The Art of Self-Arrest

At the lip of Horseshoe Bowl, my young student pauses.

She’s eight years old, a sparrow beneath the shadow of a corniced ridge. We stand at 11,000 feet, where wind carves snow into frozen waves and ptarmigan tracks vanish overnight. Below us, the north-facing pitch falls steep and long, still firm beneath a layer of spring softness. Her first double black diamond. I’ve watched her ski all week with quiet confidence—each turn a soft conversation with gravity. But this slope speaks a different dialect—sharp, fast, and unfamiliar. She knows it. So do I.

I lean on my poles beside her. A sparrow chatters in the spruce behind us. She doesn’t speak. Just leans forward—her small frame folding into a question mark: Am I really going to do this?

Gravity answers.

At first, she floats, feather-light. But then her hips drop behind her heels. Speed builds. A ski catches the backside of a wind-formed mogul. One binding releases. Then the other. She goes down—rosebud helmet flashing pink against white—flung like a toy by the mountain’s unseen hand. I call to her—“Get your feet below your head!”—but the pitch has taken control.

She tomahawks. And tomahawks. Arms wide. Gear scattered. Until, finally, a soft swell of sunwarmed powder catches her like a palm.

By the time I reach her, she’s sitting upright, breathing hard. Her goggles are askew. Tears brim, then flow like a mountain river in May.

No slide is endless. Even avalanches run out of mountain and spill their wreckage. The slope will stop you…eventually. The question is how—and whether you had a say in it.

Another student—older, bolder—had her eye on a cliff in the Windows, Breckenridge’s most formidable tree run. It’s a clean drop where the woods fall away and snow gives way to rock. One day, we peered over the edge together. I pointed out the conservative line, showed her how to ease in. She nodded, crouched low, and sent it the dicier way. She landed—barely. And then slid. Veering out of control, she dropped into the creek below. Boots soaked. Gloves frozen stiff. We laughed as water from the melt-fed stream soaked through her snowpants, giggling and gasping, the gentle current gurgling toward the Blue River far below.

What stopped her wasn’t skill. It was luck. Water did what a tree might not have. A frozen log in the wrong spot, and the story ends differently. But in this version, the creek became a cushion—a cold, comic grace that turned a near-miss into an epic memory. Years later, in the retelling, it’s not the cliff we remember. Still, it was luck. Not control.

On steeper terrain, luck is not usually on your side. And while its role should not be underestimated, for better or for worse, it is not enough.

Another spring, with another group, I watched two 12-year-old boys slide nearly 400 feet down a 40-degree pitch. We were atop the Lake Chutes when the weather shifted—clouds sweeping in like a curtain, erasing the terrain below. The wind screamed, and the line blurred. Huge rocks vanished. The familiar turned foreign. The kids had skied it before, but not like this—not socked in, not blind, not standing alone at the edge of the world. Fear crept in. Two started to cry. Three refused to move.

But one boy, trying to be brave, dropped too early. The snow grabbed him. He slipped just below the cornice, invisible except for a glove and the top of his helmet. I coached him to stay put while I settled the others.

But his best friend couldn’t wait. He stepped forward—either not hearing me or choosing not to—and reached down to offer his friend a hand.

The lip gave way.

Both of them tumbled—two pinwheeling bodies in a blur of white. But this time, there was no creek. No soft stop. Just training overriding instinct. I watched them dig in, bit by bit, slowing with each contact: a knee, an elbow, a shoulder blade angled just enough to catch snow instead of speed. They’d practiced self-arrest before. They knew how to lose control without completely giving it away. By the time the slope eased, they were upright again, waving: “We’re okay!”

They were. Because they’d learned how to be.

The difference between those two falls was the difference between being caught and catching yourself. One ended well by accident. The other ended well by design. And in that distinction lies everything I want my students to understand—not just on the mountain, but far beyond it.

We cannot always avoid the slide. But we can prepare for it. We can practice softening, digging in, meeting the fall with presence instead of panic. We can learn to soften into the spiral and arrest its trajectory before the trees appear. I’ve seen it practiced off snow, too—in the sudden collapse of what once felt solid: jobs, relationships, health. Sooner or later, we all slide. Part of life, like snow, is having your feet swept out from under you. The is how we meet the tomahawk. There is always a choice, even in uncontrolled descent. Not to stop it—but to soften its blow.

Grace is a gift. Skill is a choice.

My young student gathers her gear. Breathing steadier now, she clicks in again.

She falls a second time. But as her body begins to slide, she digs in with her elbows. Her knees find the slope. She stops herself—sooner, gentler. No tears.

At the bottom, we pause and look back. Horseshoe Bowl curves like a parenthesis against the sky. A raven circles overhead, surfing thermals rising from sunlit rock. The pitch hasn’t changed. But she has.

The next morning, we share a chairlift with a group of college boys, all chatter and stoke. They point toward the t-bar levitating up to the bowl sprawling to the north.

“One day,” one says kindly, nodding toward the ridge, “you’ll ski up there.”

She glances at me, a smile tugging beneath her heart-print gaiter.

“Oh,” I say, “she already did. Crushed it yesterday.”

They swivel around. “Wait—did you fall?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Pretty hard. But that didn’t stop me. It was fun.”