THE DARKEST WHITE

The life and death of a celebrated athlete.

Adventure biographer Blehm chronicles the storied career of Craig Kelly (1966-2003), a self-taught, world champion snowboarder, who died in an avalanche in British Columbia. In the 1980s, snowboarding was just becoming popular. “Small tribes of snowboarders started popping up across the country,” he writes, consisting mostly of surfers and skateboarders who “looked at mountains and saw frozen waves, halfpipes, and glorious glassy-smooth powder to ride.” Ski areas thought they were a nuisance: Of around 500 sites, only about 50 allowed snowboarding. By the 1990s, about 2 million people were participating in the sport, and Kelly was the brightest star. Skiing, he said, felt “disjointed,” but snowboarding “felt like an extension of my body.” He dropped out of college to train for competition, focusing on perfecting entire halfpipe runs and adding flourishes to stand out. In 1987, he “swept the field” of the Grand Prix of Snowboarding in Aspen; in 1988, for the second year in a row, he was named “Freestyle World Champion and Overall World Champion.” As Blehm writes, “He levitated down mountains, raced avalanches, aired cliffs, and landed on the covers of magazines.” But though he loved the challenge of the sport, he was not invested in the glitz and glamor of being a celebrity. Preferring to snowboard in natural terrain, he studied “the mechanics of the mountains, the engineering of avalanches, and the science of snow down to the granular, if not microscopic, level.” He aspired to join the elite Association of Canadian Mountain Guides and was in the midst of training when the avalanche hit “with cold, hard indifference” and dragged him and 12 others into the icy darkness. Blehm recounts in gripping detail the terrifying disaster, the desperate rescue efforts, and the ensuing investigations into the cause.

A stirring adventure narrative and sports bio.