The joy is deep. The pain, too.

Telluride, Colo. -

"We’re all in this thing together, walking the line between faith and fear. This life don’t last forever … when you cry, I taste the salt in your tears."
- Old Crow Medicine Show

The snow was coming in white sheets billowing from heavy pines. It was the kind of snow that bent time. The morning existed in a time lapse, everything blurry from the night before, from the falling snow, from the haze of hurt and the promise of a weightless day. We left Telluride amid the storms the day before because we had heard there might be enough snow at Wolf Creek to change our lives.

I needed to disappear, a milky outline on a blackboard. I was at a crossing. It was one year to the day that a friend killed himself. I needed the perfect day to remember him as I wanted.

So I left town on the promise of a white baptism. And with the snow falling heavy and big as drunken butterflies, I pulled my face into a smile. Until an avalanche crashed onto the highway, one mile from the Wolf Creek ski area, severing us from deliverance. We were 10 minutes too late, on the wrong side of too much of a good thing.

We waited at a bakery in Pagosa Springs. A handful of stranded skiers talked about possibilities, about driving four hours around the pass. I was sick. I was given the charge of skiing for our man, who had made Steamboat moguls part of his life. I talked with friends from Denver, all of them together on this day. "Avalanche? Well, aren’t you going to ski?" she said. "Yes," I told her. "I will." We left Pagosa for home, blowing through Durango and melting into the purple wall of another storm outside Dolores.

A mile before Rico, we stopped the car. I pulled a candle from my ski bag and moved snow with my hands to clear a place. Across the country we lit them at 4:30 p.m., a way for us to unite before his flame. A brilliant laugh. A brilliant mind. Eyes that, most days, shone through the porous sadness behind them. It was snowing sparkling flakes as the sun splintered the clouds. The flame twisted in the wind, and I blew it out.

"Pull over," I said 30 minutes later. And on top of Lizard Head Pass, as the pink storm faded to black around us, we put our ski boots on for the first time that day. I didn’t have my skins, didn’t have my beacon. My friend had on jeans. I tossed two beers into the snowdrift next to the car and set off, sinking to my waist. 30 minutes and a few hundred feet later the three of us stood amid aspen trees, their shadows bony fingers on the grainy blanket beneath us.

With my boots loose, with no vision, I took off. A deep turn around a tree, and another by the little ledge. So deep I imagined cutting through to the other side of the world. I’ve had great days. There was the day the Steamboat airports closed over Christmas and I was the only guy on the hill, free refills on powder laps. Once in Silverton I thought I disappeared into the mountain, my old man a ghost behind me. But last Saturday bested them all.

They were the best turns of my life.