TO GET THERE you follow Sixth Avenue out of Denver to Interstate 70, wind through Mount Vernon Canyon and up Floyd Hill, where the VWs wheeze up the steep grade, through Idaho Springs and Empire, then right at the fork onto U.S. 40. Forty takes you over the Continental Divide through Berthoud Pass at 11,300 feet, and from the summit of the pass it is just a matter of not doing anything stupid on the hairpin turns that slither down the mountainside like a resting rattlesnake.

This past Christmas Jim Bredar and I drove that route to Winter Park Ski Area in his old Toyota Jeep, as he had done hundreds of times before. The sky was overcast and it was freezing inside the jeep because the heater was busted and the windows didn't close all the way. We got to Winter Park around 8:30 a.m.--early, before the lifts started, because Jim was a senior ski patrolman and had to get instructions from the patrol leader before the mountain opened--and I was so numb I wondered if I could ski at all.

But the clouds broke. In fact, it was a beautiful day, the sky an unmarred shell of deep blue, the sunlight too bright, etching the dark green outline of each pine against the snowfields, the air so cold and so clear that the sight of the Indian Peak mountains to the northeast took your breath away. I skied with Jim and Mary Lyn Chapin and Nancy McKey, both friends of Jim's from the time in high school when he joined the Winter Park Junior Ski Patrol. Mary Lyn was a fast skier, as fast as Jim, and she looked the part, with blonde hair that fell past her shoulders and teeth that dazzled, when she smiled, like the reflecting sunglasses she wore.

That night the four of us dined together in Jim's cabin, drank wine, ate peanuts and watched the pine and spruce wood fire while we ran our bare feet through the deep shag rug. Jim and Mary Lyn did most of the talking. They talked mainly about the Junior Patrol, to which they had both belonged, and about some of the people on it: Peter Fader, who saved a man's life once, Joe Ward, the hottest skier at Winter Park, and Bob Patterson, the patrol leader before Jim, Jim's best friend on the patrol, and Mary Lyn's lover for a year. Bob is dead now. He died at Colorado General Hospital very early on the morning of June 9, 1976.

JIM BREDAR was born in February, 1957. His parents moved to Colorado that year and got interested in skiing. "As we grew up," Jim says of his brothers and sisters, "they started each one of us. I messed around on skis when I was five and six; it was hardly skiing. I think the first time I rode a lift I was seven. I loved it right from the start." Jim and his siblings got pointers from their parents and friends, skied scared, skied out-of-control, skied cold, but skied. Gradually, Jim's skiing improved, and he began to ski with his older brother and his friends.

Some of them were on the junior ski patrol at Winter Park, and when Jim heard about patrolling and its responsibilities--watching for fallen skiers, providing first aid, packing the snow on unskied runs so they could be opened, and performing a painstaking "sweep" at day's end to make sure no one was hurt or lost on the mountain--he knew he wanted to join, too. He was 13 at the time; the minimum age for junior patrolmen is 15.

Two years later, a sophomore in high school, Jim had enough confidence in his skiing to attempt to join the patrol. "I wanted it so bad I could taste it," he said, "and I knew they would only take 15 people." After passing an endurance test, he took a written exam on first aid and ski patrol regulations, and passed with the second highest score. This qualified him for the skiing test: Jim had to demonstrate every technique of skiing, from stem christie to parallel to snowplow on a very steep slope, and ski every kind of snow--packed, powder, ice and crud--at high speed. He passed the skiing test with a low score, but not too low. Of the 65 people to tried to join, Jim's total score placed him in the top 15. He got on.

Jim spent almost every winter weekend patrolling. "My life really changed my sophomore year in high school. I just started living for the weekends. I started calculating everything in terms of how far it was from Friday night."

At first, the patrol appealed to Jim because of its image. "I liked being the guy on the hill who knew what he was doing. I liked giving people first aid. But I was always going in for dramatic things, and that was dramatic work," he says. So was the Alpine Rescue Team, a rock-climber rescue group Jim joined in the spring of his sophomore year. "It was really neat stuff. Neat equipment to work with, and it's really slick to pull someone off the rock. It's a gas to be hanging out there, with your ass over everything. You're all roped in, so nothing's going to happen to you, and it looks cooler than hell.

"But membership in those two organizations didn't do very much for me socially, because I became less and less involved with anyone who wasn't involved with one of them. It was something that was cool not so much for everybody else but for myself."

Weekends were great. Saturday morning Jim and some of the other patrollers would drive up to Winter Park in Jim's jeep. There was real incentive not to be late; the last two arrivals had to sweep and mop the patrol room floor. They spent the day skiing with friends, free. "We had to wait in lift lines unless we skied with a senior patrolman, then we could cut the lift lines. The way to do that was to start skiing with a real foxy looking female junior. Then you'd get one of the 50-year-old seniors whose wife was giving him shit all the time, and he'd ski with you all day long; you could cut lift lines all day."

"Or sometimes if they were administering a test at the area they would want us to be dummy accident victims, so we'd fake crackups, pile ourselves around trees, and they'd test senior trainees. We used to have fun really wrapping ourselves around things, to make it a tough accident."

At the end of the day the junior, senior and professional patrolmen swept the mountain--skied every trail, open or closed--looking for injured skiers. Then the senior and professional patrolmen filtered out to their homes for the night, and the juniors had the patrol room to themselves. "We'd mess around. Sometimes people would do homework. A lot of grabass went on, a lot of dope smoking and some drinking. No adult really had too much control. There was a caretaker who lived up there, but he didn't give us any shit if we behaved ourselves as far as noise. Around 5 p.m. we'd all pile into a car, go down to the highway somewhere and eat dinner. Then a lot of the guys who were 17 and 18 would go into town and try to sneak into bars. But I was usually content just to sit around and bullshit; and crash out around nine.

"It used to get a little exciting sometimes when the sheriff would pull into the parking lot. These guys would all be in the patrol room smoking like crazy, and somebody would have to go out and say 'How you doing Sheriff Henderson? Howseverythingtonight?' He'd say, 'Hi, you guys staying up here again?' 'Yeah.' 'Well, everything okay in there?' And you'd say, 'Yeah, no problems.' Then he'd get back into the car and leave, and you're sweating, dropping bricks, afraid he's going to come inside and look around, and that would be it for everybody."

Sunday morning everyone got up and patrolled. The weekend was often capped by a grand prix of sorts that evening: the six or seven cars carrying junior patrollers raced each other over Berthoud Pass, drove into Empire and stopped in a restaurant for ice cream or shakes together. Since the patrol drew people from all over Denver, the group split up there. "And you'd start looking forward to next weekend."