When Mali Noyes got on the phone with me on April 17, she was spent. Her exhaustion, miraculously, wasn’t from the physical effort of her latest project: skiing every line in the famous Utah backcountry skiing guidebook The Chuting Gallery, by Andrew Mclean, as fast as possible; she was frazzled by the mental toll of exposing herself to hazards and dangerous terrain day in and day out.
“The mental fatigue is so intense that it’s hard to wrap my head around,” Noyes told Outside.
Noyes, 35, works as a pro re nata nurse (an on-call schedule) at the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City. After clocking out of a shift on Tuesday, March 11, she began her skiing objective—which she calls “Project Rapid Fire”—early the next morning.
Noyes skinned up Broad Fork in Big Cottonwood Canyon and skied down the east face of Twin Peak, followed by the Stairs Gulch. The standout lines were highlights due to the beautiful exposed skiing, and massive vertical drop down the gulch. She immediately began ticking off technical, steep, and hazardous ski descents up and down the Wasatch mountain range. When we spoke, she had skied 77 lines in 37 days, including just seven rest days.
“The crux for me hasn’t been the vert,” Noyes told Outside. “My brain has been doing so much decision making day after day, skiing objective hazards. I feel a little trapped in the process.”
The Chuting Gallery was published in 1998 while McLean was working as an engineer at Black Diamond. The book has become the quintessential document of the Utah backcountry skiing scene, and anyone who skis every descent in the book cements their name in ski history. Caroline Gleich was catapulted into the spotlight after becoming the first woman to ski every line in the book. The book details 90 of the hardest backcountry ski lines in the Wasatch Mountains that loom over Salt Lake City. Many skiers argue over the final number of chutes, since the book often describes areas that are home to multiple couloirs. Noyes has determined her number to be 93.
“Andrew McLean’s writing and book captured my imagination,” Gleich told Backcountry magazine. “It gave me a roadmap to becoming a ski mountaineer. His quirky book became a shaping force in my career, and I’m grateful for his leadership and vision in writing The Chuting Gallery.”
Noyes’ idea to ski all 93 lines in succession was born during the 2023 winter, when Utah received over 900 inches of snow. “I was having so much fun skiing big objectives, and I started linking up more and more of them at once,” Noyes said. Also a professional big mountain skier, Noyes began her athletic career as a Nordic ski racer. “I just love long days, and the logistical and strategic challenge of skiing all 93 couloirs in The Chuting Gallery in record time excited me.”
Prior to launching her project, Noyes shared the idea with fellow professional backcountry skier Cody Townsend, who is her mentor and teammate on the Salomon backcountry team. She told Townsend she was waiting for the right year for this project. Noyes wanted all the snow conditions to align perfectly. Some of the Chuting Gallery ski lines descend rocky and exposed terrain, and require a deep snowpack to be skiable.
But Townsend told her she’d never find the perfect year, and that she should take on the challenge as soon as possible. “It’s through the suffering and bad snow conditions that you make the experience your own,” he said to Noyes.
The March 12 start date was less than ideal. Noyes started so late in the season because she was waiting for avalanche danger in the Wasatch to subside. The late start didn’t hamper her early in her mission, but as she kept ticking off chutes and March rolled into April, the remaining ski descents melted quickly.
Many of these ski lines are clustered in the same drainages, but while in years past Noyes has been able to complete multiple descents in a day, this year, the hot April sun shortened the windows during which those couloirs would be safe from wet avalanches. This means that Noyes has only been able to ski one or two of those chutes in a day. She has had to repeatedly bushwack and hike far into gullies that on a different year she’d only have to visit once.
“A week ago I slipped in a creek on the way to the Y-Couloir in Little Cottonwood Canyon. I broke down and began to cry,” Noyes said. “I wondered if I still loved skiing, and why I was skiing this shitty snow over here instead of great snow elsewhere because of this list.”
But Noyes has a new strategy to deal with the mental crux. “Every time I scream and tell myself ‘I fucking hate this,’ I’ve tricked my brain into saying ‘I’m really fucking good at this.’” And she is. Noah Howell, a legendary Wasatch skier, took 13 years to complete the guidebook. Caroline Gleich skied every line in The Chuting Gallery over the course of four years. Noyes is on track to finish out the book in less than two months.
She’s had great days, like when she linked three lines on Kesler Peak in Big Cottonwood Canyon in stable powder. “It was a 10,000-foot day with a good crew and great snow,” Noyes said. She owns a home nestled in Little Cottonwood Canyon, and hasn’t explored the neighboring canyon enough. She told Outside that this project has been an amazing way to branch out of her skiing bubble. Noyes also skied the Great White Icicle—a popular ice climb that is in the book as a novelty and is often skied on rappel—on snowblades at night. Noyes jokingly called that a first descent of its kind.
But it hasn’t been all bluebird powder days. “I had a week where I had three close calls in four days,” she said. “That felt like it broke my brain a little, like ‘I have to keep going back into these mountains that are trying to kill me.’”
Her least favorite day of the project so far was when she skied Lisa Falls with New Zealand pro skier Sam Smoothy. The ski line is at a relatively low elevation, and the very top of it commonly avalanches and collects windblown snow. “It’s a complicated 5,000-foot approach, and the second the sun hits the face it can shed,” she said. Noyes and Smoothy began at 2 A.M., planning to climb the line, ski it, and climb it again to link up with faces on the other side of the peak. But Smoothy didn’t feel well that day and they were moving slower than they wanted. Sunlight hit the face when they were climbing and the couloir heated up quickly. “It was way more danger than I ever wanted to put myself in,” she said. The skiers were able to descend safely, but they saw many natural avalanches on their way out of the canyon.
Her latest lines have looked the hardest, as a melting snowpack has revealed multiple rappels with sketchy-looking anchors in the middle of the couloirs that are sometimes fully skiable. “Ropes slow things down, and they can create other hazards” Noyes told Outside. “Two days after Lisa Falls, I went into Hogum Fork to ski a line called Montgomery, which had a rappel at the bottom. But we couldn’t find an anchor, and it took so long that the snow heated up and started shedding.”
Noyes lamented that if she hadn’t been chasing this project, she would never have been in that spot. But she said days like that provide good teachable moments. She’s been getting up even earlier, often at 1 A.M. to beat the heat.
Risk to life and limb is just one aspect of her stress. Noyes told Outside that her cat, Beater, has been a source of concern. After a coyote ate a neighbor’s cat, Beater hasn’t been allowed out at night. But at 1 A.M., Noyes isn’t always alert enough to stop him from slipping out of the door. “He’d snuck out the night we left for Lisa Falls, and I’d be lying if I said he wasn’t adding to the pure stress I felt that day,” she said. “I saw him dashing into the woods, and all I could do was tell him, ‘Make good choices, bud.’”
When asked about how she’s been able to maintain her motivation throughout the challenge, Noyes is quick to credit the large group of friends, most of whom are professional skiers, who have rallied to ski these couloirs with her. “Skiing is not an individual sport,” Noyes told Outside. “This isn’t a Mali project, it’s a community project.”
Noyes has to work a minimum of two days a month at the Huntsman Institute to fulfill her contract. She’s hoping to finish Project Rapid Fire with enough time to clock back in for two days in April.
At the time of publication, Noyes has completed 88 of the 93 chutes in The Chuting Gallery in just 43 days.
The post This Nurse Is Skiing Utah’s Hardest Descents in Record Time appeared first on Outside Online.
