Issue link: http://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25123
Carving a tum above a green lake. It began in the fall of 1997, when I went to look at some slides of the Cordillera Blanca that my friend Pat had taken on a climbing expedition that summer. As he flipped through his images and told his stories, the mountains blended together and I nodded dreamy uh-hums. "And here is Artesonraju ... " he said. My jaw dropped. There on the screen was the most beautiful alpine face I had ever seen. A perfect pyramid with a smooth 50 to 60-degree slope coming down the right sky line. "Holy Shit! Pat, has that been skied?" "Nah, man, that is steep!" Now I was on a mission. The seed to descend Artesonraju had been planted. A quick call to adventure photographer and friend Kris Erickson and we were off and planning. We called Ptor, the crazy Canadian who skied the north face of Mt Robson in northern Canada in 1995, knowing that his experience in skiing steeps would be an asset to our expedition. He had also skied above 20,000 feet on Mt Nanga Parbat in Pakistan. Ptor invited his long-time friend Jason Schutz to come aboard. Jason had been on an expedition to Peru three years earlier and was hot to grab the first snowboard descent of Artesonraju. Filling out the roster was John Griber, a seasoned Tetons veteran with expedition experience in Africa and Russia. A week before the expedition we added cinematographer Rob Deslauriers, sound man Freddy Jacobi and local problem solver, Koky Costeneda. Just days before we were to leave, the gear arrived from our sponsors. With a sigh of relief we were off to Peru. AND SO IT BEGAN The morning of May 20, 1998, found us in the heart of industrial Lima, Peru's capital city. After a full day of flying we rested at the recently renovated Cruz del Sur, a modernized bus station complete with an electronic metal gate to keep out