Cody Townsend Should Quit “The Fifty” While He’s Ahead—and Alive

By Matt Coté on SKI.com — The line before us didn’t seem all that intimidating—a subalpine couloir with walls that were almost more gully-like than a traditional, rocky pinner’s would be. But my two partners and I still paused for a solemn moment before dropping in that day. This was the Polichinelle Couloir, where Doug Coombs fell and died in 2006. I had moved to La Grave, France, for a season in my late 20s to follow in the tracks of giants like Coombs and learn to ski mountaineer. This is where I came to understand that the most deadly terrain is not found on the mountain but in the mind.

The trick with ski mountaineering is you can do everything right and still get it wrong. It’s like getting hit by a car; you never think it will happen to you. In Coombs’s case, a simple patch of ice above a cliff proved fatal. Yet, these stories haven’t deterred other professional freeriders from transitioning into ski mountaineering and thriving. Chris Davenport was one of the first, with his 14ers project. Snowboarder Jeremy Jones followed with his Deeper, Further, Higher trilogy. And today, some of the biggest skiing heroes are Christina Lustenberger, Jérémie Heitz, and Jimmy Chin.

Enter Cody Townsend, a big, blond, lovable personality with more downhill ski talent than just about anyone on Earth. After reaching the stupefying limits of his freeride career in 2014—when he won “Powder” magazine’s coveted Line of The Year award for flashing an impossibly tight, aesthetic couloir in Alaska—he found himself at a crossroads, contemplating what lay ahead. In the throes of ski mountaineering’s new pop appeal, he discovered a book Chris Davenport co-authored, “50 Classic Ski Descents of North America,” celebrating some of this continent’s most underground self-powered feats on skis. Townsend, who was not then a ski mountaineer, announced he would repeat every line in the book and launched “The Fifty,” a self-produced YouTube series documenting the process. Here we are five years later, with Townsend, an ice-axe-wielding viral sensation and only four lines remaining on his daunting list.