Ron Bertasi is a former mountain guide.

The last day I skied with Christian, I knew I would be heading out of the Sierras, and he would be going his separate way. It was, I guess, fitting that it was such a good day. I’d first met him at Acadia National Park, mountain guiding. I was very much the newbie. Even though I definitely had the prerequisite skills, I had not honed them as well as the others. Christian was the first of the other guides to go climbing with me, because we had the same days off that season in Acadia. He sandbagged the hell out of me one day and put me on a route way harder than I thought I was getting into. He knew what he was doing, but we had a great time. We were sitting on top of a cliff overlooking the ocean, eating sandwiches, and I was just like, “I like this guy.” Sure, he was weird and a goofball, but who does that type of work and isn’t?

After that first season, the group of guides, a scrappy bunch who took me in, were like, “Hey, we’re heading out to the West. We’re going to go ski patrol.” That season in Utah, Christian was one of my roommates. He again had the same days off as me and worked on the same side of the mountain. The weekends would come, and we would go skiing wherever we could. They weren’t really weekends. Tuesday and Wednesday were our days off. Everything was empty, so we had a great season, some ferociously fun stuff.

The following year, we came back to Utah to patrol again. Neither of us was really loving it, though. We felt like it maybe wasn’t right for us at the time, and we both should get out of there, go our separate ways. So I quit and he quit, and we were just sitting around with nothing to do except ski. We started this month-long rampage, hitting all these lines, doubling up ice climbing and skiing days, skiing at night. On one of our final days, we went out to ski some chutes, Holy Mole and Holy Toledo, which are two side-by-side routes in the Wasatch. The season had been great so far. We had tons of snow, everything was filled in, so we weren’t worried about rocky conditions.

We go up and we ski Holy Toledo first, which is the more forgiving of the two routes, kind of just a powder fan. Then we go back up the ridge to double up for Holy Mole. There’s a fixed rope there that spans the 50-foot or so cliff band. You can just hand-over-hand it. But at this point in the season, there was so much snow that the rope was mostly buried, and the rocks were mostly buried. So we decided, yeah, let’s just try and not use the rope for fun. 

I go down first, pick my way through it, and step down onto the beginning. You navigate a snaking right, then it enters a little chute. You have two hundred feet of chute, and it opens up into a nice powder fan into a bowl, with no hazards and no rocks present. I managed to get down the chute without falling and without looking completely terrible. So I ski maybe 20 feet below. I have a big DSLR looking back up, shooting photos of Christian as he picks his way down the chute, and then reaches the good snow. I think, “Great, we’re out of the hazard. We’ve got fall zones that are clean.” Avalanche conditions were pretty safe that day. We weren’t worried about anything big. It wasn’t very windy. We had good shelter from the sun in that area. We’re feeling good. 

As soon as Christian gets to the bottom, he catches an edge, or maybe feathers the back of one of his skis wrong, and pops out of both skis. His skis go flying up, and he tumbles down this couloir, maybe 20 feet past me. I’m giving him so much shit. “How did you do the hard part and then fall on the easy part?” His skis are stuck uphill of him, downhill of me, because I’m still up where he’d fallen past me. I grab ‘em, ski down to him, heckling so hard. Then I tuck my camera back in my jacket, zip it up, and we go to ski out the rest of the fan. I start and I also catch an edge, eat shit, face forward, double eject out of my skis. My camera, which is in my jacket as I chestplant, levers, snapping the lens attachment. Such a nice lens, too. I also bruised the hell out of my ribs. 

That ended up being the last day. A year later, he died patrolling in Park City. He was killed when the haul line of his chairlift was knocked off by a storm-collapsed tree. I wound up stepping away from climbing for a bit. I probably could have gone back earlier, but some things came together: I got injured, got a really good job offer while still injured, and felt like I had to take it. Christian died right as I was three-quarters of the way through my recovery. It was like, “I don’t know what I’m going back for, if not him.”

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