Pro Guiding Service - Anarchy in The Yukon

"Anarchism is the true expression of individualism. It sees law and government as invasive--as the twin roots of social evil--and advocates their abolition. It's not that anarchists believe in an orderless society; order simply arises as we forge alliances and associations with others."

Karl and I look at each other, then at the disappearing Cessna abandoning us to this bearded vegetarian spouting the babble of the political philosopher Pierre Proudhon. Dark, intense eyes peer out through thick plastic lenses that are peculiarly lashed to tan ears with fishing line. Those eyes ask whether we grasp these self-evident truths.

"Got it, Arno," I say, and he smiles as I quote, "Governments are the scourge of God."

If that be true, this lawless corner of the Canadian Coast Range has God's blessing. Here, between the concrete jungles of Whitehorse (Yukon Territories) and Skagway (Alaska), there's not even a tree, much less a person, for hundreds of square miles. Which makes this a Utopia for Arno the Anarchist who extols the extremes of individualism. Looking up 4000 vertical feet to the white plastered north face of Mount Foster, at the wreath of peaks surrounding us, and at the hundreds of visible slopes which have never felt the edge of a ski, I conclude it's not a bad place for skiers either.

We shoulder our 50-pound packs and slog up an unnamed glacier flanked by unnamed peaks to base camp. Clouds gather and by evening when we erect our nylon asylums, a charcoal sky unleashes flurries of white powder. Settling into my icy tent, I drift to sleep reading Songs of the High North with its macabre accounts of northern life (and death):

Ice, white ice, like a winding sheet, sheathing each smoke-grimed wall;
Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over all;
Sparkling ice on the dead man's chest, glittering ice in his hair,
Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his glassy stare;

In my dream, Arno and I stake Karl's forty-something-year-old body out in the forty-something-below weather--retribution for his very real "joke" of drinking our entire stock of beer. The cur protests that Arno and I snuck brews into his pack and let him shoulder the load, but by voluntary association the anarchists declare him guilty.

Streaks of sunlight pierce the gray morning sky. Arno bolts from the sack and uses snow blocks to build the Taj Mahal of latrines. His three-sided wonder lets him admire the beautiful sirens of the southern skyline, lets him salivate between grunts. Not a bad way to muster enthusiasm for the day.

Hours later we're climbing one of those beauties. We learn, the sweaty way, of the immensity of this landscape. We click off a few kilometers, look up expectantly, find the peak as far away as ever, knock off another K, look up again, and discover the damn mirage no closer.

Finally the slopes bend skyward and the body's boom box pounds the sternum for a slower pace. Slope after slope falls below while we traverse widely, exploring ridges and bowls for the finest descent route. The area is a highway for winds ripping off the Pacific, but in this convoluted maze of uplifts, every windy freeway has it back eddies of lee deposition. By the time we kick steps up the ice-encrusted summit, we know where the pockets of powder lie.

Not that we're anxious to leave after we emerge into the summit sun. On the backside of this mountain, we discover a white spider of ice. Glacial legs flowing off eight peaks merge to form the frozen body of a massive ice cap. Base camp out in the middle of the white spider and you could spend a week scribbling lines on different peaks each day. And as Arno, our local font of info informs us, "You'd be the first to ski all those slopes."

Back at our boards, we start the descent down a wide gully squeezed between the summit pyramid and a satellite pillar of rock. Karl photographs from on high with his 240mm lens as we massage the slope's soft snows. Little people, vast mountains, golden light, shadowed ski tracks, and two of the planet's best skiing anarchists--the elements are perfect for an award-winning picture.

Before shadows devour us, I stop, yank out my camera, and aim it on Karl. I watch the small dot expand in the viewfinder and enjoy the Warren-Miller footage--backlit skier igniting glowing geysers of spray. Karl expresses himself, alternating between moans and whoops. Luckily I'm not shooting tape, nothing like bad audio to ruin good video.

Karl blows by and dissolves in shadows as he gravitates downhill. The anarchist and I, our eyes fixed on the steeper line of a ridge basking in sunlight, traverse a quarter of a mile before picking our own individual lines down through pockets of heavy powder. As the angle eases, silk replaces snow underfoot and we carve effortless turns following Karl's track down the gentle glacier.

We regroup at the convex edge of an icefall tumbling into the elephantine river of ice flowing back to base camp. A wide, powdery corridor leads through a killing field of black-holed crevasses. Miles beyond that corridor, two specks creep toward camp. Apparently our Cessna taxi has deposited Paul and Sean as scheduled. They'll join us for the next four days as we follow the Canadian/America border south to the Klondike Highway. We blast past the black holes of oblivion in hot pursuit of the bottled oblivion (Yukon Hootch) carried by our couriers.

The five of us drool over the towering western and southern faces of Mount Foster--both are long, steep, fall-line slopes whose centerfold beauty boils testosterone. Today is a mileage day, however, and we must restrain our longings, "Probably wind hammered" we rationalize. We push on, linking lazy turns down a glacial highway hooking to the southeast. After a mile, eight inches of light powder massage our bases and the bordering slopes, with their 700-vertical-foot drops and northeastern exposure, are too rich to ignore. Time to mine "just one" nugget of white gold: we drop the packs and climb.

Neo anarchist that I have become, I express individualism by grabbing first honors. I'm following an arc that grows progressively steeper. Soon, each cut of the blades launches me out of the snowpack and I'm momentarily weightless until legs re-contact the crystalline atmosphere. My dance teeters between control and catastrophe and for elongated seconds I'm flying on a razor's edge between heaven and earth.

Arno, predictably, takes a different descent; he skis the gentler but spectacular ridge line, flirting with megaton cornices. His cuts appear so close to air's edge that with every other turn I expect to watch the Icarus of anarchy fry.

Sean, a nationally ranked nordic racer turned telemarker, witnesses the sight and fosters his own yen to fly. He eyes the seracs in the ice field to our side and finds one with an alluring drop. Traversing to its top, he ponders the situation: forty miles to the nearest phone, one-hundred miles to the nearest doctor, not the place to spring a compound fracture. But the lad is young and Karl, with the big lens sighted on the jump, baits him with immortality, "It's a cover shot."

With masterful calm Sean launches from his perch, cranks a quick turn on the steep approach and, well before the serac's actual edge, goes ballistic for a three-story ride. The flight is a smooth one, it's only the landing that explodes. Sean is nonplussed: he gathers an errant ski and returns to our accolades, smiling and triumphant.

"Screw the mega miles," someone says, and the contagious sentiment spreads. Infected by this lode of white gold, we pitch tents on a ridge with views of 4000-vertical-foot hanging glaciers, fearsome rock spires, and more ski lines than we could assassinate in a season. Then we go to work. By the time the orange orb in the west yields to a full moon in the east, all exposures of the knoll before us are laced with tailings.

We cook while the sky purples down to black. With hot food and Glenfiddich in the belly, the call of the wild cannot lure everyone from supine sleeping bags. But the silhouette of those rock spires are like baying hounds with snouts to the sky and they speak to two of us. The setting, the windless weather, the lunar light, the snow...it all comes together like this but once in... well, a blue moon. Arno and I lather our faces with moonscreen and skin up to climb.

Pale orange light reflects off vast snow slopes to our east and the hoarfrost underfoot gleams like Liberace's gaudy suit. In this tangerine dream we shuffle to the top of the knoll where, as cliche would have it, we first notice the Northern Lights. We lie down in the snow and stare up. Brilliant balls of neon materialize from the void of space and snake out into long undulating ribbons. Bands of yellow, green, and pink pulsate along these corridors as if propelled by peristalsis, before the ribbons evaporate into the ether of the cosmos.

Cold stiffens us and Liberace's suit beckons--time to move. Pointing the boards down, we ski into the fifth dimension as sequins of frost elongate into rays of light which streak past at warp speeds. Two runs later Arno mutters, "It doesn't get any better than this, only different."

The optic orgasm of two nights ago is a universe away. This morning we rise to visual soup. Last night's camp was perched high on the shoulder of Mt. Van Wagenen, another boundary peak. Today the peak has vanished.

We pack up tents, then lounge. When a small cloud break injects shadow into this white world, we flee. Down glacier we skirt the maw of several gaping crevasses fishing for hors d'oeuvres, then continue the exodus. By the time new clouds strangle the sunlight, we have exited the glacier.

We spend the next hours in sensory deprivation wandering, by compass bearing, through a white-washed world. When the clouds break again, we are sprinting distance from the Chilkoot Pass. We traverse over to the spot where a century ago tens of thousands of people flooded into Canada. A freezer wind blows in from the Pacific and whistles through the gap. It's a horrible spot now in early April, yet it was during this very season that nineteenth-century suckers buying into the latest get-rich-quick scheme plodded through.

"Plodded" because each man shuttled a thousand pounds of provisions over this frigid gap. Not 999 pounds. Law and order reigned at this border crossing as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police set up shop and weighed the load of every prospector demanding entrance. Arrive with too little and you went home.

I think about living here in a freezing frame tent, forcing law and order upon the world's riffraff. Whose constables' wives had those Mounties defiled to deserve this post? By comparison, however, maybe they had it good. The gold-fevered riffraff still had to shuttle their thousand pounds of goods 20 miles into Canada, build log rafts while waiting out the winter, and float 900 miles of mosquito-infested waters to Dawson.

It was a far different breed who passed through these parts a century ago. They shame us with their physical toughness. They'd undoubtedly make quick work of Karl's whining over the weight of his camera gear with a quick bullet through the temple. But I don't envy them. They reached the Yukon goldfields only to find the goods gone.

We the miners of white gold, however, find treasure surrounding us at this very pass: in the snows that have accrued over the millenniums, slopes that have never seen skis, peaks that are still unnamed. And unlike the old timers who were cuffed by law and order as they entered this domain, we toe the line for no one. In this spot, in this century, anarchy reigns.

Details, details.

Possibilities for ski traverses or basecamp ski-mountaineering trips are limitless in the Coast Range. Early April marks the beginning of the preferred skiing months and above the 60th parallel (i.e. near Whitehorse, Yukon Territory) you can often log powder days into July.

Rewards are high--rugged scenery, limitless ice, and powder to die for. Ahhh, that's just a manner of speech--dying for your turns is out of vogue. If you're not experienced at avalanche forecasting, glacier travel, crevasse rescue, or dealing with the extremes of Coast-Range weather, initiate yourself to the area with someone who will bring you back. One excellent option: organized trips or private guiding through Arctic Edge (Box 4850, Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada, Y1A 4N6, 403-633-3820).