Like the prospectors a hundred years before them, eight grizzled ski bums came to the desert looking for a rare gem. They struck white gold when they found one of the most spectacular backcountry lines in California.

By David T. Page

By 6 AM the light’s coming up fast on what has to be the unlikeliest backcountry skiing line in North America. The sun hits the cornices at exactly 6:17; we pause to take it in. The mountain paints itself before us, finally, as the sort of mountain a person could actually ski. Its hidden lines are catching just the right light — there are glades off the top, a pair of wide-open bowls, a series of north-facing chutes reminiscent of Taos or Alta or Ajax, but bigger. Meanwhile, a vertical mile below us is Death Valley, the driest, hottest desert in the West. Three hundred cyclists are setting out from Furnace Creek for the Death Valley Double Century, hoping to get ahead of the heat, which in a few hours will hit 90 degrees. The summit we’re aiming for sits reflected in the stagnant pool at the bottom of Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level.

Each of us had recognized the absurdity of searching for skiable snow in the Mojave Desert — it was part of the appeal — but now it was all starting to make perfect sense. Telescope Peak, Death Valley’s tallest mountain at 11,049 feet, is enormous, with more sustained vertical rise than any other peak in the lower 48. Base to summit it requires a longer climb than any of Colorado’s 14ers, the Tetons, even Whitney, Shasta, or Rainier. If you’re looking at it from a distance, which is your only choice if you want to take in the whole thing, it’s near impossible to get perspective. The part of it that resembles other mountains you might ski — the part with trees and snow, that is — doesn’t start until around 7,000 feet and is such a comparatively small part of the whole, it’s hard to gauge. Until you’re halfway up.

Once we reach the high ridgeline, the vast alluvial mess finally gives way to the first patches of crusty, wind-dried snow. But there’s too much snow to hike around and too little to warrant putting on skis. If only we were able to attach skins to the bottom of our skis, freeheeling up the mountain would be twice as fast as walking. Instead, it goes something like this: one ginger step, then another…then punch through to your knees. Repeat. We’ve been at it for five hours already, eight tiny specks, skis on our backs climbing up and out of the desert in the dark, on the scantest of game trails. We’ve watched the moon rise and the distant glow of Vegas 100 miles away give way to the dawn. We’ve had blood drawn by the local flora. We’re nowhere near the halfway mark, and yet we’re exactly where we want to be: on our way to ski something that none of us — and who knows, maybe no one in the world — has ever skied.

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At exactly this time yesterday, we were standing in the parking lot at Dante’s View, at 5,475 feet, on the opposite side of the basin, 20 miles as the crow flies from the face we came to ski. We sipped coffee, studied the contours on the map, and looked across at the mountain through binoculars. There was snow up there, to be sure, but in the vastness of the landscape it seemed little more than an odd counterpoint. Was it powder? Was it corn? Was it a thin veneer of death crust over rocks? Some of us had been casing the peak for years; others had just heard rumors. As for me, every time I drove Highway 395 down to Los Angeles, it was there — the other side of it, the west face — and every time, especially when there was snow on it, I was reminded: That mountain should be skied.

There were six of us at that point, with two more to join later. If nothing else, we had the makings of a highly competent crew. Christian Pondella is one of the best extreme-sports photographers around, and he brought with him three local Mammoth pros. Ryan Boyer, a self-proclaimed redneck tele guy, originally from Santa Cruz, signed on simply because it reminded him of the old bumper sticker: “When hell freezes over, I’ll ski there, too!” Bernie Rosow, the youngest of the group at 28, is a lead snowcat driver for Mammoth Mountain. He worked the swing shift, 4 pm to midnight, and spent all day, every day on a fat pair of twin tips. David Schemenauer was a renowned big-mountain skier who used to trade his talents on the steeps for gear. His record for most days clocked in a single season: 232. The four of them had come down from Mammoth the night before with no small amount of reluctance, having torn themselves away from the High Sierra in the glorious aftermath of a late-winter dump. But these are all guys who thrive on dropping into something they can’t quite make out.

Then there was my brother-in-law, Devin McDonell, who had driven nine and a half hours around the southern horn of the Sierra from San Francisco to be here. There had been a brief moment during my own drive down when I worried about Devin in this company, as he was the only one of us trying to float a life beyond the purview of the mountains. I might not have given it a second thought had I known I was offering him the powder day of a lifetime, but, frankly, we had no idea what kind of snow we’d find on Telescope. For all we knew, we’d be walking down, and I wasn’t sure how much pain he’d be willing to trade for no payoff whatsoever. Then I reminded myself that he’d done an Iron Man and that, despite having grown up in New York City and learned to ski at, of all places, Jiminy Peak, Massachusetts, he was still one of the strongest skiers I knew. He also happened to have been an instructor at Jackson Hole and had once post-holed up Shasta with a full alpine setup on his back. I quickly realized it was myself I needed to start worrying about.

I’d called the Visitor Center at Furnace Creek the week before to see if the Park Service could offer any clarification on the generic advisory they’d published online: “Winter climbers should be experienced and equipped with ice ax, crampons, winter clothing, boots, and ropes.” The ranger had never even heard of anyone skiing Telescope. “You mean, like, with crampons and an ice ax to the top and skiing down?” he asked. “I think anyone you talk to is going to advise against it.” Looking at it through binoculars, even from 20 miles away, we could see there was nothing particularly technical about the climb — we’d all been up and down much gnarlier stuff — and little did the ranger know he was practically goading us to climb Telescope by telling us we’d have the whole range to ourselves.

The easiest way to the summit is via the old dirt road up the mountain’s backside from Wildrose Canyon, past the charcoal kilns to Mahogany Flat, near the spot where in the mid-1930s a miner by the name of John Thorndike actually envisioned building a ski resort. But we wanted to ski the east face, the one we were looking at from Dante’s View. The purity of making the climb straight up from the lowest point in the country and then skiing back down into Death Valley proper was too much to resist. The aesthetics were undeniable, the clean, epic up-and-down of it.

At first there was some dissent. It was true: We’d be able to spend more time on the snow if we went up the backside. We’d be in and out, with photos, and on the road home in a fraction of the time. But then Schemenauer pulled out Michel Digonnet’s classic hiking guide to the park, Hiking Death Valley. Digonnet calls the climb from Hanaupah Canyon to the summit of Telescope one of the toughest treks in Death Valley. “Crossing the Grand Canyon in one day is much easier,” he writes. “Only a chosen few can do this hike in one day, and even fewer can cram the round-trip between sunrise and sundown.”

And so the gauntlet was thrown.

As night fell on our camp at the top of the Hanaupah fan, we sipped Tecates and prepared dinner on the tailgate of the Land Cruiser. Then, out of the moonlight came Joe Walker, an ex-pro ski racer and tuner for the World Cup who was known to tag along occasionally with World’s Most Traveled Man Bill Altaffer. A few hours after that, the eighth and final member of our crew, John Wentworth, pulled up in his brand-new but already dented Toyota pickup, fresh from a day of deep powder in the High Sierra backcountry. Wentworth, pushing 50, was our wise elder. He spent years producing movies for David Lynch before finally giving in to the life of a ski bum, and then to that of a tireless advocate for public access. He claims to be the only person alive to have skied Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

“Where’s the snow?” Wentworth asked, stepping out into the dust.

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With the sun now above the horizon, we’re finally on skis and moving up fast. The goal at this point is to get on top and be skiing down before the sun gets too intense, before the snow turns to mush or starts to slide. “This is what we know how to do,” says Boyer, boosted on Pondella’s tropical dried-fruit medley and charging hard as ever. But almost immediately the pitch gets too steep, the snow like rock candy, like fine china — sunbaked by day, frozen by night — and too slick for skins. Wentworth is the only one of us who brought along a pair of ski crampons, lucky bastard, and he’s long gone by now, having dropped down into the gully looking for snow to skin up. For the rest of us, the skis come off once again, to be hefted over shoulders for the first of a brutal series of boot-packs.

As we reach 8,200 feet, our hard work begins to pay off. We get a lovely, if brief, alpine-style ski tour across an avalanche field, where a stand of limber pine has been smashed by an old slide. A crisp upslope eddy of wind hits our backs and eases our loads, and the snow begins to soften as the morning warms up. We glide through a forest of gnarled 3,000-year-old bristlecone pines, among the oldest living things on the planet. It feels like a quick lap in the woods above my house before picking the kids up from school. We’re in our element and estimating the summit to be just a couple of hours away.

Then the aspect changes yet again. Pondella takes a fair slide sideways, self-arresting with his fingernails. Devin drops a glove, climbs down to get it and back up again, then drops a pole. We are all back to post-holing — kicking and punching our way up 1,500 feet of slab, against a cascade of tiny ice crystals sliding in the other direction. If there’s a crux to this marathon, this is it.

After a week of clear skies and relentless, unseasonable melting, the sky has started to cloud over as a cold front lumbers in from the northwest. The overcast is good, I think; it will help keep the snow firm. On the other hand, if the temperature drops too much, or if the wind gets into the bowl, we could be in for a nasty, bulletproof crust. When we crest the main ridge, the wind is gusting and cold. We are still nearly 1,000 feet from the summit, and Wentworth is still nowhere to be found. Devin throws himself down on the snow. “I’d rather do an Iron Man,” he says.

We put on full winter gear, and I try to raise Wentworth on the radio. Nothing. We eat dry bagels with slices of dry salami, drink water, and force ourselves to press on into the wind, our hoods up, our goggles on. We’re now switchbacking, then post-holing again, then slapping our skis like flippers across exposed rocks. But we’re close; Telescope is ours.

Turns out Wentworth has been on the summit for some time, waiting for us. After leaving us behind earlier, he found a tongue of snow that led straight to the summit. With only the company of his iPod, he skinned straight up the throat of the thing without having to take off his skis even once. He’s already read and signed the summit register (the previous entry is dated November 7 — four months earlier).

“Look yonder,” he shouts, gesturing into the rising gale — the grand northward march of the Sierra, 60 miles away; dust storms brewing to the southwest; the innumerable ranges lined up to the east like islands in a great sea of clouds. Below us — 11,300 feet down now, and some 17 ragged miles overland — lies the barely fathomable Valley of Death, our new destination. At a few minutes after 11 am, without any great ado, we drop in.

Pondella and crew traverse to one of the steeper north-facing chutes, looking for a cache of powder and something good to jump off of. Devin and I find ourselves following Wentworth, the old wise man, off the summit cornice. We watch as he carves a smooth line down the gully, down into the big south bowl, flirting with his own route up as he drops. A dozen turns down, he stops. He makes a sign for us to come ahead. “It’s good,” he shouts.

And so we follow, carving our own widening arcs, and indeed it is good. Not just good like safe, but truly, objectively good. There’s solid coverage on every aspect, a firm base like frosting on an ice cream cake — smooth, flawless, dusted on top with two or three inches of soft, wind-sifted winter velvet. And it goes on forever, for thousands of acres of wide-open parkland: steep chutes and glades, nubs and tufts, gullies, fields, and funnels. Farther down, we hit the sweetest of spring corn. And so we go from winter to spring and back again, stopping on occasion to watch the others play, to savor our tracks and the vastness of the terrain, to try to make the thing last.

Having spent the past 30 hours steeling myself for the likelihood of truly awful conditions, I find myself wasting a few turns, throwing my arms around, putting my focus in the wrong place. Then I begin to feel it. Everything else — the long night’s upward slog, the scratches and scrapes, the pain in my lungs and legs, the epic hike out still to come — just gives way to that rare, hooting-and-hollering, time-stopping kind of freedom that can never end. And then it ends.

By five minutes to noon, having consumed 4,320 vertical feet in less than an hour, nearly 200 feet more than the most lift-served vert in the lower 48 (at Jackson Hole), we’re at the bottom of the snow, lounging on the dirt in the warm sun and the bittersweet glory, back in shorts and T-shirts, waiting for the cliff-huckers to come crashing through the brush. “That was really good skiing,” says Wentworth, in classic understatement. “Really good.”

It always goes too fast — the skiing-down part — but such is the nature of it. Then you’re on to the next thing: a cold Tecate or a long drive, or a swing shift in a snowcat.

For now, though, all that remains between ourselves and that next thing is a long hike back to the car; another 10 miles and four hours of stumbles, scree slips, and knee tweaks; numerous cactus-stabs, a broken ski pole, one pair of shoes peeled clean of soles; a seam-split pack, a torn fingernail.

One year, I think to myself, if conditions are ever right again, I’ll haul some camping gear up to this spot — a lightweight sleeping bag, a stove, something good to cook — set up a little early-springtime beach camp where the desert meets the snow, and spend a week or so doing laps in the bowls, really exploring the place. Maybe when my boys grow to kick my ass on skis I’ll bring them here just to remind them how big and old the world really is. And how hard some places are to get to — the best places, maybe.

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This article originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of Men’s Journal.