CHASING THE PEAK EXPERIENCE

Okay, so we've bungee jumped the Empire State Building, in-line skated the Kalahari Desert, and doggie-paddled the English Channel with an anvil on the chest. Time to kick back for two seconds? Nah, skinpop some Red Bull or Mountain Dew and get fired up. It's tonar, braa'ah. Supersick! I'm on top of the world, ma! This is exactly what it's all about.

But what exactly?

It's the wooing of "extremism," and it's so big that no one can deny its influence. High risk means high pleasure and, though attempting defy-defying acts for most sane folks is tantamount to digesting a bowling bowl, to extreme athletes, who chase cliffs the way a dog chases tires, called and crazy, willing to be hit, extremism is kind of like having groovy sex and nosebleeds at the same time.

Its increasing popular disciplines have grown hand-in-hand with modern MTV-brainers who are fed to it the way King Midas of Crete fed Athens choicest youths to the Minotaur. Wall Street ad men pitch its romanticism. And if one-upmanship is not the rule of the day, it still hasn't been lost on equipment, beverage, and sportswear designers.

"Extremism is a label, nothing more," explains retired Olympic speed skier and Sacramento, California resident Melissa Dimino. A former world record holder, in 1984, Dimino was the first woman to ever break the 200-kilometer barrier on skis, eventually uncorking a time of 126.523 miles per hour. Not bad for an attractive, soft-spoken American Airline flight attendant who admits that if she thought speed skiing to be "extreme" she would never have done it. "By labeling what we enjoy doing they've made some of these risk sports into a fad-like thing. Actually, none of it is too new. People have been pushing the envelope since Homer."

Not quite, but as international filmmaker and adventurer Eric Perlman explains, the beginnings of extremism was born in Chamonix in the spring of 1939 when two Frenchmen, Emile Allais and Camille Tonnais ascended 4,000 feet up the Glacier du Mileu to the top of the 12,680 foot peak called Argentiere. Strapping on their stiff wooden boards they descended down a narrow rock-walled needle of snow, over forty degrees of slope. It was beyond rational thought, but in one afternoon the two alpinists redefined the limits of skiing.

Increasingly, man took on wilder exploits.Talk about extreme: back in the 1940s Olympic downhiller Dick Buek tucked the face of Mt. Baldy in Sun Valley. Then, to celebrate, he flew his plane upside down under the chairlift. There was Frankie Bare who, on skis, popped a twisting, quadruple flip-four back flips with three full twists - a stunt which pioneer ski filmmaker Dick Barrymore today still calls, "The most incredible athletic maneuver I've ever witnessed."

Breaking down barriers was just one more brick in the wall to Californians in the 1960s. Warren Harding climbed El Capitan, Rick Sylvester parachuted off Glacier point, and Eric Beck soloed Half-Dome, all in Yosemite Valley, and all once thought beyond human endeavor.

There was the high priest of speed Steve McKinney from Squaw Valley, California who in 1978 shattered skiing's 200-kilometer - per- hour barrier with a blistering (then) 124.34 miles per hour, the equivalent of traveling the length of a football field in 1.8 seconds.

Outrageous for the era, yet extreme today? Sort of. These days speed skiers regularly unzip runs over 140 mph, but the late McKinney remains the guru to many, his personal mantra explaining extremism as "shedding the yolk of all hesitation and donning the cloak of commitment." Before his untimely death in 1990 (killed by a drunk driver) McKinney would successfully hang glide off the West Ridge of Everest at 22,000 feet, five miles above sea level.

By the end of the 70s, Sylvain Saudain skied the West Face of the Eiger. Ski mountaineer Chris Landry skied the East Face of Aspen's Pyramid Peak from the summit, long considered an impossible descent. Italian ski instructors Matteo Thun and Giorgio Ferraris successfully skied the sulfur-choked lava flanks of Stromboli as the volcano erupted, exclaiming later that "although our ski bases melted, our edges still held."

Ski mountaineers Ned Gilette, Craig Calonica, and Jim Bridwell became the first humans to circle Mount Everest on skis. Japan's Yichireo Miura, equipped with a parachute for a brake, schussed the South Col of Mount Everest.

Extremism, as yet unlabeled, was becoming a sport of strong expression. In the fast-paced 80s, extremists stretched the imagination. Ski instructor Joe Meegan skied a frozen Niagra Falls. Kirk Hill set the world single-skier endurance record at Angel Fire, New Mexico, completing 434 consecutive runs covering 195,300 vertical, skiing non-stop for 63 hours until he "began losing contact with reality."

For a jaded sense of reality, however, no one outdid Swiss daredevil-adventurer Sylvain Saudain. Without oxygen, he climbed then skied down 26,470 foot Hidden Peak in the Himalayas, the highest descent ever on skis. The descent took nine hours over 9,000 vertical feet, requiring more than 3,000 turns over slopes of 55 degrees, in conditions that he described "as the absolute worst."

Why did he do it?

"Adventure," said Saudain. "Besides, why not ski down if you take the trouble to climb up?"

"What you find around the planet is a lot of crazy conditions and beckoning environments," explains professional snowboarder Jim Zellers. The Lake Tahoe native has ridden slopes in South America, Europe, Alaska, Japan, including first descents down Half-Dome, Denali, and Mount Cook in New Zealand. "There is incredibly diverse terrain, and much of it within eye contact of accessible places. The closeness breeds a lot of enthusiasm."

Then again that enthusiasm - especially in the less experienced - has created problems, injuries, even death.

"People have to realize that all the extreme hype is just hype," says Mike Bellick, a world class paraglider from the south shore of Lake Tahoe, California. "We're not just popping up into the ski. We're not showboaters, but licensed pilots. We keep the danger down and strive towards safety, making the risks justifiable."

Bellick, who has flown over 13,000 feet in his high-aspect-ratio paraglider, mentions that successful extremists, especially those in Europe, have strong backgrounds in alpinism and have learned to feel conditions.

"Extremism is something that should be always self-monitored," he says. "The person should reflect on the reasons for undertaking the adventure."

Criticism of extremism became all too apparent during the early 1990s when Lake Tahoe skier Paul Ruff died near the Kirkwood resort after attempting to set a world record by jumping 165 feet off a cliff. He didn't make it and his death set off controversy about extremism, especially after it was learned that Ruff solely made the attempt in hopes of cashing in on the record with television commercials for Mountain Dew and posters.

"His death was not necessary," says photographer Hank deVre who witnessed the stunt. "He was doing what he loved, sure, but he still jumped for the wrong reasons, mainly fame and money. That's not what all this stuff is about. I really think we need to take a long look at what's going on these days."

Take a good look and consider how adventure has changed, at least in the grand old manner back when every other landfall meant a colony. In those days all you needed was an inquiring mind and a profound contempt for scurvy and Spaniards.

"I like showing people pushing the limits," says well-known ski photographer Larry Prosor, "but anybody involved in this has to look at themselves and realize personal limits. The best guys in the world aren't afraid to back down."

Adventure has always been a selfish business whether for a glib Mountain Dew commercial or trying to inspire the world. Since the first recorded conquest of 29,035-foot Everest in 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, more than 800 people have conquered the tallest peak. About 180 people have died on its unpredictable upper slopes.

"When they climbed Everest, it was a leap into the unknown. Everest is now a very different place," says renowned mountaineer and photographer Galen Rowell. "Now the route is well established. People hire guides for $75,000 to take them up to the summit and the trend of more money and more people is escalating."

In other words, less than stellar climbers can now arrange for an Everest escort rather than a true expedition. And for every new attempt to outdo all others such as the successfully May 25th, 2001 summit by blind climber Eric Weihenmayer of Golden, Colorado, 64-year-old Sherman Bull of Berkeley, and 15-year-old Sherpa Temba Tsheri there will be a sobering death such as Sherpa Babu Chhiri who held the world record for making the fastest trip up Everest and staying on top the longest without bottled oxygen.

On the other hand, to many, every attempt at some sort of extremism has its upsides.

"When a blind man and a 15-year-old kid and a 64-year-old guy make the summit, it sends a positive message to hundreds of millions of people," says Rowell. "It tells them that they could do it or something comparable in their lifetimes. It has pushed the envelope in several different directions."