Learning Your Limits the Hard Way

The Monte Rosa is relatively unknown to North Americans, but it’s the second-highest peak in the Alps and serves as a shaggy, glacier-capped buffer between Switzerland and Italy. To the north, its icefalls rumble toward Zermatt; to the south, couloirs helix above hibernating villages. In the late 1990s, my friend Joe Sagona and I went to explore the area’s astounding off-piste potential, and we connected with an American ski guide who’d married an Italian girl and moved to the tiny town of Alagna. One day, the guide inexplicably chose paying clients over freeloading friends, and he sent us up the rusting Monte Rosa tram with a young Swedish apprentice.

On our first run, the fledgling guide led us to the top of a 50-degree-plus slope with sketchy snow and massive exposure below, a textbook do not fall zone. As the Swede fumbled (and failed) to rig a deadman anchor so we could rope in, Joe and I stared at the line. Joe is an extraordinarily precise and confident skier, and for him the pitch was no big deal, well within his capabilities. It was within mine, too, probably…but it was the probably that concerned me.

After a long silence, Joe said, “You know, you have to want to ski it.”

I thought about that for a second. “I want to have skied it,” I said.

This was a revelation. From the time I started skiing in my late teens until I joined the staff of a ski magazine and chased around some of the best skiers in the world, I’d always pushed myself with the assumption that I would go faster, higher, steeper. If they could do it, I could do it. There on the Monte Rosa, though, this revealed itself to not be true. There were things I wanted to do because I wanted to do them (skiing endless runs of bottomless powder comes to mind) and there were things I thought I wanted to do—because they were cool, or they fit the vision I had of myself as a skier, or because my friends were doing them. But this was no ordinary slope, no ordinary risk, and I saw that if I wanted it at all, I wanted it behind me.

Adventure is by definition a commitment to explore the unknown, and that means the unknown in ourselves, too. Crux moments demand that we confront the existentials, like who am I? and why am I here? The answers can have profound implications for our daily lives, as we all know. But they also illuminate the adventures ahead and how deep we’re willing to go in them. Just how much type 3 fun can you bear? Is cold the thing that turns you back? Wet? Small chance of death? Medium chance?

And how influenced are you by the stories of others? Will you be like Gilles Sierro, the man on the cover of this magazine, who seems unstoppable in skiing steep, technical lines? Like Colin Fletcher, profiled in this issue’s Historical Badass, who drove himself relentlessly and found peace only in long, solo walks? Like Ote Dale, who spent a record-breaking 103 days floating and savoring the Grand Canyon?

When I was younger, I might have seen the decision not to ski that pitch on the Monte Rosa as a lack of courage, a broken promise, or even a moral failing. I might have felt embarrassed, or chagrined, or determined to get back out there and bang off something just as burly to show myself that I could. But instead, I accepted it simply as the right decision; I now understood that I had limits and that where they were was less important than being okay with having them. Maybe that’s learning who you really are or maybe that’s growing up. Maybe it’s both.

In the years since, I’ve skied countless steep pitches, been in a few dodgy situations, felt the grip of fear here and there. But mostly, the world seems friendlier and safer now that I know my place in it. I still test myself, for sure, but no longer feel the need to prove anything. And I’ve come to adopt the philosophy taught to me by one of my first climbing partners when we hit what seemed to be a dead end on a mixed-conditions route.

“What now?” asked the new kid.

“Well, I’m gonna try to get to the top,” said my buddy, “and if I can’t, I’ll turn around.”