Skiing without Skiers, without Skiing.

What too much Warming Hut Hors d'oeuvres will do to a man:

Sure, I grabbed an americano from the European-looking coffee machine and scrounged up a bit of the fancy cheeses. My legs were tired, I had on the endearing puffer shoes North Face puts out, and, well, when in Rome.

But I wasn’t in Rome (though the excess could’ve mirrored the whole “bread and circuses” thing); I was in [SKI RESORT], CO, tagging along with a friend through their quite nice membership to a ski-in-ski-out resort. The staff was lovely, the free cookies worth grabbing, and the luxury of the place got you thinking about all those pictures these ski resorts use for decorations: scraggly-looking ski bums, $5 lift passes, and a sport that’s so romanticized these days, it’s almost illogical to be surprised by the carrion-esque price gouging.

A little cowboy justice: I used my Dad’s Epic Pass to get up and down this week. I’d say sorry, but when you’ve got college friends working a hellish grab of shifts just to afford two days of skiing—$200 a day, with the $100 discount—you struggle to feel bad about shirking a drop of wealth from Vail’s big, big bucket. This ain’t all tree-hugger rhetoric, either; when you’ve got as similar a bone structure to your father as I do, it’s a matter of fiscal responsibility.

But that does raise a question: what’s going to happen to the sport (I don’t care what happens to snowboarders) of skiing? When I’m hanging out in my friend’s (Dad’s) club, taking in the Après as best I can, who am I surrounded by? There are some young people, sure, but a majority of the folks don’t even look like they’re getting on the mountain. You don’t have to ski at a ski resort, I guess. But one starts to wonder how the mountainside is going to look in thirty years, when the ski crowd ceases to look like the adventurers in resort decorations entirely—when the only people who can afford the slopes take two runs and french-fry/pizza all the way to the barstool.

I can tell this is coming off anti-elitist (Elitist? Different flavor? Gatekeeping?). People have the authority to spend their money however they want, even if that means to go to a place that offers the most beautiful sport in the world and not partake. There’s a non-zero chance this essay comes from a deep-seated confundity. But I keep returning to these resort decorations. A bunch of free-spirited, youthful athletes, getting knee-deep in the wilderness—this is a perception of the sport, isn’t it? We put these pictures up on our walls, across from our toilets. I guess I’m wondering: what do we owe these people we romanticize?

My dad (the one I stole the Epic Pass from) spent the year after graduating college ski bumming in Crested Butte, CO, shacking with a couple friends and dedicating himself to getting out on the mountain at least once a day. Nowadays, the only reason I can responsibly afford a ski trip at my age is by staying at a friend’s house, borrowing skis and boots, and putting my buff over my face every time the resort staff scans my pass, praying to high heaven that my dad’s salt and pepper beard can pass for my babyface (not that the staff cares, either; they’re more so a victim of “luxurification” than I am). All I’m asking here is, if the spirit of skiing—so intertwined with the idea of “The West”, Kerouac/McCandless-like freedom that the U.S. seems to be sorely missing in this moment of commodified technocracy—is also repackaged for the highest bidders to allow them a cosplaying opportunity, while shirking the true youthful spirits the opportunity to interact with their country, then what happens to that spirit they’re pretending to exhibit?

I can see people writing this off as romantic, or biased (as-written by one of the so-called “youthful spirits”). But there is something there. Our country was pushed East to West by the dream of adventure, better or worse. I catch my generation stagnating, seeing their next adventure being trivia night in their local corporate bar. And while skiing isn’t the only thing that holds a piece of that American spirit, it is a valuable crevice of experiential culture that when we push the people towards the priced image, rather than the real thing, commodifies our own culture, rather than training them into the value itself. And, as someone who mythicized those retro ski photos, I think that sucks.