Ski Bum Quotes

it’s not what you do but how you do it.

The unconscious meandering led him unconsciously to the water—his body made of it, his soul called by it.

listen to the sway of the tree and breathe the dances of the star.

Continue to lead from the front. Do what must be done.

from Goethe, “‘Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.

All I know,” continued Mike the mustached ski bum, “is that a world with more human light than starlight doesn’t feel like a good thing.

My first vegetable garden was in a hard-packed dirt driveway in Boulder, Colorado. I was living in a basement apartment there, having jumped at the chance to come out West with a friend in his Volkswagen Bug, fleeing college and inner-city Philadelphia. I was twenty, hungry for experience, and fully intending to be a ski bum in my new life. But it didn’t turn out that way.

At its best, skiing distills life to one run at a time, a two-thousand foot burn from top-to-bottom--the world becomes a single mountainside-- your tracks behind you, your past, and the untracked snow ahead your future with the endless possibilities of trees, bumps, cliffs, and groomers. Each chairlift ride is resurrection.

Sometimes the good parts and the hard ones are so close together—like the inhale and exhale of the same breath.

If the rush never really ends, why not try to escape it? Escape it for a simpler way of things, a slower way of things.

Powder over power.

it is every human being’s right, every once in a while, to get lost. For if you never get lost, what can you ever truly find?

doing what they’d choose to do today if tomorrow it would all be gone.

Passion over paychecks.

realize the uncaged animal inside human form.

From the mountains to the sea, this world is sacred.

A community of trees,’” he mused from some song he may once have heard, “‘is better than a community of buildings.

construct lives around feeding a passionate hunger,

Big parties were sacred things in the valley, gatherings, times for exchanging ideas and getting closer to God.

Let go and seek solace in yourself. Go like the water goes.

Right now, you are right here. Don’t let some unimportant, elsewhere thing rob you of it.

When in doubt, air it out,

It is only when a thing is never tried that it is never achieved,

I have always noticed in high school yearbooks the similarity of all the graduate write-ups—how, after only a few pages, the identities of all the unsullied young faces blur, how one person melts into another and another: Susan likes to eat at Wendy’s; Donald was on the basketball team; Norman is vain about his varsity sweater; Gillian broke her arm on Spring Retreat; Brian is a car nut; Sue wants to live in Hawaii; Don wants to make a million and be a ski bum; Noreen wants to live in Europe; Gordon wants to be a radio deejay in Australia. At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities—to clarify just who it is we really are?

on the mountain, a crazy, creative, and explosive skier is never completely without hope. There is always a different route—a new movement, adaption, a full commitment jump-turn, or a “when in doubt, air it out” move to be made, something unique and raw and daring to be thought of and then done.

In 2018, the average US weekend window lift ticket price was $122.30. That’s thirty times greater than the $4.18 it was in 1965. Over the same half century, US disposable family income grew slightly less than threefold. That means the lift ticket price grew ten times faster than people’s ability to afford them.

Psychologists have found that the most significant common trait among people who are pulled to the mountains is something called sensation seeking. “Neuroscience calls it novelty, it’s the willingness to take risks for the sake of rewards,” says Cynthia Thomson, a health researcher who looks at behavioral genetics. “Compared to people who don’t ski, skiers are higher on the sensation-seeking scale. They have a low threshold for boredom, and tend to look for more exciting experiences, even if there are dangers associated with them.

Except for Lisbon, Berlin is the cheapest capital in Western Europe. This despite being the capital of the Continent’s richest country. Its population is still lower than it was at the outset of the Second World War. It’s a little like a mountain town with ski bums and trustafarians cycling through. The kids come to play, not to stay.

The theory of person-environment fit says that you might be happier and more fulfilled in certain places because of your temperament, values, and goals. That your characteristics might match up best with a landscape or a location. It’s often applied to business structure, and organizational psychology, but could just as well apply to life in the mountains.

Snow is a changing, fragile substance, which accumulates in layers: a deep puffy storm, followed by an inch of rain. Wind crust followed by cold light flakes. Avalanches are a combination of three factors: a sliding surface, a slope steep enough to slide, and a trigger. Here in Utah—and in other high, dry parts of the Rockies—more often than not, there’s a deep unbonded layer in that snowpack that could always slide, given a trigger. It seems to happen the same way almost every season. The first thin snowfall covers the mountains in a crystalized layer of sugar and anticipation. Then it stops, like climatic clockwork, for a few weeks. That layer of unbonded snow is exposed to the air, which sucks out moisture, creating slippery, faceted snow crystals called depth hoar. It forms a perfect sliding surface. When the snow starts in earnest, that surface, which avalanche forecasters call a persistent weak layer, is at the very bottom, slick and unbonded, ready to slide. That’s one of the constant hazards of skiing, you always know it’s down there. Just how big it could break is a question of what comes in on top of it.

There are subtle markers that delineate space, as well as clothing, language, social codes, and behaviors that indicate someone might be an insider. I often make immediate judgy assumptions based on what other skiers are wearing, or how they carry their gear. If you look at the symbolism and the cultural clues about who is welcome—the athletes, the ads—they’re largely white. When you show up to ski, you’re facing everyday systemic racism, as well as the factors specific to these towns.

Being able to avoid thinking about something is the embodiment of privilege and for white people that is deeply embedded in American land use, social structure, and politics.

The world needs people in touch with their humanity, their mortality, and place in the natural world. And for a million reasons, the world needs people who know how to have a good time for the hell of it. People who want to run through the hills because it’s breathtaking and swim in the cold ocean because it makes them feel alive. People that push their limits because it provides a good buzz and who aren’t afraid to sail through a storm because it makes for a good story later. So protect that sense of meaning - the world needs you.

Studies have shown that people are happier when they don’t have as many choices. We don’t always want to be optimizing.

Ullr, the Norse god of snow, was a favorite of local ski bums.

Naked in the moonlight, we peered over the edge. I grabbed her hand and we swung our arms back and forth. With the third swing, we jumped together—a frozen ephemeral moment, suspended in air, the world felt perfect. I’d have paused gravity and time right there to take it all in if I could’ve.

…fresh, bottomless powder is the Holy Grail, but pow is elusive. True enlightenment can be found in things like soft corduroy on a 27-degree bluebird day. It's times like these when the perfect wax, sharp edges, and strong legs can make you feel part of the mountain, allow you to create carves as organic as the snowmelt streams that'll rush downhill in April.