Most die-hard traversers are seeking to fill up their personal buckets; they’re forming truer versions of themselves. Like the Buddhist pilgrimage to Mount Kailash or the Muslim mission to Mecca, ski tours are essentially a vehicle towards enlightenment through a conscious choice to challenge yourself among fellow believers.

Our feet groan, blistered and corpse-like, after days of sweat-saturated imprisonment in plastic ski boots. The ache in our shoulders wrestles for dominance with the searing burn where our heavy pack straps rub. Lips and noses are doing their best bacon impressions after a few days on snowfields in the hot spring sun, and every muscle seems to protest each inch we travel, whether it is balancing on skins up a frozen slope or breaking trail in a shady, north-aspect valley. Avalanches, cornices, creeks and crevasses wait for a single misstep. With the weight on our backs, even a simple caught edge can pop a knee or send you sliding down an icy slope of doom.

Multi-day ski traverses entail setting out for days or weeks into wild mountains in full winter conditions. The snow and the cold, while they add their layers of risk, also make travel much easier in many ways, by covering alder, devil’s club, small creeks, glacial crevasses and other obstacles that make off-trail travel an impossibility, or at least unpleasant, during the summer months. Your shelter, a warm sleeping bag and sleeping mat, extra warm clothes, and a stove and fuel, plus mountaineering equipment, all must be carried on your back.

Unlike our daily lives, every single decision you make out there has an impact. That reality creates a clear line between black and white, almost like a hyper-real binary system.” -Kari Medig.

On a traverse, each morning boils down to a daily ritual whose only comfort is its familiarity. Awake to the beep of a watch alarm, the ache of dehydration countered only by the ironic throb of a dangerously full bladder. Peel yourself from a toasty sleeping bag, careful not to knock the ice from the inner tent walls onto your tent mates. Pull on a down jacket, ski pants, and slip into down booties. A familiar pump and spark lights the camp stove to melt snow for the day’s water, and more importantly, coffee. Ski-boot liners frozen solid are stuffed inside still-warm sleeping bags in the hopes they will at least partially thaw before feet are wedged into them. Use frozen fingers to pack up camp and stuff a rehydrated breakfast into a protesting stomach that needs the calories.

But hours later, lying on the trail and trading turns with your closest friends as far from the rest of the world as you can get, nothing feels more divine.