Two hundred miles north of Petropavlovsk, the salmon appear in late August. Starting as a whisper, their numbers rapidly grow in volume until the river pulses with Silvers, Chums, Sockeye and Kings flooding agains the current.

It appeared as if an enormous pillow had split a seam and dumped a million tons of prime goose down on Targhee’s glades, bowls, gullies and back country extreme.

 He has been knocked unconscious and now moves like wet liver, slithering around moguls, pausing on the odd flats between them before seeking the next gutter and sliding around the next mogul.

Pepper Spray is a witch’s brew of ground cayenne and propellants guaranteed to make ursus horriblus wish he’d never laid eyes on homo sapien. “Use in short, timed bursts,” the instructions read.

Over the years I’ve had heard myths of snorkel deep powder but, having never personally skied it, I was convinced that snorkels were simply sight gags––props photographers employ to make a foot of powder imitate five.

To ride the Bataan, you need big guns–buttocks like cannonballs, hamstrings as thick as bridge cables, cordwood for thighs and massive striated calves.

Why Flims? Or, for that matter, why Switzerland? Because there is something about Switzerland’s vertical Alps, crystalline air, chiming church bells and incredible skiing that leaves you touched by magic.

It worries me that Robert, my thirteen-year old son, has no fear. Studying the Aiguille du Midi's forbidding blue ice and black rock north wall from the sixty person tram skims, he does not blink when Mark Jones tells him, “People ski that!”

Only 16 at the time, I was hypnotized by the scene in which McQueen steals a Triumph from a German soldier and tries to flee to Switzerland. It did not matter that the Triumph was a Brit bike, or that McQueen eventually slids into a barbed wire fence. From that point on I was obsessed with bikes.

The storm raged through the night and dawn rose to a vaulted blue sky and four inches of fresh powder. The conditions will haunt my dreams, but dampening that joy is the realization that each turn counts a minute until I must leave.

From Bucharest to the Castle Bran to the Tihuta Pass, I discovered Dracula in the sound of footsteps in the Seven Citadel’s locked towers and in the wet shine of fresh blood spilled across white marble steps at the Golden Crown.

I watch Glen and Darren boot up a narrow, north-facing chute to the 13,330-foot summit of Mount Emerson. A camera cannot capture the forty-five degree pitch or the width or length of this chute. A camera would flatten it out, make it appear as dangerous as a city sidewalk flanked by brown stone walls.

 He has been knocked unconscious and now moves like wet liver, slithering around moguls, pausing on the odd flats between them before seeking the next gutter and sliding around the next mogul.

Bram Stoker's description of wind swept citadels clinging to the Carpathian Mountains rocky precipices spawned images of deep snow and ski lifts running above ancient ruins.