McLEAN'S LOVE FOR SKIING was born out of his mother's efforts to give her rambunctious kids a winter outlet for their energy. "We had no money, and I didn't know what to do with a five-year-old and a seven-year-old," Duse McLean told me from her home in Bellevue, Washington. "Then I found out that if I taught skiing at Madonna Mountain"—now Smugglers' Notch Resort, near Stowe, Vermont—"the whole family could ski for free."

When five-year-old Andrew strapped on skis for the first time, he begged his parents to let him go up the rope tow alone. His dad, Pete, said no, pointing out that he didn't know how to turn yet.

"I can so turn!" Andrew said. He promptly herringboned up a nearby slope and came down, making a nice-looking turn on the way. Triumphant, he marched over to the buzzing rope and held on. He was so light that it lifted him off the ground.

Shortly after his family moved to Seattle, in 1972, 11-year-old Andrew discovered the thrill of the steeps at Alpental, an icy, notoriously challenging ski area about an hour east of the city. There he learned to handle the terrain by shadowing Butch White, a free-spirited ski racer, down a double-black-diamond run called International.

Off the slopes, McLean tinkered with skateboards, go-carts, and a scrap-heap MG. But design always came second to a hoped-for career as a ski racer. After high school, McLean chased his dream at the now defunct Mission Ridge Ski Academy, on the east slopes of the Cascades, near Wenatchee, Washington. A year later, he realized he had neither the heft nor the results to make it onto the World Cup circuit. Shut out of conventional racing, McLean applied to and was accepted at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence.

McLean went to RISD to develop his design portfolio but ended up nurturing a talent for finding trouble. He and his roommate often went climbing at night, defying Rhode Island's flatness by climbing bridges and churches. "Gothic churches were the best," McLean recalls. "All that ornate stonework. Great for fingerholds." One night they scaled the side of the RISD Museum, triggered the alarm, and climbed down into the arms of two cops. McLean says his shenanigans prompted RISD's then president, Thomas F. Schutte, to call him in for a dress-down just before McLean left for a semester in Rome.

"This trip is conditional, Andrew," McLean recalls Schutte telling him. "You will not be climbing the walls of the Vatican." After graduating, in 1985, McLean worked a few rent-paying jobs while perfecting a device called the Talon in his parents' garage. A three-pronged hook that looks something like a metal starfish and that's used by big-wall climbers to hook onto small edges, the Talon performed so well that McLean sent it to JohnBercaw, then the design manager at Black Diamond Equipment. About three weeks later, McLean's phone rang; Bercaw offered him a job.

In the outdoor industry, working at Black Diamond in the nineties was like working at Apple in the early eighties—it was a place bursting with creativity, passion, and talent. The company emerged from the implosion of Chouinard Equipment, the gear outfit that legendary climber Yvon Chouinard founded prior to his creation of the more apparel-focused Patagonia. In 1989, Chouinard Equipment general manager Peter Metcalf led an employee buyout of the assets, then created Black Diamond, moving the operation from Ventura, California, to Salt Lake City.

Metcalf wanted passion to drive innovation and soon convinced some of the world's top adventurers to come work for him. The staff included Alaska mountaineering greats Jack Tackle and Scott Backes, Yosemite pioneer Maria Cranor, and ace whitewater paddler Jordy Margid. Speed climber and ice expert Doug Heinrich ran the retail store at BD headquarters; his assistant manager was a young alpinist named Conrad Anker. All-around mountain fiend Alex Lowe was the company's quality-assurance manager.

The Black Diamond directive was simple: Its employees were expected to climb or ski into situations so sketchy that they were forced to think, Damn! I wish I had a tool for this. Then they were were supposed to invent it.

Nobody personified the place's mystique more than Alex Lowe, McLean's best friend and mentor. A dervish of energy and athletic ability, Lowe encouraged McLean to abandon the in-bounds resort steeps for the earn-your-turns adventure of the backcountry. During their first winter in the Wasatch, in 1992, McLean followed Lowe on a five-hour trek to the top of Lisa Falls Couloir, a challenging chute in Little Cottonwood Canyon, the ten-mile east–west notch that connects Salt Lake City to the Alta and Snowbird ski resorts.

McLean struggled to keep up and wondered why anyone would forfeit a day of lift-assisted nonstops for this. Once he reached the summit, though, the splendor of the scene shook him to his core. Under a bluebird sky, he stood staring at 5,000 vertical feet of untracked powder, which disappeared down a steep-walled couloir that hadn't been touched all winter.

"Follow me," Lowe said. McLean watched him float through waist-deep snow so light it filled in behind like fog.

"That," McLean recalls, "was when I realized the potential of backcountry skiing."