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Just 40 minutes from my home, Wolf Creek typically opened in October, earlier than any other ski area within 150 miles. Since I'm not a season ticket holder, this is a torturous fact. It's like being kept inside for recess and then forced to watch everyone else play outside the classroom window. Several seasons back, Wolf Creek opened even earlier than usual. With an acceptable base already on the ground, local forecasts soon called for a big storm. Heavy rain in Southern California was a precursor to several days of snow in the San Juans. On a Friday morning, it started. Flakes the size of potato chips descended like dragon flies, and snow stacked up in my front yard. I suffered symptoms: sweaty palms, accelerated heart rate, dizziness, dry mouth. Before my wife had pulled out of the driveway on her way to work, I was calling in sick.

To calm my jitters, I set up my ski-tuning bench, filed the edges and waxed the bases of my favorite pair of skis. The aroma of the wax was soothing, hints of vanilla and cinnamon. A trace of white smoke rose from the tip of the iron.

A half-day will be plenty, I told myself. What's a credit card for?

Half-day tickets went on sale at 12:30. I left the house at 11:30. Plenty of time, even if the pass was snowy. Ten minutes from Wolf Creek, a line of cars was stopped for construction. I'd forgotten about the delays. I waited. I opened the window, laid my head out. Flakes sizzled on my forehead like sprites of water dancing on a hot pancake griddle. Every minute was a minute of skiing, gone. Snow accumulated on the wet road. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. I knew what I was missing: avalanche bowls, knife ridges, cornices. It mattered not that the snow could be junk - heavy, wet stuff that stopped you dead in your tracks, or sucked you under like quicksand. And what if I was missing 33 inches of dandelion fluff that flared from behind you like a contrail? My half-day was disappearing. Old neurotic grudges percolated. I couldn't get it out of my head that Wolf Creek wouldn't take a local check on "Local's Day." Finally, traffic moved. The storm thickened as the car climbed. By the time I got to the parking lot, snow was exploding from the trees.

Twenty minutes later, I dropped my skis onto the white lint. I snapped into my bindings. I paused under chairlift #1. It was 12:30 sharp. Half-day tickets were on sale. Snow swirled. A lone chairlift operator dug like a badger in the pit beyond the loading ramp. Empty chairs passed over him. The storm glowered. This was just the introduction, the polite oriental bow, the first lean of it. The core was coming. When the storm really hit, in a few hours, it would collapse like a falling drunk, right in Wolf Creek's lap. The storm would last days. The pit would be filled with 30 inches of snow by morning and that poor guy would be digging again - head down, shoulders tight, goggles fogged. For some reason, he had no partner, which meant he had no time to check tickets.

When two skiers slid into line, he scrambled from the pit, and tilted the chair as they sat down. They rose slowly into the squall. A few more skiers came along. He didn't check their tickets either. My boot liners warmed around my ankles. I smelled the wind, a salty chlorophyll tincture. The zipping, cold snowflakes tasted galvanized. My blood flowed steadily, peacefully. I visualized the blazing, white morass of the summit. My brain flat-lined. The ski patrol would be preoccupied with raising fences, signs and tower pads to keep them from getting buried, visibility so poor they wouldn't be able to tell from a distance who had tickets and who didn't. Convinced I wouldn't be caught, I slid into the empty lift line. As I stepped into the loading zone, the operator dumped his shovel and swam out of the pit. I shifted both poles to my left hand and looked over my right shoulder. The operator stood to my right anticipating the coming chair. I saw that he was a she, red hair sprouting from her blue hood. The wind howled, throwing a shawl of snow between us.

"I hear it's really going to dump!" I hollered.

"Yah! Dude," she smacked her fat mittens together and stamped her pack boots, "Eight foot swells off Malibu, dude. They're talking feet!"

"Cool," I said. She grabbed the sidebar brusquely and tilted the chair as I sat.

The chair swung and yawed from its slacking cable. By the time I was to the top, snow filled my lap. I waved to the kid in the top shack. He wore a black beanie tugged down on headphones. He was rolling a cigarette behind his large window. As I slid down the unloading ramp, I was engulfed by new gusts of snow. The storm was opalescent. Every object I might have otherwise recognized - a safety fence, an island of trees, a drift - molted in blurry, white shadows. The diffused light straddled everything. I was alone at the top of the mountain, flush with triumph. I'd beaten the gods and the odds again. I'd survived another summer. Still alive. And, I was skiing for free. I'll never die in winter, I thought.

The first run - MY FIRST RUN OF THE NEW SEASON! - felt like a bronc ride. I couldn't see the humps and potholes on the trail. At the bottom, I shuffled into the loading zone. The operator stuffed her scoop-shovel in a drift and waded out of the pit again.

"It's really dumping!" I hollered.

She smacked her fat mittens together and stamped her boots, "Yah! Dude. It's been raining in Laguna for three days. They're talking feet!"

"Cool," I said.

She tilted the chair for me.

I remembered to buckle my boots for my second run. I scratched a film of ice from my goggle lenses. They immediately iced up again. I looked into the white maw through two small portals. I sensed the evolution of the front. When you've lived in the mountains long enough, the birthplace and life of storms are disclosed by the doorways through which they appear. Years of recognizing patterns and cycles - feeling the weight of the sky, breathing humidity or lack of it, shivering at sudden gradients of temperature, sniffing micro-dusts from the jet stream - feeds your hunches. It smells like it's going to snow, and it does. Over the years, your hunches are verified and honed, tested and calibrated, against the collective archive of the community. In high country, the weather is the real news. Volatile and fickle, it's more entertaining than politics, and more far-reaching.    

Thus, the hypnotic attraction of a snow storm. For its relatively short duration - a few hours, a few days - it rules. Each storm has a body, idiosyncrasies, personality. Years hence, we remember the gravest blizzards like a good scare, a thrill. We gossip about them, intimately, as if an axe murderer came knocking door to door late one night, and we all saw him through the keyhole, saw how fat and bearded and lurching he was. We smelled his whisky-breath streaming under our thresholds. Then in the morning, when the town was plastered with 8 inches of new snow, we realized the stranger at the door wasn't an axe murderer. It was Santa Claus.

I leaned into the front's interference scraping my goggles and skied. Weird temperature fluctuations distorted the snow pack. It was sticky, like Velcro, and you had to ski fast to scrape the frozen frizz off the top and get to the soft muff underneath. I crossed a road onto a steep wind-scoured corner. The squishy powder suddenly thinned to bony patches. The ski edges bit on a bare spot and my feet spit ahead as they were smacked out from under me. The tilt of the mountain became acute and I was airborne, like Orion tilted in the winter sky. My arms swung wildly. In the bizarre light and with my goggles iced-up, I couldn't find the slope. I felt like I was hanging from a clothesline, one pin holding. I squeezed my pole grips as if they were the bars of a trapeze.

Just as I went limp, ready to fall, the wind sheared. My left ski found the hill. The right splashed down like the companion hull of a catamaran. Saved. But the skis settled on an island of exposed wind-polished ice. They accelerated and skidded sideways. Then they both whacked a soft berm. I was pitched again, in the opposite direction, airborne, horizonless and off keel. I was convinced I was going down. But, the wind flip-flopped. Switching from a stiff-arm mashing squarely in my chest, it figure-eighted around and pushed me from behind, cinching up under my arms. I vaulted upright, as if the same unseen hands dunking me the moment before had suddenly yanked me up. The skis came underneath me; my weight was miraculously centered. A glowing, interior rush melted the cloying pallor that engulfed me. I was giddy with relief. I'm lucky. I'm lucky, I thought. I can walk under ladders.

By the end of the run, my goggles were crackled with a kaleidoscope of ice. I scratched away two portals again. The feral turbulence of the blizzard had clawed deep drifts around every chairlift tower, every corner of every building, every stick of bamboo, every shaft of every sign, reminding me that five inches of whipsawed chaff was just the beginning. That wind shear that had plucked me from disaster told me that this storm was actually two storms slamming into each other. Monsoon moisture, warmish and muggy, funneled up from the Gulf of Mexico, 1,700 miles away, and rammed into a system carried out of the Pacific Northwest by the Arctic Jet Stream. It meant critical mass, snow erupting from the collision.

Skiing run after run without a ticket, I felt like a little boy in a Rockwell print, out-running a spanking with a stack of books jammed down my trousers. The storm intensified. Burrs of snow stuck to everything. Chair pads, lift towers, skis, ski poles, skiers. The folds of my parka, gloves, and bibs froze stiff as tin foil. The snow didn't so much fall as unscrew itself from the air. It seemed impossible that any of it reached the ground. I skied, into a winding, white gullet. The taste of it turned labial, sweet. It was rooty - peat with a snip of fresh celery - and dusty, with the garden-sharp bite of radish and washed greens. There was a subtle neutralizing garnish, too . . . parsley. I scratched at my goggles, constantly. The skis floated to the edges of trails, banked off rolls, snuggled near the trees, sliced along the shoulder of a trough (a snow covered creek). They lifted and dropped me over rows of grave-sized mounds, then shoved me over a traversing road. I had no blue print, no visualization of where I was going. It was a dance. I stood on the skis like a boy on his mother's toes and they found the rhythm, made the moves. I pressed my shoulders, hips, knees, and feet forward. My fists reached and gripped. The skis whiffed through white froth, curtains sprayed from their tips.

Time passed. The lift operator was covered in white chunder, freezing. She was shoveled-out, beat. It was late. I was the only skier left. Everyone else, either cold, or exhausted, or worried about the roads went home - quite sensibly. Empty chairs cycled by, ghostly. I went up again. At the top, I slid to boundary ropes along the Divide. I leaned against the howl like a wing walker. On a clear winter day, the overlook would have had a view of a jagged rhombus, the western partition of the pass, the fortress front of Colorado wilderness. On a clear day, the near range of acute, scalene peaks stabbed at the sky like a stack of broken plates swept up against a blood-blue wall. The steep faces and shunts and shakes of fractured granite leaned on each other, gleaming. Some days, they appeared pewter: aprons and shins and thighs of discarded armor. The rock's gaps and avalanche chutes, chinked and flossed with snow, rose from the steep V of a descending glacial valley. It seemed a thousand years since I'd seen that range - and like a thousand years might pass before I'd see it again. The snow stung my face like gravel thrown up by a passing semi. The wind folded and whacked the bamboo fence line wildly. I stared into vitreous, white shadows - into a massive empty hold.

As I skied past a trail marker too blurry to read, I promised myself I wasn't skiing too fast, though the needle of my internal speedometer wobbled. In the miasma, it was hard to tell. My goggles were glazed. I was tired. A hard burn niggled into my quads. It would have been more effort to stop than to keep cranking turns, so I kept going - fast. From memory, I knew the hill panned left, then doglegged right, pouring out onto an expansive, snow swept pasture. When I got to the flats, I could relax.

At the instant I visualized that relief, I was airborne, spread-eagle and off-kilter. I didn't know which way was up or down. My body braced in the air, terrified. Figuratively, I'd been tipped from the nest to awaken, falling - a bad dream. The instant was an eternity of breathless panic. How far would I fall? My feet slammed into something hard, like I'd leapt a set of stairs and pounded onto a landing. I folded, shoulders to knees, ankles to arm pits. I spurted forward, my ass riding the tails of the skis as they sledded ahead. Then I was tossed again, spread eagle again, muscles stone-stiff again, keeling like a falling tree over a deep, dark hole. I strained to get my skis under me. I did, just in time to slam flat-footed on the far lip of the pit. My chin dunked between my knees. My arms slapped toward the ground. I bounced into the air again, knowing I was going to flip.

Slow motion: piked like a long jumper, I looked down into yet another hole, this one as big as a dumpster. Before I went all the way over, my skis slammed the ground again, like a gymnast banging on the spring board in front of a pommel vault. My neck snapped forward and my nose nearly touched my ski tips as I reached desperately and my head whipped between my hyper-extended legs. Fighting to keep the skis under me, I wondered why the heels of my bindings didn't release. They should have. I wondered why my heels didn't pull out of my boots. They should have. I wondered why my legs didn't break. They should have. In a weird flash, I remembered that I had loaned my skis to a friend at the end of the previous season. In the excitement of the first day of skiing, and overwhelmed by the thrill of skiing for free, I'd neglected to readjust the tension of the bindings. I remembered this as my right hamstring popped like a sun-rotted bungee cord. The muscle kept tearing as my palms stretched for the ground.

Fast forward: I flipped. I landed sitting, legs out, the tails of both skis hammered into the snow. My leg was injured badly enough that I had to use both arms to pull my right ski out of the snow. I was stuck like a butterfly pinned to a bulletin board. I was completely alone on the mountainside, but I had the sense that someone had seen the whole thing and they were gone and they were laughing. I swore I heard laughing. The empty chairs of a nearby lift loomed in the snowy air, but I thought there must be someone up there, just out of sight, laughing. The laugh wanted to echo but the storm muffled it. I pinpointed the sound. I recognized that laugh.

It was me.

Although I'd already paid the price, I wanted to make amends for my extra-legal afternoon of skiing. Secretly, I feared that Instant Karma was more than just a popular John Lennon tune. For three years, I didn't do anything. Then one spring day - after I'd driven up Wolf Creek Pass, sat at another construction zone, and saw that the lift operators weren't checking tickets - I threw my skis over my shoulder and climbed to that spot where, on my last day of free skiing, I had edged up to the boundary ropes and leaned into the howl. Across the deep valley I saw a jagged rhombus of the pass's western partition. The acute, scalene peaks stabbed at the sky like a stack of broken plates swept up against a blood-blue wall. The steep faces and shunts and shakes of fractured blue granite leaned against each other, gleaming. Then the light shifted subtly and they appeared pewter-green: aprons and shins and thighs of discarded armor. The rock's gaps and avalanche chutes, chinked and flossed with snow, rose over the steep V of the descending glacial valley. It was exactly as I remembered it, as if I'd seen it everyday for a thousand years.

After I recovered my breath from the climb, I skied to the bottom and bought a lift ticket.

Wayne Sheldrake is the author of Instant Karma: the Heart and Soul of a Ski Bum. He lives in Southern Colorado. Contact him at www.waynesheldrake.com