Heather Hansman - Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns and the Future of Chasing Snow

An enchantingly lyrical ode to the peculiar allure of the cold, the steep, the remote, the hard, the fast, and the fallen. I was never a ski bum, but this book makes me wish I had been.

Robert Moor, New York Times bestselling author of On Trails: An Exploration

Who are you meant to be? How will you spend your days? What, above all, matters to you? Now, more than ever, these are the questions we ask ourselves. Heather Hansman found her answers in the mountainsfrom the lift lines to the back bowls to the dive barsand among her tribe of fall-line aces wholl sacrifice much for first tracks. Powder Days is a love letter to the freedom seekers, the fun hogs, the dirt bagsthe ones our culture hasnt yet managed to tame. This is a timely, sharply observed, and beautifully written story of wildness and obsession.

Susan Casey, New York Times bestselling author of The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean

From the moment Heather Hansman first ducks a rope and escapes with a cadre of outlaws into the stark backcountry of the dirtbag dream, you know you are in the hands of a great writer and a great subject. Ski bums are iconic American figures, and Powder Days brings them to life with the details and surprising insights that come from one who has led the life in all its grace and grunge. Whether youve spent your life off-piste or only thinking about it, Powder Days is a heartfelt plunge into an age-old question: How to keep your wildness alive in a world that wants you tame.

Rowan Jacobsen, author of Fruitless Fall and Truffle Hound

Powder Days is a bittersweet love letter to skiing, mountain towns, and the people that make them work. As the climate warms and the income gap widens, Heather Hansman is clear-eyed about the challenges and flaws of the ski industry. But she never loses sight of the magic.

Eva Holland, author of Nerve: A Personal Journey Through the Science of Fear

Heather Hansman is an award-winning freelance writer and a former editor at both Powder and Skiing magazines. Shes Outside magazines environmental columnist and a contributing editor at Backcountry Magazine . Her work has been included in The Best American Essays 2015. She once won a bag of pasta in an Italian big-mountain-skiing contest (tenth place out of eleven women). She lives in Seattle, Washington.

HeatherHansman.com

Also by Heather Hansman

Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West

Heather Hansman

Powder Days

Ski Bums, Ski Towns and the Future of Chasing Snow

Contents

We duck our heads into the wind, ski tips skittering as we curve along the ridge, slowing down to scout the gullies and pick our lines.

Katie drops in first, and from above I watch her turn, every arc short but smooth. She sends down a wave of sluff as she carves through the chute, whooping, more graceful than Ill ever be. In the apron she stops below a knuckle of rockout of the line of fire if I were to fall or if the slope were to slideand waves me down. I lean forward in my boots and tilt over the edge, giving in to gravity.

This rib of rocky chutes was out of bounds when we ski patrolled here at Arapahoe Basin, almost a decade ago. Back then, the only way into the Steep Gullies was to wait for conditions to line up, then duck a rope and sneak around the elbow of the ridge, hoping no one saw you go, hoping that the sugary Colorado snowpack would be stable when you did. I followed older guys past the boundaries, nervous but glad to be invited, hopped up on a mixture of adrenaline, secrets, and the thrill of breaking rules.

Now the gullies are in-bounds, kicked open by the pressure of resort expansion and skiers hungry for terrain. From the ridge you can see down to Highway 6, where the real dirtbag skiers used to park their campers, sleeping close to the hill, cutting corners wherever they could. These days traffic stacks up in the canyon, and youre not allowed to sleep in your vehicle anymore. It feels like all of Denver drives to the mountains every weekend, cramming the slopes, skiing off every bit of snow. It seems, sometimes, like there are no more secrets.

Part of that is true. It has changed. It is crowded, more expensive, and more exposed. But my frustration is also driven by the shifting baseline of nostalgia, and the way the past resonates and echoes when Im back in a place that used to be mine.

Even if things had remained the same, we would be different. Katie has a kid now, and I live seven states away. We no longer subsist on quesadillas and High Life, and were back here in passing. Were not locals anymoreeven when I still try to hold on to those dirtbag secrets and claim them as mine.

But we were ski bums once. Or at least we were skiers chasing the idea of wildness, helixed around an obsession with untouched snow and the kinds of parties where someone often ended up naked, shooting fireworks out of their ass. For a while we were insiders, stratified into the mountain town ecosystem, shiny in our youth and ease, even when we were serving pizza second shift to supplement our skimpy on-mountain paychecks. Even when we were stamping our feet in the bitter cold, scanning lift tickets while some sweaty second home owner accused us of ruining his vacation.

We were living the dream, prioritizing skiing over everything else. Heavy on the quote unquote. We moved to the mountains and let the other facets of our lives fall into place from there. It was an idea Id been obsessed with since I was a kid when I first felt the adrenal glory of downhill motion, lit from behind by the perfect sunset shots of ski movies and glossed up by magazines. I thought that being a skiera real skiermeant committing to the constant sense of chase.

Now Im not sure if I remember the beginning correctly, or if its become a story I tell myself, one of those light-on-the-threshold moments. But heres what I remember: there was a campfire and we were in Maine. Ivan, my future boss, who was a semi-stranger then, might have been wearing a mullet wig, as he often did that summer. We were in the thin ellipsis between bug season and winter and I was just over the edge of twenty-one, just out of college. Not sure what was coming next, but sunk into that achy-chested, pre-melancholy of knowing Id never be back there, or at least not in the same way. I was raft guiding on the granite-choked rivers of the northern woods, sleeping crammed into a two-room, eight-bunk cabin with at least nine other people, living on leftover trail mix. I had already, unwittingly, primed myself for dirtbag living by neglecting showers, counting my income in tips, committing to moving my body hard.

When Ivan said he could get me a job in Colorado, where all I would really have to do was ski every day, my life pivoted toward a particular grimy dream. I dont believe in God or fate, but some tangled part of me got sucked into a modern manifestation of the frontier fantasy, problematic as it might be. I latched on to the idea that if I went west I would be braver and truer and more exciting. I wanted an adventure I could call my own, and a way to grow up with the country. A path that feels hard to find now that so much is commodified and mapped. I just needed someone to tell me it could be real.

So yes, I moved halfway across the country to a town Id never been to before because a man in a wig said he could get me a job scanning lift tickets for minimum wage. And yes, I was a couple of beers deep when I said I would go.