Skiing The Void
“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
Visibility can mean the difference between the best powder day of your life and a whiteout hellscape where snow and sky collapse into horizonless horror. When a storm rolls in above treeline, the world can dissolve almost instantly into a seamless infinity of white. Exposed. Invisible. Alone.
At Breckenridge, renowned for high alpine terrain, whiteout conditions are frequent. The balsams and chairlifts below the timberline vanish into a gray-white haze, while 40-mile-per-hour winds whip fine ice particles into a swirling frenzy that further blots out an already saturated light. When you stand on the roof of the world while perspective collapses, sometimes vertigo sets in. Other times, you feel like you’re moving when you’re standing still, or vice versa. Instinct takes over—you’re forced to trust your feet, skiing by braille. Every turn becomes an act of faith, a hesitant stem into the fall line, unsure whether the ground will meet your ski or if an unexpected drop will send you tumbling into the abyss.
A teen from Brooklyn, more than capable of tackling the Lake Chutes, had come to Breck specifically for a high alpine experience, but closures due to wind and low visibility rerouted our ambitions. After a morning of hiding in the trees, we found ourselves atop Imperial Bowl in the early afternoon, feeling bold. Since a patrol rope separated us from the promised conquest of Whale’s Tail, rather than settle for the main bowl, we set our sights on George’s Thumb—a wide-open face known for variable snow and laced with rocks. We slid down the ridgeline, eased past the gate, and then—nothing. We were inside the void.
For a moment, I panicked. Had I led this city kid to his Rocky Mountain doom? If he was rattled, he didn’t show it. He stood patiently behind me, a silhouette leaning on poles against the gray, waiting for my move.
“Let’s take this one turn at a time!” I shouted into the wind. A faint helmet nodded in response.
I nudged a ski tip into the fall line, then the other. One turn became two, then three, feeling my way through the featureless gray. Then, a rock. A marker. Then another. We picked our way down, using the very features we’d normally avoid as our guide. At last, the fence line above North Bowl emerged—a return to the visible world. We had crossed from nothingness into something, descending out of the void into reality. The eerie, otherworldly expanse still loomed above. Now bereft of our forms, the undifferentiated realm of sky and snow refolded into stillness.
“Spirit is a bone.”
Georg Hegel wrote these words in Phenomenology of Spirit, describing how Geist—human spirit—manifests in the physical world.
A few days earlier, on a powder day, I had skied with a favorite local client. Riding the T-Bar, we spoke about the role of religion in contemporary life, a conversation that resurfaced in the void of George’s Thumb. The hypothetical collided with the real. Skiing, when we least expect it, can offer a kind of “religious” or contemplative experience.
Across spiritual and philosophical traditions, The Void carries weight. To Buddhists, shunyata is emptiness—not mere nothingness, but the absence of inherent, fixed existence. To existentialists like Sartre and Camus, the void signifies life’s lack of intrinsic meaning—a terrifying yet liberating notion. Physicists define it as a vacuum, a space devoid of matter. In literature, Samuel Beckett and H.P. Lovecraft evoke it to explore despair, cosmic horror, and the limits of human understanding.
Yet when you ski the void, all these intellectual constructs dissolve. The void is no longer an abstraction—it is a whiteout on a double-black pitch, a tangible space to be navigated with very real consequences. In such moments, spirit is a bone—buckled into a boot, bound to a ski. Zero visibility offers a reckoning, a blank canvas where the mind projects its deepest fears and philosophies, and the body is left with no choice but to find a way to move through it.
Nietzsche famously wrote, “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” My experiences skiing the abyss would agree—but I would add: the abyss is not a one-way mirror. It does not merely reflect you back to yourself; it layers something else in return. A wink. A ski. A bone.
Namely, confirmation of your immediate reality—the rocks, the ropeline, the subtle shifts in texture beneath your bindings, your own frailty. For those six or seven minutes, there is neither past nor future. Skiing the void strips away everything but the present, the snow beneath your feet, reducing movement—existence—to its barest, most visceral form.
Though Nietzsche spent time hiking in the Swiss Alps, there is no record of him ever strapping on a pair of skis. Yet had he done so and dropped into a whiteout, he might have revised his words: If you ski into the abyss, the abyss also skis into you.
We got down safely and high-fived. The kid was delivered back to his mom, and I to the locker room. Yet the experience lingered long after visibility returned. The sensation of vanishing yet remaining is both tangible and ephemeral. Moving through the mountains leaves imprints on the psyche, shaping us in ways we don’t always recognize at first. One need not renounce possessions or move to the monastery to realize that strange, liminal experiences like these strip away the ordinary and reveal something intangibly profound: the void is always there, even when we can’t see it. But so are we.