The constant push and pull of a mountain guide

On a cloudy day in mid-February 2016, Zahan Billimoria emerged from the darkness the only way he knew how: skiing in the remote northern mountains of Grand Teton National Park. That day, Zahan, a mountain guide in Exum better known as Z, along with Exum President and fellow guide Nat Patridge, skinned nearly three miles across the frozen Jackson Lake, then climbed 1,500 vertical meters to the top of a mountain and scrambled another 1000 feet up a ridge that would take them to a second summit, before skiing and backcountry skiing back to their car parked in Colter Bay. It was 14 miles in a single day, with difficult route finding, little powder, little sun, and no one else around in the vast, unobstructed landscape.

This was exactly the kind of alpine adventure Z normally lived for, the kind of day he had worked so hard for over so many years, to have the physique, skills, and risk assessment ability to achieve it, and for which he and his wife had sacrificed the promise and prospect of jobs on the East Coast to live in small mountain towns with no guarantee of housing, medical care, or income adequate to support a family.

But this adventure left Zahan, one of the most knowledgeable and strongest skiers and climbers in the Tetons, devastated. Over the past five years, he had lost some of his dearest friends and skiing partners. In 2010, his best friend, Wray Landon, was killed in an avalanche while skiing in South Teton. Two years later, Steve Romeo and Chris Onufer were killed in an avalanche while skiing a remote peak on the west side of Jackson Lake. In April 2015, AJ Linnell was killed in a plane crash near Challis, Idaho. Then, in May, Zahan had been involved in a ski mountaineering accident on the north face of Mt. Moran, also on the west side of Jackson Lake, where three of his friends, all fathers, had been caught in a snowslide while climbing an icy, steep couloir called The Sickle. Two of them died, leaving behind wives and children and opening a wound for the Jackson community. This trip with Partridge was the first time since that accident that Zahan was back in high alpine terrain.

On the ascent, Patridge and his companions ski touring past Romeo and Onufer's last resting place. From the mountaintop, they could see The Sickle, where their friends Luke Lynch and Stephen Adamson had perished despite Z's best efforts to save them. Patridge, whose friend Hans Saari had died on a ski trip to Chamonix in 2002, had struggled for years with his own demons as a result of the loss.

“Toward the end of the day with Nat, we were climbing this little gorge to reach Eagle’s Rest Ridge,” says Zahan, 42, in a recent interview from his home in Jackson. “I was kicking and pushing hard up this gorge, gripped by terror and fear. I couldn’t imagine a narrative about the future that didn’t involve the mountain collapsing and with it, our deaths. When we reached the top of the ridge, my knees buckled, and the world completely collapsed.”

Although painful, the experience helped Z gain the strength to move forward. It helped him recalibrate his relationships with the guiding profession, his wife, his two children, and the ever-important assessment of risk.

But the unanswered question is how someone who had built his life and his ties around the love of the mountains and who had seen so many friends die in that environment, could continue down such a fragile path.

In the years before and after 2010, Zahan was giving it his all, as he says, five to seven days a week. That is, relentlessly pursuing his passion for being in the mountains (skiing, climbing, running), which naturally helped him make a name for himself as a guide in a community famous for its long history of setting the standard for mountain guides in the United States: Paul Petzoldt, Kim Schmitz, Bill Briggs, Alex Lowe, Doug Coombs, among many others.

At the time, Zahan and his wife Kim were living in Driggs, Idaho, the small rural town on the west side of the Tetons. They had met as freshmen at Gordon College, a small humanities school near Boston. Since they had both grown up outside the United States—Zahan in Switzerland to Indian parents and Kim in Tanzania, the daughter of missionary parents—they had much in common. “We met on the first day of our international studies class at 8 a.m.,” Kim says. “To break the ice, you had to turn around and meet the person behind you. And when I turned around, the person behind me was Zahan.”

He was very formal. “We used to tease him for wearing sleeveless sweaters and slicking his hair back to class,” she continues. They both started getting involved in outdoor activities, rock climbing and skiing on the weekends.

At 23, Zahan was running the outdoor program for an elite prep school north of Boston. But Boston was nowhere near the grand mountains he'd dreamed of as a child. Right after high school, most of Zahan's friends went on a parent-sponsored trip to Greece, but his parents knew that was a waste of money, so they offered to send him to the mountains. This decision led to a climbing trip with legendary French mountain guide Christophe Profit, an opportunity that solidified Zahan's dream of making a living as a mountain guide. That wasn't going to happen in Boston, and Zahan realized life was too short. He knew exactly what he had to do: move to the Tetons and become an Exum guide.

In 2003, Zahan and Kim packed their belongings and moved to Driggs. The short-term plan was to work at the Grand Targhee Resort, get season passes, and ski as much as possible. But by then, Zahan's clean-cut image was gone, replaced by long dreadlocks. That was the reason Targhee refused to hire him; they said dreadlocks didn't meet their standards of personal presentation.

To make ends meet, Zahan took on three jobs. He started Language School Z to teach Spanish to adults, mostly commuters or construction workers looking to better connect with Latino communities. With his gift for languages, he also worked in the Spanish program for The Learning Academy, a school for children from kindergarten through fifth grade, and at Teton Literacy in Jackson, teaching English to undocumented immigrants and other Spanish speakers. Kim says Zahan has always shown a great affection for children and, as a person of color in a predominantly white community, felt a deep connection with his Latino students. His warm and caring nature has always made him a natural teacher, whether the subject is language studies with children, avalanche courses with skiers, or guiding adults on the Grand Teton. And somehow, that same community spirit has kept him in the mountains, because while it's about the summits and the adventures, for him, it's always been about the people, too.

In 2005, their son Alyosha was born, and Zahan began competing in ski touring races, eventually joining the U.S. Ski Mountaineering Team three years later. To improve his transition times between ski touring and skiing, he would ask Kim to time him running back and forth across their backyard at night.

“That was two seconds faster!” Kim would shout in the middle of the cold night with a headlamp on her head. “Well done!”

Meanwhile, he also began guiding for Yöstmark Backcountry Tours, a Driggs-owned guiding service. But with a growing family, he knew he needed a more stable job. He kept knocking on Exum's door without success and applied for a communications position at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort.

In 2009, the same week the resort offered her the job, Exum sent her the coveted invitation to be a ski guide. She asked her supervisor in the ski area if she could do both. Her supervisor said no. She did it anyway and started working seven days a week, driving over Teton Pass every day to get to work, a 75-mile round trip. On her way there, at the pass, she would meet Landon at 5:30 a.m., and they would put on their headlamps to ascend and ski as high as possible before the workday began. Regardless of, but always mindful of, the weather and conditions.

The previous year, he and Kim had welcomed their daughter, Gemma, into the world. Full-time dad. Full-time jobs. Full-time travel. Full-time skiing. It was a tiring routine, but Zahan was motivated. He was building his life, developing relationships in the ski industry while establishing his guiding style and clientele, and taking good care of his family.

Then, on Sunday, February 21, 2010, Landon died when an avalanche swept him down a 240-meter cliff on the South Teton. Landon and Zahan had become friends running, and he had been a major influence on Zahan's perspective on mountain fitness. A quiet, unassuming man who had worked in conservation efforts in Idaho, Landon would literally run up the Grand Teton after work on summer nights, just to feel the sun-warmed rocks at the summit. For Zahan, this habit demonstrated Landon's superhuman endurance, but it also showed his attention to the small, delicate things that made him such a special companion.

When Landon died, I was the editor of Powder magazine and was preparing for the magazine's annual ski testing week in Jackson Hole. For the preceding months, I had worked with Zahan to set up the logistics for the approximately 100 people who planned to attend. I certainly noticed that Z, the resort's PR manager, wore lightweight Dynafit touring boots while skiing in Teton Village and that, despite the gear, he was still a better skier than I was. When he didn't show up that Sunday, I was upset. Then I heard the news about the avalanche, and when Z walked into the demonstration tent on Monday, I could see the anguish on his face.

Looking back on the accident now, Zahan says Landon's death was the first time he experienced the devastating consequences of taking risks, even though he hadn't been skiing with Landon that day. Until then, all his experiences on the mountain had been on the upside of risk. He'd turned around many times, but he'd never felt that crushing blow that shows you just how bad things could get if you made a mistake.

“That was the first time, as well as when Luke and Stephen died, that I really asked myself: Does this still make sense? Do you still want your life to be about this?” he says.

Deeply shaken, Zahan took time to reflect on the accident and what it meant for his personal and professional goals. He decided that becoming a fully capable skier, able to make challenging and often subtly nuanced decisions in the mountains, would eventually mean leaving his job at the resort and moving to Jackson to avoid commutes, live closer to the big mountains he wanted to ski, and finally focus solely on guiding. To become an accomplished student of the mountains.

Two years later, Romeo and Onufer died. Emotionally devastated, Zahan carried on, with some resilience but still restless. In 2012, Teton Gravity Research (TGR) hired him to teach their annual avalanche course focused on athletes and audiovisual production. TGR then selected him as the lead guide for numerous films, including Jeremy Jones's Deeper, Further, Higher series, during which he guided Jones down the Otter Body route on the Grand Teton, one of the most difficult and dangerous descents on the massif due to its extreme exposure.

That winter his phone rang nonstop; people wanted to hire him to guide them down the iconic summit. “I could have booked guided descents on the Grand all year round,” he says. “And I loved it. I thought I’d finally made it. I could ski every day all winter and get paid for it.”

"Now it's like... let me think about it for a while."

Just like music, boot size, and the taste of anchovies, risk tolerance is highly personal. You can't tell someone to love reggae (which Zahan is passionate about); you can't make someone wear just any old boots; and you can't put anchovies in just anyone's salad. But those things won't kill you—mountains will—and even knowing that, the only person who can decide how much risk is too much is the one taking the plunge. People can argue about decisions, and certainly there are external factors (family, children, personal obligations) that must be weighed during any activity considered potentially dangerous.

Finding balance can boil down to the question of how much a person is willing to gain versus how much they have to lose. But risk is complicated; it adds excitement to life, but it can end it in the blink of an eye. The answers aren't simple. But there are plenty of people who decided it wasn't worth it anymore. In Jackson alone, there are two county commissioners who have moved beyond a life of high-altitude risk to pursue the fast-paced and volatile world of politics in this resort town: Mark Newcomb, a pioneer of many great descents in the Tetons in the 1990s; and Greg Epstein, a former TGR producer who narrowly escaped death in an avalanche in the Jackson Hole lift-mountain off-piste area.

Zahan is as clear as anyone that skiing in the Tetons is objectively dangerous. In the high mountains, there are no runouts, only hundreds of vertical meters of exposure. If you misread the conditions or make a small mistake, the consequences can be disastrous, as Zahan experienced in Moran's accident. “It doesn't take much to cause an accident in the big mountains. But even if you take every precaution, sometimes you're just unlucky.”

The problem with skiing in avalanche terrain, he says, is that the only feedback you get is the kind that can kill you. “In every accident, there’s always someone who misjudged the situation, including me at the time,” he says. “But how much you misjudge the conditions isn’t necessarily proportional to the outcome. You could misjudge it just a little and have a fatal result. Or you could have made a terrible mistake and walked away unscathed, be having beers at the pub later, and not be any wiser.”

During the summer, I often see him on the local bike trails with Alyosha and Gemma. In the winter, he takes them skiing to instill in them his love for the wild. Alyosha enjoys ski jumping. Gemma likes dancing and horseback riding. When I asked him if he talks to his children about the dangers of the mountains, he shook his head.

“They already know too much,” he said. “They’ve already attended too many wakes and funerals.”

Although he says he now enjoys human interaction in the mountains as much as the wilderness, he still occasionally pursues a more radical adventure. He's in a constant state of tug-of-war: How can he chase big-mountain adventures while ensuring he doesn't overexert himself? In the spring of 2019, on a gloriously blue day in Jackson, I met Zahan ski touring on Snow King Mountain, the steep hill overlooking the town. He told me he was planning a trip and pulled out his phone to show me a picture of the enormous, striated face of a 6,400-meter mountain in Bolivia.

A few months later, he and a small team attempted to climb and ski that face as part of a mission to ski five summits in two weeks. Less than 30 meters from the top, they turned back to avoid a thunderstorm. They skied the other four summits anyway.

I asked him why, considering everything that had happened, he would choose to go to Bolivia to ski dangerous mountains in the middle of nowhere. He looked at me and gave me the simplest, yet most eloquent, explanation of all.

“Because it’s what I love to do,” she said.

A couple of times a week during the winter, Zahan meets two friends at 5:30 a.m. at the base of Snow King. They head out with headlamps and straight to their bindings to ski down the nearly 480 vertical meters of the mountain as fast as they can. It's so tough and they go so fast that they can't breathe and their eyes feel like they're popping out of their heads. They finish after almost an hour and return home in time to make breakfast for their families, like a golden retriever who's chased a tennis ball a thousand times and can now relax.

However, he remains a big-mountain climber, whose deep desire to explore windswept ridges and challenging terrain cannot be satisfied by just a small snowy hill. During the coronavirus-shortened winter of 2019-20, Zahan skied in British Columbia, Wasatch, Italy, and Austria. In BC, two high-risk encounters, a week apart, brought him back to the crushing reality of what can happen when conditions are misinterpreted.

“There are no simple answers to surviving a life in the high mountains,” he says. “If you don’t persevere, you could end up skiing in powder with little vertical drop all the time. And that might be fine if that’s how you’re wired. But being wired the way I am, I’ve always wanted something bigger, something more challenging, something more terrifying. So you have to balance the persistence to push further with accepting reality as it is. Not forcing it.”

In the coastal mountains of BC, he admits to pushing it. A week of bad weather had closed his skiing berths. When it reopened, he says, he let his mind and emotions write the script instead of the mountains. And that miscalculation resulted in a well-judged escape.

“I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life focused on the mountain environment,” he said. “These accidents make me think I should spend the next 15 with my thoughts focused on the human environment.”

In the days, weeks, and months since leaving British Columbia, he continues to grapple with the emotional and physical challenges of being a family skier, searching for answers by going to the mountains. Now, instead of rushing into the next big adventure, he lets the feeling settle for a few days while attending Alyosha's football matches or taking Gemma horseback riding.

Kim, who has been with him throughout all of this, continues to support him.

“We’ve reached a point where he’s so passionate, and it feeds his soul in such a profound way, that I would never ask him not to take that risk,” she says. “I think he’s honed his skills and is striving to be as safe as possible, knowing he’s a fallible human being in a wild environment. But he also brings so much joy to the other people he’s with. It’s a powerful combination, so I support him.”

Zahan has also launched Samsara Experience, a community training platform for high-performance athletes. His method is rooted in movement science and the study of the fascia system, and he has developed a system designed to transform the strength and endurance of mountain athletes. Everything takes place in his immaculately organized garage, which he has converted into his own dojo. A custom-built climbing wall boasts 130 holds. Ropes and other equipment hang neatly from hooks. Samsara, an Indian word referring to the cycle of death and rebirth, is what he calls a "handrail" to the future—something to hold onto that takes some of the pressure off high-altitude adventures.

Last winter, between sessions on the wall, he told me he was still looking for the right balance.

“I’m going to seek out wild places and large, exposed terrain, knowing that my equipment, my skills, my physical condition, my skiing ability, all those things, are being used to carry out a mission. I’m still looking for that.”

“Tomorrow we’re going to ski the Grand. I think it’s a bit premature, but if we can go to the mountains with that mindset and take a look, it’s easy to turn back. But sometimes you get lucky and, if you’re in the right place, you can try.”