EDWARD TUCKERMAN never skied the ravine that bears his name. He was never there in the winter. He was a botany professor at Amherst College, and in the late 1830s, along with a few other intrepid botanists, he began trekking to the White Mountains in the spring and summer in search of lichens. In the vast semicircular glacial area just below the summit of Mount Washington he discovered some prime habitat: The weather was so severe, the winds so fierce, the snowpack so deep for much of the year, that lichens were about the only thing that grew there.

The crowds didn't show up until the next century, after the arrival of the Atlantic and Saint Lawrence railroad had made New Hampshire's Presidential Range a popular tourist destination. The ravine soon became a favorite and picturesque spot for adventurous campers and climbers, but the first skier didn't appear until April 1914. He was John Apperson, a famous Adirondack explorer from Schenectady, New York, and it's doubtful that he knew how to make a downhill turn. Nobody in America did back then. The way you made a descent was by picking up speed until you fell down; then you brushed yourself off and repeated the process.

In the 1920s, after the highway department began wintertime plowing of the road from Jackson, New Hampshire, to Pinkham Notch, at the base of Mount Washington, skiers found it easier to get to the ravine and more of them began turning up. The pioneers were Joe Dodge, the legendary huts manager for the Appalachian Mountain Club, and, a few years later, the early members of the Dartmouth Outing Club, those hardy and intrepid young men, bright-eyed, square-jawed, who did so much to further skiing as a sport in this country. In 1931, two Dartmouth skiers, John Carleton and Charley Proctor (who had skied in the 1924 and 1928 Winter Olympics, respectively), were the first to go over the ravine's headwall. To understand what this means, let's go back to our model. Before Carleton and Proctor, skiers had stopped well short of the chamber pot's steep-sided rim. Carleton and Proctor climbed up and over this rim—or the headwall, as it's called, a 45-degree slope—and then skied all the way back down, which is considerably harder and a great deal scarier. When you come over the lip, the snow seems to fall away beneath your feet and all you see is sky.

In 1933, Carleton also skied in the first of the three American Infernos—races, modeled on a famous Swiss competition, that went from the summit of Mount Washington, over the headwall and through the ravine, and then down a newly created fire trail to just above Pinkham Notch, a distance of almost four miles. The third and most famous Inferno took place in April 1939. Forty-two skiers competed, but the one people still remember was Toni Matt, a 19-year-old Austrian. Matt, who had been to the ravine only once before, planned to make three turns as he came through the steepest part of the bowl and then to straighten out for the run down to Pinkham. But he made his three turns on the snowfields above the headwall and was already bombing over the lip when he realized his mistake. He schussed the whole thing, reaching a speed of 85 miles per hour. Afterward, all Matt said was that he was lucky to be 19 and stupid, and to have strong legs.