34 • FEATURE
WING AND A PRAYER HOW TELLURIDE HELITRAX GOT OFF THE GROUND
S
OMETIMES THE UNIVERSE SENDS YOU A SIGN THAT’S TOO BIG TO IGNORE. FOR THESE FOUR SKI BUMS, THAT SIGN SAID “SKI AREA BOUNDARY.”
It was the 80s, and most of the best powder stashes still lay outside of the ski resort terrain. If they wanted to ski what today are in-bound runs like Bushwacker, Logpile, and Mammoth, they had to break some rules. They had their ski passes pulled multiple times for ducking the ropes. The Silver Glade incident was probably the tipping point. That day, they swear they were innocent. The out-of-bounds policy at the time was “mellow yellow.” Yellow signs meant a soft closure, but when they put their avalanche beacons on and started skinning past a yellow sign on Silver Glade en route to Gold Hill they got stopped by ski www.TellurideMagazine.com
WINTER/SPRING 2018-2019
patrol—and were accused of putting the yellow sign there themselves. It’s 2018, more than three decades later, and they’re still rankled by it. “It was so ridiculous,” says Speed. Speed (Brian Miller), Dave Bush, Mark Frankman (“Frankie”), and Mike Friedman were all working at the resort’s day lodge at the time: janitors, cook, and busboy. They were also ski bums— powder junkies—says Frankie. They were among the few backcountry skiers who would venture out during the winter avalanche season, although there were others who mostly skied in safe spring conditions when the lifts closed. “At that time,
people thought it was stupid to climb up when the lifts were running. But we were obsessed with powder,” says Frankie. In those days, they were on the kind of kind of retro equipment you see in vintage ski posters. Skinny, 210cm-long skis and three-pin telemark bindings. They initially used purple wax, instead of climbing skins, to make their skis sticky enough to ascend. They even set up a tipi in the backcountry so they could make extended trips into the high country. Snow science was still in the nascent stages back then, but they all had a healthy fear of the San Juans, which are widely considered to have some of the most treacherous avalanche conditions in the country because of the steep slopes and complex snow structure. They read all the books, studied the conditions, dug snow pits. They tossed around the idea of guiding backcountry ski tours, but they say that anyone capable of skiing the backcountry didn’t need, or want, to be guided.