Snow streams sideways. The sky is indecipherable from the mountain tops. I stand on the side of Alaska Highway One in sub-zero temps on a murky dawn, imagining the mountains, and the routes we will climb, held in the haze. I have chosen this climb. My business, my horses, my life at home in Vermont are a blurred horizon. I stomp my feet like an impatient horse, or child, two of whom are next to me. We hope the cloud layer will burn off as the sun rises. My breath bellows. Our skis are still in the car. I unzip my parka and pull my avalanche beacon from the sleeve strapped to my chest and switch it on. The avalanche danger today may be moderate, but it is still real. What is also real are the aches in my bones: the sharp pain in my left hip, the twinge where femur presses on the tibia without any benefit of cartilage, and the twelve bones spanning the arch of my foot once fractured now fuse each morning, stiff and unstable on my slow step to the bathroom. Yet I know that I can shuffle up this mountain, three miles, twenty-five hundred vertical feet, my feet within the sturdy platform of the boots, slide my skis uphill, and the heights will eclipse my pains, and deliver awe. I remind myself, there will be delight in this experience.
These days, I choose being in the mountains to being behind the sales counter of my business. I had bought the small tack shop over twenty years ago, when my oldest was in kindergarten, and my two other children in preschool. The business housed in a one-thousand square foot building, in a town of thousand, across the road from the school in which the kindergarten class was ten children. My husband’s law practice was short on supporting my horse habit, and the opportunity of the tack shop promised to close our income gap. I wanted a safety net, a cushion. Writing grants for our local preschool was not a working wage. This was an opportunity for a career. In the early years of my tack shop, I took risks—increased inventory, expanded brands, and tried new designs—because I believed in my ability to engage customers, promote products, and make the sales to pay the bills. I wasn’t afraid of debt. Debt was banking on my potential. Debt was a challenge, and the challenge electrified me.
This morning the snow reports list the avalanche danger as moderate. A mass of snow released down a slope, can travel to 190 mph, but the average speed is closer to fifty—less like a train and more like a car, but still deadly and hard to avoid. The amount of time a buried skier survives in an avalanche depends on the size of the air pocket created—and the speed with which their companions can detect their beeping. Most people die within fifteen minutes, if not crushed to death by the force. We wear beacons in the event we trigger an avalanche and find ourselves unlucky and buried. In the event of a slide, the non-buried skiers then switch their beacon into “search” mode and work quickly to find the lost skier.
Am I afraid of an avalanche? The answer should be yes, but it is not. We choose caution. We will ski slopes less than thirty degrees, less likely to slide. We avoid avalanche terrain. We note the escape routes. And we trust in our guide. He did after all write the book, The Avalanche Factor: Understanding and Avoiding Avalanches. We would not tackle terrain, conditions, and routes on our own. We are not knowledgeable enough, and ill-advised risk for the marriage, even thirty years may not be enough bond to weather a storm of fear and adrenalin, not enough to grant kindness to each other under pressure. The book warned: No rules can guarantee your safety. First you must recognize the danger, and we recognize the danger of the steep slope, the marriage friction, and possible knee injuries. I love to climb to a high point and then point down the fall line and know I have a soft landing. What else can promise a cushion? A soft-landing invites courage.
We plan to ski for seven days in the backcountry, returning each night to a shower, a kitchen, and a soft bed. I have only ever skied six days in row one time: a route through the Alps eight years ago. Back in my forties when body parts moved better. The highest point of the Chugach Range is 13,094 feet but average elevation is 4,006 feet. I am middle-aged in the middle mountains—considering my middling career and what I want my next chapter to involve. The low elevation is misleading: the mountains are rugged and far-flung, tipping endlessly with sharp edges and steep faces. And the Gulf of Alaska ensures more snowfall in the Chugach than anywhere else in the world, an annual average of over eight hundred inches. I have dreams of snow above my knees, powder shots to the face, and long runs that deplete breath and burn muscles. Dreams of elation, of grace, and that there are more heights for me. That the last chapter was not the best chapter, yet what lies before me is indecipherable.
We pull our skis and packs from the car. My husband, two daughters, our Wyoming guide/friend Tom, Joe, and I put on the synthetic skins that adhere to the bottom of our skis and clip to tip and tail to hold them in place. We turn the bindings to free the heel. I remove my super puff parka made for a sub-zero Norwegian climate, and stuff it into my pack with my shovel, probe, sandwich, energy bars, water bottles, extra hat, goggles, Band-Aids, and mittens. We test our beacons and begin to ski. I have no idea what to expect, and expect whatever we go up, I will be able to go down. Wind blasts, skies grey, snow hard. The temperature is eight degrees, and despite the uphill movement, I am cold. Even my ass, which I didn’t think was possible. Daylight in March in Alaska is slow to arrive, like me on a mountain. I travel only as fast as I breathe. When I lose my breath, I slow. My pace allows me to preserve energy and have strong legs for the run down. In the Alaskan altitude of 4,000 feet, my breathe is regular and even, and I am in even in front of my two twenty-plus year-old daughters.
In a rural Vermont marketplace, sales come at an unpredictable pace. Within a small-town demographic, populations of one thousand, it’s tough to turn inventory within a month to pay the bills. It’s a juggle to meet operation expenses. The profit is razor thin. I take measure of the terrain and evaluate how can I increase sales. I set up at local competitions. I advertise on the radio. I develop an email list and start social media. I also begin to measure return in other ways: flexible schedule that allows me to attend my kids’ games, donating prizes to horse competitions to give back to the sport I do, training young staff in a range of skills they later upsell to a career, hearing customer rides improved through different choices in tack design, my daughter working alongside me on the sales floor, and breaking rural isolation of narrow Vermont valleys with conversations over our shared interest. I work with a goal in mind: I will build a better business, increase customer base and sales, at a loss of my own income, and I will sell it. As my children enter high school in another town, I move the shop to busy road more central to my customer base. Sales triple. More customers come through the door daily. Now, I have a mortgage, higher cost of utilities, bigger selection, and more staff. No rules can guarantee your safety. Or revenue. Even as sales tripled, and the customer base grew, the debt remained the same, not relieved but constant. The belief in self declined. The climb to profitability steepened. I questioned the base: was it stable?
I focus on my uphill climb. For hours we stare at the vast open terrain before us and the saddle above. The grade steepens. It’s tough to hold an edge on wind-packed snow. When we can no longer go straight uphill, we employ kickturns. This is the method to turn one-hundred and eighty degrees to create a switchback and ascend a steeper pitch. To begin, I dive the tail of the uphill ski under the binding of the downhill ski and pivot that ski one-hundred and eighty degrees so now that faces the opposite direction. It’s tough to pierce the packed snow with the tail of my ski, but I want to close the angle to relieve pressure on my hip joints. As I transfer my weight to the new downhill ski, I am wary of the stability of my hip. Kickturns reveal my limitations, and fear. In the event I lose an edge and plummet to the valley below, I will work to stop my fall with ski edges and a ski pole stabbed as a pick. I don’t want to fall. I don’t want to get hurt. I don’t want to have to start the climb over.
We reach the saddle of the mountain as the sun reaches its zenith and has emerged from clouds. Sweat dampens my back. My hair beneath my hat is wet. The girls have moved neck gaiters to serve as headbands. We stick poles into the hard surface of the snow and drop our packs to the ground. We pull out layers to prevent chill and water bottles to hydrate. We have watched other skiers descend and their tracks show that the south-facing ridge offers soft snow.
Sitting on our packs, we stare at mountains upon mountains, endless like a sea under a clear blue sky. For hours we had looked at the ridge like a boundary, something to contain us, now we sit atop and stare into the far distance. In his book Horizons Barry Lopez writes “A boundary says, ‘Here and no further. A horizon, says Welcome.” All morning, we have climbed and pondered the promise of snow. Having reached an apex, the boundary removed, our journey unfolds behind us in a switchback of our tracks, and we revel in this moment of lift, open to all the possibilities that surrounds us.
Danger surrounds us. Slab avalanches, the deadliest type, are difficult to predict. For a slab avalanche to slide on a steep slope, it requires a trigger to release the heavy cohesive layer from an underlying weak layer. The surface cracks, and the slab drops, sledding down the surface of the mountain, right over whatever is in its path. We are that trigger. Our weight can fracture the snow. Traversing the top of the ridge, we study a chute called Sunburst, the only untracked snow along the southern ridge. As we traverse the crown, no roller balls drop down the face. No runs of dry loose snow cascade below. Our cutting across has not triggered a fracture. The slope appears stable.
My skis hang over the cornice. Why is this the only one left untracked? Sending my two daughters into an untracked, steep gulley—was this crazy? The angle is more than thirty degrees, but we had tested the snowpack and studied the terrain. We will ski one at a time and look for exit routes to bail out of the track if necessary.
What is my exit strategy? I had worked for twenty years to hit benchmarks in sales and staff benefits. To achieve these goals, I didn’t pay myself. I worked for tack. My horses had high quality blankets, saddles, bridles and I was well turned-out at horse competitions. I prioritized staff, which allowed me the time to compete my horses, attend children’s sports games, and go on family vacations. Despite the part-time appearance, every small business owner knows, it’s an all-the-time commitment. The business layers you with concerns. I invested in late nights of worry, spreadsheets, and research. I could feel the weight of it without relief. The debt remained stable, not relieved, and in my business trajectory, this was not a good forecast. As my children went off to college, I studied the balance sheet, and wondered if I wanted to continue this run.
As we wended uphill, surrounded by avalanche terrain, conversation revolved around reckless choices and the attitude of confidence versus competence, like promise versus viability, projections versus reality. There I have balance sheets to make clear in numbers and losses, here it’s a gut feeling: “if it’s not a hell yes than it’s no,” says Joe. And with my skies hanging in the air over the edge, I had doubts. I would have to turn immediately to channel my speed and set up a rhythm to maintain control. I was looking down, at 56, at something steeper than I had skied in my 20s. Arthritic hips and soft belly, workdays long, competitions gone, I was a middle-aged woman with three kids, two of them standing next to me.
I am not an extreme skier. First, I am a mom. My kids beside me, and I want to show them that it’s not about making it pretty, it’s about making it down. To show that we can do the hard things. Oh, and that this is fun. I say, hell, yes. I hum a little tune, and I drop in, before I can overthink. I plant my pole and turn. I reach and plant and turn, always reaching. No longer am I thinking it’s steep, and I hope I don’t lose an edge and slide. I think only of the next pole plant and keep turning.
I bob up and down, rising tall and then sinking low, knees the hinge, thighs doing all the work. Rise and sink like legs are great wings offering lift and glide. Momentum and habit propel me around the turn, unleash a faith, ignite elation. On this steeper terrain, I must recalibrate my turn from my normal tight corkscrew, to open to carve deeper in the massive landscape.
I keep my upper body pointed downhill. I strike my pole forward, and my legs weave the line. I am flying. The reset of the mountains. Worries drop away. I reside within awe. And the grace of a body. I am lightness. I look for the next turn. My thighs burn and burn. As the slope grows gradual, I cut wider turns out of sheer exhaustion. When my daughter reaches me, she tips over in the snow, and sprawls on her back. “That was harder than the up,” she says. We ski one at a time and fold our turns into each other’s lines to compress our impact on the slope. We arrive at the runout breathing heavily, punctuated by exclamations of joy, and bent over, trying to catch our breath.
I couldn’t catch my breath. Momentum and habit had me continuing to make horse blanket bookings and planning the next inventory turn. The texture of my business was changing, and I looked for means to recalibrate: more product on the website, travelling to barns to sell saddles, staff with specific skill sets. I hired a manager to run daily operations. As a result, I was able to increase barn visits to fit and sell more saddles and greatly boost revenue. I was out of the store more than in it, creating a space between me and my shop: the employees, the staff, the customers. No longer did I hear customer stories. I no longer worked with staff on skill development. I no longer met the sales reps and filled out the bookings. My team held expertise in areas I lacked: business school training, marketing experience, social media interest, attention to product turn reports, and enthusiasm to learn about tack trends. Then covid upended production and mental health. Production issues slowed inventory orders. We were mentally spent by covid burdens. Young staff moved on to new careers. New staff difficult to find. Traffic in the store slowed as people became more accustomed to stay home. At barns, I admired all the product displayed on riders and horses that had been bought online. “So cheap,” they exclaimed, “Can you believe it!” I could and I couldn’t: the great deals, more choices, and delivery of the online marketplace far surpassed the tactile, limited inventory, and convenience of a store. Manufacturers selling direct to customers with better prices. Conditions were deteriorating for the stability of the business and my desire to commit to the uphill battle was waning.
For years I climbed: add inventory, increase marketing, more media, extra staff, improve e-commerce site, only to learn that possibly the business ran best on less. A single operator chatting up customers about their horse, handling a bit to show the action and how would it affect the horse. I had built my customer base one relationship at a time. I had centered the customer experience as the currency. Relationships were not real currency. Transactions are necessary to pay the bills. The volume too low. I was hovering on an edge. I had to take inventory, not just the product, but the toll the business was taking on me. I had to commit more time or close. It was beginning to look like a hell no. Closing was hitching myself to failure that I no longer believed the business could support itself. A belief I had been working twenty years to disprove.
It’s another sunny day and we are just north of Valdez, six hours south of Sunburst, but still in the Chugach range. We skin up through a small Aspen grove with bear-clawed trunks, and trees stripped of bark by porcupine. We cross moose tracks and pee holes. As we climb, I dive my pole into the snow and feel how it meets resistance in dense, strong layer and then punches quickly through the soft, weak layer. Above the trees, the snow is frozen in turbulent waves, called sastrugi. A term that morphed into strudel, not softening the impact. I know, because I skied a soft line, saw the group tracks veer left on traverse over the bumpy wind-sculpted snow, and before I knew what had happened, following the thin lines of ski edges slicing the slab, my ski tip hit a frozen wave of sastrugi, like a stone wall, and I went down fast, ski wedged, leg twisting, shoulder crunching, face smack down. My sunglass lenses popped out. My knee throbbed. Pain shot over my collarbone. Then, my leg freed and I slide about ten yards so that when Kent reached me, he asked, “what are you doing down there?”
“I was on the track,” I said working to pop my lenses back in and pressing my left fingers into my right collarbone to be sure it was stationary. “I hit the strudel.” In the car ride back to our rented house, I moved my charcoal hand warmers onto my shoulder. I drank water. Took Advil. I can ski with one arm. The next day, my shoulder ached each time I shrugged on my pack. I move the strap off my collarbone. It didn’t hurt to plant my pole, turn my skis, or move up hill. I could ski fine.
A customer complaint, a staffer quits, sales down, and I would rather be training for ski season than arresting the fall of the business. I would rather make the time for my adult children in the mountains. I have removed myself from most relationships: the in-store customers and the staff. The store has shifted from relationship to transactional. The in-barn saddle sales have become the lifeblood of the business. The building needs a new roof. No one is applying for sales positions. The manager, weary and overworked, hides out in office with paperwork. In July I decide to close the store. To show I can do the hard thing. No longer can I make it pretty; I just want to make it out. There is no happy tune to sing. By December, we manage to sell off three-fourths the inventory, not including the saddles I will persist with selling. I move the remaining inventory into a former staff member’s new consignment shop. The amount of inventory remaining equates to the amount of debt I am still holding. The saddle business will cover my building expenses. I have downsized. I have simplified. I have shifted my terrain. I have made a kickturn and point in a new direction.
Warming temperatures can shift stable terrain into a wet mass ready to let loose with a trigger. I soften from relief to let loose with anger. I am so angry about the continued debt: it’s the reflection of all my efforting. There is no beautiful track in the snow that is the visible marker of my skill. The loss on the ledger fixed for all time. I had wanted to sell and pass it on, like a legacy or a future, to receive payment, proof for my work. A cushion for the fall. Maybe what I really wanted was to walk away unscathed.
At mile-marker forty-five, we stare at a narrow snow-filled seam in the mountain. We traverse over the Valdez pipeline, up a steep ridge, and work our way to the top of the seam. It’s wider than I anticipated. Still, I doubt my ability to make a jump turn, and then several in succession—which is what this line requires to ski it and not simply sideslip down. In Sunburst, I had skied a narrow line within a great face. There were wide margins, forgiveness, on that run, if I shot forward out of balance, with too much speed, I wasn’t going to hit a rock wall.
The top of the chute is about two ski lengths across. I will have to hop four turns in quick succession before it widens. Four turns in quick succession are likely to cause me to wet my pants, or tangle my skis, or hit the rock wall. Four quick turns seem like a hell no.
My daughter hops quickly. She is twenty-five. I offer to let Kent and Tom go first, because sideslipping will remove the better snow. “Go ahead,” they both say. Perhaps demonstrating I wasn’t the only middle-ager hesitant to hop down. I side-slip, constantly looking for the moment I will plant a pole and rotate with a leap to face the other direction. I didn’t see that moment. I slipped through the narrows. The great cliff walls looming four stories above.
I regretted not attempting jump turns, but I celebrated I had come down on skis and not face first trying to get a pole in the snow to arrest the fall. I felt hope, about my abilities to move within my limitations. Movement, an antidote to the paralysis of despair, triggers hope. My confidence opens like the horizon.
After working for so little for so long, framing it as community service, I was sad to let the community down by closing my doors. Then I was angry that it was gone without a trace. All that work disappeared like tracks blown out by the wind. I held there was a cherished place for a community tack shop. As barns increase in-house services to their boarders, and riders’ shop within their homes, we isolate within smaller social circles. No longer are we going into the store to learn about a new product that may have just arrived or encounter others outside our barns and mix up our social circles. We are narrowing the margins of our beliefs.
I love the ski mountaineering ethos. The choice to be foot-powered and not use helicopters. A culture that loves five hours up and the one-hour down is just icing and not the main event. I love that we move so slow we have this deeper study of our surroundings: wolverine prints, aspen grove, porcupine territory, deep tracks of moose. We’re sweating because our bodies are working gloriously. We examine the conditions and read why they matter to us: where the possibility of an avalanche, where a nice line, how to set track going uphill to hold an edge, the best place to position a kickturn. We read the landscape and partner with it.
With my store, I was part of an idea—that small towns sustain small businesses. That local business gives autonomy and jobs to workers, builds skill sets to expand employment choices, that we give back to a sport we love, and we offer a marketplace for cottage industries. A place where all gaits of a horse community come together and find a shared language despite different pursuits. We connect over a shared love. An avalanche is the sudden, irresistible descent of anything. And in this moment, it’s my sorrow.
In the mountains, I hear my breath, the wind, bird chatter. I feel the grace of my body. It doesn’t matter that I’m carrying fifteen extra pounds, and I’d like to be thinner because I have powered up the ridge, peered over an edge that had my skis hanging in air, dropped-in, and carved steady turns. I am a woman of certain age, soft in body, and in many regards diminishing, but I am skiing mountains of Alaska. I stand at the entrance of another narrow chute and push off for my first turn.
“Shoot the gap,” Joe yells. I see the gap before me: a sliver between narrow rocks. It’s not a turning opportunity; it’s a go-straight necessity. It wasn’t the length of a single turn; it was the length of three turns; it was going to be acceleration through rock walls. Turning small and quickly, I enter the narrows with poles outstretched. I yell “shooting the gap,” and ski straight. I exit with speed. I look for a pole plant and a turn. I want to make quick turns to re-gain control, to avoid hitting a tree, rocks, or a stump disguised as a snow mound. I see it, plant and turn around stumps, increasing my arc as the chute widens.
I had clung to the store for distraction, for community, and for a purpose. My children had witnessed my learning, the sales growth, the scale of my industry, and my frustrations, as they had also witnessed me stand on the cornice and stare into the steepness of the chute, confess my fear, and yet drop in. They had seen me face risk, sideslip challenges, emerge humbled but unscathed. They had listened to a litany of reasons for the descent of a small-town business. In the mountains we traverse a sliver of a ridge top and clink our poles in a fist pump of relief and accomplishment at the top. The awe lifted me; the climb gave me reward. Snow layers build like sedimentation, a striation of different textures, a history to unveil a story. A story of unpredictability: new powder upon a hard packed layer, a dense layer over sugary snow, tell us about the terrain.
Memories layer the store. My husband attaching slat board to walls to hang gloves and bridles. My twelve-year old daughter berated by a hurried customer while ringing up her sale. My sixteen-year-old daughter showing the attributes of a girth. My seventeen-year-old son carrying a box brimming with halters when we moved into this building. April printing inventory reports to review with me and Megann adjusting a saddle for a customer. Me fitting a customer with a helmet and discussing the previous weekend competition. The UPS man unloading a palette containing a blanket booking. A grandmother returning breeches their grandchild didn’t like the color. Striations of hard and sweet spanning twenty-two years. Like this too an adult-child graduated, and gone. I stand alone in the empty space that is my store. Four empty breeches rack. The wall shelves bare of helmets. A brand poster left hanging on the boot display wall. The floorboards squeak underfoot. I hear my breath. Cars speed by outside the dust-coated window. A small pile of horse blankets and bell boots remain on the floor. I am surrounded by empty racks, in a space that no longer has boundaries, but looks like a horizon.
Annie Penfield holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Twice named notable by Best American Essays, her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Under the Gum Tree, Fourth Genre, and more. This essay is both a celebration of her years as a Vermont shopkeeper and a call to action to shop locally and please support rural business. www.anniepenfield.com