You remember skiers: they’re those rich dorks that drape sweaters over their shoulders and love playing tennis once the moguls get rutted. They own yachts and have silicon-breasted girlfriends named Veronica. They’re the worst, but not their girlfriends — their girlfriends are hot. Or that’s how they once were. At least, that’s how I remember them. But I wasn’t born with this deep hatred for skiers, and I’ve since grown out of it.
I started out skiing in the early eighties and at one point Aspen Extreme was my favorite movie. I once saw famous extreme skier Glen Plake at local Minnesota resort, which felt like seeing Michael Jordan at your local park playing basketball. I was even bi-skier-ious for a while and would sometimes break out the old skies if my family dragged me to somewhere as terrible as Utah, where in the late eighties and early ninetiess snowboarding wasn’t as widely accepted.
However, in 1992, I threw away my skies (or more realistically my parents probably sold them to Play It Again sports) and I committed to a life of being an outcast and pissing off authority figures. This is when my hatred of skiers really began. In the early nineties, snowboarding wasn’t super popular yet, especially in Minnesota. At that point, if you were a snowboarder, you were really just a skateboarder who couldn’t take another winter of being confined to skateboarding in a small cold garage — so we said “fuck it” and started snowboarding. We were basically the bad kids who smoked cigarettes, listened to loud punk music, and dyed our hair weird colors. To all of the ski patrollers, old people, and jocks that got drunk and went skiing on the weekends, we were perfect targets for endless abuse.
I was berated so many times by older skiers that I had to start following around the older snowboarders as closely as possible, just so I wouldn’t get beat up if one of them caught up to me. It was always important to time riding under the lift just right, because if you rode under when there was a group of jock skiers riding up, you would be in danger of a waterfall of spit landing on your head. Don’t get me wrong, we were jerks too: we would throw snowballs at them from the lift, flick cigarettes at them when we rode by, and always talked as much shit as possible, especially if the older guard was around to keep us safe.
The hate boiled throughout the 1990s, but pretty soon we started to increase in numbers, and before you knew it we were the prevailing kings of the heartland. Snowboarding became so popular from the mid nineties to the early 2000s that I can’t even remember having a bad encounter with a skier post-1996. By then, they started building snowboard parks in the mid-west and we kind of just did our own thing, and watched the ski industry shake in fear and start to shrivel up and die. The hate remained though. There had been too many homophobic slurs, and too many fists swung to just forgive and forget. We would still ride over the back of skis and spray unsuspecting skiers whenever we got the chance. There still felt like there was a major division between the two factions, but we knew we were winning the war, and frankly we were thrilled to watch skiing die.
But then something happened, skis started to look a lot like snowboards. All of the sudden they had a flipped-up tip on the back and a new generation of skiers started to show up that looked a lot like us, only they were about three years behind whatever skateboarding fashion trend we were ripping off at the time. They started hitting the park, and while they have never looked cool on handrails and never will, they were at least attempting to find common grounds with their evil brother snowboarding. It was surreal: the ski industry started to make a comeback.
In 2007, I had reached my lifetime fill of icy Minnesota winters, and packed up my life in search of an endless supply of powder. That search led me to Seattle, Washington, where I would make a new home and slay more powder than a yacht full of investment bankers in the eighties. What I also found in Seattle was an odd unity between snowboarders and skiers. It seemed that when it came to real mountains and one’s life pursuit of untracked snow, it didn’t matter what device was used to ride down it. The important part was that you made it down alive and high-fived over Clif Bars as you anxiously awaited your next ride to the top.
As my back- and slack-country skills developed, I started to notice a new appreciation arise in me for my new two planked brethren. I started to study the way people approached technical mountain lines, and often the subject matters were skiers. I also noticed that almost every big mountain snowboarder I admired was not a skier-hater, which helped solidify my decision to work through my angst-y teenage anger and embrace the true ways of the mountain.
Even though I now appreciated skiers, I still didn’t really trust them. But, as it did with my appreciation, all of that changed when in 2008 I was offered a job as Associate Editor at Snowboard Magazine, and once again packed up my life and moved to Boulder, Colorado. Snowboard Magazine is actually owned by the publishing company that owns Freeskier Magazine — so now not only was I in Colorado, which is home to an ass-load of skier, I was actually working with and for them, yikes.
The skiers much to my surprise were really cool though, and I actually became good friends with all of them. I actually liked them better than the snowboarders who worked there. In fact, Matt Harvey who was the Editor and Chief of Freeskier during my short tenure at the magazine. and he let me borrow his car for a weekend one time when a beautiful girl from California came to visit me. If that’s not a solid move, I don’t know what is.
After leaving, or more accurately being told to leave the magazine, I returned to Seattle with a love of both skiers and snowboarders and a realization that there is no us and them: it’s really just a matter of whether or not you love the mountains, and if you do then we are some sort of spiritual kin.
You see, the mountains unite us. They bring us together to rejoice in their glorious powder. And if you really respect the mountains, then you must respect those that honor them. It is with this new perspective that I approach my relationship with skiers. It also could be that I’m now in my mid-thirties and it just seems petty to hate skiers now, but either way I feel as if I have evolved.
So set forth and find yourself a skier friend, and appreciate them, because they at the core, they are the same as you. And even though they might be the offspring of horrible old rich people that winter in Deer Valley, today’s skiers are just fellow mountain enthusiasts, and at this point we should all just love one another. Unless they hit handrails, which still looks stupid.
