Tuckerman Ravine and Toni Matt's Schuss
Near Mount Washington Valley, New Hampshire
Carved into the southeast face of Mount Washington is a great bowl-shaped hollow called Tuckerman Ravine, a glacial cirque that is one of the most legendary places in American skiing. There are no lifts here and never have been. To ski Tuckerman, you climb it, carrying your gear up on your back, and then you drop into a headwall that falls away for roughly a thousand feet at a pitch that turns your stomach.
Every spring, when snow lingers in the ravine long after the valley has gone green, skiers make the pilgrimage. In the nineteen thirties, this bowl hosted a top-to-bottom race down the mountain called the American Inferno. The third and final running, on the sixteenth of April, nineteen thirty-nine, produced one of the most famous runs in ski history.
A young Austrian skier named Toni Matt, facing the near-vertical headwall, had meant to make a few turns first but did not realize he had not yet reached the lip, so he pointed his skis straight down and let them run. He schussed the entire headwall in a single unbroken line, finishing the roughly four-mile course in six minutes and twenty-nine seconds, at an estimated speed of roughly ninety miles per hour, roughly cutting the old record in half. Tuckerman remains a place of genuine danger.
Avalanches are a constant threat, and one struck during that very same nineteen thirty-nine race. This is where American extreme skiing was born.
