MY MOTHER SKIED the ravine in the early forties—or at least she said she did. She claimed to have done it on the Fourth of July, which, though technically possible, is a little bit of a stretch. Without a doubt, though, both my parents were enthusiastic members of the pioneering generation of New England skiers. Her letters to my father during the war, when she was working in Boston and he was in Hawaii with the Navy, drove him crazy. They were full of accounts of winter Sundays at a nearby country club that had just installed a rope tow and, even more maddening, of weekend ski trips to New Hampshire. My mother and her friends would take the train from Boston after work on Friday, and before mid-night they'd be in Franconia or Jackson. Logging trucks would meet them at the station and drive them to local inns that had been turned into dormitories. They'd ski all day Saturday, squeeze in a run the next morning, and then take the train back through the Sunday twilight. Somebody might break out a "jug," and there would be jitterbugging in the aisles. When the war was over and my parents finally married, they spent their honeymoon skiing in North Conway and brought back a little booklet of snapshots, which years later I used to pore over. They looked young and glamorous, like John Payne and Sonja Henie in Sun Valley Serenade.

And then they never skied again. Kids, illness, money problems. But their stuff lingered in the basement and cast a kind of spell—the bamboo poles with leather-wrapped handles, the long, heavy wooden skis with spring bindings, the boxy, square-toed leather boots with a groove around the backs of the wooden heels. When I was growing up outside Boston, I used to wear these boots—first my mother's and then, as my feet grew, my father's—to school on snowy days.

But I didn't seriously take up skiing until I was a grown-up, with kids of my own, and by then it was too late for me ever to become really good at the extreme stuff. After helicopter-skiing in Idaho a couple of years ago, I decided that I no longer had anything to prove—to myself or anyone else—and I resigned myself to a sensible life of happily cruising the blues. But for some reason, the idea of the ravine would never go away, and after having heard about it all through college and from friends in the seventies and eighties, I began to think about skiing it myself. I put it off two years in a row—because it would take too much time away from golf, or so I said—and then last spring I finally took the plunge.