“Down, down, down!” Trent yelled.
The snow cat had turned back up the slope, its lights pointing in our direction. Trent and I dropped flat into a small depression, our bodies hopefully obscured by the shadows. The snow was cold and hard, but I was wearing plenty of padding. We were at the top of Vail Mountain at night, and it was pitch black save for the snow cats grooming the ski slopes for the next day. We looked around for our third, but Matt’s tall, skinny shape was nowhere to be found.
The lights passed us over. “Go!” Trent cried. In the crunching snow at a full sprint, we covered the last open expanse, then slid baseball style down to the catwalk, fully out of view. Matt reappeared a moment later, clutching a square of folded black plastic to his chest. “I dropped my trash bag,” he explained.
The sledding we were about to do was not smart, legal, or safe. In fact, we were probably the stupidest people on Vail Mountain that night. But that’s what made it great.
We started out with a blue square, an intermediate run down the middle of the mountain. Trent handed me a trashbag with two leg holes cut out of it, and I climbed in, feeling like an overdressed hobo. Trent gave me a quick primer: wear goggles, tap with your arms to steer, and get up as fast as you can so as not to be bowled over by the next sledder. Then he and Matt, veteran trashbag sledders, took off down the run.
I could not decide which was scarier: standing atop a ski slope on a moonless night, waiting to get arrested by a snowmobile patrol, or sliding into the impenetrable darkness in a waste receptacle liner. I thought I heard voices, so I chose the latter.
I had forgotten the goggles. I became a moving cloud of snow crystals, an arctic Taz zooming my way to the bottom (and hopefully not into a tree). I couldn’t see a thing, and I barely missed taking Matt out as he stood up from his run.
We kept going like that, running, sliding, jumping up and running again, till we came to the end of the blue. Thrilling, I thought, but more for the James Bond antics than the actual sledding. The trashbag was easy enough to slow down by sitting up instead of lying flat on one’s back.
And we kept hearing voices. Our codeword was “Red,” as in the color that ski patrollers wear, and we whispered it to each other at least several times on the running, stopping dead in our tracks. We couldn’t decide if it was ski patrol or other trashbag sledders on a parallel run.
Then we came to the top of International, a steep, mogul-y black diamond. Trent looked over the top of it. “I’m not saying we should try it,” he explained. “I just want to see.”
Matt seemed hesitant, too. I didn’t see the big deal. “Dude, go for it,” I said.
Trent shrugged. A Vail native, he didn’t need to be told twice. From a sitting start, he slid down the face. We lost sight of him in a cloud of snow after twenty feet, but his cries did give us a roadmap for the run.
“Whoa…”
“Whoop!”
“HOLY SHIT!”
Giggles.
Matt and I went next. Sitting start, hands digging into the snow to slow down, but it made no difference. After the first mogul launched you airborne, the speed was too much to control, and the second and third one knocked us so high it made you wonder if you would have a functioning ass the next morning. My goggles had completely stopped fogged up, so I was flying blind at uncontrollable speeds down a mogul run. If my senses weren’t so overloaded by rushing wind, ice, and the sensation of weightlessness, I probably would have feared for my life. When I stood up, my beard was so encrusted with ice crystals that I looked like Santa Claus.
I called my girlfriend Jen from the bottom of International and told her what we were doing. “I’m imagining you guys as cartoon characters because I can’t imagine real people surviving that!” she exclaimed.
We had one last slope to consider: Pepe’s Face, the steep strip at the bottom of Vail Village that après-skiers sipping margaritas love to watch beginners fall down. We weren’t idiots; we took the catwalk around. But we did notice boot prints leading up to Pepe’s, getting deeper and deeper as if someone was running headlong, and then a single butt-sized trail heading off the cliff into the darkness.
I guess were weren’t the stupidest people on Vail Mountain that night after all.
Funny. When I was a kid in North Carolina, it didn’t snow that often, so my family never had a sled. So the few times it did snow, we would totally sled on trash bags. I love it!