Choc Therapy
Life and Death on Quebec's Gaspe Peninsula
By ADAM HOWARD

He was dead and there was nothing we could do about it. But after nearly 30 minutes of CPR, Tim gave another in a relentless series of chest compressions and looked at his watch. I listened intently now to the dark silhouettes murmuring in French behind us, and gave five more myself. I breathed into the cold mouth. Then in broken English I heard the word defibrillator. Perfect, I thought. Perhaps they keep it in the woodshed.

I gave another breath. "Defibrillator?" I blurted to the bearded man now kneeling across from me. "Not in Quebec." He nearly laughed. Another breath. I knew. Not in Quebec, not in Gaspe, and certainly not here at Lac Thibault, a full days' ski into the Chic-Choc range.

We shouldn't even be here. The thought shuddered through my mind in the sleepless hours that followed. We'd finally given up on the old man—Jim was his name—after nearly an hour of pumps and blows, pronouncing him dead to his shocked widow at just after 1 a.m. But our own shock was tendered by the strange feeling of fate that brought us to Jim's party and Lac Thibault in the first place. It was only the first day of our week-long excursion, and bleary-eyed we now wondered if fate would also deliver us unharmed from the soul of this remote mountain range.


The Gaspe Peninsula's Chic-Choc Mountains have been inaccurately compared to New Hampshire's famous Tuckerman’s Ravine. While there are Tuckerman-like bowls here, the mountains are unlike any in the world. Squat with plateau-like summits, they appear like amoebas on contour maps, bowl after bowl linked by a common summit stretching for hundreds of acres. The range rivals the size of New York's Adirondacks.

The Parc de la Gaspesie is well known among the eastern backcountry corps for its vast array of hotel- and cabin-based one-day excursions on Mt. Albert in the heart of the provincial park. But our trip and midnight cardiac arrest took place in the remote western end of the range, nearly at the park's boundary.

Our plan was to sprint 24 miles in the first day on nordic gear from Saint-Octave-de-L'Avenir, west of the 500-square-mile park, to the summit of Mt. Logan on the edge of the Chic-Chocs. Then we'd spend five nights in the summit cabin, skiing the rowdy trees, chutes, and bowls by day. June, our interpreter and Montreal-born pinner, had arranged for our alpine/tele gear and camping supplies to be shuttled via an old Ski-Doo to Mt. Logan, thus significantly lightening our load and enabling the one-day dash.

That was before our sled driver bailed at the last minute, declaring his season over, verbal agreement be damned. We figured he just didn't like Americans, or perhaps all Anglophones.

This kicked off a two-hour massive scramble to pare down gear into two manageable haul-sleds and four backpacks. I attacked my first aid pack. "You bringing your mask?" I asked Tim, a fellow pro patroller at Smugglers Notch in northern Vermont. "You're not going to need a mask," he barked. He needed room for the Grand Marnier. I tossed the mask aside.

To pull the heavy sleds we'd have to skin full time, and since we didn't have skins for our nordic setups this left one option: switching to our heavier gear. For me, it was Alpine Trekkers and heavy alpine skis. For Teo, alpine boots and snowshoes. Tim chose randonnée, and June, teles.

We'd also be much slower now, so we opted to split the 24 miles into two days. The first would be short and steep: a seven-mile pull to Lac Thibault, where we'd poach one of the hut-to-hut cabins. The second: a brutal 17-mile pull to Logan's 4,000-foot summit. We figured it'd be an uneventful stop for the night. No one planned on American Jim dying.


Despite a healthy serving of vodka and Tang for breakfast, the taste of death was still in my mouth. Our first hours of skinning from Lac Thibault were quiet ones.

It was the first time I had performed CPR on anything other than a plastic dummy. I tried not to think of the event or evaluate my first-aid performance. But that taste, coupled with no sleep, turned a sunny Chic-Choc morning into a walk through a mental and physical hell. We trudged wearily toward the summit of Mt. Logan some 15 miles away.

Nearly every hour we'd encounter a message etched in the snow with ski poles. "10k left 3:20," said the latest. Tim and June got an hour head start on Teo and me, hoping to rendezvous with the flaky Ski-Doo driver. Several of the French nordic skiers confirmed he was still working in the park. Now he'd have to shuttle out a frozen body.

Teo called back to me, interrupting the monotony, "What happened back there?" I had no answer. The methodical whoomping of our skins through six inches of Quebec's finest filled the void.

"What religion do you think he was?" continued Teo.

"His wife had mentioned he was a poet who wrote about the Norwegian ski god, Ullr."

"I wonder if he's making turns with them somewhere..." I tried to smile at Teo's suggestion. Slowly we moved from alpine meadow to meadow, skinning through fresh caribou tracks and patchy spruce grooves. A previous thaw uncovered parts of a nearby river, revealing a 15-foot snowpack. Now, though, it was full-on winter. The hard wind loosened fresh snow from the conifers and swirled it at our feet. The snow didn't care about our torment. The St. Lawrence breeze in our face was steady and cunning.


"This is why the heli-skiing operation went under up here," said Tim, a forty-something patroller from Vermont and veteran Chocs skier, after we woke to a total whiteout on top of Logan the following morning. "They couldn't get the birds off the ground in these conditions."

When the white refused to lift, we ventured into it. After cutting contours for ten minutes, we broke through the cover of icy mist and squinted at our objective—a giant north-facing bowl we traversed a day earlier en route to the summit. "Check out that action," said Teo pointing east. A straight, rock-lined chute, steep and easily 1,000 vertical and probably three ski lengths wide, appeared only a quarter mile away across the bowl.

To get there we'd have to traverse up and around the bowl, or descend the east-facing slope below us and bootpack up the other side. We choose the latter and made turns through nicely buffed wind slab. The gentle first pitch proved stable, but we then noticed surrounding aspects were loaded on top and wind-scoured beneath, with jagged fracture lines perhaps a week old.

Still jittery from the experience at Lac Thibault, we now skied with serious apprehension. Yet something in the next series of turns released me. Bits of wind-slab busted into the air, eaten by the wind. Tight, eastern platform turns became bigger mountain turns in the absence of trees. The open, 800-foot slope delivered a buzz not often experienced in eastern skiing–the buzz of not having to nail each turn for fear of tree impact. The sheer soul of each turn lifted me out of two days of mental and physical misery.

At bottom, the wind was nearly unbearable. During a brief powwow we agreed that the spied chute was farther away than first estimated. It would take an entire day to get there and back. Truth is, we were accustomed to our New England woodscape; the Chocs deceived us by their sheer magnitude.


The sun melted red into the mighty St. Lawrence that evening, and the wind painted Logan's summit with brilliant cloud-strokes of orange and purple. Perhaps this moving spectacle was the reincarnation of American Jim, or the collective soul of all dead skiers. Signs pointed to clearer weather. Maybe we'd finally get a shot at the couloir that had eluded us for the past two days.

But again we woke to the eerie white, and it was bittersweet. Nearly a foot of light, dry snow had dropped overnight. And the steady St. Lawrence sidewind was tossing the new fluff over the summit and into the bowls on its southeastern side.

Reluctantly, we left the chute behind. Instead we set out over the summit and followed the wind and blowing snow to find more than a foot in the southeastern bowl. After careful snowpack analysis I dropped in first. At the bottom I turned to watch the other three float down to occasional face shots. Teo arrived last. He skied up to us grinning ear to ear and declared, "This is my religion!"

I spoke these words to myself. Questioning Jim's death became arbitrary. The truth was skiing. Jim risked his life to ski. I spent the entire trip searching for meaning in his passing–in the wind, the snow, the sun. Each was beautiful, but no more or no less beautiful than before or after the tragedy.

If death sparks a search for answers, then skiing embodies the search for life. Somewhere near the root of these questions is a hill forever linked with powder turns in the Gaspe.


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Adam Howard is the editor of Backcountry magazine.