Read from "Skiing Walhalla" in Where the Rain Children Sleep: A Sacred Geography of the Colorado Plateau by Michael Engelhard with new essays and a new preface by the author:

"I awaken to dishwater light and the SHUSHing of snow sliding down the tent fly. Poking my head through the entrance I find our campsite muffled by cloudbanks. Already, Kate hovers near the canyon rim, eager to capture the sweet light of morning with her camera. By the time I’ve wriggled into my ski pants—condensation showering me from the domed ceiling—and coffee is steaming on the stove, there is movement in the abyss. Wet shrouds drag across ponderosa-clad slopes. Where the fabric thins, the sun bleeds through in an amorphous smear. Elsewhere, gashes reveal Toroweap ridges and pinnacles perched atop raw-boned Coconino scarps. To the northeast, a thick broth spills across the Painted Desert, barely contained by the glowing rim of Vermilion and Echo cliffs.

A true Götterdämmerung, a dawn stirred by sullen gods, a scene Wagner himself could not have staged better.

It comes as no surprise that the Grand Canyon, and the North Rim in particular, inspired heroic nomenclature. Francois Emile Matthes, a naturalized American born in Holland and charged with producing the canyon’s first topographic maps, named the locale of our weeklong ski trip. In Nordic mythology, Valhalla was the “Hall of the Slain,” Odin’s abode in Asgard, the home of the gods and paradise for warriors killed in battle. Still veiled from our sight, this frosty otherworld juts from the North Rim’s bulk east of the visitor center, flanked by Bright Angel Canyon. Like a misshapen lobster claw, it pinches the Colorado where the river swings from a north-south to an eastwest orientation. Theories to explain the stream’s crookedness or the remnant plateau involve headward erosion, drainage reversal, rate of uplift, and the Bright Angel Fault; but nobody knows for sure. Steep-pitched routes from Cape Royal—the mesa’s southernmost tip—down Unkar Creek into the inner gorge gave Ancestral Puebloan farmers access to permanent water, to fish, bighorn sheep, and soils fit for corn.

As the cloud screen dissolves, Kate’s partner joins us at the overlook. Andy is along as much for companionship and some Arizona-style skiing as for hauling a mule’s load: camp gear and photographic equipment in a search-and-rescue sled. Both are thrilled at this winter wonder opportunity, because normally they experience a different canyon, as dory guides more than a mile below."