THE NEXT MORNING we headed up the mountain. (We did this twice, actually—once on a Friday, when the ravine is usually less crowded, and again on Saturday, to get the full, festival-like experience.) The 3.1-mile hike from Pinkham Notch to the ravine is an arduous climb in itself. The trail starts gently enough, easing up through the hardwood forest and switchbacking over the swollen Cutler River, but it gets steeper as it ascends. About a mile up, toothpaste-squirts of snow started to appear under my feet. The last third or so was completely paved in snow and ice. You can make it in sneakers (if you don't mind wet feet), but most people prefer sturdy boots, and even nonskiers tend to carry ski poles for leverage and balance.

The trip typically takes two hours. I went up "like a scalded dog," in Dave's words, and made it in half that time. I wasn't showing off. Having taken rueful note of a memorial in the trailside lodge listing the 126 people who have died in the Presidential Range since they started keeping count in the mid-19th century, I was propelled by anxiety. I was also unused to lugging a 30-pound pack, with my skis sticking up like antennas overhead, and was afraid that if I stopped for very long I might never get started again. Even in my haste, though, I was startled by the fierce and dramatic landscape, and I marveled at my fellow hikers. Snaking up the mountainside, we climbed in purposeful procession, like medieval pilgrims on our way to Canterbury or Santiago de Compostela.

I passed a pair of orthopedic surgeons talking about hip replacements—other people's, not their own. I overheard two guys planning to climb Aconcagua, in the Andes, and two others talking about skiing the Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt. I declined a swig offered by a bunch of college kids who were starting in early on the wineskins—"lightening the load," as one of them put it. And I chatted briefly with a Massachusetts schoolteacher and self-proclaimed "medical and biological miracle." At age 44, still recovering from knee surgery and carrying some extra weight, she was determined to make it up in shorts, sweatshirt, and plastic-bagged running shoes. She made it, too. I talked to her again on the way down, and though she had turned her ankle and cut her knee, she whizzed right by me, sliding on one of those little plastic snow seats.

The chamber pot was shrouded in fog when I began to look for it, and then, as the wind blew stronger, it hove into view. A Pampers moment. The ravine is bigger and steeper and more forbidding than even your most careful imagining and model-building will have led you to believe; it's some 800 feet tall, with 45- and 50-degree slopes in places, and stretches roughly half a mile across—a huge hollow gouged into the side of the mountain. The summit, a few hundred feet up to the right, sits amid some snowfields that pour down into the ravine.

I saw some people hauling up inner tubes, and I asked a ranger with the U.S. Forest Service, "Do you really encourage that?"

"We don't encourage anything," he said. "Or discourage it, either." Then he pointed directly overhead, to the left of the ravine, where the slope was even more sheer and more perilous. "Last year a guy went up there with an air mattress," the ranger said. "God must have been watching, because a gust of wind came along and blew it out of his hands. Otherwise that guy would be dead."

In general, the Forest Service and the Appalachian Mountain Club, which runs the base lodge and a shelter farther up, take a fairly hands-off approach to skiing (or sliding) the ravine. On our second day, a volunteer at the bottom of the slopes was gently warning people of falling ice. (Remember our freezer gunk? The big danger in spring is that ice that has formed high up on the headwall comes crashing down in chunks that, as the locals take great delight in pointing out, are often as big as cars. I didn't see any sedans, or even any compacts as it happens, but I did spot some tumbling chunks the size of home entertainment centers.) Even in spring, avalanche is a real and ever-present danger in the ravine, and every now and then somebody dies in one.

Climbing the ravine is a chastening experience. The surface is mushy in places, icy and unyielding in others, and higher up there are rock chutes and faces protruding through the snowpack. Step by step, you've got to get yourself up there and then figure out a line coming down. I saw one guy with a pair of kitchen knives duct-taped to his mittens; he was pulling himself up hand over hand. For much of the way, the ravine is probably no steeper than your average double-diamond slope, but it feels steeper because you are doing the work, not the chairlift, and the slope is at times literally in your face, your ski tips digging into the snow overhead.

On my first trip up I was not encouraged by the sight of a solitary ski descending on its own. A little while later a snowboarder came flying down and wiped out in spectacular rag-doll fashion. At the bottom he jumped up and raised both arms to acknowledge the cheers coming from the lunch rocks; only after a minute did he seem to notice that his right hand was hanging from his wrist at a completely unnatural angle. Most serious falls at the ravine are caused by overaggressiveness; in places the terrain is wide enough that, if you're so inclined, you can traverse in gentle swooping arcs. One guy made it down, for example, with only two turns—one less, as Gus pointed out, than even Toni Matt, though Matt's weren't half a mile apart.

The hardest thing is finding a place flat enough to let you put on your skis, and after that the secret is to take a deep breath and not think too much. If you really contemplate what you're about to do, you can hang up there for hours. You make a turn—and wish that you had practiced a little more during the winter. You make another—so far, so good. And another, and before you know it your held-in breath comes whooshing out. You're going to live after all!

How high did I go? Well, not as high as Gus, but then he was so bushed from his ascent that he called it quits after a single run. "That's it," he said. "You don't come here to get a lot of skiing in." And I certainly didn't go as high as Adam, George, Jeff, and Mike, superb skiers all, who went up so far it hurt my neck to look at them and then came down through chutes requiring heart-stoppingly narrow turns. But on three runs I went high enough to get the pump racing, the palms sweating, and the nerves jumping; high enough that when I fell once, I had a nice long time to savor my missile-like descent (and to appreciate those woolen ski clothes my mother and father wore, which gave the snow something to grab onto); high enough that when I got to the bottom I felt great. I wasn't out of my mind, exactly, but I was still a little bit out of my body, and I had that dumb but profound thought you have at moments like this—that just to be alive is indescribably sweet. I wasn't all that unhappy at how I had skied, but I was already thinking about how much better I could do, and before I knew it I was making plans with myself to come back next year. I also found myself wishing something I hadn't wished in years. I wanted to call my parents and tell them where I was and what I had done.