leaves diminutive tracks. But within the placid facade is a world of heterogeneous motion: multifaceted, stratified, dynamic, seething. 

Even now, as Nelson analyzes the snow, it is changing. It is flowing, thawing, freezing, gliding, creeping, settling, subliming, rotting, transpiring, trickling, diffusing. It is, as the great snow scientist Ed LaChapelle once put it, “a granular disco-elastic solid close to its melting point. You can’t make it much more complicated than that.” It is constantly experiencing destructive metamorphism. Flux. Snow is a quasi-living organism, in other words. And like all living things, it has the power to kill. 

Ingmar Nelson can’t wait for the clients any longer. It’s time to get out of here. He pulls the radio off his belt and calls Dan, the helicopter pilot. He laughs as he speaks into the transmitter. “Come and get us, bro. This ain’t gonna go. It is serious sketch out here, just as expected.” 

But the only response he gets is garbled gobbledygook. He pushes the transmit button again, speaks louder and slower this time, even as a burning sense of futility and dread gnaws at his gut. Nothing. As he stares at the handset with incomprehension, a gust of wind washes over the ridge carrying with it the urgent whisper of snowflakes pelting his jacket. 

“What the … ?” This wasn’t in the forecast. It was supposed to be a fast-moving, relatively dry storm, dropping maybe six inches overnight before moving out. Instead they’d got a full-on San Juaner with three feet of fresh snow in the first round. Now it’s starting to dump once again, slashing visibility and obscuring the opposite. And now, in the distance, another sound: The staccato of a helicopter’s rotors. He smiles. Dan heard his call after all. He shoulders his pack and begins to move back toward the pick up spot and, presumably, his two clients. But the chopper is already there, barely visible through the snow falling from the sky and kicked up by the rotor-wash, and the clients are climbing aboard. “Ivan!” He yells. “Georgi! Wait!”

The chopper’s thud-thud matches the rhythm of his pounding pulse and mingles with the hiss of wind tearing through spruce needles. He calls out again. Waits. Calls. When he tries the radio again he gets the same static and lifeless response. The chopper’s bass-beat grows louder, holds steady, then dopplers away from him, back toward town. 

Without him.

“What the fuck?!” he mutters. He forces himself to breathe deeply. It’s okay. They’re just overloaded or a gust came up and he had to get away from the ridge for a bit. He’ll be back. There’s no way Dan would leave him out here.

Unless … 

The snowfall gains intensity, diminishing both visibility and hope. 

Unless … 

“Oh, fuck,” he says as the realization hits him: The chopper won’t come back. There will be no rescue team coming to save him. There will be a search, yes, but it will wait until the danger subsides and it will not be for him but for his lifeless corpse. He shivers, but not with dread or fear. Rather it is an almost erotic elation that sweeps over him; a sense of liberation, perhaps, that only comes when one abandons all hope. 

He removes a glove, unzips his pack, and pulls out his phone. The cold has almost killed the battery, but he’s still got a little juice left, but no bars. With chilled, sluggish fingers he taps out a text message and pushes send. Then he stuffs the device into the waistband of his thermals, in the hope that the warmth of his body will help prolong the battery’s life. He shoulders his pack and cinches the straps. Instinct and reason both tell him to stay there, in the trees, and wait for the chopper to return. But a more primal urge goads him onwards and downwards onto the seething slope of the North Battleship slide.  

A bright beam of light appears through the raging snowfall, accompanied by a high-pitched whirr. He smiles, grips his poles, and surrenders himself utterly to gravity, to the Gods, and to the deep powder snow. 

CHAPTER I

Thanksgiving Day (about five weeks before the PROLOGUE).

 Later, Malcolm Brautigan would describe the sound that began emanating from somewhere in the drivetrain of his 1985 Toyota Corona just as he summited McClure Pass as a whirring, groaning, moaning, grinding hum. But at the time, he chose to pretend that there was no sound at all, instead cranking up the stereo’s volume to ear-throbbing levels. When even that couldn’t drown out the sound — which he could now feel as a caustic vibration transferred to his palm via the gearshift handle — he began screaming along with Warren Zevon:

Don’t the sun look angry through the trees! 

Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves!

Don’t you feel like desperados under the ea-eaves … 

And that was enough to fix the car. Or, rather, it was enough to squeeze the potentially terminal problem to the dimly lit edge of Brautigan’s consciousness, allowing our hero to slip into a dazed state of denial and semi-oblivion, which is how he had been dealing with his problems and his life for many many years by then. 

During the short pauses between songs, when the sound and shimmying and loss of steering-responsiveness could not be ignored, Brautigan used his rudimentary mechanical skills to diagnose the problem: Most likely both CV axles and one or more wheel bearings had failed concurrently, which could result in the wheel separating itself from the car and sending Brautigan plummeting into the Paonia Reservoir’s mudflat below.

Instead of pulling over and getting help, Brautigan sped up, diving into the curves recklessly, shouting at some unknown entity to send lawyers, guns, and money — and a mechanic. While the reckless behavior certainly gave insight into the man’s emotional state, it can also be partially chalked up to the two liters of gas station coffee, three bags of Reese’s Pieces, and one toxic-tasting, heat-lamp-shriveled hot dog he had consumed that day.

Much later, Brautigan would also blame what happened next on the caffeine, or rather on the reaction between the caffeine and the non-dairy creamer he had poured into the caffeinated beverage to mask the acidity. After turning off the highway and rolling through the outskirts of Paonia, he managed to get the crippled car into the cracked and deteriorated driveway of his friend Ted Denton’s modest home.