For the next week, The Mountain Culture, will profile skier and mountaineer, Bill Briggs, a legend by any standard for his contribution to the evolution of American steep skiing. Writer Jeff Burke takes a closer look at the first man to ski the Grand Teton, and the life he has spent on and off the mountains.

TWO: Beginnings

When Bill Briggs was seven years his older sister taught him to ski, and he pursued the sport feverishly. Her husband became one of Briggs’s first skiing mentors and would later inspire him to attend Dartmouth University. But before Dartmouth, Briggs attended Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and that’s truly where his relationship with alpinism began. It was there he met English teacher and accomplished mountaineer Bob Bates, who became one of Briggs’s most lasting influences.

“This was a great man,” Briggs says. “I took up mountaineering simply because I wanted to be like him. If his sport could do that, then that’s what I wanted.”

While attending Dartmouth, Briggs became critical of college academics and their purpose in his life. He believed he was being groomed to become what he calls an “organization man,” set up to work in the corporate world. He had no intentions of ever working in the corporate world. Going against the grain made it difficult for Briggs to make friends and fit into the role of the Dartmouth man. His first roommate was a football quarterback. They didn’t get along at all.

“He was just glory bound,” Briggs says—a light jab at 1950’s jockdom. He summarily quips that the Dartmouth academic scene was nothing other than a mob action, wrought with lunacy. His disdain for the prescribed college experience was also compounded by a tendency towards depression that he been aware of as early as the third grade, and which remained with him for a large part of his life.
“Essentially, I figured I’d commit suicide, but found I couldn’t do it. I really couldn’t do it.” Instead he adopted this mantra—”I will do what I enjoy to do, what is rewarding for me: to ski, climb, and play music. I will focus my life on those three things.”

Briggs got a new roommate, a Jewish climber and skier named Mike Marx, who also loved music. When the two met up with another black student Chad Day, they set out to learn to play music together. Briggs said it was the “outcasts” getting together. That was the beginning, and the place to play was the Dartmouth Outing Club. Briggs hadn’t found an education in the classrooms at Dartmouth, but had found a family, purpose and a life of his own in the Outing Club.

“It was inspiring,” he says of the club. “That was the Dartmouth Education.” Academically, there was nothing there. But the Outing Club and music were there, and that’s what I really appreciated.”

Jeff Burke lives in Jackson, Wyoming, where he works as a freelance writer, Editor-at-Large for Backcountry magazine, and moonlights as a Jackson Hole Ski Patroller.