skier pinwheeling over an ice cliff—I turned out to be the only media present. (To be fair, one guy from New Hampshire Public Radio showed up, but he bailed about a third of the way up the trail.)

By the time we were climbing Tucks’s intimidating 800-foot headwall, our party had dwindled to four: Johnson and me, plus supporters Ryan Hunter, who is a competitive freeskier from Utah, and Mike Babcock, a lawyer who’d driven up from Brooklyn, New York, the day before and slept in his car at the trailhead. We ascended single file, ice axes in hand, in a frozen gully that was so steep I could look up and see Johnson’s boot soles.

The descent was worse. We made our way over to a vertiginous 50-degree runbefore stapling the end together.) By then, Johnson was a self-made millionaire, a recent governor, and an accomplished adventure hog. He and his wife at the time, Dee Simms, had settled in Taos, their two grown kids, Erik, 30, and Seah, 32, having long since left the nest.

Though much of Johnson’s pragmatic worldview had been honed by 20 years at the helm of his construction company, outdoor activity had taught him valuable lessons, too. One day, back when he was in his twenties and working as a ski instructor in northern Idaho, he was making laps on a practice giant-slalom course. He finished his first run in 35 seconds. His second run improved to 33 seconds. On the chairlift before the third lap, he decided to smoke a