It had been snowing regularly for days. The base at Bridger Bowl was in good shape, 12” more had fallen overnight and it kept snowing into the morning. I was in line for the opening bell and skied hard all day. One by one my buds dropped away. Some were tired, others had obligations at home. For some reason, my energy levels seemed to increase with each run. I didn’t want to leave, at least not without first putting down tracks on Bradley Meadows. It was almost 4 PM when I made my way to the top of Alpine lift and skied over to the backcountry gate. No one else was there. It wasn’t like me to go into the backcountry alone, but it was just Bradley’s, a place I ski a dozen or more times each year. I decided that I was comfortable going alone.
I skinned up and started climbing. Luckily, I wasn’t the first one who had been out here today. There was a track in place, which lessened my workload. As I grunted up the track it was obvious, this was going to be an epic run. The snow bordering the skin track was knee deep, light and fluffy. Every time I’d duck under tree branches that hung over the trail I’d blow on the snow of a nearby limb. It just floated up into the air. I was getting giddy as I climbed.
Bradley’s is a good 500 vertical foot climb. The top is a tree lined ridge, the face is an open meadow that steepens to about a 40-degree pitch near the top. One could count on 20 to 25 beautiful turns in the meadow before entering the woods where the slope flattened considerably, but where some beautiful rollers were nestled that provided a few last turns before one should start making their way back to the ski area proper.
It was late when I reached the top. I kept skinning along the ridge until I saw the line I wanted to ski. The light was just starting to shade toward grey. I quickly stripped off my skins and was ready to descend, but I stayed for a moment longer to look out at the world around me. Puffy clouds sat high in the sky and were blazing orange over the Crazy and Absaroka ranges, both of which lie to the east. The world was white. Everything appeared to be covered in a blanket of deep powder. Evergreen limbs were laden with large pyramids of snow that nearly obscured all the green. This had been a good ski season so far.
Suddenly, a skier zipped by me blasting me with a rooster tail of snow and started down my line. “What the heck?” I was at the top of the run. How was this possible? I felt compelled to give chase. He was flying. I skied as fast as I could but I couldn’t keep up with him. He was skiing an odd line. Instead of following the fall line, he skied down on an angle that veered steadily to the right. It wasn’t the line I had planned to ski, but I followed his path. I was having a great run, skiing the fastest I had in years. It was as though I was young again, if just for the moment.
The snow was in motion as I skied; sluffs moved with me as I turned, and I was feeling the flow. As I have told my buds, we put in lots of mediocre runs in lots of mediocre conditions all for a few moments of grace and beauty. The flowing snow added to the feeling that this was one of those moments. My balance was spot on, my skis were carving smoothly. It was perfection.
I couldn’t get a clear view of the skier in front of me. The cloud of powder obscured all but an occasional glimpse of long blond locks. He stopped at the bottom of the slope and turned to look at me as I glided toward him. That’s when I saw him. He wasn’t wearing goggles or a hat. He had long blond hair, a blond beard, but his eyes, black orbs, made me shudder. His glare was intense. It was though he was screaming into my head to hurry without actually saying a single word. He turned away, quickly pushed off and kept skiing.
I followed him into the woods. We turned through the trees, down the first roller and headed toward the next. He launched himself from the top of this roller doing a forward flip and landed in a cloud of powder. But then, … nothing. He was gone. I slid to a stop.
Before I could contemplate what had happened, I heard the snapping of trees as an avalanche roared into the woods. I felt the gust of wind preceding the avalanche and expected to be buried by a wall of snow, but the slide came to a stop right next to me. The forest above to my left was buried in a thick slide, but where I stood stayed clear. I guessed that the other skier and I had set off the slide. Then it hit me, if I had skied the line I was planning at the pace I usually ski I would have been buried.
I looked back and began to scan for my companion. “Wait, where are his ski tracks?” He didn’t leave any. There were no tracks in the woods, none where he had launched himself from, and no compression in the powder where he landed. A shiver ran through me. I didn’t know what to think. I skied down the roller right over where I had seen him ski. Nothing. It was time to get to the car.
I popped my skis off when I reached my car and brushed the powder snow off my boards. The snow floated away easily except that when I brushed the one ski some snow stayed stuck to the board and formed the letter R with a B below it. It lasted only a moment, then the letters themselves dissolved and floated away. I watched the particles drift to the ground. “R B, Rune?” I looked around. Rune Bakke was the only person I knew with those initials. It had to be my imagination. This whole thing, the skier, the letters, had to be my imagination. Rune was in Norway almost half a world away. This couldn’t be real. I was unnerved, but I shook it off and headed for home.
As I was driving home my phone rang. It was Huk. Part of me was incredibly excited. I wanted to wax on about my excellent Bradley’s run. That he should have stayed around to ski it with me, but I wasn’t sure what to think, so I just said, “Huk, what’s up?”
“Are you sitting down?”
“I’m driving back from Bridger.”
“Pull over.”
I was almost at the “M” parking lot. I pulled in there. “Okay, what’s up?”
“I just got off the phone with Kari.” Kari was Rune’s wife. “Rune died about an hour ago.”
“What? Damn it. Bakke’s gone?” I was overcome with emotion. “I knew that he had prostate cancer, but I didn’t realize it was that bad.”
“Yeah, I knew from my conversations with Kari that he was really sick. I just didn’t know that he was dying.”
“Damn it that we never got to visit him and say goodbye.” We only learned about Rune’s cancer a few weeks ago. Our normally laconic friend had sent an email telling us not to do what he had done. Not to ignore the pain he felt when he sat down. Go to the doctor early if you feel that something is not right. His cancer could have been easily resolved if only he had caught it early. Now it was a much bigger problem.
What I had seen skiing and written on my ski, made somewhat more sense now. I wasn’t one to believe in the supernatural, but I couldn’t deny what I saw. I said, “We should have a memorial.”
“We will. I’ll call Gary and Joe. Let’s plan to get together here tomorrow afternoon. We’ll sit around a fire in my backyard and tell old Bakke stories.”
“Okay, see you tomorrow.” I’d think more about what I’d seen, I’d tell them all tomorrow. Maybe.
Huk had setup chairs in the snow and had a roaring fire going. Gary drove up with Joe’s van, Joe in the back sitting in his wheelchair. We gathered around, cracked some beers and toasted with shots of Akvavit. “To Rune.” None of us had a lot of details about his death, so we quickly shifted to talking about our times together. Huk talked about the winter of 2010 when he went to Norway to work at a ski area that Rune had become a partner in. It was a small operation. Rune’s partners were less than enamored with him bringing someone else on board. Huk’s deal fell apart after six weeks when every piece of equipment had broken, but Rune was very generous with him. He paid him for the whole winter before he headed home.
I lived in the east until June 2020. The last two times Rune visited Bozeman I joined him; we both came out to ski Bridger Bowl in February 2007 and February 2018. The 2007 trip was epic. It snowed for 7 straight days, some 60 inches in total. It was the best ski trip ever. In 2007 the Schlasman’s chair was still on the drawing board and Slushman’s Ravine was outside the south boundary of the ski area. We were all in our 40s. Even though Rune and I didn’t ski regularly where we lived, we were able to keep up. We skied fresh powder in-bounds all morning, then skinned up Slushman’s in the early afternoon. After skiing there, we worked our way lift-by-lift toward the north boundary where we skinned up to climb Bradley’s. We made it back to the cars by 5:30 each evening, skiing Bradley’s in the fading light of day.
The week was perfect with one exception. Joe was struggling. He was a few years younger than the rest of us, he was a great skier who normally pushed us on the climbs and pushed us harder on the descents. This year he wasn’t pushing us. He struggled to keep up on the climbs, and fell on the descents. Not a lot, maybe once or twice on most descents, but Joe normally didn’t fall. We were all perplexed, Joe included. As the year progressed, he started having difficulty stepping off curbs, entering doorways and with uneven surfaces generally. He got the diagnosis in March 2008: Multiple Sclerosis. It has slowly ravaged him. He lost his ability to ski, to mountain bike and eventually his mobility more generally. Most amazing to all of us that have watched his struggles is how hard he has worked to maintain his health. He never gave up, still hasn’t, and he maintains an upbeat attitude. He works within his bounds and keeps a positive outlook even as those bounds close in on him.
We had fresh snow on the 2018 trip, but not nearly as much. The 2007 epic was not to be repeated, but we had the Schlasman’s lift this time. Huk and Gary spent lots of time touring us around Slushman’s, and we made a few late afternoon trips to Bradley’s. Rune spent the evenings putting up the short videos we all took during the day. His efforts provided us with a full accounting of the trip: our best runs, and a few classic fails.
Joe began, “I remember the day I was skiing with Rune and he punctured a lung. We were skiing Upper Bridger Gully off the Ridge when Rune caught a tree branch in the chest, and he literally got tangled up in the tree and couldn’t free himself. I was ahead of him and had to climb back up to help him. He was struggling to breathe. He knew he had broken a rib, but didn’t know about the lung until he got to the hospital. It was a deep day, the skiing was so sweet and Rune was bummed. He was in a lot of pain and when we got him back on his feet he found that he couldn’t ski. He had to slowly skitter his way down and quit for the day. I swear that bothered him more than the broken rib and punctured lung.”
Huk talked about the time Rune lost a ski and the two of them dug until dark never finding the thing. A patroller had come by during “sweep” and, since he knew them and knew they’d be okay, told them to keep digging.
When the stories quieted down, I hesitated, but finally said, “I saw Rune yesterday, at least I think I did, and not the grey-haired Rune of recent years, but the young blond Rune of our youth.”
Joe piped up, “Charlie, I didn’t think you smoked anymore.”
“Yeah, I know that’s what it sounds like, but no, I wasn’t stoned.” I then proceeded to tell the story of the skier, the avalanche and the letters on my ski. No one knew what to say. Gary asked when it had happened. “That’s the strangest thing. From Huk’s call yesterday telling me that Rune had died about an hour before, that probably placed me at the top of Bradley’s moments after he died.”
“He flew around the world after he died to save your life? That’s what you’re saying?” Joe asked somewhat incredulously.
“You weren’t there, but I can’t explain it any other way. Maybe at the moment of his death, his spirit had the ability to transcend space and time, or something. I just don’t know. But I do know that he saved my life. At least I think he did.”
“I’ve heard stranger tales,” Gary chimed in. “I used to go to drum sessions. A group of guys would sit around a circle in silence drumming quietly, until someone decided they wanted to speak. They’d stand up and the drumming would stop. Then they would speak. Most would just say something about their families or work, things they weren’t comfortable saying in other contexts, but sometimes they’d tell stories about supernatural phenomena they’d experienced. I think the weirdest one was the guy who told, testified as we would call it, about being out on a solo backpacking trip and sitting around his campfire one night when a bear came out of the woods and sat next to him. The bear just sat peacefully, not at all in a threatening manner. Then it started to speak. It was the guy’s long dead father speaking through the bear.”
“Sounds like a peyote dream out of a Carlos Castenada novel,” I chimed in.
“Yeah it does,” Gary replied, “but we didn’t question each other, we just went back to drumming when the person stopped testifying.” Then making emphatic hand gestures and glancing around, Gary continued, “I’m not saying that we didn’t shoot furtive glances at each other when somebody said something seemingly insane, but we didn’t question speakers.”
“Did it look like Bakke,” Huk asked.
“I really can’t say. The blond locks and beard certainly could have been his—his 40 years ago that is. But the light was grey. I couldn’t make out the face well, just those eyes. They definitely weren’t his.”
“But maybe you’ve never seen his eyes when he was really annoyed at you for skiing too slow,” and with that Huk lunged toward me with bulging eyes. That gave us all a good laugh. He then picked up two pieces of firewood and before placing them on the fire, held them out in front of himself horizontally and flapped them like a pair of lips while saying in a squeaky voice, “I am channeling my great grandmama. She says ‘I was always fond of getting me some wood, so it’s fitting that I came back as a log.’” That caused another round of laughs and broke the weird supernatural vibe that was settling over our gathering.
“It doesn’t sound like we are going to solve the mystery of whether or not I saw Rune last night. Either way, he was a good buddy that we all enjoyed hanging with over the years and that we are all going to miss. To Rune.”
“To Rune, may he rest in peace.”
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