Hella-skiing

[mauitian]

I spent the last week heli-skiing in the Chugach mountains of Alaska, near Valdez. My friend Mark had called me up a month previously and asked if I wanted to go, offering to pay my way in exchange for talking physics with him. I think I thought it over for about a tenth of a second before saying yes. This was definitely among the more crazy things

Comments

[smandal]

Wicked -- I wish I could ski well enough to partake.

[mauitian]

It was definitely a trial by fire. Or, I guess, ice. By the end of the week my skill level had increased just enough to handle the beginning of the week.

[smandal]

I imagine, though, that you are able to handle all the trails at a ski resort -- I am not :)

[nibot]

wow!

[mauitian]

And then I said it backwards. Wow!

[hidden_is]

wonderful photos!

[chaource]

Awesome man! Way to go!

[mauitian]

It was even scarier than almost flipping a snowmobile on a glacier...

[browascension]

Holy crap! (As the saying goes.)
I'm glad you had a helmet.

[mauitian]

I did wear a helmet, but I'm not sure it mattered much. The snow was soft, so there wasn't much head injury risk during usual falls. The main risk was secondary exposure--the cases where you might fall, start sliding, and go off a large cliff into some rocks. I don't think a helmet would matter much in that case. But I wore one anyway, as did most of the others.

[browascension]

Yeah, I meant it with some irony. I am glad you had a helmet, as I can imagine some cases in which a helmet would help. But the scenario was scary mostly because a helmet would not protect you from the bigger dangers.

I find it very cool that you can hijack your fear-processing in order feel the exhilaration of endangerment. It's just that you usually fool your brain into feeling endangered, whereas this time there was a higher level of actual danger.

[mauitian]

"Oh, irony! Oh no, we don't get that here. See, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a high priority. We haven't had any irony here since about '83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at."

I don't know how I ended up being wired this way, but I do maintain rationality and can act in a controlled fashion through fear-inducing situations, without hesitation. The only negative effect I suffer in these circumstances is a certain amount of "tunnel vision," where I can only focus on the main task at hand, and don't notice other issues in the environment. For example, I've been in near miss car accident situations where I would have completely failed to notice the gorilla standing on the sidewalk.