As the spring progressed, the epic conditions in the mountains continued to improve. By that time most of the locals could already be found at the town's local sport crag clipping bolts and sunning meaty white thighs and rippling abs left over from a season of hard skiing, while the truly committed were hunkered down in high mountain refuges waiting for Mother Nature to smile upon them.

Rumors flew through town like bloodthirsty bats emerging from a cave at dusk: elusive, unsubstantiated, impossible to pinpoint. Meanwhile from the balconies of the refuges, the inspired few patiently scoped their lines. Beneath the lenses of high-powered field glasses their lips could be seen moving as they prayed for a brief window of good weather, which would stabilize the snow: "Just three nice days..." Their intensity was unsettling to everybody but the guardians of the refuges who had seen it all before.

Then like a flash of heat lightning from a cloudless, west Texas sky, local photographer/zenmaster René Robert materialized out of nowhere with a couple of sheets of slides that he thought I might like to take a gander at. Second descent of Le Nant Blanc on the North Face of the 4122m Aiguille Verte apparently. Seems as though legendary extreme skier Jean Marc Boivin made the first descent back in '89 or something. This was more than we had all been hoping for. This news was massive. I ripped the sheets from his hands and spread them across the light table.

"Who claimed it? Jérôme and Dede, right?"

"Non. A friend of mine named Marco Siffredi. He soloed it."

"Soloed the Nant Blanc??!? Who?"

"Marco Siffredi — a local kid who's been working his way through the classics all spring. After he ticked off all the majors he started sending everything in sight: Isolée Couloir on Mont Blanc du Tacul, the Diagonal on the South Face of Mont Maudit, Southwest Couloir on the Aiguille de l'Epéna. He's laying down first descents like they're just another afternoon in the snowpark for most riders."

"Never heard of him."

"Pas de surprise. He's only been riding for four years..."

"No frikkin way!"

"Seriously. The kid's off his head."

"What's his name again?"

Now to understand what all the excitement was about, I should probably digress briefly to try and give you a better picture of just exactly what it is we're talking about here. The word "steep" doesn't even begin to describe the Nant Blanc because not only is the pitch far beyond what more than a handful of riders have ever even dreamed of dropping into, it's sheer exposure is so terrifying that most so-called extreme riders would never consider it. Even a fall on the relatively benign lower slopes would mean an unstoppable 300-meter rag doll over a bergshrund and down into the rocky bottom of the glacier below.

But the real danger lies in the appallingly exposed top section of the route where a blown edge, a miscalculated turn, or a momentary lapse of concentration and the rider might as well have jumped from an airplane without a parachute. Oh and one more thing, the only way to truly understand the condition of the snow on the route is to climb it first. Yep, that's right; drag yourself out of your warm sleeping bag at an ungodly hour and spend the next seven or eight hours front-pointing your way up a cold, dark face of mixed rock, snow and ice. This highly technical climb alone is enough to leave most serious alpinists completely shattered by its completion and the thought of strapping a snowboard onto your wobbly legs and dropping into a descent so gnarly that it has only ever been done once before is truly beyond the realm of most riders' imaginations.

Having said that, Marco (who was a tender 20 years old at the time) describes the route this way, "I wanted to do the Nant Blanc because it was the most difficult route I had heard of. The famous extreme skier, Jean-Marc Boivin was the first to ski it ten years ago and it was his biggest descent....