Chapter 6 West Valley Work
Liza POV
The mountain didn’t care where I came from.
That was the first thing I noticed the next morning, when I pulled the lodge truck back into the West Valley resort lot and cut the engine.
Yesterday’s visit had lasted just long enough for Zeller to look over my certifications and tell me to report at seven for a practical assessment.
Now the runs above me were streaked white and brown, fresh snow over exposed rock, the kind of early-season terrain that punished bad decisions and rewarded patience.
Two lifts were spinning. A third stood still, its upper station buried under drifts the groomers hadn’t reached yet.
Wind scoured the peaks and kicked up plumes of loose powder along the ridgeline.
I sat there for a minute with my hands on the wheel.
The replacement gear Dominic had promised was in the back seat.
It had been waiting in my room when I returned from arranging the assessment with Zeller.
The gear included a jacket, base layers, a radio, and a pack, all issued by West Valley and dark blue where mine had been red.
The jacket fit well and had no insignia above the heart, only clean fabric where a patch would go.
I grabbed the pack and headed for the patrol base.
Glen Zeller was standing outside the equipment shed with a clipboard and a thermos, watching two younger patrollers load a rescue sled onto a snowmobile trailer.
He was lean and weathered, with a gray beard trimmed close and a face reddened and lined by years in the wind.
His eyes tracked me from the parking lot to the door without any change in expression.
“Mallory,” he said. “You’re early.”
“I’m on time.”
He looked at the blue jacket. Looked at the scar. His gaze didn’t linger on either one, any more than it had yesterday.
“Six seasons on the East side, four of them running the upper mountain. That’s what your paperwork says.”
“It’s what I did.”
He wrote something on the clipboard. “Salvi said I should give you a fair shot.”
I set the pack down on the bench beside the door. “I don’t want favors from anyone’s Alpha. I want the same assessment you’d give any experienced applicant who showed up looking for work.”
His expression eased by a degree. He capped the thermos and tucked the clipboard under his arm.
“Good,” he said. “Because that’s what you’re getting. Set your radio to patrol frequency two and meet me at the top of lift two in fifteen minutes.”
? ? ?
The assessment was thorough and fair and exactly what I needed.
Zeller started with medical. We worked through a scenario in the patrol shack where I stabilized a simulated spinal injury, talked through medication protocols, and demonstrated splinting techniques on a practice dummy scarred by years of drills.
He asked questions the whole time to see how I worked through each problem.
I answered without rushing. He wrote things down.
Then we skied.
The upper mountain skied differently from East Valley’s runs.
It was steeper and wider, with more exposure to the wind and longer fall lines that dropped through rocky chutes before opening into groomed terrain below.
The fresh snow from the storm sat unevenly on the old base, and I could feel the difference in every turn.
The wind had scoured out hollow spots and loaded dense pockets against the rocks.
Along the tree line, a thin, breakable crust would catch an edge if I stopped paying attention.
I paid attention.
Zeller skied behind me for the first two runs, watching my technique, my line choices, how I handled the variable snow. On the third run he pulled alongside and pointed toward a closed section above the main chute, where orange ropes and signs marked the boundary.
“What do you see up there?” he asked.
I stopped and studied the slope. The fresh snow had loaded heavily along the upper face, and the wind had built a cornice along the ridgeline that overhung the chute by several feet.
Below the cornice, the snowpack looked layered and uneven, with visible fracture lines where the new snow sat on older, harder surfaces.
“Wind slab,” I said. “That cornice is going to calve off the first time the temperature swings. When it does, it’ll trigger the layer underneath. The whole face will go.”
“How far?”
“Past the road, if it’s big enough. The runout zone feeds right into the drainage above the river road.” I pointed. “You’d want to close everything below the tree line on that aspect until you can do control work.”
Zeller took his time. Then he nodded.
“Most applicants tell me the snow looks fine,” he said. “They want to impress me by being confident. You just told me exactly what I needed to hear.”
We skied another run. By the fourth, my legs were burning and my lungs had found the altitude, and I felt the mountain under me the way I’d felt East Valley’s runs for years.
The terrain was different, but the same discipline applied.
I had to read what was in front of me instead of pretending I already knew.
Zeller brought me back to the patrol base and introduced me to two of the regular crew: a tall woman named Kristen with pale blond hair pulled back under a helmet, and a younger guy whose name I missed because he was already heading out for a boundary check.
They looked at my scar the way you look at anything on a new person’s face, brief and automatic, and then moved on to the business of asking whether I’d worked with the same radio system they used.
I had. The equipment was the same, though the frequency assignments differed.
“She reads terrain,” Zeller told Kristen, like I wasn’t standing right there. “Spotted the wind slab on the upper chute without a hint from me.”
Kristen raised her eyebrows. “Nice.”
“Don’t tell her that yet,” Zeller said. “I haven’t decided if I like her.”
A smile tugged at me, but I kept it down.
? ? ?
The call came in just after noon.
Zeller and I were in the patrol shack going over the resort’s avalanche protocols when the radio crackled.
A lift operator on chair two reported a skier who’d gone past the boundary ropes near the closed section on the east face, the slope that dropped toward the river, and hadn’t come out the other side.
Kristen’s voice followed a few seconds later from a mid-mountain station, confirming she could see a figure down in the rocks below the closure.
“Shit,” Zeller said, already reaching for his pack. He looked at me. “You’re with me. Grab your gear.”
We were on the mountain in under two minutes.
Zeller took the direct line down the groomed run toward the closure boundary while I cut through the trees on a traverse that would put me above the fall zone.
The snow was deep in the glades, thigh-high in places, and I had to sidestep through the last section where the terrain dropped off into exposed rock and scrub.
I found the skier before Zeller did.
He was a man in his forties wearing resort rental gear, with his goggles pushed up on his forehead and one ski still attached.
The other ski was twenty feet uphill, snapped at the binding.
He’d gone over a rock band and landed badly on his right leg, which was bent at an angle that made my stomach tighten. He was conscious, pale, and swearing.
“Don’t move,” I said, dropping beside him and shrugging off my pack. “I’m ski patrol. What’s your name?”
“Joel.” His teeth were clenched. “I think my leg is broken.”
“Yeah, it probably is.” I pulled the splint kit from my pack and started working. “Did you hit your head?”
“No. Just the leg. I saw the rope and I thought I could handle it.”
“The rope was there for a reason.” I got the splint positioned and started securing it, keeping my hands firm and my voice even. His leg was bad. The boot was holding the ankle in place, which was the only good news.
“Am I going to lose it?” he asked, and I could hear the real fear underneath the bravado.
“You’re not going to lose it. But you’re going to have a hell of a story about why you should read the signs.”
That got a weak laugh out of him, which was what I wanted. His breath loosened, and he kept answering my questions.
Zeller arrived thirty seconds later, assessed what I’d done, and nodded without comment.
“Bring the sled in from below,” I said. “The uphill approach crosses that loaded pocket. We can lower him through the trees and take the traverse once we reach the groomed run.”
Zeller radioed Kristen to bring the rescue sled to our position by the lower route and called the base lodge medical team to prep for a transport.
“Splint’s clean,” he told me while we waited. “Good stabilization.”
“Thanks.”
“You’ve done this before.”
“More times than I’d like.”
Kristen brought the sled up by the lower route.
We got Joel onto it, strapped him down, and ran a careful, controlled descent through the trees to the groomed run below.
Kristen took point while I managed the tail of the sled, keeping it from sliding sideways on the traverses.
The whole extraction took maybe forty minutes from the first radio call to delivery at the base clinic, where a resort paramedic took over and checked the circulation below Joel’s boot cuff.
Joel grabbed my hand as I turned to leave. “Thank you,” he said. His grip was tight and his eyes were glassy from the pain, but he meant it.
“Read the signs next time,” I said.
He laughed again, and then the paramedic told him to hold still.
? ? ?
Outside the clinic, Zeller was waiting with his clipboard. He looked at me, then at the clipboard, then at me again.
“You’re hired,” he said. “Regular patrol, full season, starting tomorrow. Same shifts as Kristen’s rotation. Pay is standard resort rate. Gear stays with the position.”
I nodded, and my shoulders loosened.
“Thank you,” I said.