Falling (Hard) For Telluride

Telluride's upscale restaurants and shops have lured the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise. (Doug Berry)

And somewhere in the cosmos, a gavel slammed down and my name was entered in the Book of Doom.

Actually, it went swimmingly at first. Saftler was right, I was ready for the steep stuff. After a couple of extra gulps at the edge of the abyss, I schussed down the top stretch of Bushwacker with something like aplomb. I turned my hips just so and kept my weight on the downhill ski with iron discipline. I was loose and, remarkably, unafraid.

"Woohooo," I said, or words to that effect, as I pulled up beside Saftler about halfway down the run.

I was nearly at a full stop when some tiny misstep caused me to stumble and cross my skis for an instant. It wasn't a wipeout, more like a gentle lie-down. I was laughing at myself as I threw a ski over to dig the edge in and stand up, and was surprised to find myself picking up speed. Saftler shouted something, but he already seemed far away. I rolled again in a desperate attempt to plant a ski, but it was icy and the downward slope was as inexorable as a church steeple. Within seconds I was moving at double-digit mph.

My skis sprang free, followed by the poles. With all that out of the way, gravity spit on its hands and really went to work on me. I took off like a tumbling rag doll, completely out of control. After what seemed like a few hundred thousand rotations, I came to rest on my stomach, spinning like a propeller and still picking up speed. Panicking now, I dug my fingers in; I didn't slow, but I stopped spinning and my head was uphill.

I was still speeding out of control, but I was able to steer a bit by scratching deep with my gloved fingers and boot tips. I edged to the right, hoping a rank of mogul humps would slow me. Bad idea -- the instant I hit the first one I was airborne, pitching and yawing in several dimensions at once, like a gyroscope. I landed hard on my back and immediately hit another hump. This time I dug my fingers in and was able to pull away from the moguls, on my butt now, rocketing downhill. By this time, I'd slid a good half-mile. It felt like hours but was probably just under a minute.

Several hundred yards below, I could see a group of skiers pulled over, watching my appalling progress. If I hit them, they would scatter like bowling pins. To their side was a deep, tree-filled ravine. I knew what that ditch meant: the same bone-cracking end that waited for me if I drifted into the blur of evergreens closing in on the right.

Nothing worked. With a scream of effort I dug my heels even harder into the ice. A plume of freezing white smoke engulfed me, covering my goggles and filling my mouth with ice. I was suddenly blinded, but I could feel some slackening of that horrible speed. I dug deeper and pushed my hands down, careful not to leverage myself into another agony-of-defeat somersault. Slowly, slowly -- with my legs on fire and terrified I was heading toward the trees -- I squeezed a tiny modicum of control away from the mountain.

And finally, after more than a minute and almost a mile, I stopped. And froze. If I moved again, I knew I would start sliding again. It was like clinging with my fingernails to an icy roof.

Saftler came racing down with the skis, poles, scarf, hat I'd distributed along the trail. He pulled up in front of me, planting himself between me and that sickening downhill. He said I made a joke, although I don't remember it. That was my smart-aleck reptile brain taking over while my higher cortex whimpered in a dark corner, gasping for air.

Saftler told me later that day, when we were well away from any grade steeper than a wheelchair ramp, that he had been petrified.

"We call that the Slide for Life," he said. "Typically it gets reported in the paper as 'So-and-so died yesterday when he struck a tree at the edge of the trail.' Usually they're sliding like that when they hit."

I'm glad he didn't tell me that while I was still lying there, making lizard-brain wisecracks and hallucinating my wife's face. I still had to get up and ski down the rest of Bushwacker.

The only thing harder than stopping myself on that slope was starting down again. I got my skis on and stood up, but it took about 20 minutes of fierce internal psychotherapy before I could force my legs to move in even the most speculative, shallow line across the slope. My form suffered, I'm afraid.

And so began life After the Fall. Telluride didn't look so pretty that afternoon, even though the sun stayed out. I made a point of going back up the mountain, but I was noodle-legged, even on the weenie greens. The hot tub seemed to tire more than relax, and even the sublime ribs at Fat Alley lost some of their tang.

The next day, I had the whole morning before my flight, at least four hours until my rental skis were due back.

I turned them in early.

We'll see how it goes this year.

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