Originally featured in Outer Edge magazine.
On a clear day the snow-cloaked mountain peaks near Gulmarg in northwest India rise into the blue sky exactly like the Alps near Lugano in Switzerland or those of Squaw Valley in California.
This simple epiphany struck American freestyle skier Lel. C. Tone as she paused to survey the world from 14,000 ft, propped up on ski poles and with goggles pushed up on her head on the slopes of the Kashmiri Himalaya.
“To the east was China and some of the bigger peaks, to the west was Pakistan and it kind of overwhelmed me, suddenly realising how far from home I was and how skiing had pretty much brought me here and opened these doors,” she explains during a break between her many gigs.
She’s just starred in Warren Miller’s latest epic Like There’s No Tomorrow, squeezes in a bit of helicopter-ski guide work in Alaska and to round it off, manages to be an avalanche patroller in Squaw Valley.
Lel spent her first ten years living in Lugano during the 70’s and early 80’s when her family moved there from the States, and was put in skis as a two-year-old with the rest of the kids in her pre-school class.
“It’s amazing to look back on your life and consider how things pan out,” she explains patiently, probably recounting the story for the millionth time.
“From those humble beginnings at school in Switzerland, who new it would end up defining my career?”
Lel’s career description is unlike any you’ve heard about before. Part of her routine involves throwing sticks of dynamite from a helicopter to blast new and safer ski routes. It begs the obvious question, “Do you light the dynamite with a match?”
“No,” she replies, “with a cigar.”
Like one of the new American settlers who made their way to the Klondike during the late 19th century gold rush – except sitting in the wide open bay of a helicopter rather than astride a pack-mule – Lel Tone tosses fizzing sticks of TNT into the hills like some form of modern day Calamity Jane. A Yosemite Sam-style ski route blaster with a cheroot clenched between her gritted teeth.
Lel chuckles at this wishful characterisation and promptly sets the record straight.
“We use Dyno+AP rather than gelignite or TNT, it’s an emulsion explosive and while I’ve done a bit of heli-bombing we mostly place charges, which means sort of crawling around on ridges in very high winds with zero visibility throwing them by hand.”
Lel has dedicated her life to snow. She moved to Lake Tahoe in 1995 and has been a professional ski patroller at Squaw Valley since then. In 1999 she added heli-ski guiding to her resume, choppering powder- hungry clients to virgin routes in the Alaskan ranges. She’s an American Institute of Avalanche Research and Education (AIRE) level two avalanche instructor and a board member of the American Association of Avalanche Professionals. There are few people in the world who combine her born intuition on skis, with the thorough respectful understanding of the permanent snowpack mountain environment she’s developed over the years.
It’s an understanding she’s fostered courtesy of living in the mountains rather than travelling seasonally from sea level, and perhaps it’s this too that’s dulled her competitive ski-racer urge. Lel has always fancied making her home in the mountains rather than being one who visits sporadically to perfect skills for competitions. She was never really motivated to train for the Olympics for instance.
“For me it’s about being out there in the elements as a patroller on an avalanche route, it’s about being out there with a partner that you trust and communicate well with, you know, feeling the rawness of the elements, the howling wind, being somewhere absolutely beautiful with your friends, feeling the power of Mother Nature,” she explains.
“I’ve competed as a mountain-bike racer and done a bit of stand-up paddle boarding and I’m certainly a very competitive person but I don’t know if I actually had the talent to be pure ski-racer, I never really considered it too seriously anyway”.
All her training is geared around having fun, winter or summer, rather than the hard-core hundredths-of-a-second time shaving fastidiousness of Olympic downhill standard preparation. She trail runs and rides her bike around Lake Tahou in the summertime and loves to get down to the beach whenever she can to stand-up paddleboard or surf to get fit for her physically demanding wintertime work. Like the fabled soul-surfer of ocean guru folklore, Lel prefers the chilled out bliss of sharing the mountains with her friends – all day long under clear blue skies if possible.
“I’m only small, about 130 pounds, but I’m expected to lift as much as my 200 pound co-workers so it’s super important to be fit, which is why I cross-train all year round,” she says, almost apologising for the fantasy lifestyle she has just described.
It’s almost too fantastical to believe. She helicopters to wilderness mountain powder, sharing in the unrestrained glee of her clients carving fresh tracks for half the year, and then runs and rides the summer mountain trails of Lake Tahou for the other half – with occasional dashes to the Californian coast for the odd surf when the swell’s up.
To top it off, when she’s not heli-bombing, throwing explosives by hand, scooting down pristine mountain trails on her bike and the rest of it, she moonlights as a hot-dogger for Warren Miller productions.
It was during an eight-day shoot for Like There’s No Tomorrow in Kashmir where she found the moment to pause and reflect on her life in skiing. She was part of a crew of four comprising fellow skier Lynsey Dyer and cameramen Chris Patterson and Logan Schneider. A helicopter – she seems to hop in and out of the things quite frequently – had dropped her off with a local guide. There was something that looked to her like a series of telephone poles down below. The guide explained it was actually the disputed border between Pakistan and India and that Islamabad was only 70 miles beyond. This catapulted her out of her reverie, and reminded her how lucky and privileged she was to be up there in the snow without a care in the world.
“When I first got that phone-call from Warren Miller, I felt like I’d won the lottery, but seeing the border, realising Islamabad, and everything that’s going on there politically, was just over the horizon, kind of brought it home,” she says.
The ongoing geo-political hostilities between the United States and factions in the Middle East ceased being just news on a TV screen and instead loomed up real as life in front of her eyes. And, as is often the case in such situations, the event seemed unreal, almost trivial in spite of its portrayal as the massive dilemma routinely trotted out on our screens and papers.
“Being on the mountain with my buddy Lynsey, two women laughing and having fun, having that female camaraderie and connection, I just felt so blessed, it was easy to imagine we were anywhere in the world”.
It wasn’t lost on Lel that their unselfconscious carving through the pristine powder would’ve been impossible for any local women from the area to even contemplate.
“I remember this one gentleman asked if I had received my husband’s permission to go on this trip and at first it made me want to laugh because, you know, in our house there’s always been a battle about who wears the pants,” she explains. “Then I realised he was being perfectly serious and I just had to bite my tongue and think, goodness! In order to do anything you need your husband’s permission?”
Loaded up with the latest film camera technology, kitted out in colourful and stylish ski gear, the crew were very aware of the cultural split between them and their gracious Kashmiri hosts.
“Lynsey and I somehow managed to get hold of the reins of a horse-drawn cart in the city one time,” she says. “ We were just playing around charging through the streets when suddenly we realised that, like, 300 people were crowding around us fascinated at what we were doing, amazed I think that we were having so much fun”.
The attention became too much of a spectacle so they slowed the cart down, handed the reins back to their male guide and tried to quietly slink back into dignified anonymity. Their efforts at cultural interaction had veered, they decided, from curious polite enthusiasm into a glaring example of female inhibition unbound. For an uncomfortable moment they felt like they’d just been dropped from Mars.
“The Kashmiri people were so awesome and their hospitality towards us was so generous,” Lel is keen to stress on numerous occasions during the interview. “It was especially gracious when we got out of the city and up into the Himalayas where it was quiet and peaceful”.
“All of us, blonde girls from the States and folks from Gulmarg, we were all there loving where we were and understanding each other through this shared appreciation for mountain culture that transcended any nation culture”.
Her favourite moment of the eight-day filming experience in Kashmir came near the end after they had packed up and were hanging about waiting for their lift.
“Just before we were due to chopper out, I saw this Hindu woman skiing in a sari! She was skiing in a sari!” she repeats.
“That was just so awesome to see, it put a huge smile on my face the whole way out, it was literally ear to ear”.
It begs one last obvious question, “The woman in the sari, did you give her any pointers?”
“No, we didn’t have time! I would have loved to if I’d seen her earlier, but she was quite away down the slope and we were leaving anyway,” she says regretfully. “She was the first local woman I’d seen sking”.
“I gave plenty of the men lessons though – how to carve and stuff,” she adds with a wink.
