These articles were written by Kristen and published in international and national magazines, where they were subjected to an editors eye. Here we find them in their raw form.

I Hate Couloirs —Kristen Ulmer for SKIING Magazine

In May of 2001, my life changed forever.

At this point, I’d been a professional skier for over ten years- been called by the American magazines the best all around female skier in the world for that entire time. Sponsors called often to offer contracts, I was in every ski magazine in North America every month, I had skied in two dozen hard core ski movies- life was fantasyland.

And yet another fantasy trip was in the making. Skiing magazine was sending me to the town of Chamonix, France to write a feature article about skiing the vertical chutes of snow between rock cliffs, otherwise known as “couloirs.”

Of course this wasn’t my first time in Chamonix. Known as the ‘death sport capital of the world,’ it was without question the place all big mountain “extreme” athletes wanted to live or at least visit as often as possible. The absurdly steep, black and blue ice-covered, crevassed, real ski descents found in Chamonix made otherwise famous ‘extreme’ runs in the North American resorts look like puny, kindergarten playgrounds.

Of course, the danger was the draw. The size of Aspen, Chamonix is where between 40-60 people die every year doing their favorite activity. Skiers and snowboarders are taken out by avalanches and pitched off thousand foot cliffs. Hikers are flattened by house sized, toppling ice chunks. Paraglide pilots tangle like tether balls around power lines. Climbers bull winkle 3000 feet down whole mountainsides, as their sharp, metal ice axes swing from wrist leashes round and round.

At Skiing’s request, my partners were to be Stephan ‘Fan Fan’ Deng and Francine Moreillon, the ski stunt talent from the recent James Bond movie ‘The World Is Not Enough.’ The two were well cast; Fan Fan was perhaps the most radically charged guide in Chamonix, with a deeply tanned face, 15-plus years of guiding experience and a love of sketchy ski descents. Francine, in her early 30’s, Swiss, usually died her hair purple or blue and was possessed by demons, as I once was, to make a name for herself as a radical do-anything skier. Skiing Magazine was gonna get one hell of a story- certainly we were gonna out-Bond Bond… this wasn’t make believe, baby.

I arrived the end of April, when couloir skiing season was the most safe- because the wetter, more predictable snow pack had less chance of avalanching. This was the time of year when the “extreme” crowd could really tick off descents like Les Courtes or Les Drue.

The bad news was- it had dumped 4 feet of snow the day I arrived, and all those wonderful couloirs that littered Chamonix like flowing white veils were too dangerous to ski. A meter fresh with springtime heat coming? The second the sun hit and melted the bonds between snow crystals- big, baking avalanches were going to rip those mountains apart. So I sighed and settled in for a second-rate life of international dinner partying and cheap red wine instead.

Two days later I was awakened at 8 a.m. by a very irate Francine, throwing gravel at the window of my friend's house where I happen to be sleeping. “Where ‘ave you been, I t’aught you were staying at Gar-ee’s. Today is the only day Fan Fan is available and the sun’s hout. Grab your gear and bring a ‘arness, we are going to ski a cool war!”

Apparently, Fan Fan, overwhelmed by guiding jobs, was on a tight schedule. Francine, too, was anxious to do our project and make it home to Switzerland for the summer. I packed quickly and grabbed a single powerbar.

Francine drove me, still yawning but very excited, to the base of the Aiguille Du Midi tram to meet with Fan Fan. We also met up with Nicolas Mermoud, a designer for Dynastar, who skis like a highly caffeinated downhill racer. The four of us boarded the bottom tram, and less than 10 minutes later, at the base of the second tram, Fan Fan pointed to a line under the second tram called the Face Nord du Col du Plan- the far skiers right side of the North Face of the Aiguille Du Midi. This was our “cool war.”

Located on the Mount Blanc Massif but not on the mountain itself, the fifth-mile long North Face houses the scariest, most exposed extreme descents in Chamonix. However, rarely skied in years past, because several lines are easily accessed off the two connecting trams, and because of the hearty and growing French habit of taking huge risks, the face now gets skied as many as dozens of times per year- but only in good conditions and never in a casual manner.
Oh my sweet mother, I didn’t know whether to scream or whimper. Was our chosen line even ski-able? The top face was about 50 degrees steep with ice runnels that eventually waterfalled over into a 1500 foot sheer ice cliff. We would have to exit above the ice cliff to the skiers right then rapell 300 feet into the bottom couloir which looked so skinny it barely existed. I estimated the couloir was about a ski length wide, stupidly steep, even more so than the top, and looked to be about 1200 vertical feet long. Francine mumbled something about feeling like she could throw up.

No doubt, if we pulled off The Col du Plan, it would be one of the most memorable descents of my life. “You fall you die” was a way to describe this line, because to fall at any time meant certain death. On such a steep slope, sometimes you have a split second chance to get back on your feet, but after that you accelerate like a squid on a vertical pane of glass. I’d skied ‘you fall you die’ lines hundreds of times- they were like crack to me. But his one was on such a bigger scale my mind was screaming.

With the familiar hum of fear vibrating inside my body like a tuning fork, we rode the next tram to the top, hiked down holding fixed ropes, then traversed a mere 15 minutes to the opening rock slot leading to our route. Fan Fan had skied this line twice before and seemed nonchalant, so I pretended to match his confidence. He was a hero in Chamonix, and I trusted him as if he were James Bond himself.
The sheer slope below was covered with that meter-deep of fresh powder and looked like the absolute edge of the earth. Fan Fan rappelled several times over the rim to check conditions. Each time, however, he climbed back up shaking his head with worry.

I know it appears more rational to turn away when conditions seem unclear, and of course part of me hoped we’d just ski down the mellow Valley Blanc instead. But I was also wildly excited about skiing the face. My God, if we pulled this off, like we’ve pulled off years of descents in even scarier conditions before, the dripping euphoria and intense personal satisfaction afterwards would be magical. A couple of hours of heart in the throat, nail biting, then I could step back on the plane without skiing another run, and still feel the entire trip was worth it. “It doesn’t have to be fun, to be fun” climber and Chamonix local Marc Twight once said.

I knew the others wanted that buzz too, plus we had the added pressure to get the article done. So after 2 hours of wavering, wondering if we were about to make the best decision of our lives or the worst, we finally cranked our bindings 3 full clicks higher (to lose a ski while turning would have meant certain death) and put on our packs. Fan Fan always took pride in knowing, that should he ever be on the fence about something, he’d back out. But this day he was with friends and was probably thinking differently. Taking risks in the mountains, after all, is what our group does for a living.

The entrance started with a sudden 50-degree drop onto a bowl of powder that had no bottom. If it slid, we’d cartwheel down thousands of feet before flying off the icy edge.

Fan Fan hopped and free-fell the first five turns then hid below a rock. As Francine was about to go next, the boom of a nearby avalanche made her pause. In Chamonix, we always hear these booms, but this one was particularly ominous because not only were we starting our commitment over the edge, but we could see the avalanche clearly. To our far right a house-sized block of snow waterfalled magnificently over several cliffs. “Oh my Gud” she said in her Swiss accent, and looked at me with alarm.
The slide had been triggered by the sun moving onto a distant face. By contrast, the exposed face below us was in deep shade, and despite the constant, heavy fear that its thick layer of fresh snow would slide, we knew the skiing would be great.

In Alaska, skiing 50+ degree powder is stress-free thanks to the stability of consistent, wet, well-bonded maritime snowpack, and it’s possible even , if you’re really good, to make huge, carefree, sweeping turns. But in Europe, with its blue ice and roller-ball, hair-trigger snowpack, the experience can be sickening. We picked our way down with wide eyes, but we also got powder face shots (a first for me on steep Chamonix faces- usually the steepness sloughs off snow naturally) and skied amongst the most spectacular sprawl of brilliant blue ice and deep crevasses I’ve ever seen.

The 300-foot ice cliff into the couloir required 2 separate rappels, which went slower than normal. I was surprised to learn Nicholas and Francine had never rapped before and needed help threading in. Looking sideways at them, it occurred to me that as much as I hummed with adrenaline, they might be humming twice as loudly. The pitches were full rope lengths (150-feet) each, very exposed and at times overhanging. Each anchor took half an hour to create as Fan Fan chipped away the ice and carefully jammed corn-sized, metal nuts into the cracks found in the rocks underneath. We trusted out lives to these nuts. In between the two pitches there was only a 2-inch ledge of ice for all of us to stand and wait to rappel again. We wore no crampons on our boots, so our calves strained in our ski boots.

We rappelled into the couloir from the skiers left side and couldn’t see what it looked like until the last ten feet. This particular couloir was a couloir for good reason. Above were unseen vast faces so steep they naturally slough their snowpack without any trigger, and the avalanches have funneled down for centuries until this deep, tight slot between the rocks has been created; our chosen ski line.

It was ridiculous- 60 degrees steep, about a ski and half length wide petering down to a meter across half way down, with an icy camel hump splitting the center in half. To ‘ski’ the thing would mean frequent side slipping with our tips and tails scraping rock. The glacier and the end of the line was indeed 1200 feet below.

But we were going nowhere. Far above us, as the day wore on, the sun had wrapped slowly across the upper face warming the dense, new snow and making it unstable. Each newly heated spot would then slough naturally, and like a rolling snowball gather more and more snow volume and momentum as it fell, until by the time the avalanches got to our level they were enormous and alarmingly fast. The scale of the North Face is huge, and with four feet fresh to work with, this funneling slot was in for some serious action.

To our right were more frequent and closer booms, and I could tell we needed to hurry. Turns out though, we were already to late. I was the last to rappel in when the first avalanche came streaming down our slot.

It wasn’t particularly large, perhaps 5 feet deep, but it was moving fast as a bullet just 4 feet to our right, The noise left a ringing in my ears. We all knew more were coming, so we stayed put, still attached in a chain to the rope on the steep, icy 65-degree steep side-wall, and helped each other put our skis on. Nicolas clung directly below me face-level with my skis, then stood Francine, then Fan Fan, all in a line. Sixty five degrees is steep enough our shoulders were touching the slope as we stood upright.

The avalanches flew by every about every five minutes. They were close, and at first we found them merely exciting to watch. Then they grew bigger, throwing hurricane wind blasts which coated us with fine snow crystals. We started to get scared. Then they grew even bigger still, and clumps began to smack our faces. Within an hour, they were 50-feet high, 200 mph freight trains  landing directly on the back of our necks.

Why did we survive? Above our huddle was a 5-foot-high rock buttress. Because the side-wall where we stood and the cliffs above were so steep, the buttress didn’t offer much protection- but it did toss the avalanches slightly higher so they didn’t hit us face first, but instead deflected off our backs and continued their trajectory down the mountain. Our job every five minutes was to take a deep breath, press our faces flat on the slope, and hope for the best. We remained tied loosely to the rope, but with relentless tons of wet snow in free fall, the protection was no more secure than a piece of string holding a bull.

Our trauma wasn’t so simple as the fear of dying, we just couldn’t comprehend the reality of what was hitting us. To watch 5-story walls of snow roaring toward us at 150 plus miles per hour and have no where to run, and have them pound on our backs, felt kind of like being the guy in A Clockwork Orange; tied to a chair with his eyes held open with wires, and a man coming toward him with a pair of pliers intending to rip his eyeballs out. But, strangely, the slides were also beautiful, like dancing angles with violent puffs of white exploding off rocks left and right and vacuuming down at us with tremendous anger like tidal waves.

I didn’t know what to think. The stimulation made me shut down completely. I fell into a fascinated trance and couldn’t say a word for hours. It was just too much to understand.

The others kept talking excitedly in French. At one point Fan Fan exclaimed we should quickly take our skis off and try to climb higher and closer to our buttress. Francine screamed “Move! Move!” at me, but the slope was too steep and icy to take a step in any direction, certainly without crampons. As it was, I could barely stand with my skis on and once I took them off, I had only inch deep chips in the white ice to stand on. It was safer to hold the skis at our chests than to face the possibility of them pulling us off if the snow hit wrong.
My calves hurt more and more as the hours passed. The only thing we could do was strain our necks and look to the sky, eyes darting back and forth like schizophrenics, hearts pounding and every muscle tense with anticipation. Where was it, where was the next one?

My goggles were so wet, fogged and packed with snow from the slides, I had them pushed onto the top of my helmet so I could see. When each slide came, I’d quickly push them back over my eyes, then hug closer to my skis and lay flat until the violent pounding on my back stopped and I could look up again. I had an ice axe in my pack, but couldn’t risk the time to get it. If any of us had looked up or had stray parts hanging when the snow hit, our backs would have snapped backwards, the rope would have broken like a hair, and all four of us tied together would have hurled into the walls at 150 mph and down the couloir. I kept squeezing my eyes shut bracing for that to happen.
After each slide, I’d quickly pull up my drenched goggles and look below. Everyone was covered with snow, looking like lumps. Then they’d shake up and the snow would fall away down the couloir. Fan Fan, periodically, would then light a cigarette and suck on it for a few seconds before it was extinguished by the next avalanche. Once in a while I’d see a pained look play across his face, like that of a crying child. Inevitably, too, after each slide they’d all resume their high pitched, panicked French banter. My French was no good. A minute later I’d always turn my face back to the sky in search for the next one. I never said a word. 

The slides were bigger each time but strangely, I always felt we would survive, as we had continued to survive each round of increasing intensity. I was aware though, what we were experiencing was only a fraction of what that face was capable.

But then, the Big One came.

Francine screamed quickly in French: “This is the ONE!” as it hit with an unexpected fire-ball burst. I didn’t have time to put my goggles down. In all my life I have never imagined anything so loud, violent, fast, or crushing. I sucked a quick breath and lay flat for 20 seconds, waiting for the beating to end, then slowly pulled by neck bac and shook away the snow caked around me. Emotionally, I’d hit a wall. I couldn’t breathe because my throat had closed from fear. All I could do was suck quick, scared breaths in, like a drowning fish. This wasn’t fascinating anymore. This was shocking. I stared in disbelief at my soaking wet hands and nodded my head back and forth; NO. I didn’t look down anymore because I didn’t want to see my partners' eyes. How on earth could we have survived that? It was 7 stories high.

A helicopter came. The mid-station tram operator had called it in to retrieve the bodies. Amazed to find us alive, Fan Fan showed them a thumbs down- meaning we needed a rescue. They flew away to gather supplies and, returning 10 minutes later, they lowered a skinny man in long underwear 170 feet down into the couloir on a metal cable the girth of a dress shoelace. He went to me first, and upon discovering I was wearing a harness hand made to be light weight for ski touring (the straps were no bigger than another shoe lace), looked at me with alarm. I gave him the thumbs up, and said “no problem” with confidence, even though I felt none. He attached the two shoelaces together with a carabineer, the helicopter pilot high above us twitching all the while to leave in case another slide came, and I was plucked straight up and out of the “cool war” like a bad kitty.

With me swinging 170 feet below, the pilot moved quickly away from the face. The rush of air was a shock and my mind panicked looking at what little metal and fabric prevented me from falling into the cliffs and ice below. Then slowly I was reeled in, spinning in circles, and I stopped thinking long enough to watch the stunning blue and white scenery flash in circles around me.

One by one they brought us down to the glacier below and eventually flew us all back to Chamonix, where the grass was green, and cigarette smoke mixed with the damp smells of spring and the wave of spilled helicopter fuel.
We never talked about what happened after getting back to Chamonix. We all sat in a bar for an hour afterwards, talking in spurts to a photographer friend, but then quickly shut up. Fan Fan disappeared from the bar first and hasn’t returned my phone calls since. Francine and Nicolas prefer not to talk about it, as if it never happened at all, although Nicolas did finally tell me two years later he has been euphoric about life ever since. But, the experience remains difficult to internalize or certainly to explain for all of us, and we prefer not to talk of it probably because we don’t know what to say.

I did ask the photographer that day, if had he known the outcome in advance, whether he would have wanted to join us through the experience. And, he replied without hesitation:  “Yes.” And I understood completely.

I understood completely because while on that face, while staring into the sky for three hours looking at each new tidal wave, I was smiling. Not just any kind of smile either, but one of those big heart, , euphoric smiles- the kind you see on a person who is having the time of her life.

Chamonix… was my crack pipe bottom.