Steven Kotler - Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad

This is a book about goals and grit and progression, especially in the second half of our lives. Its a book about what it takes to fight off that quaint human urge to die a little bit each day. Its an antidote for the weariness.

Dont think of it as a how-to book. Think of it as a how-not-to book. How not to lose that brash fire. How not to give in to that cozy blanket of middle age. How not to go gently into that good night.

In short, this is a book about growing old and staying rad. In even shorter, this is a book about skiing.

Of course, if youre wondering what punk rock and skiing have to do with growing old and staying radwell, good question. Yet to answer it, I need to tell you a little bit more about where this book came from, and that requires telling you a story about skiing.

So, for now, back to the skiing.

KIRKWOOD, FEBRUARY 26, 2020

According to The Liftie Report, Kirkwoods Oops and Poops is the tenth-steepest run in Tahoe. Of course, you wont find Oops and Poops on a standard map of Kirkwood. On the map, youll see the double black diamond Chamoix perched above a thick glade of trees with the words avalanche boundary printed across them.

But heres one way to tell the tourists from the locals: If you go to a resort, ride the lift, and ski a run thats clearly identifiable by a sign with a nameyoure probably a tourist. If you ride the top of run A into the little chute in the trees separating run A from run B, then zip across run B to hit the little cliff that launches you onto run C, and so forth across the mountainyoure arguably a local. Locals like to draw unusual lines across their mountains. Tourists usually follow the lines the ski area has predrawn for them.

Oops and Poops is one of those lines that locals have drawn. It starts just right of Chamoix, with a nosebleed-steep, cliff-lined face that launches skiers into a sneaker chute through the forest that ends at a keyhole notch formed by a large rock wedged between tall pines. Dropping through the keyhole puts you atop a ten-foot-wide natural halfpipe that descends for over a thousand feet of crazy angled possibilities. Think pinball, at thirty miles per hour.

Riding the pipe well requires a significant amount of creativity. The tourist choice is the center line: Just ski down the middle of the damn pipe and be done with it. But the middle of the pipe is actually strewn with boulders that form mini-cliffs at often inconvenient moments. These obstacles may result in that familiar mountain experience known as shitting your pants, thus, the runs name: Oops and Poops.

Plus, on a personal note, I think the center line is bullshit. Most tourists dont ski ten-foot-wide, cliff-lined corridors with ease, thus their choppy, staccato, weak-ass attempts at turning create a drunken array of asymmetrical moguls that dont mix with my flow-and-destroy approach to skiing.

Id also like to mention that tourist is the polite term. In the parlance of mountain culture, a tourist is a Jerry. As Thacher Stone, creator of the Jerry of the Day video series, once explained to Freeskier magazine: Within the ski industry, a Jerry, otherwise known as a Gaper, a Joey, a Gorb, etc., is someone doing a boneheaded move. My personal definition of a Jerry is: An individual who exhibits a true lack of understanding for their sport, or for life in general.

Locals, on the other hand, approach their sport with high-speed creativity, a form of intuitive problem solving that Ive come to think of as fast geometry. Oops is a solid example. If you want to ride Oops with style and flow, beware the lure of the center line. Instead, with gleeful and wanton abandon, hurl your meat carcass onto the walls of the pipe for a round of fast geometry.

The walls are steep, running anywhere from thirty-five degrees to dead vertical. At most ski areas, a tilt of thirty-five to forty degrees is a single black diamond run of the most difficult variety. Double black diamondsexperts onlyfall away at forty to fifty-five degrees, or steep enough that you can reach out your hand and touch the slope. Above forty-five degrees, any turn you make will likely include a three-foot freefall before you reencounter the surface of the Earth, which explains the hop-and-drop technique developed by early steep skiing pioneers.

The secret to riding a line like Oops creatively is to ride the entire pipe. Make big arcing turns onto the wall, hop off somethingusually a stump or rockand drop into the smooth transition that blends the pipes wall with its bottom and with enough acceleration to ride up the other side of the wall and repeat the process. Of course, in a normal halfpipe, the walls arent lined with obstacles, and the pipe doesnt take abrupt, forty-five-degree turns, as the Oopss pipe does on three different occasionsbut whatever.

When you ski a run like Oops at speed, which is the only way to ski this line with any fluidity, you dont get to see much. All the brain really gets is a millisecond to recognize a terrain feature, recognize the features angles, recognize the trajectory that the human body will fly off those angles, and then its go time. Fast geometry. Compute, then execute or tomahawk. What does tomahawk mean? It means to tumble, ass over teakettle, down the side of a mountain.

On February 26, 2020, Ryan Wickes, my ski partner, and I were skiing Oops on the last powder day of the season. We didnt know it was the last powder day, nor was there much powder. Maybe two inches of new snow had fallen. But we hadnt seen new snow since January and the presence of the fluff brought out the rowdy.

I remember little from the day except blazing down Chamoix, carving hard right under the cliff, and blasting through the keyhole notch and onto the top of the Oopss halfpipe. I leapt off something, bounded over something else, then carved high on the pipes right wall. About ten feet in front of me was a little pillow of fresh snow, perched atop a small boulder beside a towering pine. My brain saw the snow pillow and made an unusual suggestion: sliding spin 360.

The thing about fast geometrytheres no time for internal debate. When your brain makes a suggestion, you either execute immediately or drop out of flow because youre now catawampus and taking an awkward line down the mountain. Or, youre catawampus, taking an awkward line down the mountain, and about to spend a less-than-lovely evening in the nearest emergency room.