Backcountry

When Ingrid was twenty-five she lived for four months in a big house on the edge of an unfinished—never to be finished—ski resort. This was in Montana, on Adelaide Peak, twenty years ago. Richie, her much older kind-of boyfriend, and mastermind of the whole sad enterprise, had borrowed against his land to build the house, a baronial place full of grandiose touches like antler chandeliers and stone fireplaces and a drawer that warmed plates. It was the only structure on the mountain. After Richie went missing and Ingrid was left alone, all his expensive possessions started to seem foolish, and a careless contempt for them would steal over her—for him, too, who had been dumb or weak enough to probably die.

Richie liked to say the house was ski-in, ski-out, even if skiing out took some work since there weren’t any lifts. If they wanted to go down, they had to climb up, earn their turns. After the search was called off, Ingrid hiked or skinned up Adelaide on the days when the weather allowed and skied different routes down, looking for some sign: a ski tip poking out of the snow, his blaze-orange beanie snagged on a branch. Truthfully, though, she wasn’t looking very hard. Going up, she often lost herself in the rhythmic jab of her poles, the cold air cycling through her lungs, the crows caw-cawing in the trees, the distant frozen lakes visible from the summit. Coming down, she got to thinking about her technique and line and sometimes forgot all about Richie until she was back at the house. Then the sight of it, stone and timber, dark and empty, reminded her he’d be spending another night out there, somewhere, either dead in the cold with the night creatures or, less probably but still possibly, alive and safe somewhere else, somewhere like the Cayman Islands, having abandoned her and his other problems with one tidy disappearance.

Before she met Richie, Ingrid had been with Wesley, the man she would eventually marry. They’d gotten together one winter in Breckenridge, when they were both working in a ski shop, a clattering dungeon that smelled of socks and wax and steel edges fresh off the grinder, and had dated for some months, into the summer. When he’d left her, Wesley disguised the leaving as a simple departure: He was going backpacking around the world, seeking something vague yet important. To be fair, he’d invited her along, but he knew she didn’t have the money.

She had grown up on Lake Tahoe—her parents owned a bar and grill, a taxidermy-and-neon kind of place—and as soon as she finished high school, she’d taken off without any plan beyond drifting through the mountain states. The people she hung out with were seasonal people like herself: lifties or instructors or patrollers in the winter, rafting or fishing guides or dude-ranch wranglers in the summer. In the shoulder seasons, they tried to get jobs waiting tables or working cash registers, and they ate ramen and canned chili from the discount store while they waited for the snow to finish melting or start falling.

Seasonal people are always in and out of versions of lust and love, and why not? Everyone’s fit. Everyone’s drunk on nature and cheap beer. When seasonal people spout off, without irony, about free love and mother nature and the purity of the mountains, all you have to do is keep saying, Yeah, totally, I know what you mean, and eventually you’re kissing someone. So when Wesley left, Ingrid was sad but not devastated. She decided she’d go where the wind blew her.

First it blew her to Keystone, where she got her first real instructor job and burned through a succession of amiably stoned snowboarder quasi-boyfriends, and then it blew her to Idaho for the summer (rafting gig), and then, in October, to Jackson Hole to teach ski school. Before the season started, before...