In the late 1980s, photographer and writer Chris Noble was spending time in Chamonix, France, ground zero for extreme sports, where people like Jean-Marc Boivin, Bruno Gouvy, and Patrick Vallençant were pushing the outer edge of snow performance. After one of those stays he brought a word back to the States that seemed to capture this high-angle energy, and he shared it with me: glisse.

Glisser, as Noble explained, meant to glide, and the French had adopted glisse, the act of gliding, as an umbrella for what Americans came to call action sports. To my young ears, new to the alpine scene, it was the right word at the right time—foreign, cool, suggestive of what North Americans were doing but not American. Glisse was slippery, slidey, Gallically insouciant and

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