Ski The Void
Visibility mediates reality. It draws the line between a transcendent powder day and a whiteout in which sky and snow fuse into a single, horizonless field. Above treeline at Breckenridge, this happens often: forty-mile-per-hour winds lift ice crystals into the air, flattening light until even the chairlifts vanish. Perspective buckles. You feel motion while standing still, or stillness while moving. Skiing becomes a form of touch—performed with the feet, interpreted by nerve.
A teenager from Brooklyn had come for the above-treeline expanse, but visibility kept insisting otherwise. After a morning of hiding in the trees, he and I decided to try Imperial Bowl. Whale’s Tail was closed by a patrol rope, so we aimed for George’s Thumb, a face known for its rocks and its indifference to confidence.It was named for the man who first scouted it, George, who attempted to document his discovery and instead photographed his own gloved thumb.
We slid past the gate and stepped into nothing. No slope. No sky. Just a depthless gray. For a moment, I wondered if I’d misjudged the situation: a city kid, a burning-out guide, a vanishing world. But he stood patiently behind me, waiting for my instructions.
“One turn at a time,” I shouted. “Follow me closely.”
I nudged one ski downward, then the other. A single turn became a second, then a third—slow, tentative movements through the blank. Then a rock appeared: not a threat but a reference point. Another followed. We used what we’d usually avoid. Eventually the fence above North Bowl emerged, and the visible world returned.
Behind us, the featureless expanse resumed its silence. The kid yipped with victory.
Whiteouts are rarely described accurately. They’re not metaphors; they’re conditions. Yet skiing them strips away distraction in a way that makes metaphor tempting.
A few days earlier, on the T-Bar, a longtime client and I had talked about religion—not belief so much as the frameworks people use when certainty is scarce. Hegel’s phrase from the Phenomenology, “spirit is a bone,” rose up from memory: Geist locating itself in the physical. In the void of George’s Thumb, the idea shed its academic tone. Spirit wasn’t lofty. It had weight, bindings, and edges. It was a body figuring out where the next turn might land.
Philosophy has many voids. Buddhism’s shunyata—emptiness without nihilism. Existentialism’s lack of inherent meaning. Physics’ vacuum. Literature’s dread and absurdity. But skiing the void is different. It is not conceptual. It is immediate. Everything extraneous falls away. There is only the angle of your skis, the texture underfoot, the willingness to commit to a space you cannot see.
Nietzsche’s well-worn line about the abyss holds that it gazes back. Had he dropped into a whiteout, he might have added that the abyss also clarifies. Not grandly, but practically. It tells you what is actually under you. It strips your attention to its essentials. It edits the adjectives of the world until only verbs in the present tense survive.
We reached the bottom without incident. The boy found his mother; I found the locker room. But the void lingered after visibility returned. The sensation of moving through something that erased you even as you moved within it leaves a faint residue—an awareness that reality is more permeable than it seems.
It doesn’t take renunciation or retreat to recognize this. The mountains provide their own thresholds—spaces where perspective collapses and must be rebuilt turn by turn. You exit the void, but the recalibration lasts longer than the descent.
The void is always there, even when unseen, waiting for the next blizzard. And so, improbably, are we.