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and I had gone off this precipice

down a thousand feet.

""Well, that's Briggs

and he"s finished, right?""

Well, I drew a big turn

and I ski right up to my friends.

And they turn around and,

"Where did you come from?"

They didn't see me come through that at all.

They figured I was dead anyway.

And, all of a sudden, I reappear.

Bill descended more than 6,000 feet on skis.

It took him almost five hours

to reach the valley floor.

When I got to the bottom, I'm really tired.

I'm really physically beat

and...

Overjoyed.

I did it. Okay?

Man. This is...

This is the biggest thing I'll do in my life.

There were no witnesses

to Bill Briggs" achievement.

But the next day the proof was still etched

in the snow.

The editor of the local paper flew

with Bill around the summit.

She took four photographs.

And one of them was just a classic.

The beauty of the mountain,

enhanced a bit by human contact.

It was fabulous.

I don't know.

You dream up

what you want to accomplish

in your life and...

I don't know that many people get a chance

to fulfill that.

What that was...

I had at that point fulfilled a dream.

Totally.

I knew that someone had skied the Grand,

but I didn't know

what the Grand looked like.

So it just sort of, "Oh, yeah,

somebody skied the Grand."

And it was, you know, big news.

But I didn't really know what it was.

Doug Coombs was a teenager

growing up in Bedford, Massachusetts

when Bill Briggs skied the Grand.

The quote in his high school yearbook said,

"There is no such thing as too much snow. ""

Even when I was just a little tiny kid,

I would try to ski every day.

And where I live I could even

go skiing in my backyard.

My parents would flick the light on

and I'd ski at night.

You know, I could just go down

a little hill in the backyard.

It was flat as a pancake,

but it was icy because it was New England.

And I would just skate like a fiend

from the neighbor"s house

and then come down

through the other neighbor's house

and by the time I got to my house

I could do some turns.

No one ever said to me,

""Don't go off the trail. ""

We were off-piste skiing

when I was seven, 10.

I just didn't think of it as that. I just thought

it was going through the trees.

And then we'd go down riverbeds

and things like that and jump off waterfalls.

I just thought it was normal.

I grew up skiing maple trees in Vermont,

birch trees in Vermont.

Sometimes we weren't even on the ground.

We were skiing branches

and calling it good skiing.

We weren't even touching the snow.

You're not skiing the ground,

you just ski the trees.

If someone said you have to ski

at a ski area for the rest of your life...

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