MY COLD-WEATHER friend Dave Marsh was my guide and companion. I e-mailed him beforehand and asked what I needed to bring. He e-mailed back one word: "Pampers." It's also customary for Dave to bring along a special kind of trail sausage that his friends call (for obvious reasons) "the horse wang." Every winter for the past 20 years, Dave, a former coach and now a school administrator, and I have skied and hiked and played countless hours of pond hockey together. Sometimes he doesn't even call; he simply shows up at my house when the mercury plummets and in his booming voice yells for me to get a move on.

It was early spring when we left my house in Allendale, New Jersey. In northern New Hampshire it was still the back end of winter. The deciduous trees were just barely in bud; the aspens were as bare as whisk brooms. The mountains, now coming into view around every bend, looked gray and flinty.

The gloom lifted later that evening at the Red Parka, a local pub in Glen, where we hooked up with the rest of our party: Adam and George, Dave's two sons; Dave's old friend Gus, a Hanover, New Hampshire, native who has been skiing the ravine since he was a teenager; and Gus's son, Jeff, and his friend Mike. We enacted a ritual that was no doubt taking place in other roadhouses and in campsites and motel rooms for miles around. Dozens of Long Trail beers (the vin du pays) were drunk, old times remembered, and various Tuckerman horror stories retold. We heard about the guy who was propelled from the lunch rocks a hundred feet in the air by a cannonball of ice (miraculously, he survived), and about the girl who missed a turn up top, slipped through a crevasse carved by a waterfall, and was never seen again. Toni Matt was invoked more than once. Gus recalled a Harvard-Dartmouth race in 1947, when, still a high-school student, he went down as a forerunner and, turning around at the bottom, saw the entire course get wiped out by an avalanche.