Briggs in Five- PART FIVE
Posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008
For the past week, The Mountain Culture, has profiled skier and mountaineer, Bill Briggs, a legend by any standard for his contribution to the evolution of American steep skiing. Writer Jeff Burke took a closer look at the first man to ski the Grand Teton, and the life he has spent on and off the mountains.
FIVE: the Legacy
Galvanized by a new confidence, Briggs began handpicking the high Teton peaks for ski descents. The idea and aesthetic was to bring the margin of error down close and play inside, shouldering up to the edge all the while. He took this risk management with him to ski some of the most striking and challenging peaks in the Tetons, including Mount Moran’s Skillet Glacier, the Northeast Snowfields of Mount Owen, and of course, the Grand Teton.
What is so significant about Briggs’ descents is that he not only overcame a severe impairment through a demonstration of exceptional athleticism, but that he calculated the descents rationally and followed through with it, looking beyond what was perceived as possible, and turning improbability into something real. What’s just as cool is that Briggs, still to this day, is fired up about ski mountaineering. If not doing it, then thinking about it, talking about it.
“Skiing the Grand,” Briggs adds, “the twists and turns and complications of that experience were fabulous. They all were.”
Briggs’ life in music is also strong. He can still be seen every Sunday night playing with the Stagecoach band in Wilson, Wyoming, going on its 38th year, as well as organizing the musical “Hootenany,” a Monday night tradition in Jackson Hole that Briggs has fronted for the last 14 years.
During interviews, he’s been pressed with all kinds of questions that become departure points for endless stories, Scientology stories, questions too involved for this venue. He offers up just enough to keep interviewers asking more.
“When the doctors said you’d be in a wheelchair later in life, didn’t that weigh heavy on your head?”
“Not particularly,” he says.
“Really?”
“You want the whole story on that?” he asks.
“Yeah, please.”
“It gets wild.”
“All right.”
“It’s World War I. I’m in the army in France…”
In 2003 Briggs joined Junior Bounous, considered to be the greatest off-piste skier of the 50’s and 60’s, in the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame in Park City, Utah, alongside Stein Eriksen and Axel Andresen. He still teaches skiing.
Jeff Burke lives in Jackson, Wyoming, where he works as a freelance writer, Editor-at-Large for Backcountry magazine, and moonlights as a Jackson Hole Ski Patroller.
