THE STRATEGY ISN'T WORKING.

As the sweat dribbles down our necks and our breath labors with the effort to climb the steep stone steps, I talk of the Tuckerman Ravine mystique. I talk of the ravine's spectacular beauty, its deep snow, its spring skiing. I talk of its origins, of Ice Age glaciers and compacted snow carving out U-shaped valleys. I talk of its grand waterfall and fickle weather. I talk of its power, its pull, of looking into the ravine from Wildcat Mountain and yearning to leap across Pinkham Notch to ski over that snow-covered headwall into the bowl, so perfect, so white. I talk of anything that will take my son Luke's mind off of his misery.

He doesn't buy it. He's hot, he's tired, he wants to stop. Now.

At 12, he doesn't care that he's ascending the alpine Mecca of the Northeast. He doesn't care that New Hampshire's Tuckerman Ravine is the birthplace of extreme skiing, the site of Toni Matt's flight over the headwall at 70 mph in the 1932 Inferno Race. He doesn't care that on any springtime Saturday as many as 2,000 people will carry skis and snowboards and kegs of beer up this three-mile trail on the side of Mt. Washington. He doesn't care because he's a kid and hiking is always more work than you think and this hike in particular is too much.

And as I try to tell him that's the magic of Tuckerman, that its challenge is part of its reward, he stops. And glares. If he thought he could get away with it, he'd curse.

Perhaps we should turn around and head for lunch in North Conway.

The hike up Tuckerman Ravine was my idea. Growing up in New England, I'd spent many a cool, windy summer day treading the trails on Mt. Washington. As a high school student, I'd hiked the ravine with friends to plot how we'd ski that 50-degree pitch (so steep your elbows could touch the snow) if we had the guts. As a UNH sophomore, I finally had the guts and celebrated my last exam in the spring with a few runs—and one tumble—down the bowl. What I didn't know as I flew, both vertically and horizontally, past the crowd lounging on the "lunch rocks" and the line of skiers trudging up, was that I had joined an unnamed, unorganized, unofficial but very passionate UNH club.

For decades, thousands of UNH students and alums have made—and still make—the springtime pilgrimage to this formidable outdoor playground carved into the southeast shoulder of the Northeast's tallest peak. To be sure, plenty of people visit "Tucks," as its admirers call it, the rest of the year for summer and fall hiking and deep winter backcountry skiing. But every natural wonder has its season of glory, and for Tuckerman Ravine that season is late March to early June when the bottomless snows melt enough to ease the threat of avalanche and the sun warms the air.

For many, it is a rite of passage; you can't call yourself a skier until you've stood at the top of the headwall, your ski tips cantilevered over the edge, your heart in your throat, and then careen down the pitch so steep you wonder if you can turn. Although he had skied glaciers in France and Paradise at Mad River Glen, Tim McCaffery '00, '02G felt that he needed Tuckerman on his ski rŽsumŽ during his first year as a graduate student. "I was only doing it," McCaffery says, "to end the question, 'You haven't skied Tuckerman?'"

For others, it is a chance to pump the adrenaline and test the ski skills. After spending their undergraduate years skiing the bowl and some of the popular gullies carved into its side, Jim Jelmberg '67, '71G, '86G, '93G and his ATO brother Dick Knight '67 braved the fiercely steep and narrow Dodge's Drop in May 1970. After skiing the Drop successfully—bare-chested and in shorts—Jelmberg says, "It never occurred to me not to return to Tuckerman each spring."

Some view a trip to Tuckerman as an escape, a "mental checkout," according to Cary Kilner '95G, who says "our cares, anxieties and petty concerns drop away as we really live for a few hours."

Yet that "living" comes at a price. The price of lugging a backpack weighted with skis, perhaps a snowboard, boots and lunch up the three-mile trail to the ravine, and then carting skis and boards up 800 vertical feet to the top of the headwall, step by step, toehold by toehold. The price of knowing that as you plot your descent, one wrong turn, one bad decision could mean the difference between what Al Sanborn '53 calls "the thrill of a lifetime" and the end of a lifetime. Of the 139 people who have died on Mt. Washington, 31 perished in Tuckerman Ravine.

"The dual nature of this revered place is defined by its great beauty," says Jelmberg, "and its great danger."

And the attempt to conquer that danger, to survive the contest, to learn the lessons that contest will teach, is at the heart of the lure of Tuckerman Ravine.

To understand the ravine named after the botanist Edward Tuckerman is to understand its geography. It's as if all the elements for a screaming ski run were considered when the glaciers melted, scooping up tons of mountainside and positioning this earthly amphitheater to benefit from what many call the worst weather in the world.

The 6,288-foot summit of Mt. Washington, as most New Hampshire residents will proudly tell you, peaks at the intersection of three major storm tracks, which results in cold (as low as minus 113 degrees Fahrenheit) and moisture (an average of 21 feet of snow annually in the upper elevations). Mt. Washington also holds the record for the highest wind—231 miles per hour—measured anywhere on the planet.

Perched less than half a mile beneath Mt. Washington's treeless summit, Tuckerman Ravine acts as a catch basin, collecting the snow blowing off the cone and upper snowfields as well as snows from the surrounding Presidential Range. Beginning in late autumn, the snow begins to fall and blow and build in earnest, burying the ravine with depths of up to 100 feet by January. While nearby Huntington Ravine receives the same assault, its pitch is steeper, forcing the snow to slide off. Through mid to late spring, Tuckerman is a bowl of uninterrupted white. As late as July, there's often enough snow left in the gullies to ski.

It's little wonder, then, that when men began exploring Mt. Washington on skis at the turn of the 20th century, Tuckerman became the favored destination. At first, skiers stuck to the gentler slope of the lower bowl. But in April 1931, two Dartmouth alums who had competed on the U.S. Olympic ski team skied over the headwall and down the bowl. Not to be outdone, a week later a group of Harvard skiers became the first to ski from the summit down over the headwall and into the bowl. All of Tuckerman, then, became fair game. New routes—Left Gully, Center Gully South, Center Gully North, Hillman's Highway, the Sluice—were discovered. Improvements were made. The narrow path through the forest to the ravine was widened to 12 feet. Then a different trail, named after John H. Sherburne Jr., who founded the Ski Club Hochgebirge in Franconia (which has housed the UNH ski team for portions of many a winter), was cut to allow skiers a separate route down to their cars. Once you've skied Sherburne to your car, says Derek Wallace '76, you'll never want to hike down again.

And then came the races, culminating with 19-year-old Toni Matt's legendary schuss from the summit to Pinkham Notch in six minutes, 29.2 seconds in the last American Inferno race. (Matt thought he'd passed the steep part when he hit Tuckerman's headwall, and, without a turn, flew over the lip at a terrifying speed.) Tuckerman was in the news. And as the decades passed and skiing became a sport for the masses and not just the elite, the path to Tuckerman became clogged with skiers as soon as Cannon and Wildcat and Cranmore closed for the season.

In the spring of 1943, when Nancy Hubbe '99G was a high school junior, she accompanied her older brother to the ravine for a week of skiing. The light snow that began on their first day became a blizzard. Sleeping in the lean-to was cold, she remembers, so she wore layers of ski clothing inside her Army surplus sleeping bag. Later Hubbe stayed dry in HoJos, the lodge at Hermit Lake, selling hot chocolate. In those early days, HoJos offered shelter and food for skiers (today it houses a forest ranger and information). When Hubbe's brother slashed his wrist as he chopped firewood, he skied down to Pinkham Notch to be tended by a doctor. Still, despite the cold, the snow and the injury, Hubbe remembers that when the weather cleared and her brother returned, they enjoyed "a beautiful week climbing up and skiing down, not always landing upright."

For many, tackling Tuckerman is not like childbirth; you don't forget the pain. John Poole '00 hasn't forgotten the lost foothold on the headwall and the slide all the way down the bowl on his back clutching his skis. Michael Pompian '86 hasn't forgotten his horizontal trip down when he was felled by a tumbling skier. Kilner hasn't forgotten watching a friend skid down the slope on his bottom towards a 10-foot crevasse and field of boulders before steering himself into some low brush, screaming.

But there's little comfort in others' misery for my son Luke. Both he and his 10-year-old brother were game for this summertime introduction to the slope they hope to one day ski. They have heard my Tuckerman stories. They have viewed Mt. Washington from the car, from lakeside beaches, from ski peaks. When this adventure was proposed, Luke planned to hike beyond the headwall to the summit. Jordan wasn't so sure, arguing that finishing in time for lunch in North Conway might be nice.

Yet, as we climb above treeline, roles reverse. Jordan is hot, but as he sees the top of the headwall inching closer, he senses the victory he loves so much in sports. Luke, however, rebels. His face is flushed, his strawberry-blonde hair matted with sweat. He wipes beads of water from his glasses, mumbling a litany of complaints that flows faster than the Cutler River beside us.

"I want to be hit with a fire hose."

"I wish I could fly."

And my favorite: "Where's the conveyor belt to the top?"

It's not that he doesn't like activity. He plays soccer and basketball and lacrosse, and loves to swim. But if offered a choice, he'd recline with a book. Once, a teacher assigned Luke and his classmates to write about their favorite place. He wrote about our couch. All of a sudden, for Luke, scaling Tuckerman Ravine in particular and Mt. Washington in general seems overwhelming.

"Sometimes," I say, "you have to push yourself to see what you can do." Once again, he stops, and glares. "Please stop talking, Mom," Jordan says. "You're wasting energy."

On this Friday in late August, the weather is so perfect—sunny, light wind, warm, clear enough to see almost all the way to the Atlantic Ocean—that it's hard to imagine any ill could happen in this glacial cirque. It's hard to envision the brutal weather swings that create perilous conditions for hikers and climbers and skiers. UNH ski coach Kurt Simard '91 remembers one April trip that began sunny and warm in Pinkham Notch but became snowy and bitter in the bowl. The good news: They skied eight inches of new powder. Brent Bell '89, '05G has experienced every kind of weather—sunny and warm, cold and snowy, so foggy he could barely see his ski tips. Only once, though, were the conditions so miserable that he failed to take a run.

Without the snow, it's hard to envision the avalanches that have killed six people. Because of the vast amount of snow it receives and because of its slope, Tuckerman Ravine is ripe for snow slides, which occur when an upper layer of snow fails to bond with the snow layer beneath. The trigger can be human—someone disturbing the snow, or natural—warm sun melting the top layer, high winds, an abrupt temperature change. Whatever the reason, Tuckerman's 40- to 50-degree pitch is "perfect for avalanches," says Joe Klementovich '95, who works as a photographer in North Conway and volunteers on the Mountain Rescue Service.

In the decades that Klementovich has spent hiking and skiing Tuckerman, he has avoided avalanches, but he has witnessed the aftermath. In December 2003, he hiked up to the ravine to take photos and saw where the snow had slid, filling the bottom of the bowl with "stove-sized chunks of snow." Eight hours earlier, he says, "someone would have been killed."

The risk of avalanche dims in the spring as the snow melts, but Chris Joosen, a ranger for the U.S. Forest Service who spends nearly every day between Nov. 1 and June 1 in Tuckerman Ravine, maintains his avalanche warning system—on Web sites, at the Appalachian Mountain Club visitor center in Pinkham Notch, at Hermit Lake Shelter—until the snow is gone.

Of greater threat in spring is ice. Each year tons of ice form on the headwall, in the gullies, and on large swatches of the bowl. As the sun melts the snow, it also melts the ice. But it leaves the ravine in chunks, not in gentle drips. The first death in Tuckerman, in fact, was from falling ice. On July 24, 1886, 15-year-old Sewall Faunce was killed when the infamous "Snow Arch"—a bridge of ice and snow—collapsed as he stood underneath.

While skiers and hikers are warned relentlessly to stay away from the Snow Arch and icy ledges, flying ice chunks are an integral part of a Tuckerman trek. One spring day during her senior year, Cindy Conlin '92 stopped at the lunch rocks for a break after skiing one of the chutes. While the lunch rocks are the most popular spot to observe other skiers, they are also in a direct line from ice breaking off the ravine's center wall and the Sluice. "Not a great place to sit," says Joosen.

Conlin was wise; she watched for ice. And when she saw a skier dodge a piece the size of a dishwasher, she looked for a rock to hide behind. She was safe, but the ice chunk rolled over a 5-year-old boy as he ran to his mother. He was bruised and scared, but otherwise—miraculously—okay. "All of a sudden the danger was so real," Conlin says.

Dave Cohen '54 suffered his own near-collision with ice on his first trip to the ravine three years after he left UNH. He says he wanted to see "if I could handle a slope that dropped faster than it progressed horizontally." He heard the bang, then the thumps as he scaled the headwall. A man-sized chunk of ice rolled towards him. He and the line of skiers moved sideways. It rolled past. He skied down in "10 long scary seconds" and packed up. Still, he returned again the next year. "It's the adventure," he says.

As we scramble up rocks and a narrow dirt path, I assess the gamble. If Luke rises to the challenge, he could gain the confidence that comes with achievement. But if he crumbles, he could hate hiking forever—and me temporarily. Or worse.

We have achieved our initial goal: We reach Tuckerman Ravine. Walking into its floor, we look up and soak in its magnitude, its stunning cliffs, its waterfall. But as we look to the top of the headwall, the half-circle lip looming above, we realize that we haven't conquered the ravine. Looking into it is not the same as looking down it. We vote. All but Luke elect to forge ahead.

The higher we hike on this trail up the ravine's side, the steeper the terrain. Luke plods on silently. I mention that Henry David Thoreau sprained his ankle as he traversed the ravine, and that his Native American guide started a fire and burned a swath of forest on the ravine floor.

Luke doesn't respond.

I think of Cary Kilner, who believes that "you should push yourself into the abyss when it presents itself." Challenging ourselves makes us more appreciative, aware. "It's part of why we go outdoors in the first place," he says.

I think of the spectacle that awaits skiers and boarders on a warm spring Saturday. I think of skiers in shorts and T-shirts. Skiers in bikinis. Skiers in nothing at all. I think of people sliding down the bowl in shovels, in canoes, on inner tubes. I think of all this as we reach the top of the headwall, as we turn and breathe in the view that reaches to the coast. From here, we can see the hikers in the ravine floor, looking up. From here, we can see the summit, so close you can almost touch the Mt. Washington Observatory's tower. Jordan is ready to push on, to say he's climbed Mt. Washington. I watch Luke. His shirt is soaked with sweat, his glasses foggy. He drinks in the ravine's height, the ravine's depth, the accomplishment.

"Let's go to the top," he says.

And we do.

Sue Hertz '78 is a UNH associate professor of journalism. Her articles have appeared in Redbook, Parenting, House Beautiful, Boston Magazine, New England Monthly Magazine, Boston Globe Magazine and other publications.