Self-Arrest
At the lip of Horseshoe Bowl, my eight-year-old student stops moving. She’s a sparrow-sized figure against a corniced ridge at eleven thousand feet, where wind carves the snow into permanent waves and ptarmigan tracks vanish overnight. Below us, a north-facing pitch drops sharply—her first double black.
She’s skied with quiet confidence all week, but this slope shifts the terms of the conversation. She leans forward, a small question mark, and gravity answers before I do.
She starts well enough, then her hips drift behind her heels. A ski clips a wind-formed mogul. One binding releases, then the other. She tumbles—pink helmet blinking in the white—until a mound of sun-softened snow interrupts the slide. The mountain stops her eventually, as mountains do. The question is always how, and whether we get a say in it.
By the time I reach her, she’s upright, breathing in short, surprised bursts. Her goggles are crooked; her tears are not.
Another spring, in the Lake Chutes, I watched two twelve-year-olds slip nearly four hundred feet down a forty-degree pitch. The weather had turned abruptly—clouds dropping low, erasing the terrain, converting the familiar into a blank page. Fear spread faster than instruction. One boy slid first. The other stepped forward to help, and the lip gave way beneath both.
What saved them wasn’t luck. It was technique—imperfect, improvised, enough. Elbows, knees, shoulders: small points of friction interrupting gravity’s plan. They had practiced self-arrest before. Not gracefully, but deliberately. By the time the slope relented, they were upright and waving.
The difference between those falls—my young skier caught by the mountain, the boys catching themselves—is the difference between luck and agency. Skiers talk a great deal about control, though the artistry of skiing lies in letting go.
Self-arrest is not glamorous. It’s procedural. You accept that you can’t prevent every slide, so you learn how to inhabit the slide: soften, angle, dig, interrupt. You won’t stop it entirely; that isn’t the job. The job is to reshape its trajectory before the trees appear.
Versions of this exist off snow. A job collapses. A relationship implodes. A diagnosis redraws the perimeter of a life. People imagine resilience as refusal. More often, it’s timing—knowing when to meet momentum, when to oppose it, and how to slow it by degrees.
My student gathers her equipment, breath steadier now, and clicks in again. I tell her what many instructors never say aloud: fall better. I don’t tell her how to prevent another slide, but to meet it with intention.
She drops in. She falls again. This time she digs in—an elbow, a knee—and stops herself halfway down. A small, deliberate interruption. No tears.
At the bottom, we look back at Horseshoe Bowl curving upward like a parenthesis—holding what just happened without defining it. The terrain hasn’t changed. She has.
“Fall better” sounds like ski jargon, but it’s something else entirely. It’s what remains after strength and nerve ebb with age, after the confidence of good conditions becomes a rarity. It’s the ability to place a small wedge of agency between yourself and whatever is accelerating beneath you. Not mastery—just influence.
Self-arrest, in practice, is almost never dramatic. It’s incremental: a shift of weight, a differently placed arm, the refusal to go rigid at the wrong moment. Children learn it on snow; adults relearn it everywhere else. A promotion evaporates. A relationship implodes. Real estate gives way. The instinct is to brace or deny the fall. But the quieter, steadier instinct—the one that comes with practice—is to make enough contact with gravity to soften the outcome by degrees.
From the chairlift, the bowl already looks less severe. Her fall has contracted into the mountain’s larger grammar, one clause among thousands. By tomorrow, it will be a chapter; in a week, a footnote. But her body will archive the lesson: a template for how to meet a sudden drop with attention rather than abandon.