Snowboarding moments of madness are as easy as falling off a cliff

For the last few weeks, the same video clip seems to have been circulating endlessly on snow sports related social media. Filmed at the Whistler-blackcomb ski resort in British Columbia, Canada, it shows a hapless snowboarder clinging to an almost-sheer cliff face having taken a very serious wrong turn. Fortunately for him, his board has come to rest in a little pocket of snow at the apex of a column of rock, so he has just enough of a platform to support his weight. Unfortunately for him, he’s right above a 40-foot drop and there’s nowhere for him to go but down. All he can do is keep his upper body pressed up against the cliff face, hang on to the sketchy-looking hand-holds he’s found and pray for somebody to rescue him before he runs out of strength in his fingers.

Thankfully, after an hour or two, the Whistler Ski patrol managed to hoist him to safety, but not before a local snowboard coach had captured his predicament on his smartphone and broadcast it to the world via Instagram. Cue a weekslong outpouring of schadenfreude from everyone who’s ever skied or snowboarded on Planet Earth.

Of course, as the snowboarder in question (we’ll call him Agent Beige as that’s what he was wearing) came through his ordeal unscathed there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a bit of “there but for the grace of God go I.” However, my feelings on watching him doing his best limpet impression have been somewhat mixed – a combination of chuckles at how utterly scuppered he is interspersed with small, unwelcome shots of adrenaline, because not so very long ago I ended up in a similar situation, only a mile or so away.

In January 2006 I was in Whistler black comb writing a travel story for this newspaper. As part of my itinerary, I was shown around the resort by a local snowboard pro called Jim Mcmahon, who introduced me to the double-black diamond terrain of Spanky’s Ladder

– the area of Blackcomb Mountain where Agent Beige found unwanted internet stardom. I remember it being a classic low-vis Whistler day – the kind where you can easily misjudge distances or take a wrong turn; I remember there being a lot of signage at the entry point, along the lines of “here be dragons;” and I remember Jim sternly advising me to follow him as closely as I could if I didn’t want to end up flying off a cliff.

Happily, with Jim showing the way, Spanky’s was a blast, but later that week I did something so monumentally stupid I still shudder to think about it. Free to explore Whistler on my own, I decided to head back to Flute Bowl

– a giant amphitheatre of powderstuffed loveliness that Jim had also introduced me to. Joining the queue for the Harmony Express chairlift, I got talking to a local snowboarder called Jeremy. He offered to show me some out-of-the-way runs he knew and I agreed to come along for the ride. Unfortunately, Jeremy didn’t know the area quite as well as he’d made out. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” I shouted, as we passed a sign that said “DANGER: CLIFF AREA”. “I’m gonna go for it,” he grinned, and carried on. At this point, of course, I should simply have turned around; for reasons best-known to my twentysomething self, though, I carried on.

For a hundred metres or so we sideslipped down a steep, narrow gully, hoping it would open out, but instead it became more of a chute. Soon it became too narrow for snowboards, so we took our boards off and started scrambling. Eventually Jeremy came to a halt at a point where the chute seemed to disappear into thin air. “How’s it looking?” I asked. “Er, bad,” he said, “can we climb back up?”

“No way,” I told him, “why – what’s it like down there?” There’s was a pregnant pause. “Ah, it looks really bad,” came the reply. And then, just like that, Jeremy disappeared. I tried shouting down to him but got no reply. I tried climbing back up the chute, but in big squishy snowboard boots it was impossible. I had two choices: sit tight and shout for help, or shuffle down the icy drainpipe towards the point where I’d last seen Jeremy and see what the drop was like. In the end, I went for the shuffling option, started to slide almost straight away, tried and failed to grab hold of a small pine tree to my left and then, as its needles slipped through my gloved hand, I sailed out into thin air.

After a couple of seconds of horrible silence I felt my feet hit snow and then I was tumbling – head in the snow, feet in the snow, head, feet, head, feet – until finally I came to a halt buried up to my waist looking back up at the crag I’d just fallen from. My hat and goggles were long gone, having flown off somewhere further up the slope (yes kids, this was back before helmets were a thing.) Fortunately, though, Jeremy and I were both fine, having landed on a steep slope covered in deep, soft snow – he’d even managed to retrieve my board, which I’d thrown as far away from me as I could as soon as I’d got airborne. So yeah, don’t worry Agent Beige – loads of people have ended up in situations just as silly as yours; the only difference is that you ended up on Instagram and the rest of us didn’t.

“Ah, it looks really bad,” came the reply. And then, just like that, Jeremy disappeared