“Now just remember what Huey Long said—that every man’s a king—and I’m the king around here and don’t you forget it.”

—A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951

Our prop plane climbs away from Tahiti and heads north over the whitecapped Pacific. Leveling off at a few thousand feet, the French pilot turns from the cockpit and flashes a thumbs-up to me, my wife, Anne, and the handful of other passengers in the half-empty cabin. Twenty minutes later, we glimpse our destination through the tiny window: a pristine atoll consisting of 12 islets—or motu—arranged in a circle, like a necklace of emeralds laid upon the sea.

The effect is jaw-dropping as we dip through the clouds. A bloom of surf breaking along the reef. Then a golden ring of submerged coral; then a turquoise band of shallow water, followed by a blinding sliver of beach. Jungles of waxy green—breadfruit and ironwood, pandanus and palm. All told it adds up to about 1,600 acres of South Seas paradise, nodding in the ocean breeze.

You’d never know that on one of those motu lies one of the poshest hotels in all of Polynesia, its clusters of blond-wood buildings and 35 thatch-roofed villas so unobtrusively tucked into their environment that we don’t see a thing until we fly right over it. There are none of those annoying over­water bungalows that have become a clichĂ© of French Polynesia, the romantic architecture honeymooners supposedly love.

We bank above the stunning inner lagoon, which has been called the Billionaire’s Bathtub. It’s the flooded caldera of a volcano that sank into the sea eons ago. There are said to be 32 shades of blue in the lagoon, but who’s counting? Cerulean. Azure. Robin’s egg. Delphinium. Cobalt. Indigo. Ultra­marine. Aquamarine. Teal. ±ő’v±đ heard it described as “ludicrous” blue, “electric” blue, and “Hockney” blue; none of these seem hyperbolic.

Our puddle-jumper lands on a small airstrip lined with solar panels. Stepping off, we hear the thrum of a ukulele and are saluted by a regal-looking Polynesian man. Standing nearby is a phalanx of staff dressed in white linen shorts and white leather loafers. It feels like the whole island has been waiting for us, eager to deliver miracles.

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It’s good for the soul to nurse a fantasy, an escape plan, a thing we yearn to do someday, some way, off in the middle future. For some it’s a boat, or a beach shack, or a cabin deep in the woods. For others it’s a distant rendezvous with a fly rod, or a pair of crampons, or a blank canvas to paint en plein air. It’s the thing we’re going to get to one of these days, when there’s time and money and attention to burn.

My pipe dream has a certain shape, a certain shimmer and sheen. It’s a dream of the open road, but also one that’s very much fixed within the iconography of America. Long story short, I’m insanely into Airstreams: teardrops from the age of Sputnik, space capsules from the pages of . I don’t own one of the classic orbs, but ±ő’v±đ obsessed over them for decades. Bambis. Sovereigns. Land Yachts. Excellas. Flying Clouds. I guess you could call it a fetish—and there are many tens of thousands of people around the world afflicted just like me.Ìę

±ő’v±đ , ±ő’v±đ been to national Airstream conventions, ±ő’v±đ studied the life and times of the company founder (world traveler and trailering evangelist Wally Byam). I collect Airstream art posters, bric-a-brac, salt and pepper shakers. My tree at Christmas is festooned with Airstream lights. My affections are trained less on the object itself than on the aesthetic. But there it is. I can’t control it. It’s bigger than I am. I’m smitten with unsmirched aluminum, with that aerodynamic curve, that monocoque argentine shell.

Will ownership make me happy? It could destroy the fragile feeling altogether. When an Airstream becomes a thing to be maintained, a quotidian chore, my love may wither. Some things, I know, are better worshipped from afar.Ìę

But mark my words, I shall possess one of the righteous silver lozenges one day, so help me God.

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Da, Da, there it is,” Andrey says with a smile as he idles the outboard engine. He puffs a cigarette and points at a bulge on the horizon. “Amerika Khaya—America Mountain.”

Ìę

I look where Andrey is pointing, but I’m distracted by clouds of insects. In this part of the Siberian Arctic, there are only two seasons: Winter and Mosquito. Right now we’re in the middle of Mosquito. The ravening swarms work their way under our clothes, dive into our mouths, clot our eyes and nostrils. On a nearby island, a few wild reindeer try to nibble the tundra moss, but they look tormented, their hides jumping with nervous tics.

We’re 5,000 miles east of Moscow, nearly 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in the gale-smashed barrens where the great Lena River meets the Arctic Ocean. This is one of the world’s largest deltas, an estuarial snarl of river channels and silty islands that spreads out over 11,500 square miles of mostly uninhabited terrain. The Lena Delta is a (scientific nature reserve), one of the largest in Russia, set in the most remote territory of the Sakha Republic.

It’s mid-August, and I’m traveling with Andrey Kryukov, a former Russian soldier from Irkutsk who has worked on the Lena River for 22 years. Kryukov, who is in his forties, is the second-in-command of the Puteyskiy 405, a diesel riverboat that ±ő’v±đ hitched a ride on for much of the past week. To navigate some of the shallower back channels of the delta, we left the Puteyskiy 405 around midday and ventured out in a banged-up johnboat. Andrey wears a black knit cap and army fatigues, and in case we should meet wolves or bandits or a rogue polar bear, he has a rifle slung over his shoulder.

Amerika Khaya is a small hog-backed mountain that rises 400 feet above the Lena’s floodplain of marshes and islands. It was also the burial site of ten Americans who perished in the Lena Delta during a then famous but now little-known polar expedition in the 1880s. It’s just a large hill, really, but on extra-clear days, Amerika Khaya is visible for a hundred miles, sometimes magnified by the refractions of the Arctic atmosphere.

Now we can clearly see it, but the mountain is surrounded by labyrinths of sandbars and channels of water. When we run aground for the fourth time, Andrey kills the engine in disgust. “Hop out,” he mutters, then drags the boat onto a sandbar. “From here ve vade.”

We start splashing across the puddles and stagnant ponds, swatting mosquitoes as we go. The mud sucks at our swamp boots—and yanks one of mine off my foot. Loons call in the distance. I can see the tracks of an arctic fox stitched across the sand. The water is bone-wincingly cold—somewhere in the low forties. When it suddenly rises to our waists, Andrey hoists his rifle over his head.

It’s past midnight when we reach dry land and hike to the base of America Mountain. Everything is suffused in the weird golden light of the Arctic summer, muted and thin, like the glow of a solar eclipse. We climb for an hour, stumbling over spongy terrain matted in stunted heathers and tiny red mushrooms. Here and there, bleached reindeer antlers are strewn over the ground.

We’re swallowed in desolation, not a sound but the whine of the bugs. This is a Pleistocene tundra on a fantastic scale, an ancient emptiness that seems better suited for the mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and woolly rhinos that once lived here. No trees grow in the Lena Delta—we’re far north of the timberline—yet along the river channels are tangled graveyards of trees that have drifted a thousand miles from the dark forests of the taiga.

Seen from the air, the Lena Delta looks like the cross section of an enormous tumor that bulges far out into the Laptev Sea. Most of the year it’s covered in ice and snow, and even today, though Arctic flowers are blooming everywhere, it’s a frozen landscape: the permafrost, just below the surface, extends 2,000 feet belowground.

Throughout tsarist history, the upper Lena was known as a region where Russia banished her criminals: a prison without bars. Later, the Lena became the site of at least five Soviet gulags, the so-called River of No Reprieve. Surely this must be one of the loneliest spots on earth. Yet it’s also a land of awesome beauty—and a haunting site for a memorial to an expedition of forgotten American explorers.

I had come to the Russian Arctic to retrace a Gilded Age polar voyage that I was writing a book about. Three decades before Admiral Peary reached the top of the world, another American polar attempt, the United States Arctic Expedition of 1879, was all the rage. It was one of America’s first official efforts to reach the North Pole, sponsored by the U.S. Navy but paid for by James Gordon Bennett, the half-mad playboy publisher of the New York Herald who had sent Stanley to “find” Livingstone in Africa. The expedition, commanded by an indomitable Navy lieutenant from New York named George Washington De Long, carried the hopes of a young nation itching to make a mark on the world. The hold of De Long’s ship, the USS Jeannette, was crammed with the latest American inventions: a dynamo newly designed by Edison to generate light, as well as Bell’s telephones.

De Long, 34, planned to reach the North Pole via Alaska and the Bering Strait, a route that had never been tried before. (Up until that time, all polar attempts had concentrated on the Atlantic side, by way of Greenland or the Svalbard Islands north of Norway.) De Long actually hoped to sail to the pole. His expedition was predicated on the theories of an eminent cartography professor from Germany named August Petermann, who believed that the Kuro Siwo, a tropical current in the Pacific, swept through the Bering Strait and then softened up the ice, creating a “gateway” to a basin full of warm water—the Open Polar Sea, it was called—that many leading thinkers believed covered the earth’s dome.

Professor Petermann thought that all De Long had to do was burst through the Kuro Siwo–weakened ice pack to enjoy smooth sailing to the top of the world. De Long massively reinforced the hull of the Jeannette with thick timbers and an iron sheathing so that he could temporarily imprison her in the floes. His Ice Ark might drift for a few months, the thinking went, but eventually it would emerge from the pack and reach the tepid waters of the Open Polar Sea. If he succeeded, he would return a world hero.

Today it’s hard for us to understand how intensely curious people were in the 19th century to learn what was Up There. The polar problem loomed as a public fixation and a planetary enigma. The gallant, fur-cloaked men who ventured into the Arctic had become national idols. People couldn’t get enough of them.

Cheered by huge crowds, in July 1879, De Long and 30 carefully chosen men sailed with high hopes from San Francisco. His crew included a meteorologist, a naturalist, an ice pilot, an engineer, a few dozen seasoned seamen, and two Cantonese cooks from San Francisco’s Chinatown. “We have the right kind of stuff to dare all that man can do,” De Long wrote. Later that summer, the Jeannette passed through the Bering Strait and then on toward Siberia before aiming due north for regions mapped UNEXPLORED.

Today, De Long is one of the great forgotten heroes of American exploration. He discovered new lands, crossed a thousand miles of unexplored frozen ocean, and consigned a load of ridiculous theories—including the Open Polar Sea—to the dustbin. Though his voyage fell into spectacularly dire straits, De Long managed to avoid the three great banes of Arctic exploration: mutiny, scurvy, and cannibalism. He ably held his expedition together until the end and did all he could to ensure that his men came home.

The Jeannette was a sensation in its day, an American Shackleton story 35 years before the Endurance. It was chronicled in newspapers and was the subject of songs, poems, monuments, paintings, Congressional inquiries, and popular books. De Long’s expedition journals were bestsellers at the time. Yet most Americans today have never heard of him or the audacious voyage he undertook on behalf of his country. History, it seems, has passed him by.

I wanted to follow in the path of the Jeannette to experience something of what that epic journey was like. The end of the Cold War and the thinning of the ice brought about by climate change had made it possible to reach many of the places the Jeannette had voyaged, places that had effectively been off-limits for more than a century.

I planned to spend six weeks, taking a series of ships and boats, jets and prop planes, to trace De Long’s route from the Bering Strait to the Lena Delta. The distances and logistics were Siberian in scale. Most inconveniently, my route to the Bering Strait led not through Alaska but clear around the world. I flew to Moscow to secure an absurd number of government permits. (One official quizzed me: “By tradition, people are sent to those parts—you want to go there?”) Then I connected several flights east across eight time zones to the small port city of Anadyr, a town once governed by Roman Abramovitch, now the billionaire .

In Anadyr, the icebreaker Professor Khromov awaited. It was registered as a Russian vessel but owned by , a New Zealand adventure-travel outfit, and had a motley mix on board—scientists, eco-tourists, and a French documentary crew. The ship was bound for the Bering Strait, the Siberian coast, and a highly restricted Russian reserve set in the Chukchi Sea known as Wrangel Island.

We left Anadyr and were soon cruising past Alaska, but we couldn’t go there. Leaning over the rails, drinking a cold Baltika beer as gray whales breached in the distance, I gave a little wave to Sarah Palin and thought how ludicrous it was to have traveled 10,000 miles to look at my own country.

On his way to the Arctic, De Long had stopped at St. Michael, Alaska, where he bought furs, dogs, and other supplies—and hired two Inuits to serve as hunters and dog drivers. De Long found America’s newly purchased territory “a miserable place” with an air of decay fueled by liquor and exacerbated by the American fur and whaling industries.

Later in the day, we hopped into Zodiac rafts and sped to some cave-riddled cliffs along the Siberian shore, where we encountered hundreds of thousands of nesting birds. Puffins. Guillemots. Pelagic cormorants. Steller’s eiders. Ross’s gulls. They shrieked and chattered so loudly we had to shout to be heard. Agitated by our approach, their dive-bombing brethren nailed us with their guano. I’d never seen so much throbbing, jittery life crammed into one place.

On the faces of nearly everyone in the Zodiacs was the same look of delirious abandon. Out came the bird guides, up went the Nikons with their 800-millimeter zoom lenses. Everyone clicked away, giggling, ecstatic. “Look at the puffin! Aren’t you gorgeous!”

I hadn’t seen it coming: I would be spending the next two weeks on a ship positively infested with birders.

When the Jeannette passed along this coast, the expedition’s civilian scientist, a mousy, Smithsonian-affiliated naturalist named Raymond Newcomb, blasted one specimen of every bird species he encountered. Newcomb’s shipboard office became an abattoir, piled with decaying carcasses. “Natural History is well looked out for,” De Long wrote of his odd specimen collector. “Any bird that comes near the ship does so at the peril of its life.”

As we passed by the Diomede Islands and through the Bering Strait, following the international date line, I felt a kind of demarcational vertigo. Left was Asia and today. Right was North America and yesterday.* Behind us lay the Pacific Ocean, but the Arctic Ocean was just ahead. Beneath the ship, on the shallow seabed, was the Bering land bridge, across which, it is widely thought, waves of paleo-humans had wandered to the new world. This strait, a mere 53 miles across, has always been one of the planet’s great mytho-strategic chokepoints—a spot where currents collide, genes migrate, epochs touch. No wonder scientists of De Long’s day believed it was the natural gateway to the pole.

In years to come, the Bering Strait may serve as a different sort of gateway: the Russian government has been touting a plan to build a 64-mile tunnel that would connect Siberia to Alaska. The gargantuan conduit could cost upwards of $50 billion and, when finished, would be twice as long as Europe’s Chunnel. Theoretically, ordinary citizens could use it, though the tunnel’s main purpose would be transporting Siberian oil, gas, and electricity to the United States and Canada. Since Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Crimea, the project seems more fantastical than ever. But regionally, at least, the will is there on both sides of the strait.

Farther up the coast lies the tiny Chukchi town of Uelen. Russia’s easternmost settlement, Uelen (pop. 740) is set just south of the Arctic Circle along a gravel spit that backs up to a cold lagoon. An Orthodox church topped with a small onion dome rises over a grid of prefab buildings and weather-scabbed shacks. It’s essentially a marooned place—no roads lead from town, so the only way to get there is by helicopter or boat.

When we arrived, on a partly sunny afternoon with temperatures in the high forties, we were swarmed by giggling children. The village was in the midst of a festival. Hunters had recently caught a gray whale and butchered it on the rocks. Now the place was full of blubbery mirth, and a good bit of alcohol had made the rounds. Drums pounded as women in calico dresses performed ancient Chukchi dances. Athletic games were in full swing along the gravel beach: pole climbing, tug-of-war contests, weight lifting, wrestling.

The mistress of the games, a Yupik woman with a bullhorn, coaxed me and some of my birder friends to form a tug-of-war team. We won a few matches but were soon destroyed by a crew of burly young Ukrainian construction workers who’d come for the summer to erect prefab homes for the locals.

On the perimeter of all this festiveness lurked an air of official menace: four Russian soldiers, clutching Kalashnikovs, kept a close watch on the crowds. We’d been told we weren’t supposed to look at them, and that if we photographed them we’d be arrested, our cameras confiscated. In 2012, Putin declared this place a closed border zone. Visitors without special permits can expect to be imprisoned, fined, or deported. The soldiers inspected our paperwork and escorted us wherever we went. We were welcome, but not really. They made sure that after a few hours we returned to our ship and went on our way.

The next morning, we woke to find a huge ice field spread before us, obstructing our path to Wrangel Island. Most of the Arctic had seen a record amount of ice melt that summer, but not here. Our Russian captain gritted his teeth and said he’d never seen it so thick this time of summer. The Professor Khromov shuddered as we smashed through it. Great jagged cracks jigsawed out in front of us. Once, we rode up onto a floe and slid back down, grinding to a halt. Off the starboard bow, a polar bear stood on its hind legs and sniffed at us, mystified by the cumbersome thing crunching through its world.

Then the fog parted and there it was: Wrangel Island, 90 miles long, with broad valleys and mountains of virgin tundra gauzed in wisps of fog. Wrangel is a federally protected reserve some 80 miles off the northeast coast of Siberia. It’s a primeval place, supporting such an astonishing abundance of wildlife that biologists have called it the Galápagos of the far north. Wrangel is the largest polar bear denning ground in the world and boasts the largest population of Pacific walrus and one of the largest snow goose nesting colonies. It’s also the last place on earth where woolly mammoths lived.

In the late 1870s, when De Long was planning his expedition, Wrangel was still terra incognita. Some geographers thought it was a polar continent connected to Greenland. De Long’s idea was to try to land on Wrangel and explore it while using its coast as a ladder to climb toward his ultimate goal. If he reached the Open Polar Sea, he could sail for the North Pole in the Jeannette. If he didn’t, he could dash overland for the pole with dogs, sleds, and small boats.

But De Long never reached Wrangel. The Jeannette got locked in fast-moving ice, and he drifted past the island. “A glorious country to learn patience in,” De Long wrote. “It would take an earthquake to get us out.”

De Long didn’t know it yet, but this was the beginning of a long imprisonment: the Jeannette would drift northwest in the pack for more than 600 miles—and for nearly two years, without any link to the outside world. “I calmly believe,” De Long wrote, that “this icy waste will go on surging to and fro until the last trump blows.” He never found the Open Polar Sea, or a warm-water current that softened the polar pack. The Jeannette had been thwarted by a fortress of ice.

As we approached it, I could understand why cartographers once thought Wrangel might be a continent. It felt as though we’d reached the end of the earth.

An American relief vessel dispatched in 1881 to look for De Long did manage to land on Wrangel; the surrounding ice was unusually spare that summer. On board this rescue ship was the young naturalist John Muir, who was then a part-time San Francisco newspaper correspondent. Muir and his party raised an American flag on the beach and claimed the island for the United States, which is why certain hawkish groups in America today insist that Wrangel is rightfully U.S. soil and should be retaken. Muir found no sign of the Jeannette but was astounded by Wrangel’s pristine grandeur. The place seemed specially made for polar bears. Everywhere Muir looked he saw them. “Very fat and prosperous,” he wrote. “They are the unrivalled master existences of this ice-bound solitude.”

We landed on Wrangel Island by Zodiacs and clambered over a rocky shore littered with the bones of walruses and whales. Anatoli Rodionov, a big Russian preserve ranger in fatigues, met us at the beach. He was one of only four people who lived here year-round, and he seemed almost desperate for fresh human contact. He kept a can of bear spray and a flare gun holstered at his side. “Privyet, and welcome to Ostrov Vrangelya!” he gushed. “Thank God you have come!”

Anatoli led us over to Ushakovskoye, an abandoned settlement from Cold War times consisting of an old bathhouse and a few decrepit cabins, some of which had been dismantled for firewood. Nearby stood an ancient radar installation and a junkyard’s worth of mystery equipment from the Khrushchev era.

We spent five days on or around Wrangel, taking overland forays into the mountains, camping in tiny huts, passing over tundra whitened by vast flocks of snow geese. Anatoli introduced me to Sergey Gorshkov, who had been coming to Wrangel for much of the past decade to photograph polar bears and other animals. Pale and soft-spoken, with a goatee, Sergey retired from the oil business in Moscow in his thirties and picked up a camera. Nowadays, he ventures to extremely remote places—Kamchatka, Botswana, but especially Wrangel—and lingers for months at a time. He has since become a . “My life,” Sergey said, “is divided in two—before the camera and after. Photography is my sickness. My wife is ready to kill me.”

Sergey invited me into his cabin, a ramshackle space piled with photographic equipment and canned goods he’d been living on for the past month. The windows were covered with metal grids spiked with six-inch nails to deter bears. After he showed me some of his work on an iPad, we took off on a Honda ATV, following a riverbed.

Sergey cut the engine and pointed. “There—in the river.” I splashed over to something half-submerged in the freezing ripples: a fossilized woolly mammoth tusk. “They’re everywhere on Wrangel,” Sergey said, beaming. “Wherever you go, elephant ivory!”

Sergey would be departing Wrangel with us in four days. “It’s difficult for me to leave,” he said. “I always think I may never come back, that it’s my last visit. This place gets to me.”

Nearly 600 miles northwest of Wrangel, the men of the Jeannette spent the spring and early summer of 1881 drifting in the ice pack. De Long’s men had plenty to eat and were generally healthy, though they were slowly going mad from boredom and inaction.

By then, De Long had given up on the idea of the Open Polar Sea—the whole concept, he said in his journal, was “a delusion and a snare.” But he had not given up on drifting to the North Pole. De Long discovered a group of islands and claimed them for the U.S. (They’re now known as the De Long Islands.) But in early June 1881, the Jeannette was mortally crushed by the ice. At one point, the decks bulged. At 4 a.m. on June 13, the ship plunged through the pack and sank to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

Cast out on the ice with their dogs, three open boats, and a few essential belongings, De Long and his 32 men had only one chance at survival: to drag their boats nearly 600 miles across the ice, hoping to find open water, and then sail for the nearest landmass—the central coast of Siberia.

They had only a few months to save themselves before winter set in. They would have to hunt for their own food while slogging over impossible expanses of crust and rubble and sludge. De Long’s maps showed that there might be settlements at the mouth of the Lena. Hoping to find a native village, he and his men aimed for the delta of one of the greatest rivers in the world.

The Lena River originates nearly 3,000 miles to the south of the Arctic Ocean, in a mountain range near Lake Baikal. As the river flows through the vast solitudes of Yakutia, it picks up tributary after tributary—the Kirenga, the Vitim, the Olyokma, the Aldan, the Vilyuy. The Lena is the world’s 11th-longest river, draining a vast swath of central Siberia. Because it flows north toward the Arctic, each fall the Lena freezes first at its mouth, developing a natural barrier that forces the water to fan out in a frantic search for other paths to the sea—which helps explain why the Lena’s delta is so extravagantly intricate, with untold thousands of islands and oxbow lakes.

This was the baffling landscape De Long and his men approached in their three open boats in September 1881. His crude chart labeled the country, simply, SWAMP OVER ETERNALLY FROZEN LAND.

To retrace this part of De Long’s journey, I left the Professor Khromov in Anadyr and flew west to a very different part of Siberia, the interior capital of Yakutsk—a booming hinterlands metropolis, built on gold and diamond riches, that is said to be the coldest city on earth. Then I took an iffy Brezhnev-era prop plane 1,000 miles north over the taiga and tundra to the coastal town of Tiksi. “Town” is a charitable word for this decaying, garbage-strewn collection of Soviet military barracks and empty slab apartment complexes. Technically speaking, Tiksi is an “urban locality,” the administrative center of the Sakha Republic’s Bulunsky District. During the Cold War, this place thrived as a staging base for long-range bombers. It basically was erected for the express purpose of annihilating my country.

Now Tiksi is mostly abandoned, although there is a climate research station nearby where scientists from around the world are studying the rapidly changing conditions in the Arctic. Tiksi is so remote, and the weather so harsh, that it’s nearly impossible to maintain infrastructure. The roads had turned to rubble. Pipes snaked across the tundra. Rusty container-ship modules were stacked everywhere, between scattered heaps of snarled wire, bent rebar, and busted concrete. Drinking vodka seemed to be the main pastime—I met a group of German engineers doing contract work there who had taken to calling the place Tipsy.

“Where are we?” I asked Victor, the taxi driver who drove me around town in a fumy Russian Uazik van. He was a dour, balding hardware-store owner who wore camos and had a rheumy hacking cough.

“Where are we?” Victor replied. “We are in the past.”

I had the privilege of being stuck in this existential wasteland for nearly a week. First I was required to obtain (what else?) more permits. The military officer inspected my papers and said, “State your reason for existence.” He had actually heard of George De Long and the Jeannette—a surprisingly large number of Russians have—but he’d never met an American who’d heard of them. Come to think of it, he said, he’d never met an American here at all. “Why such interest in De Longka now?” he wondered aloud as he studied my passport. “Americans want back islands De Longka discover—hmmm? Perhaps zat is real purpose here?”

He stamped my papers anyway and said, “Veelcome to Tiksi. You vill find it appalling place.”

Months earlier, I had made an arrangement by telephone to meet the director of the Lena zapovednik, who, for an exorbitant fee, had agreed to take me deep into the delta to find America Mountain. He’d told me he was the only person authorized to guide me there. I arrived in Tiksi a day before our departure date. But he was nowhere to be found when I visited the natural history museum he runs, a musty place crowded with mammoth bones, sagging specimens of taxidermy, and a small Jeannette expedition exhibit. An underling in his office said the director had gotten an offer to lead another trip into the delta—and that he was unreachable.

How long would he be unreachable? I asked.

“Vill be one month,” the man said. “Maybe two.”

I had to find an alternative, fast. That’s how I learned about the Puteyskiy 405, a commercial riverboat contracted by the government to work the delta every summer, gauging depths, removing snags, checking buoys, and generally keeping the main channels open for the big boat traffic. For a fee of a few thousand dollars, plus five cartons of cigarettes, I could hitch a ride.

The Puteyskiy 405 picked me up at an abandoned ship ten miles from Tiksi. The captain, Vitali Zhdanov, said he knew America Mountain well and had even hunted and trapped there when he was a boy. It was on the far side of the delta, he said, more than 100 miles away, and would take three days to reach.

Soon we headed out into the bay, then slipped into one of the Lena’s eastern branches, called Bykovskaya. The river was big and broad, and I felt as though I had landed in some Russian version of Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. The Puteyskiy 405 was a hard-working vessel, with a crew of ten and a fat gray cat named Marx. I was expected to help with the daily chores and galley responsibilities. This I was thrilled to do—anything to get me out of Tiksi.

We ate like kings: reindeer stew, smoked sturgeon, mounds of cabbage, and fresh fish hauled from the muddy river. I slept under the twilit sky and listened to the captain and his second-in-command, Andrey, as they laughed and smoked and rambled on through the night in the bold, beautiful Russian language. The world of the Lena enveloped me—its brackish smells, its plays of light, its endless patterns of snarls and eddies. I couldn’t have been happier.

We made a stop at a village called Bykovskiy. The dock had been wrecked by the ice, so getting ashore was a little tricky, involving a cat’s cradle of ropes and boards. The village was a jumble of slatternly houses, broken-down vehicles, and bored dogs. Planks were laid across the low swampy places, and rickety boardwalks had been built atop networks of steam and gas pipes.

People from around Bykovskiy were among those who helped save some of the Jeannette survivors when they finally reached the Lena by open boat and worked their way up its complicated delta. It was a village of Yakuts—seminomadic hunter-fishermen who built their world around the reindeer. In their facial features, the Yakuts resemble the Mongols, but their language is more closely related to Turkish. They had migrated here starting in the 13th century from the forests around Lake Baikal.

The men of the Jeannette found the Yakuts to be a proud and open-hearted people. They had spent centuries perfecting techniques for thriving in extreme cold; much of their independence came from their ability to live where no one else wanted to be. In these remote parts of Siberia, the expression went, “God is high up and the Czar is far off.”

People in Bykovskiy still talk about the De Long expedition. It’s a source of pride. At the school, I met a woman named Rabella Mukhoplyova—a Yakut administrator and teacher. “We know about De Longka,” she said. “We study him in our geography lessons. It is still hard to believe Amerikanskis came all the way here on a ship!” Rabella said the Yakuts around here thought the Jeannette survivors were a race of otherworldly men who had emerged from beneath the ice.

Bykovskiy was a shadow of what it used to be, Rabella said. The villagers had all but forgotten the ways of the reindeer, the walrus, and the whale. “In the seventies, there were dogs or reindeer next to every house,” she said. “Now everybody just drives snowmobiles.”

We continued deeper into the delta, working our way toward the river’s western branches. One afternoon we landed at an international research station, where a joint Russian-German team of scientists has been studying the condition of the permafrost. The station was a thriving compound of stackable sleeping modules powered by solar panels, wind turbines, and diesel generators. I met an intense young man named Alexander Makarov, from the polar geography department at the University of St. Petersburg. Researchers based here have been drilling in the soil at multiple locations around the Lena Delta to extract permafrost samples going back tens of thousands of years. “The permafrost is like a library archive of past climates, past environments,” Makarov said.

In recent times, as more permafrost melts during summertime, increased levels of methane—a greenhouse gas—have been escaping into the atmosphere. It’s a phenomenon common all over the Arctic, one that has led many scientists to make doomsday predictions. Some have called it the methane time bomb. Makarov is more guarded on the question. “Something is definitely happening out here,” he said. “The question is whether the changes are catastrophic. My opinion is that the permafrost is more stable than some people believe. This is a process of thousands of years, not decades.”

Back aboard the Puteyskiy 405, we continued west. Up on the bridge, Captain Zhdanov and I stood looking at his chart of the delta. The delta was dizzyingly complex—and always changing. Every year the spring flooding caused the channels to assume new courses. “Like most women I know,” Zhdanov said, “the river likes to change her mind.”

I could see how De Long and his contingent of men had gotten hopelessly lost here, staggering over this bewildering landscape for weeks without seeing a soul. “Here we 
 seemed to be wandering in a labyrinth,” De Long had written in the journal that he hauled in his weakening arms. “One does not like to feel he is caught in a trap.” Winter was setting in, but he could find no settlements. He was forced to make a cache and bury his meticulous meteorological logbooks from the Žł±đČčČÔČÔ±đłÙłÙ±đ’s two years in the ice. (These records were later recovered and are now to understand the condition of the late 19th-century ice pack.)

As their circumstances deteriorated, De Long was forced to slaughter his last dog. Then one of his crewmen died of frostbite. De Long wrote: “What in God’s name is going to become of us?”

The next morning, America Mountain slid into the Puteyskiy 405’s view, dancing in vaporous waves like an Arctic vision. In the refractions of the Siberian atmosphere, it sometimes looked like a castle, or a whale emerging from the sea, or the back of some enormous prehistoric beast. The Yakuts generally stayed away from America Mountain—it was said to be inhabited by witches—but it was the most dominant feature in the northwestern delta, a place so high it would never wash away in the Lena’s seasonal floods.

We drew as near as we could in the Puteyskiy 405. Then Andrey and I put out in the dingy.

In the spectral light, Andrey and I reached the top of Amerika Khaya. The survivors of the Jeannette expedition built a marker here in the Lena Delta in 1882, not just as a memorial and a crypt lofted safely above the floods, but as a rebuke to anyone who might pass this way and entertain doubts. We Americans were here, it seemed to say. Remember us.

De Long and his 32 men had stayed together for 700 miles and nearly three months as they retreated over the ice. But when they reached open water, a gale separated them. The survivors eventually found ten of their lost comrades, frozen by a broad bend in the river 20 miles from here, having died from exposure and starvation. The survivors wrapped the bodies in scraps of tent canvas and then hauled them by dog team to the top of this mountain. From lumber they’d found scattered along the river, they built a massive coffin—7 feet wide, 22 feet long, and 22 inches deep—held together by mortise-and-tenon joints. The bodies were placed inside it, with their faces turned toward the rising sun. Then the top of the coffin was hammered into place. Next, scores of lichen-splotched rocks were piled upon the coffin until the monument had assumed a pyramidal shape. From driftwood timbers, they constructed a large cross, 20 feet high with a 12-foot crossbeam. They carved out the inscription—“In memory of the officers and men of the Arctic steamer ‘Jeannette’ who died of starvation in the Lena Delta, October, 1881.”

Their somber work was completed on April 7, 1882. In 1883, the bodies were disinterred and shipped by reindeer team, horse-drawn sleds, and train all the way to Moscow, in an elaborate funeral procession jointly orchestrated by the U.S. Navy and the Russian government. Then they were shipped to New York, where the Jeannette dead were celebrated as national heroes and “martyrs to science.”

The Jeannette monument had scarcely changed from the lithograph sketches I’d seen from the 1880s. The original cross—or perhaps a refurbished one, it was hard to tell—was still there. A tattered Russian flag snapped in the wind. Next to the cross stood a little stone obelisk that had been erected by some historically minded group from Tiksi. At the base of it was a metal box. I unclasped it and found messages from the handful of people who had visited over the decades—a few Russian and German climate experts, a Japanese polar scientist. They’d left trinkets, cheap jewelry, cigarettes, airplane bottles of liquor, and paper money that had yellowed over time. These items, it seemed, were meant not merely as offerings, but as things that might prove useful to the long-dead adventurers in their Arctic heaven.

I scribbled a note of praise to the men of the Jeannette, for their sacrifice, for their ingenuity, for their integrity. “Nil desperandum,” I said. Never despair. It was a catchphrase throughout De Long’s journals, his motto to the end. I placed the note in the box.

I stared off at the iceless Arctic Ocean to the north, which giant freighters and Maersk container ships have increasingly been using in summertime as a northeast passage. One day soon, the climatologists tell us, an Open Polar Sea may really exist. Maybe De Long wasn’t crazy after all; he was just off by 140 years.

Andrey and I were savoring the ghostly light, high above the bogs. We made a picnic of vodka, sturgeon, and reindeer jerky. At around 1 A.M., we finally decided it was time to go. As a gift to the dead, Andrey placed a shiny new bullet in the metal box and clasped it shut. “In case they’re hunting,” he said, flashing a smile of tobacco-stained teeth. “In case they’re hungry.”

Then he raised his rifle and fired three rounds into the air. The shots rang out over America Mountain and fell on the braided bends of the Lena Delta, scattering a flock of geese.

Editor at large Hampton Sides's book about De Long's expedition, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, is published this monthy by Doubleday. .

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IT STARTED OUT as a funny little place on my right elbow, itchy and raw. I figured it was a bug bite and gave it no more thought. But the next day, I woke up with throbbing pain and curious-looking red streaks extending up and down my arm.

A few hours later, my forearm had swelled hideously, and the skin had grown rigid and hot to the touch. I started to breathe uneasily. I felt dizzy and feverish, then collapsed half delirious on the floor. My wife, Anne, rushed me to the hospital, where the ER docs found that I was in septic shock.

What I had was a rare flesh-eating streptococcus infection, introduced by a puncture wound of uncertain origin—possibly from a spider bite. Technically known as necrotizing fasciitis, it was something out of Stephen King: great ravening armies of microbes were laying waste to the meat of my arm, filling my subcutaneous tissues with exotoxins.

The ER doc took a black Sharpie and drew a line near my wrist, noting that if the redness advanced beyond this boundary, I was in serious trouble. Over the next hour, the strep marched right past the mark and was well on its way to my hand; half my arm had been consumed.

The doctor told Anne we should be prepared: cutting off my arm might be the only way to save me.

I’d just returned from several months in Kuwait and Qatar, where I was writing about the Iraq war.
I was 41 years old, in the prime of life, and (I thought) in excellent health. In a week, Anne and I were set to move into a house we’d spent a year renovating. We’d just emerged from the Urine Years—our three boys, at last, were done with diapers. My career was more or less where I wanted it to be. I was feeling
 not invincible, but firmly in control of my luck.

Now, hearing the skreak of a Civil War bone saw, I found myself asking questions like: Is this how it ends? Have I lived a halfway-decent life? If I get out of this, will I live any differently?

SOMETIMES IT TAKES a brush with eternity—a crash, an illness, some shock to the system—to get you really thinking about what you want to do with your limited time here, and why you’re living on this wobbling dirt clod in the first place. In my twenties and thirties, I don’t think I ever took stock of these kinds of things. Apart from my dad’s early death, I’d never faced any dramas that caused me to reevaluate my course. I lived intuitively, improvisationally. Winging it seemed to work.

But my uninvited guests had made a deep impression on me—the idea that these superbug strains are just out there, a skin thickness away, loitering in their millions on the ordinary surfaces of the world. Life was even more fragile, more fraught with random hazard, than I realized.

We don’t usually think of it this way, but it’s an actuarial fact: forty is the beginning of “middle age.” Most Americans who cross this Sharpie mark are already halfway to the grave; the trip’s 50 percent over.

Certainly, we’re not kids anymore. The forties are the time when you begin to take notice of certain aches and pains. Your body and brain behave in inexplicable ways: Less hair on your head, more in your ears and nostrils. More memories in the bank, less synaptic firepower with which to access them. Gravity has started to show its inexorable pull.

All the same, it’s a great decade, in some ways the best: Many of life’s really big questions—will you get hitched? how will you make a living? do you prefer wet or dry ribs?—have probably been answered. You’re still able-bodied enough to do most of the things you liked to do in your twenties. But now you can perhaps afford to do them right. Along the way, your adventuring self has learned the difference between a crazy risk and a calculated one.

In our late thirties and early forties, Anne, the boys, and I spent as much time as we could traveling as a family to unfamiliar places: Costa Rica, Japan, Kauai, a fish camp in Montana, an off-the-grid spot on Andros Island in the Bahamas. We rafted the Gunnison, Dolores, and Rogue Rivers and put in some quality time at the summer ski camps at Whistler and Mount Hood. Maybe it was the Guinness, but for me, our time of deepest bliss was the four months we lived in a thatch-roof house beside a castle on the west coast of Ireland, in a limestone paradise called the Burren.

Our wanderlust somewhat sated, Anne and I returned from Ireland and made a decision to put down deep roots in New Mexico and orient everything around our boys. Winging it had begun to lose some of its charm. Our midforties, we knew, would be a time of frenetic building and doing: A skateboard park in the driveway. A trampoline dug into the ground. A standard-issue golden retriever named Frodo. The Urine Years gave way to the Taxi Service Years. Somewhere in there, books got written, orthodontists got seen, the birds and bees got thrice explained, and, between all of us, some 54,000 meals got eaten. Lots of stuff happened. Maybe too much.

For me it all came with an asterisk: Life is dear, but you aren’t in control. Live it with fullness and verve, yet also with an acute awareness that anything can happen, at any time, to take it swiftly away.

WHEN THE E.R. DOC sliced open my arm to “irrigate” the tissues, the stuff that came out was beyond disgusting. He pumped various IV antibiotics into me, but they didn’t work. He speculated that perhaps something in the inoculations that a Marine medic had given me in Kuwait—a cocktail that included the anthrax and smallpox vaccines—had compromised my immune system. But he had one more item in his quiver, an astronomically expensive “designer” antibiotic.

“This one,” he said, “is on loan from God.”

It took a day, but the red armies began to recede. In a few weeks, my arm was back to normal.

The planet kept turning, and my forties kept racing by in an exhausting blur. I’m 51 now, and our kids are in college, or on the verge of it. The Taxi Service Years have given way to the Raise a Vein for the Bursar Years.

Now Anne and I are feeling freer to move about the cabin again. We’re thinking of living abroad, learning a new culture, a new language. Chile looks good, or Barcelona. Who knows? We’re going to wing it. Wherever it is, I’ll look upon the adventure as time on loan from God—or at least from His antibiotics department.

Hampton Sides is the author most recently of .

The post Wake-Up Call: Surviving an Attack by Flesh-Eating Bacteria appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

AKSEL SVINDAL pulls to the front of the start hut and edges toward the chute. His boots creak in the packed snow. He plants his poles and leans forward as the Longines clock beeps down the count. The big Norwegian takes a final deep breath, and then, with coaches barking encouragement from behind him, he heaves himself across the start wand.

Aksel Svindal

Svindal in Beaver Creek, Colorado.

Svindal Crash

After the crash in Beaver Creek, November 2007.

Svindal family

From left, Aksel, father Bjorn (with Simen), and grandma Gerni in Norway.

Svindal and Mancuso

Svindal and Julia Mancuso in Portillo last year.

Aksel Svindal

“Aksel’s one of the top racers in history,” says former U.S. Men’s Ski Team coach Phil McNichol.

Young Aksel

A young Aksel, exhausted post-skiing.

Aksel in Portillo

A downhill run in Portillo.

It’s December 2 at the downhill race in Beaver Creek, Colorado, one of the first events in a long 2011–12 World Cup season. More than 10,000 people wait at the finish, fluttering pennants and rattling cowbells in the bitter-cold air as Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way” blasts out of concert speakers. Though it’s only 11 a.m., the roving beer vendors are already doing a land-office business, and a Tyrolean oompah band threads through the crowds. A live eagle, twitching on the gloved hand of its tamer, watches over the proceedings.Ìę

The downhill is the marquee event of skiing—the fastest, longest, and most dangerous of the alpineÌęraces. Beaver Creek’s Birds of Prey doesn’t disappoint; it’s a wicked course. In the years since it was added to the World Cup tour in 1997, it has become a renowned speed event, admired for its steep technical turns but also widely considered treacherous. As in all downhills, skiers at Birds of Prey reach jittery speeds in excess of 80 miles per hour. Downhill racers areÌębasically test pilots, always exploring the outer limits of the aircraft—only, in their case, they are the aircraft.

A commentator breaks in over the music to announce that Svindal is on course, and when his determined form flashes across the JumboTron the crowds go wild. Screaming in the stands are plenty of recovering downhillers—guys with hounded looks who understand the rush of speed and long to return to a place they know, deep inside their stapled bones, they have no business being. They’re familiar with Svindal’sÌęstory and recognize how hard it is to face down a mountain that nearly ruined you. “Beaver Creek is a special place for me,” Svindal told me before the race. “The very best and the very worst things in my career have happened here.”

Nearly all sports champions have a defining moment that exposes something profound in their character and summons a previously unseen dimension of greatness. For Svindal that moment began on a training run here at Birds of Prey almost exactly four years ago, on this same downhill course. It was November 27, 2007, a cold, overcast Tuesday. Svindal was 24 years old then, the reigning king of the World Cup ski-racing circuit. Going into the race, he was right where he wanted to be: first place in the standings for best overall World Cup skier. “I was on fire,” Svindal said. “I didn’t think anything could go wrong.”

But something about the piste that day wasn’t quite right. A dearth of storms that fall had forced Beaver Creek officials to spray down layer after layer of artificial snow. The coverage was still a little thin in places, and the course was erratic, full of unforgiving bumps and dips. The third skier out of the chute, Austrian , promptly crashed, bruising his heel so severely that he would be out of commission for weeks. Several other skiers remarked on the tricky conditions. After his run, , a Swiss champion hot on Svindal’s trail for the overall title, expressed his reservations. “If you make an edge mistake,” he said, “you’re going to fly—but not in the right way.”

A few moments into his run that day, Svindal dropped over the Brink, a terrifying transition roughly akin to plummeting over a waterfall. Within seconds, he accelerated from 35 mph to 60. At six feet three inches and 220 pounds, Svindal is one of the biggest skiers on the World Cup circuit, and his considerable mass helped him gather even more speed in the midsection of the course. Ìę

By the time he flew over the Screech Owl jump, Svindal realized he was having one of the runs of his life. “I was hitting everything perfectly,” he said. He had never gone faster, never skied a tighter line or felt so in tune with the flow of the mountain. It was almost surreally quiet, only the wind gushing in his ears and the occasional fan hooting somewhere beyond the safety fences.

Today, as I watch Svindal approach the flats that lead toward the course’s biggest obstacle, a notorious spot called the Golden Eagle Jump, I cringe when I think of what happened here in 2007. Just before the lip on that fateful morning, Svindal hit a slight compression that threw him off balance. With all the speed he was carrying, his skis scooted out in front of him, just a little, so that when he reached the jump, he was leaning back—exactly the wrong posture. The G-forces he’d so carefully harnessed during his extraordinary run now rearranged themselves into something hideous.

“As soon as I was airborne, I knew it was going to be bad,” he said. In the updraft, his skis tipped backward, throwing him into a long, terrible arc. He attempted to correct himself, trying in vain to best the laws of physics. His arms instinctively flailed in desperation—rolling down the windows, as racers say—but it was no use. As he vaulted through the air, his body kept rotating backward.

“You hope you’re going to save yourself,” he said. “But once you can’t see the snow anymore, you don’t even know where to land.” His skis were now in the intensely compromising position that some coaches call bases to the sun. Svindal had given up trying to right himself and was twisting his torso sideways, to the snow, in order to protect his neck from the coming fall.Ìę

At this point, he was traveling 72 mph—flying, but not in the right way. When he finally , along a stretch of course known as the Abyss, Svindal had sailed 197 feet through the air.Ìę Ìę

I MET SVINDAL THIS PAST SEPTEMBER in the craggy mountains of Portillo, Chile, where he was doing speed training with the Norwegian team. He came in from his runs, and we hunkered down in the hotel bar, a smoky cave with coved ceilings, a fire crackling in the corner, and the resident Saint Bernard snoring on the Spanish-tile floors. Jaime, the bartender, was serving up pisco sours, the country’s signature drink, to a party of Argentinean skiers. “It’s a little slushy out there today,” Svindal said, staring out the window at the blazing Andean sun. “But this place is good—much better than New Zealand for speed training.”

Aksel was wearing a Red Bull cap and a T-shirt that said Yes I Am A Speedaholic. He’s a huge guy, not just physically but in his presence. Though he’s understated, modest, even a little shy, he fills up a room. Svindal has dark brown curly hair and a warm face that turns deep tan on the slopes. As is true of most Norwegians, his manners are impeccable, and so is his English. (“He’s very Americanized,” says U.S. Olympic gold medalist , a friend on the World Cup tour. “You wouldn’t mind if he took your verbal SATs for you.”) But Svindal may express himself best in facial hair. His whiskers seem to change monthly, even daily. Through the years he’s gone with chops, goatees, Vandykes, Elvis burns, and various scraggly constructs impossible to name. On this day, he had anÌęimpressive case of helmet hair going and an emerging flavor saver.Ìę

We ordered a couple of bottles of Escudo beer and talked for a while about his skiing aspirations. “In the end,” he said, “I’d like to be known as one of the all-arounders, someone who could do it all.” There is little question that Svindal is already one of the greats in this regard, at least in the modern era. In the 2010 Winter Olympic races in Whistler, British Columbia, he took home three medals—a gold (in super-G), a silver (downhill), and a bronze (giant slalom). All told he has won 15 World Cup races, two World Cup overall titles, and four world championship gold medals. While he’s strongest in the pure-speed events—downhill and super-G—he is also a serious threat in GS and sometimes does surprisingly well in the supertechnical slalom events, unusual for someone with his body type. He skis with a steadiness and a humility rare in a sport notoriously prone to psychodrama and egocentricity.

“Aksel’s without a doubt one of the top racers in history,” says Phil McNichol, former head coach of the U.S. Men’s Ski Team. “He fits into that small category of athletes who are capable of winning across all disciplines. He’s a true champion, the real deal. He’s definitely got confidence and maybe even some swagger, but not an ounce of arrogance. Everyone can get behind this guy.”Ìę

The likable Vike has something else—a quality almost as unique, and certainly as bankable, as world-class talent. People in the ski world are always looking for the next big icon, a supercelebrity who can transcend the arcane specialties of the sport and stir new waves of popularity: the new poster boy, the “It” guy, the ambassador. In the late sixties, it was ; in the seventies, . Then there was , the , and, most recently, (who remains the reigning star on the World Cup even though his results have been erratic and his cocky, sometimes cryptic comments have at times made him polarizing).

Needless to say, Svindal is a celebrity in Norway—his face plastered on billboards, a frequent guest on television shows, his exploits lauded across the nation. But his fame extends far beyond Scandinavia. It’s possible that Svindal, who lives much of the year in Innsbruck, Austria, and speaks fluent German, may just have the international appeal and charisma so many ski insiders are looking for. Sponsors like him—he’s represented by companies as diverse as Red Bull, Audi, and Prada, in addition to Head and Dainese. Ladies like him, gents like him, fellow competitors like him. A quick roll through the Internet yields descriptors like “dreamy,” “hunky,” “yummy,” “beefcake,” “simply handsome,” and just plain “sigh.
” Hot, however, seems to be the operative word, as in “hot boy,” “hot on snow,” “the Hottest Dude of Skiing.” During the Vancouver Olympics, one enamored fan on a gay-oriented website gushed, “OMG, ±ő’v±đ just been watching HIM Aksel, he is so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so łóŽÇłÙ!”Ìę

But, alas, Svindal is taken. For the past couple of years, he’s been dating Julia Mancuso, the American ski-racing phenom from Squaw Valley, California, who has won three Olympic medals and four medals at the world championships. The 27-year-old Mancuso, widely known as Super Jules, is herself something of a pinup model. Famously unflappable, Mancuso poses for her own underwear company, Kiss My Tiara, and has been praised for the way she takes her family’s complicated history in stride. (Her father, Ciro Mancuso, a Tahoe developer, was convicted of running one of the nation’s largest marijuana-smuggling operations during the 1970s and ’80s and served four years in federal prison while Julia was growing up.)Ìę

Mancuso and Svindal seem to lead a charmed existence together—when their frenetic traveling schedules permit. On his website, Svindal that charts their occasional international intersections: Now they’re in Monaco at a royalÌęwedding. Now they’re surfing near her summer home on Maui. Now they’re attending a Formula One race. Now they’re at a Studio 54 theme party at some mansion in the Hamptons—with Julia in a skimpy polyester getup and Svindal in a towering Afro.

Every gossip in the ski universe is dying to know when they’re going to get married. When I asked him Svindal demurred. “No plans,” he replied. “There’s no rush.” When I asked Julia, who was also in Portillo, training with the U.S. women’s team, she said, with a big laugh, “I’d like to learn a little more Norwegian first. But it just sounds like a bunch of blah blah blah.”

Svindal is no playboy of the Tomba la Bomba school, and he’s never been partial to partying “at an Olympic level,” as Bode Miller once famously characterized his own nocturnal roisterings. Still, Svindal does seem to enjoy the glam life, and he embraces his celebrity—up to a point. Underneath the nearly permanent smile and the ever morphing facial hair is a stolid Norwegian reserve, a bedrock need for private space, that’s absolute. When he’s training, he has little room for anything else. Before he’s done with the sport, he wants to be in the pantheon with the undisputed greats of all time—Stenmark, Eriksen, Killy, Maier. The work and discipline required to get there will be staggering, and he’s always conscious of the clock.Ìę

“OK,” he said after exactly one beer, rising with a matter-of-factness bordering on impatience. “I think I’ll go down to the gym now and take a spin on the bike.”

WHEN SVINDAL REGAINED consciousness on that awful day in Beaver Creek, he wasÌęlying on his back, his body resting against the safety netting. He heard worried voices carrying over the snow. Svindal, thinking like a racer, checked for the usual racer injuries: He felt the bones of his legs and arms. He flexed his knees, shrugged his shoulders, arched his back. Everything seemed OK. I got hit hard, he thought, but I don’t think this is too bad.

As a trauma team arrived with a sled, Svindal looked back and saw smears and spatters of red on the snow. There was a gash in the backside of hisÌęLycra racing suit, and a large crimson stain was growing around him. “It was a lot of blood on the white snow,” he said. “And I thought, This is not right. That blood should not be there.” Then he passed out.

At the Vail Valley Medical Center, emergency room doctors immediately set to work assessing the damage. He had a few cracked ribs, broken front teeth, cuts and contusions all over his face. His nose lay to one side, and an eye was swollen up. He’d lost a great deal of blood and would need several transfusions. X-rays also revealed that he had sustained five facial fractures. But none of this particularly worried the doctors. What concerned them was that gash in his racing suit. When they snipped away the fabric, they made an extremely troubling determination: apparently, one of his skis, releasing upon impact, had become a weapon—a flying saber, basically. Waxed for maximum speed and edged sharp as a razor, it had hurtled down the slope alongside its former occupant. Somewhere along the way it had sliced into Svindal’s left glute, causing a long, deep laceration—more than four inches deep in some places—that passed just to the side of his anus and through the underside of his groin.Ìę

The gash was so significant that the doctors, now worried about a deep-tissue infection or a perforation of his lower intestine, ordered emergency surgery to open up Svindal’s abdomen and further explore the damage. “They said, ‘You could die pretty quick,’ ” Svindal said. “‘We need to cut you open and make sure you’re OK.’ ”

To the doctors’ pleasant surprise, Svindal’s abdominal surgery revealed nothing out of the ordinary. After he got out of intensive care, there would be further surgeries to fix his nose and the broken bones in his face. “It’s funny how things can change quickly,” he told a reporter. “One day I was in the best form of my life, and the next I am lying in a hospital bed unable to move.” He lost a lot of weight, and his sallow face was a mess of sutures and bandages. “He didn’t look very nice,” Bjorn Svindal, Aksel’s father, said. When Julia visited him (they were dating off and on at that point), she just thought he seemed “kinda sad.”Ìę

For two weeks, as Svindal stewed in his bed while happy skiers carved down the slopes just outside the hospital, he began to plot his comeback to the World Cup. “I knew I wasn’t going to ski for a while,” he told me. “But I was like, ‘I don’t care how long it takes. That’s irrelevant. As long as I get back, 100 percent.’ ”

He flew to Norway and, after another week in a hospital, went to live with his dad in Lillestrom, the town where he grew up, in the hills near Oslo’s airport. Bjorn made arrangements to put a medical bed in Aksel’s boyhood room, and there Svindal spent the dark Scandinavian winter healing his wounds. All he could think about was the World Cup. “As a racer,” he said, “you have to have a short memory.”

In the aftermath of his surgery, Svindal had lostÌęnearly 40 pounds of muscle mass. For a long time, he was simply too weak to get out of bed. Tentatively, heÌęstarted shuffling around the house, then around the neighborhood—donning a big hat so that no one would recognize him. He was often dizzy and easilyÌęexhausted, but slowly his strength returned. HeÌębegan lifting weights again, riding a bike, running. “I am me,” Svindal told reporters, “and nothing has changed in my attitude. I will return when I feel strong enough to win races.”

WORLD CUP SKIERS, ESPECIALLY THOSE who excel at speed events, are essentially risk managers. They have to calibrate precisely where and when they need to push their skiing to the absolute edge. Continually making that calibration, in every kind of snow and weather condition over the long haul of more than 40 World Cup races every season, reveals a kind of deep cumulative judgment, an intimate knowledge of self. This is perhaps Svindal’s greatest skill.

Like many Norwegians, he learned to ski when he was three. He was a big, determined kid who giggled a lot. His brother, Simen, came along a couple of years later, and during wintertime the little boys loved to strap on nordic skis and scoot around the garden. When they were a little older, the brothers would go to their grandparents’ hytte in the big mountains near Geilo.

Alpine skiing ran deep in the family. Bjorn was solid enough on skis to become an instructor, but it was Aksel’s mother, Ina Lund, who had the real gift. She’d skied on the Norwegian national team and even raced in Europe for a few seasons.Ìę

In 1990, when Aksel was eight years old, Ina went to the hospital to deliver her and Bjorn’s third child. But something went wrong during the delivery, and sheÌęstarted to hemorrhage. The doctors couldn’t get Ina’s blood to coagulate. She died the next day. The infant—a boy—was saved, but after 18 months languishing on respirators and other machines, he too died.

As a balm for the family’s raw grief, the Svindals made for the mountains every weekend and threw themselves into skiing. “It kept us together,” Bjorn says. “I think skiing saved us.”Ìę

Aksel and Simen proved to be prodigies. When he was 16, Aksel was invited to Norway’s elite ski academy at Oppdal, and he began to spend more time racing in Europe. He qualified for his first World Cup race in 2001. Simen’s skiing took off, too. But while training in Oppdal in 2007, he suffered a terrible fall going off a jump and broke his back in six places. Though at first the doctors thought he might have to live the rest of his life in a wheelchair, he recovered—but was forced to give up racing forever. Aksel would now shoulder the family’s skiing dreams.

When it comes to ski racing, Norway has long been known for doing a lot with a little. Although the country’s nordic-skiing program is formidable, its alpine counterpart is almost laughably tiny andÌęunderfunded—a pale shadow of the high-tech juggernauts that exist, say, in Austria and Switzerland. Yet Norway has produced some of the all-time greats in alpine skiing. Svindal was lucky enough to come up through the ranks at a time when two of them— and Kjetil Aamodt—were just beginning to peak. Both had been childhood idols of Svindal’s, both were decorated all-arounders, and he consciously tried to emulate them.

“If you want to understand where Aksel comes from, look to those guys,” says Tim Layden, who has covered alpine ski racing for Sports Illustrated for 15 years. “Kjus and Aamodt were bulletproof—tremendous competitors under pressure. But you never heard anything negative said about them. There was just a universal respect and affection. And Aksel was the junior skier watching them—like Kobe grew up watching Jordan.”

Svindal’s first breakthrough occurred in 2005, at Alberta’s Lake Louise, with a big victory in theÌęsuper-G. From then on his star steadily rose, and at exactly the same time that Kjus and Aamodt were waning. (Kjus retired in 2006, .) It was perfect kismet, both for Svindal and for Norway. “There was a big question who was going to take over the throne, or whether there was even going to be anyone else,” says , Svindal’s teammate and close friend. “But he came along at just the right moment. He lifted the pressure off of them and put it all on his shoulders. He inherited the kingdom.”

As with his idols, Aksel’s style has been marked by composure, consistency, and, except for his big crash in Beaver Creek, a certain absence of white-knuckle drama. A few skiers over the years have criticized him for being a bit too conservative. (Bode Miller once called Svindal “tactical”—suggesting that he takes insufficient risks and that he’s more interested in accruing points than in winningÌęraces.) But others say this perception is more a function of Svindal’s style than of his attitude. “His technique is so sound that he doesn’t need to make the kinds of crazy, dramatic recoveries that Bode and I sometimes have to make,” says Ted Ligety. “Aksel is so big, so solid, and so strong, and he has such a good touch on the snow. I think he takes huge risks, actually, but his style just doesn’t show it.”

When I watched Svindal training on the slopes of Portillo, I was struck by how obsessively involved he is in the process of designing and perfecting his skis—now all the more so, given controversial new International Ski Federation ratings taking effect next year that mandate a radical reshaping (supposedly for better safety) of all GS skis worn in World Cup races. At the top of the slope, laid out among waxing tables equipped with vise grips and various edging and scraping tools, there must have been 20 pairs of Head skis systematically arranged in the snow; Svindal, who calls them his “weapons,” went from one pair to the other, testing them. This one was too rigid in the tail. That one had too much pop. This one needed more forgiving flex in a certain kind of snow. The R&D techs from Head listened attentively and took notes. “He always gives goot veedbeck,” Head’s director of ski racing, RainerÌęSalzgeber, told me. “One tiny millimeter change in a sidecut will make bick changes on ze hill.”ÌęSalzgeber could dial in the specs to the factory in Austria that afternoon, and a brand-new, tailor-made pair of skis would arrive in Portillo six days later.Ìę

“You pretty much build your own skis nowadays,” Svindal said. “I’m always fine-tuning; there’s always something to test.”

Later, I asked Mancuso about Svindal’s endlessÌęequipment tweaking. “I think it’s a guy thing,” she said. “He likes physics. He’s always looking for the magic combo that’s going to gain him that extra hundredth of a second of an edge.”

IF RECOVERING PHYSICALLY from a bad crash is hard, recovering mentally can be much harder. For Svindal, there was no getting around the fact that his own ski had come within a few inches of literally unmanning him. If he ever wanted to ski competitively again—particularly in the downhill—he would have to reclaim his nerve and get his head around the crash. When he initially got back on skis in late February 2008, he realized, with considerable dread, that the Birds of Prey downhill at Beaver Creek would be one of the very first races in his return to the World Cup. He couldn’t get the Golden Eagle Jump out of his head. He thought about it all the time. He wondered how he wouldÌęapproach it or if he even could approach it. It was his hobgoblin, his bĂȘte noire.

He visited a sports shrink, who gave him dubious advice—something about how he should just try to trick himself into thinking it was an ordinary race, an ordinary jump. For him that tack wouldn’t work. “I’m supposed to pretend it’s nothing?” he says. “That’s bullshit. I can’t do that. I have to deal with what’s really there. I have to admit that I’m nervous. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step is to admit that you have a problem.”

Through the summer and early fall, as Birds of Prey loomed ever closer on the calendar, Svindal closely analyzed the mistakes that had led up to his crash. “It’s far better to admit that you made a mistake than just to say it was bad luck. You can’t control bad luck. But if you focus on the idea that it was your fault, then you can change that—it’s all up to you.” He studied the video and broke down the errors—precisely where he was going too fast, precisely why he was leaning back, precisely how he could have corrected his posture before it was too late.

When he got to Colorado, Svindal slipped the Birds of Prey course carefully. He lingered at the Golden Eagle Jump and assayed it like a golfer studies a green before a clutch putt. He devised a plan for how to run the race. In his mind, he would separate the jump from the rest of the course; he would conceptually isolate it and put it in a clean little box. When he reached Golden Eagle, he would dial it back just a hair—undercook it. This might lose him a few tenths of a second, so he’d have to push the envelope somewhere higher in the course and tighten his line. He would reapportion the risk, in other words, and simply accept the inescapable fact that the Golden Eagle Jump scared the living shit out of him. “I’m the sort of skier who has to have a good plan that I can direct all my nervous energy into,” he says. “If I don’t, then all that energy just comes right back to me and makes me even more nervous.”

Finally, race day came—December 5, 2008. Bjorn was there in the crowd, surrounded by well-wishers waving Norwegian flags. Svindal started off well and floored it through the flats. He nailed everything, just the way he’d planned it, and when he came to the Golden Eagle Jump he inched it back the way he said he would. When he crossed the finish, he doubled over panting, then turned to see his time: 1 minute, 43.85 seconds. He couldn’t believe it. He was .06 seconds ahead of the next best competitor, Liechtenstein’s Marco Buechel.

The crowds erupted in wolf howls of joy. Svindal pumped his poles in the air and drank in the glory while Bjorn watched through tears. A year after nearly dying on this same storied slope, Aksel Lund Svindal had . Svindal stood on the podium clutching his gold medal. “I could not dream of a better place to celebrate,” he said. “I feel strange somehow. I think I will need some time to fully understand what is happening to me today.”

Three years later—December 2, 2011—I stand in the Birds of Prey crowds as Svindal tucks across the finish and skids to a stop. This time his downhill run has been solid but not enough to make the podium: fifth place. (Bode Miller will go on to win, putting down one of the best performances of his career. “The risk you take,” Miller says, still shaking off the adrenaline, “it’s no joke. It’s a pleasure to get to the finish—and be safe.”) The following day, Svindal will claim second place in the Birds of Prey super-G, giving him enough points to put him comfortably in the lead as the World Cup’s best overall skier at the time, ahead of Ligety and Cuche. Ìę

Svindal clicks out of his skis and walks over to the media barricade. I ask him if he ever thinks of his mom on good days like this. “I think she’s watching,” he says. “I hope so, for sure.”Ìę

And what about Birds of Prey? I’m wondering if this place still holds anything over him, any lingering juju. Svindal waves his hand dismissively. “Not in the least,” he says with a smile. “That crash? It’s ancient history.”

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Looking back over his nearly 30 years as a highly decorated first responder in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, Michael Ferrara has trouble pinpointing the exact moment when his life began to unravel. His ordeal arrived not all at once but in a long spool of assaults on his soul and psyche. A plausible starting point, though, might be March 29, 2001, and a nightmare that occurred at the airport in Aspen.

One fine warm day this past August, Ferrara and I decided to walk over to the site. His six-year-old mountain-rescue dog, a German shepherd named Lhotse, led the way. Ferrara wore sweats and trail-running shoes. His skin was ruddy from the sun, his graying strawberry-blond hair cropped short. We stopped outside the Aspen airport’s fence, which is designed, among other things, to keep herds of elk off the tarmac. Ferrara squinted through the sun as a Learjet taxied and then shot into the sky.

“I’m OK with this,”Ìęhe assured me. “I’ve learned to recount without reliving—it’s part of the therapy.”

The weather was snowy and cold on that evening nearly ten years ago. One minute past seven o’clock, a Gulfstream III came in on an instrument approach. Fifteen friends from Los Angeles, most of them in their late twenties, had chartered the jet for a few days of spring skiing to celebrate a buddy’s birthday. Something went wrong on the final descent. The pilot apparently couldn’t see the runway. A wing tip caught the ground, the plane flipped, and the tail segment broke off. Then the plane exploded into flames.

Ferrara, who at the time was both a Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy and an assistant coroner, was among the first to arrive. Over the years, he had worked on a half-dozen small-engine-plane crashes in the mountains around Aspen. In other jobs as a paramedic, ski patroller, high-angle rescuer, and avalanche specialist, he’d often dealt with blood and trauma and heartache. Among scores of incidents, he was first on the scene when the late senator Robert Kennedy’s son Michael Kennedy, 39, fatally struck a tree while skiing in Aspen in 1997. Ferrara was steeped in the stoic culture of the first responder, and instinctively knew how to take charge in chaotic situations. But he wasn’t prepared for this.

In the swirl of the dome lights, through the flickering of a dozen fires, Ferrara drank in the surreal horror of the crash. The first charred and bloodied body he came upon was still buckled to his seat, his cell phone ringing in his pocket. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Ferrara saw something jammed into the elk fence: a hunk of flesh, dripping with serous fluid. Ferrara spent that terrible evening with fellow officers, assembling body parts into plastic bags. It was one of the worst tragedies in Aspen’s recent history. All 18 people, including the crew, were killed. Ferrara got home at four in the morning, smelling like jet fuel. He stripped out of his gore-smeared clothes and left them in the front yard.

As he told me all this, he blinked and blinked, as though waiting for tears that wouldn’t come. “The thing is,”Ìęhe said, “I drive by here every day. It’s a reminder. A trigger. People jet here all year long to have fun in this playground. Nobody comes to Aspen thinking something like that is going to happen. They look at these beautiful mountains and see paradise. I look at these same mountains—and sometimes I see another side.”

Ferrara, who has long been known around town as Mongo, is a genuine Aspen character. His nickname comes from the burly villain in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles—played by football star Alex Karras—who knocks out a horse with a single punch and deadpans the famous line “Mongo only pawn in game of life.”ÌęMongo landed in Aspen in 1979, after passing on law school in Buffalo, New York, near his rural hometown of Williamsville. He was 29, and in those early days he became known as a hard-charging, hard-partying, slightly outrageous but extremely competent tough guy who liked to live on the edge.

Ferrara quickly learned the calculus of thrill and risk that abides in this richest, fittest, most overachieving of alpine towns. He raced motorcycles and skydived and climbed desert spires and ran ultramarathons and skied like a beast. He risked his own life, but he also saved lives. In the town’s highly accomplished world of mountain paramedics, he was one of the very best.

“Among the SAR guys, Michael had the reputation as the smartest, the most passionate, and probably the one willing to take the most risks,”Ìęsays Doug Rovira, a climber and expedition physician in Snowmass who’s worked with Ferrara. “I’m only half joking when I say that I’d lie there an extra hour to have him come rescue me.”

Ferrara was trained as a paramedic, in rope work, in forensic pathology, and in the use of avalanche explosives and firearms. Mongo was Aspen’s Mr. 911: tuned in, wired up, on call, at your service. When something dramatic or awful happened in Pitkin County, he was usually there, in one expert capacity or another, to help pick up the pieces.

Ferrara left Aspen on occasion to chase other adventures. He spent a good bit of time on Denali, in the Himalayas, on Rainier, and in the Yosemite Valley. He went to work for the Alyeska Pipeline, on Alaska’s North Slope. For one year, he lived above the Arctic Circle at the base of Atigun Pass, near the western boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “I thrived on the stress and the darkness and the inclement weather,”Ìęhe says. “This is where I do well. I thought, Maybe I just suffer better than other people.”

Practically everybody around Aspen knows Mongo—especially people who’ve been here awhile. When he tools through town in his beat-up but fundamentally trustworthy Ford Ranger truck, he elicits a flurry of waves and honks. Most people know his dog, too. Lhotse is canine royalty: born in Munich, he’s worth more than $10,000 and comes from a long line of specially bred, specially trained rescue dogs. He’s also a TV star: Lhotse appeared with Ferrara on the Today show in a segment demonstrating how rescuers find skiers buried in avalanches.

At work and at play, Lhotse has been Ferrara’s constant companion. “He comes with me everywhere I go, good times and bad,”ÌęFerrara says. “Dogs pick up on whatever’s happening in your life. As they say, it travels right down the leash.”

Working with dogs has always been a part of Ferrara’s life. Back in Williamsville, his Italian American father had been a hunter who trained teams of German shorthaired pointers. At a dog trial one day, when Ferrara was 15, his dad had a massive heart attack right in front of him and died. So from an early age, death and dogs in the outdoors became curiously conjoined themes in Ferrara’s mind.

Ferrara is a handsome guy, a former bodybuilder with bulging biceps, a barrel chest, and a strong, clear voice that gets your attention. True to the dialect of Buffalo, faint echoes of Canada—“a-boat”Ìęfor “about”—creep into his speech. He has frosty blue eyes and a chiseled face reminiscent of Clint Eastwood. He’s in terrific shape for a man of 60, yet there are hints of pain in his step, from a life of sports injuries. He’s had nine knee surgeries, two ankle operations, fractured ribs, a broken collarbone, a cracked sternum, a collapsed lung, a ruptured Achilles tendon, four compressed vertebrae, and four concussions “that I know of.” Physical injury is “part of the equation you accept,” he says. “If you play the games of the mountains, you’re going to get hurt.”

It was the possibility of emotional injury that Ferrara hadn’t counted on. Yet in December of 2008, after several months of downward spiraling, he snapped. Ferrara experienced a devastating breakdown and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder that’s required a regimen of comprehensive therapy that continues to this day.

Fellow Aspen first responders were momentarily shocked by Ferrara’s news. PTSD was supposed to happen to soldiers, a malady incurred on jittery battlefields far from home, not in a Xanadu dedicated to strenuous good fun. But Ferrara had long suspected he had PTSD and wasn’t surprised.

“Of course he got PTSD,”Ìęsays Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy Alex Burchetta. “Mike always did it big. He climbed the biggest mountains. And when he was on duty, he seemed to get the biggest calls. Injury, trauma, death—for 30 years, that pager was on 24/7, and he couldn’t get a reprieve. You’d have to be naive to think that he’d be impervious to it.”

The risks associatedÌęwith exposure to extreme trauma have been part of the human story since we evolved as a species. Matthew Friedman, a psychiatrist and executive director of the Department of , says that humans have been dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder “since the days when we were getting attacked by saber-toothed tigers.”ÌęAccording to Friedman, Homer describes something very like PTSD in The Iliad, and Shakespeare’s Henry IV has what appears to be a classic symptom: a post-traumatic nightmare. Army physicians described a malady in Civil War troops that they called “soldier’s heart.”ÌęIn World War I, the diagnosis was “shell shock.”ÌęBy whatever name, the condition was largely the same: an invisible injury, a hurt without blood or perceivable scars, an overpowering hopelessness that lasted long after a person’s encounter with catastrophe or horror.

It wasn’t until 1980 that the term “post-traumatic stress disorder”Ìęentered the lexicon of the American Psychiatric Association and its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. PTSD’s acceptance as a diagnosable disorder was greatly hastened by the experiences of veterans’ hospitals treating soldiers, sailors, and marines who had returned from the Vietnam War. VA doctors found that the disorder manifests itself in a range of symptoms—panic, sleeplessness, nightmares, social withdrawal, emotional numbing. But the overriding symptom is a patient’s tendency to reexperience traumatic incidents with a vividness and clarity that is often indistinguishable from the original event.

“In many ways, PTSD is a disorder of the memory,”Ìęsays Friedman. “It alters the neuro­circuitry and the neurotransmitters which balance retrieving memories. In terms of brain chemistry, they’re different people than they were before. Through brain scans, we can observe the changes. In people with PTSD, an almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala becomes hyperexcitable—we can see it light up when PTSD patients are reminded of their trauma.”

There are an estimated 24 million cases of PTSD in the United States alone, the majority of the patients likely being veterans. Over the past decade, however, PTSD has gradually become associated with civilian professionals as well: firefighters, police officers, emergency techs, and other first responders whose jobs routinely put them in harm’s way and expose them to horrific scenes. A study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in 2007 reported that 22 percent of volunteer emergency workers at the World Trade Center disaster site developed a wide range of PTSD symptoms. Traumas suffered by victims and relief workers in recent natural catastrophes such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and last year’s earthquake in Haiti have further confirmed that PTSD extends far beyond combat scenarios.

Ski resorts and mountain communities have been slower in catching up with this trend, but alpine first responders are gradually beginning to recognize that PTSD may be widespread in their ranks, too. Dwelling in backcountry beauty does not inoculate one against tragedy. Whether you’re in a tank or on a pair of teles, the psychological ramifications of dealing with bloodshed and trauma are the same.

“PTSD is a sneaky player,”Ìęsays Utah’s Dean Cardinale, president of Wasatch Backcountry Rescue and ski-patrol director at Snowbird. “In the industry, it is probably one of those things that gets missed. These stresses do affect us—profoundly. We wouldn’t be in this profession if we didn’t have care and concern for the people we’re trying to rescue.”Ìę“I know half a dozen people who’ve had PTSD,”Ìęsays Tim Kovacs, a prominent wilderness paramedic and mountain-rescue specialist in Arizona. “For those of us who work in the backcountry, the old mantra was ‘Take a lap, run it off, get over it.’ÌęThankfully, it’s slowly getting more attention. PTSD exists. The stress of this kind of work mounts on you. You either deal with it preventatively or it consumes you.”

“The culture is slowly changing,”Ìęagrees Skeet Glatterer, a Colorado-based search-and-rescue specialist and cardiothoracic surgeon who is chairman of the medical committee of the Mountain Rescue Association. “We basically used to say, ‘Buck up, shake it off.’ÌęNow we’re all painfully aware that seeing those kinds of sights does something to us.”

After the Aspen plane crash of 2001, Ferrara continued to excel in his high-pressure work. Two years later, in 2003, Pitkin County awarded him a commendation for bravery for actions above and beyond the call of duty. His reputation as a rock-solid rescuer began to spread far beyond Aspen, and he found himself spending his vacations doing almost exactly what he had been doing at work: going climbing and pulling bodies, alive or dead, from the mountains. In 2005, Ferrara patrolled on Denali with the National Park Service High Rescue Team. That same year, he was part of a crew that discovered, identified, and reburied the almost perfectly preserved body of a man from Wyoming who had perished at 17,000 feet in the late 1960s.

Ferrara not only held up through all this strenuous work; he seemed to thrive on it. “I loved it,”Ìęhe says. “I got to do all this great physical work in the outdoors that had a purpose. People said I was a pillar of strength. And for a long while, I really believed them.”

Yet without being fully aware of it, his profession was taking a toll. Ferrara began to withdraw from friends. He developed a blank stare. He went through several relationships. He started using Percocet, a narcotic painkiller, and became indifferent to former pleasures. Throughout the day, for reasons he couldn’t explain, he would cry for a few minutes, consumed by an overwhelming sadness referred to by some PTSD sufferers as “flooding.”

“He hid it well, but the people closest to him could tell something was really wrong,”Ìęsays his sister, Janet Ferrara, who lives in nearby Carbondale and works at the Given Institute, a think tank at the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine. “He couldn’t interact. There was no laughter anymore. He just wasn’t there.”

At other times, he was overtaken by what he called “the slide show,”Ìęa cruel flickering of mental images he couldn’t control: an eviscerated body, a father in the ambulance with his critically injured skateboarder son, those charred figures on the runway. He could hear the sound of Michael Kennedy’s children saying the Lord’s Prayer while gathered around their dying father in a mountain glade. He could see the icy, waxen face of a drowned woman who’d fallen off a log bridge while hiking Conundrum Creek Trail. He could hear the wailing of a mother as she held her baby who’d just died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

It was a horror show, crowded in his head like a HiĂ«ronymus Bosch scene, and the images wouldn’t stop. He reacted to them with a surge of adrenaline, a stab of fear, a complex of real and present emotions. His eyes would drop; he’d lose visual contact with his surroundings. His blood pressure would spike and he’d find himself hyperventilating. He wasn’t just remembering these traumas; he was reliving them.

“The pictures were burned into my mind,”ÌęFerrara says. “They were happening right here, right now. My subconscious didn’t know it wasn’t actually real.”

Ferrara was clearly in serious trouble, but he didn’t seek help. After a fatality, he and his teams typically held something called a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, but all that meant, really, was that he and his fellow first responders sat and talked for a while. In all his years of training, no one had ever impressed upon him the notion that rescuers themselves might need rescuing from the cumulative stress of their job. Like those in many ski towns, Aspen’s subculture of mountain athletes and first responders is a rarefied and often hypercompetitive world that places a high premium on toughness and takes note of every stumble. “It’s a super-intense town to work in, and the crowd Michael ran with was really charged up,”Ìęsays Dave Hahn, a world-renowned mountain guide and ski patroller in Taos, New Mexico, who has spent time with Ferrara in Aspen and on Everest. “If you fail, you do it publicly. It’s very difficult to keep your place in the hierarchy.”

In Ferrara’s view, an admission of weakness was tantamount to an admission of failure. “My identity and self-esteem were wrapped up in this life,”ÌęFerrara says. “How could I admit I was so broken? I’d been doing this for more than 25 years. There weren’t a whole lot of other jobs I could do. I’m not going to be very good in a bank.”

Ferrara’s age also figured into his predicament. He was in his late fifties and couldn’t keep up the ferocious intensity of his twenties and thirties. “In Aspen,”Ìęsays Janet Ferrara, “people go 120 percent. None of us likes to admit it when age starts to slow us down.”ÌęFor all these reasons, Ferrara felt he couldn’t show the slightest crack in his armor. When the slide shows played in his head, he just tried to ignore them. As he recalls: “I thought to myself, I’m professional. I’m well trained. I can do this.”

“The thing about Michael was that he didn’t know how to disengage,”Ìęsays John Barstis, Ferrara’s best friend from Buffalo, now an oncologist in Los Angeles. “His idea was, if something is wrong in your life, just get in better shape. Go run another ultramarathon. Go climb another Himalayan peak. He had no peaceful way to release the pressure.”

Experts in SAR say that it’s often people like Ferrara—the best and brightest in their communities—who end up having the most acute problems with PTSD. “The bigger they are, the harder they fall,”Ìęsays SAR specialist Tim Kovacs of Arizona. “They think they can out-think it, outrun it, out-ski it. Some of them can hide it for damn near a lifetime. But eventually it eats them up.”

InÌę2006, Ferrara quit the sheriff’s department, but he was still working as a ski patroller on Aspen Mountain and as a paramedic at the Aspen Valley Hospital ER—while also volunteering for mountain rescues and recovery operations. He spent two more high-pressure seasons dragging hurt skiers off the mountains, tending to traumatic injuries, digging corpses out of avalanches, and, at times, making dreadful calls to loved ones.

On the mountain, the drumbeat of injury and death was steady. Highland Bowl, Snowmass, Pyramid Peak, Independence Pass, the Maroon Bells: everywhere he looked, he could find a trigger that might set off memories. Says Ferrara: “I spoke with a mother whose son had just tumbled 600 feet off the back side of South Maroon”—a young athlete whose terribly mangled body he had found and recovered. “She was remarkably stoic. She said, ‘The mountains take a great toll on our young men.’ÌęIt was like she was talking about a war. I’d long thought my work was like a war at home, and it was never-ending. And the casualties were all civilians.”

SAR veterans often speak of the particular horror of encountering free-fall victims like the one Ferrara removed from South Maroon. Marc Beverly, an SAR trainer and mountain guide in Albuquerque, New Mexico, says he’s never fully recovered from a 1996 incident in which three climbers fell off an 850-foot-high cliff.

“You pick up an arm and it disarticulates, you see eyeballs exploded, you see brain matter in the trees, and the birds are eating everything,”Ìęhe says. “You’re picking up people’s teeth and putting them in Nalgene bottles. When you experience something like this, it’s with you forever. When you go back to that spot, it’s haunted. It’s no wonder some people in SAR cross over and never come back.”

It wasn’t until December 2008 that Ferrara’s life truly came apart. One Sunday evening, he was working in the emergency room when a fellow paramedic told him, “There’s been an avalanche on Aspen Mountain, in the Mid Country. The patrolmen just found a skier. Michael, it’s Cory.”

Cory Brettmann was a beloved figure in Aspen, a veteran ski patroller and family man. He and Ferrara were kindred spirits and former roommates. They’d ice-climbed together, spent time in Alaska together, traveled widely in the spirit of adventure.

“Any emotional armor I had left, Cory’s death shattered it,”ÌęFerrara says. “I was in a fog of despair. I couldn’t see beauty anymore, only darkness.”ÌęHe withdrew into himself. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think. On his days off, he wouldn’t leave the house. The slide show played without cease.

By this point, Ferrara had begun to seriously abuse Percocet. “All I wanted was to medicate,”Ìęhe recalls. “I lived every day in fear of the next call. I couldn’t go back out there and face the mountain. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I got all the Perc I could get my hands on.”ÌęFerrara’s dependency fit in with the established literature on PTSD, which has a very high “comorbidity”Ìęwith substance abuse. Some studies show that nearly 50 percent of male PTSD sufferers—military and civilian alike—simultaneously battle addictions.

As his substance abuse worsened, Ferrara burned bridges and frustrated colleagues on the mountain, interacting with them as little as possible. Then, in early February, after working an ambulance house call that proved to be a SIDS death, he hit bottom. He was using morphine and downing four Percocets at a time. When the head of Aspen Mountain ski patrol confronted him about his erratic behavior in February 2009, Ferrara confessed to his addiction.

Banished from the patrol room, his paramedic license rescinded, Ferrara broke down. He was evaluated by Aspen Mental Health. Then he entered a Carbondale-based intensive rehab program and began, with the guidance of his sister, to consult a series of psychiatrists at the University of Colorado’s Depression Center.

The specialists there had no trouble diagnosing Ferrara’s underlying problem. He had many signs of PTSD: the combination of debilitating anxiety and severe depression, the withdrawal from the world, the emotional flooding, the insomnia, the lack of eye contact, the memories stuck on merciless “play.”ÌęIt was a textbook case.

I first met Ferrara on a misty, cold afternoon last winter, when he was in the throes of his recovery. Though he was still persona non grata in the Aspen Valley Hospital ER and in the Aspen Mountain patrol room, his paramedic’s license had been officially reinstated and he had a new job working on the Snowmass Ski Patrol.

On his day off, Ferrara picked me up at my hotel at the base of Buttermilk, where ESPN television crews were furiously building sets for the 14th annual Winter X Games. Lhotse restlessly whimpered in the back as we drove on slushy roads to the log-cabin headquarters of Mountain Rescue Aspen on Main Street. Inside, we sat at a table in a locker room stuffed with crampons, sleds, ice axes, helmets, Avalung packs, and countless miles of coiled rope. It was a kind of war room where Ferrara had prepared many a rescue—and a place where both he and Lhotse obviously felt at home.

Mongo was 11 months into his therapy at this point. He stroked the soul patch on his chin and spoke of his malady with thoughtful detachment. He wasn’t out of the woods yet, he insisted, but he felt he was well on his way. “I’ve got joy again,”Ìęhe said. “I’m running. I’m climbing. The slide shows have stopped. My eyes are up again—I’m here.”

He had successfully confronted his substance abuse and had been clean for a year. He was taking the antidepressant Zoloft and had sat through many months of cognitive-behavior therapy sessions—sessions designed to “unpack”Ìębad memories and relearn ways to store and think about trauma. He had also experimented with more esoteric techniques such as eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), which involves staring at a rhythmically moving light or holding rhythmically alternating buzzers while concentrating on traumatic experiences. The theory behind this therapy is that when one’s neurological activity is steadily shifted from side to side, something happens to the way the brain processes memory.

“EMDR activates the connector between the right and left lobes—so that both halves of the brain start working together to process the trauma,”Ìęsays Barbe Chambliss, a Carbondale psychotherapist who knows Ferrara.

Ferrara has found a similar restorative power in physical activity that involves a rhythmic, left-right-left-right action, which may physically mimic EMDR. Soldiers diagnosed with PTSD have widely found that vigorous repetitive-motion exercise such as ice skating and rollerblading can be extremely helpful in keeping the disorder’s symptoms at bay. For many PTSD sufferers, though, the most helpful sport of all seems to be nordic skiing. Ferrara has taken to it with a vengeance.

In fact, he’s made cross-country skiing a central part of his recovery. Ferrara says it stimulates an entirely different brain chemistry from the more intense sports he’s used to—releasing endorphins instead of adrenaline. Nearly every winter day, Ferrara and Lhotse have hit the endless miles of trails that twist like capillaries through Aspen’s surrounding mountains.

It was during those long hours of brisk solitude, hearing his own breath and falling into a healing rhythm, that Ferrara hit upon the idea that’s animated him over the past year: the First Responder Recovery Project. In November, he launched a new Web site—frsos.com—filled with information about civilian PTSD, the disorder’s symptoms and warning signs, and its treatment—with links to psychiatrists, therapists, clinics, and hospitals across the country. “In the first-responder world, there’s no doubt that PTSD is rampant,”ÌęFerrara says. “The more I’ve gotten into this, the more people I’ve found who had it. It’s an iceberg—we’re just seeing the tip. We need to create a whole new culture in which civilian first responders can openly talk about it, and we need to make good PTSD treatment as readily available to them as it is to soldiers. Corporate and government bureaucracies aren’t going to help us—we’ve got to help ourselves.”

Locally, Ferrara started a first responder’s self-help group, an open-door meeting of his peers that gathers in Aspen the third Thursday of every month. Only a handful of people turned up for the inaugural meeting, in August, but Ferrara says the numbers are picking up each month. “All that’s required,”Ìęhe says, “is that you show up willing to listen—and unwilling to judge.”

Finally, to raise national awareness for the , Ferrara has done a most Ferrara-like, most Aspen-like thing: he’s hatched an ambitious adventure. Starting the second week of March, he plans to ski across Alaska, south to north, from the Pacific Ocean to the Arctic Ocean, from Valdez to Prudhoe Bay. Lhotse, of course, will be trotting along at his side the whole way. The 900-mile trek, which is being sponsored by Eddie Bauer First Ascent, should take about 70 days. It will be “one giant EMDR session,”Ìęhe says, good for mind, body, and soul alike. And, he thinks, it will be a first for the record books: according to his research, no one has ever skied across the entirety of America’s largest state.

It’s an altogether ridiculous and beautiful idea, and one that is calling upon Ferrara’s considerable organizing and logistical skills. Working with first responders and search-and-rescue specialists in Alaska, he’s been planning the route for months. He’s arranging regular drops of food and supplies. At carefully spaced intervals, he will pass through villages where he can get a hot shower and a square meal—and where Lhotse can see a veterinarian if the need arises. In the end, Ferrara says, “it will be a long walk to clear my head—and to raise awareness so that maybe others who’re hurting can avoid what I’ve gone through.”

What Ferrara will do when he gets back from Alaska is less clear. What does any wounded hero do once he’s hit a wall and can go no further? To pay his bills over the past year, he’s had to patch together an assortment of odd jobs. He’s bucked hay on a nearby ranch, assisted at a home for developmentally disabled adults, done a little janitorial work, and served as a fitness trainer at Aspen’s five-star Little Nell hotel, dispensing advice on how to get chiseled abs or where to find a first-rate facial. A modeling agency in Aspen even approached him to be a “mature fitness model”Ìęon television. If these jobs seem beneath the dignity of a man of his training and experience, the fact is he’s grateful for the work.

Whatever happens next, Ferrara knows he has to reinvent himself. He can’t go back to ER work, and the search-and-rescue assignments he does accept will be fewer and further between. He’s talked about teaching, or touring the country to “spread the gospel”Ìęabout civilian PTSD. “It’s OK to dial it back,”ÌęFerrara says. “And it’s OK to quit. That’s what I learned. I don’t need the boldest job—I don’t want to be that guy anymore.”

One day this summer, Ferrara, Lhotse, and I spent an afternoon walking through Aspen together. We wound past the boutiques and sushi bars, beholding the plastic surgery on display in the crowds. Coming out publicly about his PTSD has been hard for Ferrara; rescuing himself has taken more courage than any highstakes save in the mountains. I could sense that he still worries, just a little, how people in town now view him.

We passed the fire department, where the big garage doors were thrown open. Two young firemen got up, came over, and shook Ferrara’s hand. “Hey, Mongo!”Ìęthey said, and he flashed a big smile.

Then we wandered over to Wagner Park for Lhotse’s daily romp with the village hounds. Some of his friends were already there—a Labradoodle and a mutt—and Lhotse bounded across the field for a tussle beneath the rugby goalposts.

It was a perfect, crystalline day, the kind that made Ferrara proud to be an Aspenite. “I’m the luckiest guy in the world,”Ìęhe said. “Despite everything, I don’t think I could ever leave this place.”ÌęBeyond the field, Aspen Mountain rose steeply, its swaths of emerald grass zigzagging through high shimmering groves. The lifts hummed toward the summit, where we could see a lone hang glider dancing in blue skies.

Then a siren punctured the quiet. An ambulance screeched around the corner, lights pulsing. It raced right past Wagner Park and disappeared, bound for someone in distress. It didn’t even register with Mongo. He just kept watching Lhotse—a $10,000 rescue dog emphatically off duty.

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“Where are you? The dogs are here.” It’s the Discovery Channel PR handler, calling from the set in downtown Los Angeles.

Bear Grylls

Grylls says, “I feel like I need nine lifetimes to even begin to scratch the surface of the things I want to do”

Bear Grylls

Grylls in Los Angeles, December 2009. Yes, the scorpion is alive

Bear Grylls

In a zebra-skin canoe, Zambia

Bear Grylls

Eating a bullfrog

Bear Grylls

Eating a bullfrog

“Stuck in traffic,” I say. “These storms got everything backed up.”

I’ve got to hurry—the dogs are about to attack!

It’s a dreary day in early February, and I’m just barely crawling along the freeway, creeping past one ugly accident after another. The latest in a series of El Niño storms is turning the L.A. foothills to mud, and now whole neighborhoods are sliding into oblivion. Miles ahead, somewhere in downtown L.A., Bear Grylls, the 36-year-old former UK Special Forces paratrooper who for the past four years has braved the world’s harshest environments as the star of the Discovery Channel’s runaway hit Man vs. Wild, is about to be mauled by wild dogs as part of his latest foray into reality television—a new series, making its debut this spring, called Worst Case Scenario. With the show, Grylls is essentially bringing the feel and concept of his fabulously popular Man vs. Wild and applying it to the city. Based on the perennially popular Worst Case Scenario books, survival manuals, and board games, he is presented with a number of classic hypothetical situations of high peril from which he then endeavors, with the help of advice from experts, to extricate himself. Over the past few days, he’s demonstrated for the cameras what to do if you’re in a free-falling elevator, if your car’s brakes stop working on a steep hill, or if you’re suddenly trapped inside a burning vehicle. I plan to watch the filming of an episode on what to do if a dog attacks, but I’m trapped here in this crappy rental car, growing ever more vexed by the screak of my wiper blades.

A half-hour later, I turn into a rain-soaked studio parking lot in an industrial warehouse district near the Los Angeles River and find Grylls’s trailer, inhabited by a lonely line editor. “Wait here,” she tells me. Listening to the drone of the generators, I spy his clothes, his flip-flops, a package of nuts: Bear tracks, but no Bear. Soon a black Yukon pulls up and transports me over to the set, which has been rigged up beneath the classic art deco 4th Street bridge. Tucked back from the spitting rain, the crew is filming an episode of Grylls’s new show in an urban jungle of concrete pylons streaked with pigeon guano. The Discovery Channel, which ordinarily guards access to Grylls, has promised me an exclusive sneak peek on the set.

“There you are,” the PR handler whispers, emerging from the bridge’s gloom. “It’s OK. The dogs are still here.”

A crewman with a spray can is tagging the concrete walls with graffiti, while a gaffer works on a fizzly neon sign that reads PIZZA. I can’t see Grylls—he’s hidden behind a confusion of cameras, boom microphones, and lighting screens—but I can see the dogs now: a pair of menacing-looking German shepherds with long, wolfish snouts. Despite appearances, they’re not wild at all. They’re highly skilled Hollywood actors—”the best in the business,” their trainer boasts. Even so, a phalanx of professionals is on hand to ensure that no humans or canines are harmed in the making of this film. Off to one side, a team of Humane Society representatives, clipboards in hand, dourly observe the festivities. An EMT stands at the ready, as well as a “risk-management consultant” hired by the Discovery Channel.

Bear’s pretty blond wife, Shara, 36, is here, too, lingering just out of camera range with their three adorable blond boys, Jesse, 6, Marmaduke, 3, and Huckleberry, 1. Though they live in London, in a houseboat docked on the Thames, the whole Grylls clan has flown out to stay for the week in a rented beachhouse in Malibu and watch him film the first few episodes of his new show. All told, there are 30 people standing around now, and everyone’s making far too much noise for the director’s liking. Quiet on the set!

The trainers give their animals the signal, and then, over a great snarling and gnashing of teeth, Grylls emerges from the nest of cameras, wearing a hoodie and brown Chuck Taylors. His hair is clipped military short, as always, and his face is wide-eyed with feigned alarm. I hear the familiar voice, the burst of boyish exuberance, the posh Etonian patter. “This is nought a place you want to be,” he says. “This is nought ideal. These two beasts are really quite nahhhhsty.”

It’s been another action-packed week in the swashbuckling life of Bear Grylls. For him, fending off a couple of vicious curs is all in a day’s work.

“Make a wrong move and you’re going to get a propah mauuoooling,” he says to the cameras. “But I reckon we’re just going to have to show a bit of brains over brawn.”

ACCOMPANIED by a small retinue of Discovery handlers, as well as his personal assistant and a production-crew driver, Grylls heads back to his now-bustling trailer, where he quickly strips out of his wet clothes and changes. (On camera and off, he seems blithely indifferent to his own nudity.) He grabs the bag of nuts and one of his boys’ apple juice boxes and heads out the door, sucking toddler nectar through a little straw. “Gotta refuel!” he says. I find it hard to keep up with him; he’s walking at breakneck speed, just like on his show, splashing through rain puddles in his flip-flops, glancing impatiently at his special-forces diving watch. “Gotta keep moving. Let’s go!”

At the Urth CaffĂ©, a groovy Internet spot around the corner on South Hewitt Street, Grylls orders up a high-test coffee drink, only to be accosted by an awkwardly smiling LAPD officer. “Aren’t you…that guy?” the cop says, and then he immediately summons a downloaded Man vs. Wild episode on his iPhone. “Yeah, that’s me,” Grylls says, glancing down at his own image on the tiny screen. “Cheeahs.”

“THE RIVER PROVIDETH all things,” drawls John Ruskey in the mock-reverential tones of a redneck messiah. “And now, it will provideth … fawwrwood!”

Ruskey is our ever-competent guide and spiritual leader. When he talks, which is seldom, and always in a very soft voice, we listen. He’s brought us here to this fine-powdered beach in the middle of the Mississippi River, and now we’re enjoying the musky coolness rising off the water while passing around a bottle of Jameson’s whiskey.

It’s an hour before sunset. Our group of ten friends is pitching camp here, 30 miles above Memphis, on a Crusoe-esque sandbar called Dean Island. We’re not in Tennessee or Arkansas but a happy no-man’s-land that’s uninhabited and apparently unowned. As we fan out to collect driftwood, an air force of Canada geese honks along the flyway, arrowing north for the summer.

“In the ten years I’ve been canoeing the river, I’ve never seen a soul out here,” Ruskey says. “Not even once.”

From Dean Island, the Mississippi stretches for nearly a mile to the opposite bank. The channel here is deep, more than a hundred feet, and the water’s colder than I expected—about 59 degrees. The smooth current seems almost languorous, until a massive creosoted telephone pole slingshots past.

Our mixed armada of canoes and kayaks lies just below us on the wet sand. We’ve been paddling the Mississippi all day, floating its confusion of currents, slipping into swampy back channels, and skirting the occasional tugboat as it nudges a zip code’s worth of barges upriver. We’ve been provoking indignant horn honks from river pilots, who think they own the Mississippi, and drawing bewildered stares from Coast Guard and Army Corps officers, who think they rule it.

Maybe it’s the Jameson’s talking, but as I gaze at the river and warm myself by a crackling driftwood bonfire, I’m hoping the Mississippi will provideth something else, this river that is our river, the river, superlative among superlatives—biggest, widest, strongest.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for weeks now: What would t be like to jump into that roiling mess? To wallow and drift in it, to feel its fish-redolent muck against my skin? And, most important, to get out into the full swiftness of its main current and swim it, from shore to shore?

FOR ME, THIS IS A SUBVERSIVE, if not suicidal, idea. I was born less than a mile from its banks, but until today my associations with the mighty Mississippi have always been bad. Growing up in Memphis, I was told it was sure death to go in that nasty, stinkin’ river. It was a big drainage ditch swirling with the country’s foulest waste—Our National Colon. Every category of danger lurked in there: snags, whirlpools, menacing big-ass catfish, industrial sludge, burning chemicals, snarled trotlines, and cottonmouths, not to mention a wicked current intent on sweeping away everything in its path.

The riverfront, I grew up believing, was a god-awful unsavory place—full of chiggers and poison oak and rabid dogs and rusty objects sure to give you tetanus. Its only true denizens were drunks and hoboes. Historically, the Mississippi had always brought bad tidings to Memphis—yellow fever epidemics, another boll weevil blight, news of the latest stock-market crash, or the twin pestilences of Sherman and Grant. Surely it was the height of idiocy to mess with such a groove-worn fate.

One day during the 1930s, my grandfather took my mom, who was seven at the time, out on the Mississippi in a little fishing boat. Something went wrong with the propeller. The engine quit. They drifted for miles and miles, without a paddle or life preservers. The boat spun like a waterbug on the currents, until my grandfather rather ingeniously jury-rigged a new cotter pin from a coat hanger. They made it safely back, but my mom never forgot the feeling of helplessness the Mississippi inspires.

“It’ll up and kill ya,” she’d tell me. “And I mean right quick.”

And so the Mississippi became for me something mythological and willful, like Charybdis. The more-or-less-predictable laws of hydraulics didn’t seem to apply to this crafty torrent of gravy. Without warning, I was told, it will suck you down, swallow you up, smother you in its miasmal embrace. It is less a river than a conveyor belt of quicksand.

This belief in its fundamental otherness goes way back. As early as 1837, an English captain wrote of the Mississippi that “few of those who are received into its waters ever rise again.” In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain describes a kid named Lem Hackett, who drowned one Sunday while playing in an empty flatboat. “Being loaded with sin,” Twain writes, “he went to the bottom like an anvil.”

Over the years, the Mississippi River really has seemed determined to kill people. The examples abound.

Take the tragic case of Jeff Buckley, the 30-year-old singer-songwriter sensation who drowned one night in 1997, in plain view of the Memphis skyline. Buckley went for a quick dip in the river while a friend stayed on shore. Suddenly, Buckley disappeared … and that was it. A few days later, a tourist aboard the American Queen spotted his body bobbing in the river. The autopsy revealed nothing unusual—no drugs, no sign of struggle, no hint of suicide. One minute he was fine; the next he was gone. The river just took him.

And then there’s the story of the sinking of the Sultana, the worst nautical disaster in American history. The doomed steamship passed Memphis early on the morning of April 27, 1865, with nearly 2,500 passengers, many of whom were Union troops newly freed from various Confederate prisoner-of-war camps. A few miles upstream, at around 2 A.M., the Sultana‘s boilers exploded. Hundreds were instantly scalded to death. Passengers jumped into the cold Mississippi, but many of the soldiers were too weak and emaciated to swim.

In the end, an estimated 1,700 people burned or drowned that night, more than on the Titanic.

While I was growing up, I remember a steady drumbeat of lesser tragedy along the river, melancholy flickerings on the local evening news—suicidal souls jumping off the Hernando de Soto Bridge, cane-pole fishermen losing their footing and slipping in, hapless adventurers whose boats swamped in the violent wake of a tugboat.

I remember the exact moment when I realized I’d finally lost my firstborn son to the clutches of the cult. It was in Whistler, British Columbia, four years ago, on a warm green day in July. I decided to take the lift up to the top of the mountain. My son McCall, then nine years old, was up there in the mists somewhere, on the Horstman Glacier, at a summer snowboarding camp. Like a good Presbyterian inspecting my investment, I decided I should go check out the scene.

McCall is a natural snowboarder. From the beginning, he had one of those gifts that can come only from the icy-bearded Norse gods. (My wife is half Norwegian.) He learned to shred on the brawny slopes of Telluride when he was six, and from that point on snowboarding pretty much wouldn’t let go. He began to obsess on the subject or, as the child psychologists call it, to perseverate. He spent whole afternoons bouncing on a trampoline in our backyard while strapped to his board. In class, he doodled designs of fantasy snowboard companies in the margins of his notebook. When he was eight, he wrote a school paper in which he said he loved snowboarding “as much as life itself.” He started wearing outrageously hideous beanie hats, and his door became barnacled with shredder stickers. His friends called him Air Mack. He even began composing odes to the mountain, like this bit of inspired doggerel, dated 12/12/02:

I am the tall strong mountain, king of the snow.
When people slide down my face they tickle me so.

I knew he was good, but on this bright morning in Whistler I was about to find out just how good. The humming express chair whisked me upslope, over heathery meadows where fat bears prowled for berries. I reached the station, took another express lift, then boarded a clunky bus that chuffed up to yet another lift, which deposited me in a snowy-white world of endless winter, more than 5,000 feet above town.

From the catwalk, I peered down into the immensity of the Horstman Glacier. The mists parted to reveal an arresting sight: a thousand jittery dots in the snow, all launching and buzzing and looping down salt-crusted slopes.

Good God a’mighty! It was a mosh pit of determination down there, an X Games incubator. Every inch of the glacier was roped off to create lane after action-packed lane where hundreds of juiced-up kids from a dozen camps ran gantlets of jumps, hips, boxes, tabletops, and rainbow rails. It was the Institute for Advanced Aerial Studies, the Academy of Amplitude, the Summer Symposium of Goin’ Huge.

A gamma-ray burst of adolescent energy assailed me as the mighty riffs of Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever” came blasting up from concert speakers parked on the bowl’s icy floor. As the Nuge bragged that he could make a pussy purr with the stroke of his hand, I realized that my nine-year-old little buddy was down there in all that baggy-panted bustle of delinquents.

It took me another half-hour to work my way over to the rocky couloir where McCall’s camp was ensconced. , it was called. For a few minutes, I watched him quietly as he mingled with his posse of knuckle draggers.

It was strange. I was standing only 20 yards away, but I hardly recognized him. In one short week of camp indoctrination, he’d undergone a personality transfusion. He had a new slouch, a new squint, a new inflection in his voice. Unfamiliar words came out of his mouth. At one point I actually heard him say, “That’s so wack, it’s dope!”

But I felt uncomfortable spying on him like this. “Hey, McCall!” I yelled, a bit too cheerfully. “How’s it going?”

He tried to ignore me, but I could see that the aura of tribal togetherness had been punctured; the magic was gone. It was as though I’d intruded upon a finger-cymbal dance of twirling Hare Krishnas.

I spoke to his coach, a heavily pierced and studded French-Canadian dude in his mid-twenties who’d supposedly competed all over Europe. “You are McCall’s father?” he said and then pursed his lips and adopted that tone of utmost Gallic severity. “You realize that McCall has a gift. I have coached many. But his talent is . . . is . . . electric.”

It was like a scene from Searching for Bobby Fischer. I could see that this coach was prone to hyperbole, yet still I couldn’t mask my fatherly pride.

McCall shambled over in his fat Burton boots and guardedly decided he was glad to see me. He breathlessly recited the sweet new tricks he’d landed this week: a switch 180, a perfect Japan air grab, a deliciously corked-out method down in the quarterpipe.

“This place is sick!” he said. He wanted to start training now for the 2010 Winter Olympics, which, it was already being rumored, would be held in part right here on the slopes of Whistler Blackcomb.

What was the point of doing anything else? he wondered. What was the point of going home, even?

“Dude . . . I mean Dad. Can we just move here?”

My name is Hampton and I’m a snowboard dad.

Since that fateful day in Whistler, my wife, Anne, and I have sucked untold numbers of gas tanks dry driving untold thousands of miles every year to haul our young Jedi to regional and national snowboarding competitions. We’ve been everywhere from Maine’s Sunday River to California’s Mammoth Mountain, from Oregon’s Mount Hood to New Mexico’s Angel Fire. With McCall having qualified for five consecutive amateur national snowboarding championships, in multiple events, we’ve more or less built our vacations around snowboarding. Although he’s not in the nation’s top ten, he’s consistently done well. At last year’s nationals, at Tahoe Northstar, he placed 18th in slopestyle, and in previous years he’s placed as high as 13th overall. Santa Fe, where we live, has a snow-starved mountain without a snowboarding coach or even a halfpipe, but over the years we’ve sought out some of the best freelance instruction we could find. At a skills clinic in Aspen a few years ago, through dumb luck, McCall wound up spending a whole day in the pipe with a promising (and, might I add, hot) twenty-something phenom named Gretchen Bleiler.

As a native flatlander from Tennessee, I never in a million years imagined I’d grow up to be this kind of father, spending so much time loitering on the mountain. On the morning of an event, as McCall pulls on his competitor’s bib, I hear myself urging him to “style out your melons,” “watch your speed checks,” and by all means never “overrotate.” During the competitions, I stand anxiously beside the scoreboard with butterflies in my stomach as I wait for McCall to take his run. I study the judges for clues to their proclivities. I watch the coaches from Steamboat and the Stratton Mountain School in their natty matching team jackets. I savor the different styles of these young riders, who all seem to come with names pitch-perfect for the X Games: Dash Kamp, Zac Fear, Blaze Kotsenburg, Zeppelin Zeerip. (Composer Burt Bacharach has a gifted snowboarding son McCall has ridden with who goes by the name of Sharky. He wears a floppy dorsal-fin getup over his helmet.) I enjoy the patter of the soul-patched announcer as he narrates the action from the Red Bull tent over strains of thrasher music. “Yo, dawg, check him out!” he says. “He keepin’ it thug, he keepin’ it real!”

And sometimes, Ă  la Tonya Harding, I secretly dream of kneecapping my son’s rivals.

We snowboard pops are a pathetic new breed. Though we do not yet have a support group, during my travels I have found solace commiserating with my cohorts through many dark hours. Our affliction is both real and surreal. Though many of us think we’re cool, we’re actually the epitome of squareness. We push for a greatness we don’t quite understand, we root for a style and an energy that’s not of our generation. We bankroll the growth of a youth culture that would never accept us as members. Some of us peroxide our hair and tattoo our arms and wear skate-shop clothes in a lame attempt to blend in with their world forgetting, silly rabbit, that tricks are for kids. We want to cheer on our little grommets, but we don’t quite know what to say. “Go! Jump! Cork it out!”

Although I’ve tried it a couple of times, let’s face it, snowboarding didn’t even exist when I was growing up. Only a few years ago, it was a renegade endeavor, an expression of pure freedom, an anti-sport. It strove in its own ruffian way to be the opposite of everything organized sports had become. But now, at its worst, snowboarding has turned to the Dark Side: lucrative sponsorships, asshole coaches, a thoroughly corporate-driven aesthetic, and pressure enough to give kids a bleeding ulcer.

And just like in Little League, there now can be found those familiar yelling, goading, make-you-cringe moms and dads, standing ever so obtrusively on the sidelines, pushing their kids, embarrassing their kids, making their kids cry. Moms and dads who soap up their minivan windows with annoying messages like SHRED ‘EM, CODY! Live-through-their-offspring parents who nurse decidedly premature visions of Olympic glory and see snowboarding as their free ride to a college scholarship.

I’ve witnessed some soul-searing scenes out there on the circuit. In Colorado I once met a dad who, as a matter of policy, refused to attend an awards ceremony unless his son came in first a silver or bronze wouldn’t cut it for the Great Santini. At the 2005 nationals, at Copper Mountain, I overheard another father say, “Good God, Ty, we rehearsed this! You were s’posed to end with a big 540, and you come up with a piddly-shit method air?” And this from a despot in California to his son after a poor showing: “There’s a little thing called talent look into it.”

We all know that the great American philosopher Mr. Bacharach, father of Sharky, put it best when he said: Love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of. But why, if we truly love our kids, do any of us encourage these competitions?

I remember three years ago, sitting in the bleachers at the nationals in Angel Fire on a blazing-hot day and watching the slopestyle warm-ups. In one hour, I witnessed a series of injuries happen, one after another, with these poor young test pilots crumpled on the sticky snow right in front of me, half conscious and already out of the competition before it had even begun. My better instincts told me I shouldn’t watch this carnage, but I couldn’t help myself. It was a little bit NASCAR, a little bit roller derby, a little bit Colosseum lions eating slaves.

Multiple injuries in one hour! Most of them resulting in stretchers and medics. Here comes a champ from New Hampshire whoa! Snapped collarbone. Now here comes the little menehune from Alaska eeewww! Broken pelvis? And now the lady shredder from Michigan wham! Cracked vertebrae, broken collarbone? “Do you know what day it is? Who’s the president?” Dilated pupils, pools of kiddie vomit on the snow. By week’s end, the scene was an orthopedic surgeon’s dream: A great clinking clatter of crutches as throngs of Percocet-happy kids milled about the resort in slings, casts, neck braces, and other badges of daredevilish honor.

So, yes, we snowboard dads are crazy as hell and probably should be rounded up by Health and Human Services. All I can say is their little bones mend fast and after they down 12 ibuprofens (Vitamin I, as we like to call it), you’d be amazed by how much pain they can ride through.

The truth is, Air Mack’s never been seriously hurt on a snowboard knock on fiberglass. He never tries anything he’s not already sure he can pull off, and that incremental sense of caution has seen me through many hours of what would otherwise be extremely anxious spectating.

In fact, the only real injury in our family related to McCall’s snowboarding was mine. In 2002, I went to watch him compete in the nationals, at Mammoth Mountain his first national competition, when he was nine. One early morning before his first slopestyle run, I went up to ski an irresistible-looking double diamond called Drop Out Chutes, a rocky groove that spills from Mammoth’s high cornice. It’s a run, I was later told, that enjoys a rather gothic reputation for mangling skiers. I slipped on a sheet of ice and pinwheeled several hundred feet down the sheer slope. I broke my arm and wrecked my shoulder, and the EMT, who pulled me down the mountain right past McCall’s competition, said I was in shock with a probable concussion.

The next thing I knew, I was in the Mammoth emergency room, and there was McCall standing over me, looking very confused.

“Dad, I was the one who was supposed to get hurt. It was scary Mom said they actually saw you strapped to one of those sleds!”

This past June, McCall went with a bunch of his New Mexico snowboarding buddies to the Phillips Exeter of all summer snowboarding camps, Windells. With its own permanent campus set among rainforest ferns and giant pines on the lower shoulders of Oregon’s Mount Hood, Windells bills itself as “the Funnest Place on Earth,” and few of its shaggy-haired denizens would disagree. It has an immense skateboarding halfpipe, a BMX course, an outdoor skate park, and a cavernous indoor trampoline complex (known affectionately as “Bob”), not to mention a bodacious terrain park higher on Mount Hood, where the snows never melt.

When I pulled into the Windells parking lot early one morning to check in on McCall (his mom and I were staying in a riverside cabin not far away), the camp was stirring for a big day on the mountain. A fleet of buses idled in the parking lot while a camp chaperone roamed from dorm to dorm with an electronic bullhorn in his hand. “Rise and shine, campers! Weather report is sunny up there.”

The doors began to creak open and the degenerates groggily emerged into the morning glare, with bed-head ‘do’s on loan from Ozzy Osbourne. I peeked in at McCall’s bunkhouse and found him already up and at ’em. He was eating a breakfast burrito and watching Beavis and Butt-Head with his posse Dillon, Clay, Peter, Kevin, and the rest of the Santa Fe crew. It was great to see them all lounging together in full thrasher regalia, but I dared not go in: The dorm room gave off a heinous stench, composed of the mingled fragrances of boot mildew, pepperoni-pizza grease, and adolescent crotch sweat.

“OK, you shred zeppelins!” the megaphone guy squawked outside. “Hood times, rad times! Move it!”

Soon McCall and his friends joined the other legions streaming into the parking lot. They stashed their boards on the roof grates and piled into the Windells vehicles. One by one, the vans turned out and formed a long badass convoy that moved out smartly. They aimed for the happy white volcano, its sharp point soaring into the red morning sky.

I followed the fleet of vans up to the Timberline Lodge, the great rambling inn built by the WPA in 1937 the same lodge where Stanley Kubrick shot exterior scenes for The Shining. I walked over to the Timberline lift and rode up to the Windells terrain park. It was a crystalline day, and all of Oregon was spread before me the Willamette Valley, Mount Bachelor, the Three Sisters. I felt the vertiginous sensation that I was perched on the roof of the very coolest frat house in America, where the greatest party was raging for the luckiest generation in the long history of fun.

Watching McCall hit the jumps, I realized how much bigger he’d grown since that week he first found rapture on a snowboard a few years ago. He’s 14 now and hardly a kid anymore. He’s almost as tall as I am, and his voice has dropped a register. His tricks are growing riskier, more dramatic; he goes up higher and comes down harder, and it’s all getting more serious. Seven years into this, I can still see he’s got the itch to soar.

My wife, an expert skier from Michigan, has a higher threshold for this mountain madness than I. But I’ll be honest: I worry that somewhere along the way, all the effort and expense and crazy crashing-through-life logistics will soon make snowboarding just another family vexation. Every half-reflective parent of every half-serious young athlete knows what I’m talking about. Parent and athlete alike reach a place of saturation, where the sacrifices outweigh the joys of what attracted you to the sport in the first place.

If McCall truly wants a shot at the X Games, or those 2010 Olympics he still sometimes dreams about, we’ll have to take leave of our family sanity and ratchet everything to a radically higher level. Maybe we’ll have to move to Tahoe or some other snowboarding mecca so McCall can train every winter day with a full-fledged team led by a full-time coach (with walkie-talkies!). Or maybe we’ll have to start summering on the downy slopes of New Zealand, as a growing number of these kids do. Or send him for a winter term to one of those outlandishly expensive alpine boarding schools.

And that’s just McCall. We’ve got two more young Vikes right behind him Graham, 11, a sleek ski racer, and Griffin, nine, a fearless freeskier who will doubtless want their own shots at mountain glory. Thor save us all.

It’s the American predicament, the American disease: Specialization! Structure! Overscheduling! Of course, we’ll support McCall and his brothers as far as they want to go, but as The Shining‘s Jack Torrance might type it out, in a thousand terrifying pages, ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES SHREDDER A DULL BOY.

The greatest joy for me on that radiant day in Oregon was watching McCall and his buddies ride together down Mount Hood to the Timberline. They weren’t trying to perfect their jumps for the coaches anymore; they were soul riding, just for the giddy fun of it. There was Dillon, McCall’s erstwhile rival, a cat-nimble boarder who also competes at the national snowboarding championships, but no one gave a thought to any of that. There were Peter and Clay and the others, all having the time of their lives. I saw them razzing each other, fishtailing, catching gratuitous air, improvising their way down.

I could see Air Mack in the midst of them, carving effortless scallops in the volcano, spraying his buddies with horsetails of slush, leaning so far over that his hands skimmed the snow. I could see he loved being there, maybe as much as life itself. He was a kid again, tickling the tall, strong mountain and I swear I could hear the mountain laughing back.

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ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in early autumn, Adam Teller pulls up in a mud-slathered blue Wrangler and steps out into a windy motel parking lot in Chinle, Arizona, yakking quietly on his cell phone. A rail-thin Navajo in his mid-forties, he has a standard-issue ponytail, with a few nuggets of turquoise accenting his fine-boned frame, but something about him says right off the bat, “21st-century Indian.”

canyon de chelly

Canyon de Chelly's sandstone walls have been occupied by indian groups for more than 2,000 years.

canyon de chelly

Navajo guide Adam Teller

canyon de chelly

A canyon rock streaked with desert patina.

canyon de chelly

A navajo hogan at Standing Cow Ruin.

Adam removes his shades and waves at me. There’s that moment of tentative recognition all guides must have with their clients: Whoever this joker is, I’m stuck with him now.

I walk over to Adam, and find that I instantly like him. “You surprised by the way I look?” he says, shutting off his phone. “A lot of people say, ‘Why aren’t you in your buckskins?’ They seem real disappointed. They think I ought to be making arrowheads or something.” He chuckles. “Or living in a fucking tepee!”

Oafish bilagaana that I am, I shake Adam’s hand, but he gives me the customary limp-fish grip that Anglos find so unsatisfying. Then he flashes a warm smile of dental calamity, his teeth twisted, banged up, or missing in action. “Used to be a motocross biker,” he says. “Broke my ankle, broke my hip—man, those were the days.”

I’m not the sort of traveler who ordinarily seeks out a guide, but at Canyon de Chelly National Monument, in the wrinkled recesses of northeastern Arizona’s Defiance Plateau, I have no choice. Although the National Park Service runs the place, and has done so since the monument was created back in 1931, the park is set entirely on Navajo reservation land. And so, by federal and tribal law, a visitor can enter the canyon only when accompanied by a licensed Navajo “interpreter.” The partnership here is unusual, and sometimes strained—and in fact many tribespeople want the Navajo Nation to reestablish complete control of the canyon.

But the guide requirement is a good idea, all in all. It’s a way to protect the sacred sites and the many Navajo who still farm in the canyon from dumbass, potsherd-stealing tourists—while ensuring that local Navajo like Adam Teller have a livelihood. Since the Navajo Nation has steered clear of casinos, this sort of enlightened tourism provides one of the few sources of income around Chinle, a dreary outpost of double-wides, snarling rez dogs, and an unemployment rate four times greater than in the rest of Arizona.

Adam is, by all accounts, one of the best guides around. He started leading tours in Canyon de Chelly when he was a gangly kid of 13—he was the youngest certified Navajo guide ever. Taking people through the canyon is something he’s always wanted to do—and he still has that wide-eyed eagerness of a boy keen on showing you his tree house.

In some ways he’s a Navajo traditionalist, but he’s put a distinctly modern spin on things. He went to the University of Arizona, where he studied business and anthropology. Four years ago, when he started his guiding company, Antelope House Tours, he constructed his own Web site, and now 80 percent of his business comes from the Internet. He’s become the guide to the stars, it seems—he says his clients have included Jodie Foster, Bill Gates, John McCain, Sandra Day O’Connor, and, my favorite, Henry “the Fonz” Winkler. He’s a Digital Age success story—so much so that a number of his envious competitors have tried to tear him down. One even called him a witch!

“Can you imagine that?” Adam says. “I had to hire a medicine man to throw the evil off.”

Now Adam glances at his watch. “You ready to rock?”

Most definitely, I say. I’ve always wanted to go exploring with a witch.

THE NAME HAS a French ring to it, but “de Chelly” (de-SHAY) is neither French nor Spanish in origin. It derives from the Navajo word tsegi (“rock canyon”) and is thus bilingually redundant: “Canyon of the Rock Canyon.” Over the centuries, Spanish conquistadors tried to approximate the unfamiliar sound of the Navajo word, and it came out, in various documents, as Chelli, Chelle, Dechilli, and Chegui, among other renderings—and finally Chelly, which eventually became the preferred spelling.

Before the Navajo took up residence here sometime in the 1700s—or possibly earlier—Canyon de Chelly had been continuously inhabited by various other Indian groups for more than 2,000 years, including, and especially, the Anasazi. I’ve come here to research a book about the life and times of the controversial frontier figure Kit Carson, who arrived in Canyon de Chelly in the winter of 1864 on a scorched-earth mission to bring the Navajo to their knees. Carson’s men rampaged through the canyon, torching cornfields, taking prisoners, and chopping down some 2,000 peach trees—the pride of the Navajo—that graced the canyon floor. The Navajo were sent on a 400-mile forced march, known as the Long Walk, and spent four years in bitter captivity in southeastern New Mexico before General William Tecumseh Sherman sent them home. The Navajo still talk about this tragedy as though it happened yesterday—and nowhere is its currency more keenly felt than at Canyon de Chelly, the high church of the tribe.

“It’s like this,” Adam says. “We feel about Carson the way Jews feel about Hitler.”

While Carson was here, he vowed that “everything connected with the canyon will cease to be a mystery,” but about that he was dead wrong. Canyon de Chelly still has an aura of intrigue and impregnability about it—which to certain people makes it irresistible. But how does one really describe the peculiar aesthetic of this fabulous sandstone labyrinth? What is it that draws more than 800,000 visitors every year?

Yes, it’s beautiful, and every fine-art photographer from Edward Curtis to Ansel Adams has tried to coax its magical tricks of light onto film. But beauty alone isn’t what makes it, in my mind, the marquee natural wonder of the Southwest. Since it’s in Arizona, comparisons to the other canyon are perhaps inevitable, if a little flawed. Canyon de Chelly, people often say, is a scaled-down Grand Canyon, kinder and gentler, easier to absorb, mind-boggling but not quite mind-blowing. This is true, I suppose, but I’m more inclined to take the comparison in the direction of Manhattan architecture: If the Grand Canyon is the brutishly macho Empire State Building, de Chelly is the Chrysler—smaller, yes, but also finer, more intricate, more sinuously feminine.

Here’s the main difference, though: Canyon de Chelly is a rock world with a human pulse. To an extent impractical throughout most of the Grand Canyon, people live here, and have lived here for thousands of years. The place is crammed with memories, good and bad. Because the water running through it is not a raging torrent but rather a gentle stream percolating along the sandy floor, the canyon has always supported culture, with farming and domesticated animals and huddled lodges tucked safely among its myriad notches and alcoves. The entire length of it is strewn with ruins, many of them world-class sites that over the decades have attracted some of the lions of archaeology, people like Earl Morris and A. V. Kidder. And everywhere, painted and pecked high on the luminous copper-hued walls, is the art of the ancients.

Adam and I have planned various angles of approach—by Jeep, on foot, and on horseback, crisscrossing this riddle of geology any number of ways. That’s the kind of place Canyon de Chelly is—a Rubik’s Cube—and to grasp it you have to look at it from multiple viewpoints. Its various branches and side canyons total nearly a hundred goosenecked miles.

ADAM PRESSES ON into the mouth of the canyon, where the ghostly cottonwoods are just beginning to turn yellow. After a mile or so, I feel a sense of imminent claustrophobia, the sheer rock faces climbing higher with every bend. We’re cruising on the sand floor, moving at a good, jittery clip. The nearby Thunderbird Lodge has a small fleet of World War II–era open-air troop-transport trucks, called “shake-and-bakes,” touring the canyon today, and there are other 4x4s prowling the flats. Until we all veer off into various side passages, the bucking procession has something of a Mad Max feel.

In many places, the sandstone is streaked with brown stains—called desert patina—that curl like a wizard’s long fingers down the massive sculpted walls. There is a convoluted chemical explanation for these streaks, but I like Adam’s explanation better. “That’s Changing Woman’s Hair,” he says, a reference to the Navajo matriarch goddess, who changes her appearance with the seasons and presumably leaves her hair all over the place.

Early on, Adam conducts a seminar on nomenclature. The Navajo are not properly Navajo, he reminds me; they’re DinĂ©, which simply means “the People.” (“Navajo” is a Spanish corruption of a Pueblo word meaning “People of the Great Planted Fields.”) Similarly, the preferred term for the Anasazi, those prehistoric druids of the Southwest, is now “Ancestral Puebloans,” because “Anasazi,” a Navajo name often translated as “Ancient Enemies,” gives offense to the Hopi and other current-day Pueblo descendants. There are dozens of other lexical do’s and don’ts, all rooted in the basic problem that so many different cultures have intersected here at various times, and all of them have been somewhat at loggerheads, if not plunged in outright warfare, with one another. You can’t open your mouth without saying something that’s either nonsensical or just plain pisses someone off.

Adam doesn’t seem to care much about any of this naming business, actually. “You can call me Butthead if you like,” he says. Nonetheless, in due time, my Indian name develops. “You ask a lot of questions,” Adam says, and so, perhaps inevitably, I become Many Questions.

About eight miles in, we hit our first serious patch of quicksand. You have to be extremely wary driving in Canyon de Chelly—its famous sloughs are deep enough in places to swallow an entire car.

“If you get stuck here,” Adam says, “AAA won’t come and pull you out.” Like sunken wrecks in the Caribbean, there are lost relics buried all over the place: tractors, ATVs, even a couple of those Thunderbird shake-and-bakes. Canyon de Chelly’s greedy quicksand has been known to mire a packhorse so deeply that it has to be pulled out with a winch. Not infrequently, the animal breaks a leg in the trauma and has to be put down.

The difficulty of driving in the canyon is yet another reason why guides are required. Adam has spent much of his life mastering the technique: steady gas but not too fast, a rhythmic dance of the wheel in the rough spots, never under any circumstances tapping the brake. He’s got just the right touch, and with a few skittery fishtails, we wallow on through.

We push a few more miles into the main branch and round a corner. There, looming before us, is one of the most fabled landmarks in all of Navajo country: Spider Rock, an 800-foot-tall pinnacle erupting from the floor of the canyon. The Navajo say that a great goddess, Spider Woman, lives atop this fantastical spire. Spider Woman is the wise but cryptic old crone who gave the Navajo the gift of weaving.

At the same time, Spider Woman is something of a bogeywoman for Navajo kids. “Grandma used to warn me when I was being mischievous,” Adam says. “She’d say, ‘Spider Woman is going to come and get you. She boils and eats bad little kids.’ Look up there—see those white banded streaks on top? Those are the bones of disobedient children, bleaching the rocks.”

Although he wears a faint smile, Adam says all this in a perfectly inscrutable tone that suggests he believes it—or at least doesn’t rule it out. It’s always best to adopt a respectful demeanor, Adam says, and keep your voice down. “Who knows? She might be listening.”

LATER IN THE WEEK, Adam’s father, Ben Teller, takes me down the other major branch of the canyon—an equally spectacular prong known as Canyon del Muerto. We’re on horseback, clopping through thickets of chamisa, finding shortcuts through fields whose owner invariably seems to be Ben’s aunt or cousin or nephew. “Don’t worry,” Ben assures me. “We’re all related!”

I’m riding an old nag who doesn’t seem to like me much. We turn into a side canyon, and as the walls grow tighter, she fiendishly speeds up while hewing tightly to the rock. Perhaps she’s hoping to knock me off, or at least give my thigh a long, hard pinch on the sandstone while she simultaneously gives herself a luxurious loofah rub.

On this particular day, Ben is wearing a feed cap, blue jeans, and, inexplicably, a fancy pair of tasseled loafers. He’s a stocky, amiable guy in his late sixties with thick glasses. Ben lives alone down in the canyon and is one of the only people who stays here year-round. (The icy winters can be brutal.) He drives an old Massey Ferguson tractor and has a cabin set on family land at an amazing spot inside Canyon del Muerto called Antelope House (after which Adam named his company). It’s the site of an Anasazi ruin constructed in a.d. who-the-hell-knows, a chinked-rock pueblo that once had as many as 91 rooms and several kivas.

Because Ben lives in such a remote place, he sent word ahead for me to bring beans and beer, his usual standbys. I got the beans but failed him on the beer, since Chinle, like the rest of the reservation, is dry. “Dat’s OK,” he said, trying not to telegraph his disappointment. “Next time, though, bring beer.”

Despite my horse’s diabolical nature, I decide that horseback really is the best way to see the canyon. Ben and I can get to places that Adam’s 4×4 can’t, and the pace of a walking horse is just about right for taking in the ever-shifting angles and plays of light. As we ride together, Ben tells stories of the old days, shows me where he used to go swimming at a natural mudslide that formed every spring when the snowmelt brought running water, shows me the place where some Hollywood western was filmed in the fifties (Canyon River, he thinks the title was). He remembers watching fellow tribesmen, all painted for battle, hurling papier- mĂąchĂ© boulders down onto the actors. “I know it sounds weird,” Ben says with a chuckle, “but I was rooting for the white guys!”

At a place called Standing Cow Ruin, Ben points out a remarkable pictograph stained on the wall. It’s a realistic rendering of a long train of cavalrymen, wearing flat-brimmed hats, carrying lances and muskets, and riding pinto horses into battle. The ominous figures look like horsemen of the apocalypse, their capes clearly emblazoned with crosses.

“Those are Spaniards,” Ben says. “From your town. Santa Fe.”

The DinĂ© inked these haunting images onto the walls to memorialize a painful event—perhaps the only occasion on which the Spanish successfully invaded this Navajo refuge. In January 1805, a force of nearly 500 Spanish soldiers marched all the way from New Mexico’s capital, killing Navajo warriors by the score and collecting prisoners as they rampaged through the canyon’s meandering course. In Canyon del Muerto, not far from where these images were painted, the Spanish troops were surprised to hear the shrill voice of a Navajo woman shouting strange invectives at them. “There go the men without eyes!” the voice screamed. “You must be blind!”

Puzzled, one of the soldiers climbed up the talus and spotted a group of more than 100 women and children crouched in a high recess of the canyon wall. Another soldier began to crawl his way up the steep wall with the notion of rounding up prisoners. When he crossed the threshold of the cave, a Navajo woman wrapped her arms around him and dashed for the precipice; the two figures, locked in a desperate grip, plunged several hundred feet to their deaths.

From the canyon floor, the soldiers began to ricochet bullets off the roof of the cave. Eventually everyone was killed but an old man, who would relate the story to other Navajo. More than 150 years later, the victims’ bones were still lying on the cave floor when archaeologists examined the site.

Today the spot is widely known as Massacre Cave. But, Ben tells me, the Navajo have their own name for it: The Place Where Two Fell Off.

ONE OF THE interesting challenges about learning history from a Navajo guide is that you’re often forced to consider the age-old question “How do we know what we know?”

On another day, Adam and I take off on foot through Canyon del Muerto, and at every turn he shares a tale that, like Ben’s story of the defiant woman at Massacre Cave, is based on oral history, passed down in sweat lodges and over campfires. Sometimes Adam tells me the wildest things—about Kit Carson, the Spanish, the Anasazi—things I’ve never heard even a whiff of before, things I’ve never seen written down in any books.

Though he’s an avid reader, Adam still primarily operates in an oral tradition, and at Canyon de Chelly the stories are out there, on the rocks, along the ground, in the air. He’s spent his whole life absorbing them, and retelling them. Sometimes these stories drive me crazy, even as I find them irresistible. The Navajo sense of chronology, often said to be more circular than linear, can be frustrating for a bilagaana writer trying to nail the cold facts to the wall of truth. The what and where details are often precise, but the when is almost always vague.

That doesn’t necessarily make them any less true, though; the stories have their own logic and discipline—and an authenticity slowly accrued. Some of these stories are hundreds of years in the making. “We’re a patient people,” Adam says. “We let things develop.”

One day, Adam takes me to see a massive anvil of sandstone called Navajo Fortress Rock and tells me another one of these great mythic stories—maybe the best one of all. Soaring 700 feet and connected to the main wall by only a thin stone bridge sagging from centuries of erosion, Fortress Rock is a legendary place, one that figures prominently in DinĂ© folklore.

In the winter of 1864, Adam says, the Navajo used Fortress Rock as a supreme hideout when Carson’s soldiers came pillaging through the canyon. During the weeks leading up to the American invasion, the women stockpiled foods and supplies—smoked turkey, piñon nuts, wild potatoes—while the men made improvements to the old network of Anasazi toeholds, gouging them deeper, so that children and even elderly Navajo could safely pull themselves up.

As it started to snow, some 300 men, women, and children, perhaps tipped off by a sentry that an army was on its way, ascended to the top and pulled up the ladders. Hoping the evil might pass beneath them, they planned to hunker down and dwell in silence for months.Then one day, as the bleak winter sun slipped behind the canyon walls, a column of American soldiers came marching into the canyon, laying waste to fields and chiseling their Kilroys into the sandstone. (Some of their inscriptions are still visible today, and on another day, Adam shows me one.) Somehow detecting the Navajo sequestered on top, the Americans camped near the base of Fortress Rock, beside a stream called Tsaile Creek, and attempted to starve them into final submission.

But unknown to the soldiers, the Navajo were already slowly perishing from thirst; the snows had melted away, and the natural cisterns pocking the surface had run dry.

So one moonless night, the Fortress Rock exiles devised a plan: They formed a human chain along the sloping rock, down to Tsaile Creek, where several American guards lay sleeping. A group of warriors crept out onto a ledge over the stream and dangled gourds from yucca ropes, dipping the containers into the cold running water. They filled gourd after gourd and steadily passed the vessels from hand to hand back up the sheer rock face to the summit. By dawn they had replenished their stores.

So what happened to them? I ask Adam.

“They outlasted the siege,” he says. “They were never captured.”

I SPEND A WEEK in Canyon de Chelly and find that I could easily spend another. It takes me several days to trace the extensive network of foot trails—Bat Trail, Baby Trail, Bear Trail, Barboncito Trail—many of them making use of the old Anasazi foot- and toeholds. Sometimes it’s hard to believe I’m in the USA, circa 2006. The passing vignettes seem impossibly pastoral, like a scene from ancient Arcadia. A man splitting wood. A herd of churro sheep cropping grass. A ruined hogan. Cottonwood leaves hissing in the breeze. A decrepit plow half swallowed by the earth. Two old women working at their looms. Orchards of scabby peach trees, heavy with fruit.

It feels like another country, another time. And in a way, it is. Maybe this is what Carl Jung meant when he called Canyon de Chelly the “essence of antiquity”—not just the presence of old things, but the seamless cohabitation of the ancient with the modern. I feel a kind of pleasant chronological vertigo. I know where I am with clarity. But when, I’m not so sure.

All week I’ve been feasting my eyes on the dazzling confusion of the canyon’s rock art: serpents, lightning bolts, fret patterns, whorls. Menageries of headless birds in flight, human figures with insectlike antennae, antelope with crab pincers instead of hooves, bird-headed men, frog men, turtle men. And palm prints everywhere, ancient choruses of hands, hailing from the walls.

At a place called Newspaper Rock, which Adam takes me to on the last day, the designs are so densely painted that there seems to be a kind of frenetic dialogue going on. It’s the Sunday Times up there—comics, sports, editorials, even crossword puzzles. Adam used to romp around here with his friends as a boy. “It was a cool place to be a kid,” Adam allows. “But I didn’t know it then. It was just home.”

I find the cumulative message of all these queer drawings strangely uplifting. If the Grand Canyon continuously reminds us of our squishable insignificance in the vast timeline of geology, then Canyon de Chelly does much the same thing from an anthropological perspective. It reminds us at every turn that humans have been at this game a long, long time. In the scheme of Homo not-so-sapiens, we American moderns are just a passing phenomenon: nothing special, soon to be forgotten, and destined to be replaced by other folks different, but not very different, from ourselves. We’re specks in a continuous anthropological record.

Those figures up on the walls are us.

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