Victor Major, finishing a seven-mountain traverse alone after strong partners have emptied their reserves, is so tired he falls asleep with his head against the slope above his boot-pack stance. It is May 2022, and he is also about to see that his intended ski route down Pyramid Peak has fallen to pieces.
Nika Meyers in 2021 endures not only 50-mile-average days for nine days on the Colorado Trail, but continual sleep deprivation. She gains 89,032.5 feet, cowers during the sky-splitting thunderstorms of that madly monsoonal summer and remains aware of birdsong and wildlife.
In 1925, Albert H. MacCarthy completes years-long efforts to make the first ascent of the remote and stormy Mount Logan, the highest mountain in Canada. Three of the six first ascensionists lose their way on the descent, zigzagging across the summit plateau and scraping depressions in the snow during two nights in the open at minus 25.
In “Seven Dances Along the Wild Abyss,” out Oct. 10, Art Burrows collates seven stories of uncertainty and hardship. He has written five chapters, with two by others, and his observations about the story by Meyers are representative.
“It’s her voice,” Burrows says from his home in Snowmass Village, “which is very powerful because you can tell how difficult it was, and what the weather was like, and how beautiful it was at the same time.”
While the book is about risk, it is also about wonder and appreciation in people entering wild terrain with “a rare ability to live intelligently with consequence” and manifest “acts of awareness.” The most predominant motif espouses humility.
“Humility,” the author writes, “may be the most important survival skill of all.”
Burrows generously opens the anthology with ripping tales of others, when he certainly has his own such (i.e., trying to make it to morning on Mount Logan in a wind-blasted tent, scraping off surging interior hoar frost). The stories vary greatly, but with the exception of a piece by Jon Turk, are about people on the Western Slope, and it is positively fun to spot so many locals: Lou Dawson, Neal Beidleman, Ted Mahon, Christy Mahon, Jordan White. Chris Davenport, Chris Landry, Boots Ferguson and more. There is Fritz Carpenter who, with Morris Hogan, joins Major on his first four peaks, and Fritz Stammberger of 1970s Aspen, an early extreme skiing mountaineer.
The photos are gorgeous, crystalline, and the book is deeply reported. Gathering information on Logan expeditions of 100 years ago or Major’s little-known Elk Mountains traverse in 39 hours means compiling history, gear information and strategies; geological detail, much from the author’s own observations; times, distances and heights; and snow conditions from “smirt” (a new one for me) to penitentes, frozen troughs and “sun-abused chunder.”
An account of a disturbing 2023 avalanche accident in the Elk Mountains contains striking details not found in the comprehensive, factual Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC) account, such as how a buried skier, digging himself out for three hours, has nowhere to put the snow, so he packs it into snowballs to throw overhead. Burrows’ is a humane rendition.
“It was horribly tragic and everyone suffered horribly,” he says in the recent phone conversation, “even though there were two survivors. And emotionally, can you ever recover from that?”
A fifth-generation Valley resident, Burrows is a photographer, painter, gear designer and pioneer in telemark skiing. Lou Dawson, area ski mountaineer and scholar, most recently author of “Fourteeners Snow,” has written, “Art is an incredibly gifted athlete who was the big daddy of telemark racing in the 1970s.”
Dawson says today of the book: “If it doesn’t win any awards, I’ll eat my shirt.”
“It’s quite a read. Lots of it is enjoyable but some of it is just scary and brutal, which still makes good reading. I like the way he honors our home mountains. It honors a lot of history.”
Burrows, who previously coauthored “Fifty Classic Ski Descents of North America” with Davenport and Penn Newhard, came up with the idea for this book in 2020 under grim circumstances.
“I had gotten COVID in January and actually had two strokes in Japan,” he says, “so had a lot of time to think … Nine months of recovery “was a good time to jog my memory and start writing things down.”
A first story, about living through COVID, is not in the book, but after that he began work on the “Tenacity” chapter about Mount Logan, keenly interested in the historic research. Next came “White Sirens,” about the 2023 avalanche, and third was “The Opportunists,” from his experiences of bears in our area during a time of deprivation. An anomaly in the lineup, that story ended up being one of my favorites, haunting and salient.
All are real-life stories except for “The Neanderthal Echo,” in which one character represents the bowhunting experiences of two people, locals Zach Hayes and Jim Cardamone. Burrows calls the story interpretive, “but pretty close to the facts.”
I learned much from this book: about MacCarthy in 1925, the 2023 avalanche and Major’s very major feat. For comprehension, see the map on the book’s inside front cover. The line starts at Capitol Peak and ends at a spot marked “Cold Pizza.” Burrows knows.
See sevendances.org (185 pages, 130 photos, $62) for more info.