‘Powder Days’ focuses on ski industry and culture

Heather Hansman loves skiing. In her 20s, her life revolved around the sport. Later, she covered it as a journalist. Now, she’s written a book about skiing and the people who love it, as well as the uncertain future of a sport that depends on certain weather conditions. She examines the race, class and gender inequities in the world of skiing, as well as the mental health struggles some devoted skiers face. We talk with Hansman about “Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns and the Future of Chasing Snow.”

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud, I’m Dave Miller. In 2005, lifelong East Coaster Heather Hansman, fresh out of college, headed west. Like many people before her, she was lured by a story, the promise of powder, freedom, adventure, camaraderie, and counterculture cool. The life of a ski bum. She lived that life for a few years before becoming a journalist, but she never quite let go of the dream. So she recently spent a winter chasing snow and ski bums in Colorado, Montana, Vermont, and West Virginia. She was, as she put it, tracking the anthropology of her own obsession. She was also asking bigger questions, like this one: in the face of climate change, skyrocketing real estate prices, and ever greater economic inequality, what does the future hold for people who have chosen to orient their lives around skiing? And what about the ski industry itself? Heather Hansman’s new book is called Powder Days. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Heather Hansman: Thanks so much for having me.

Miller: It’s great to have you on. So your book focuses on, among other groups of people, ski bums. It’s in the subtitle of your book. You also call them dirtbags, and unlike the way that phrase is normally used by people, when you use it, it seems like a kind of honorific. It’s a title that you use with respect. What’s your definition of a dirtbag?

Hansman: Yeah, there’s definitely some affection in there. That dirtbag idea shows up in surf culture, or climbing, or that kind of thing. But it’s really this idea of prioritizing, in this case, skiing, above everything else, and kind of letting a job or a relationship or clean clothes or healthy food or all those other factors kind of fall to the side. Skiing is kind of the main obsession.

Miller: Why? What, is it? As you know, it’s not like skiing is alone in creating this, but it’s a relatively small number of activities that can lead to that kind of lifelong obsession. Can you put into words what it is about skiing that creates that obsession?

Hansman: It’s hard. I think that’s one of the things I really struggled with in the whole book, is trying to kind of quantify or put words to this thing that feels sort of inherent, but also a little fuzzy and hard to pin down. But I think with skiing, one of the things I always go back to is gravity, this idea that skiing pulls you out of gravity in a way that nothing else can. And I feel like there’s something in that physical feeling that it’s easy to get obsessed with, that especially kind of certain kinds of people who are geared for that type of adrenaline really want to chase.

It’s sort of this physical component. There’s also sort of a social/emotional component too. Skiing clicks all these brain sensors in a way that not a lot of things do.

Miller: You still have a bunch of connections in mountains and resorts around the West, or you know people who know people, which is maybe a similar thing. But if you were dropped off at a place for the first time you didn’t know people there, what would you do to try to find the true ski bums of the mountain?

Hansman: This is one of the great parts of my job being a journalist is that you get to drop in to see towns and you have permission to ask nosy questions and ask people what they’re doing.

One of the interesting leveling points of skiing is that you’re getting on the chairlift with who knows who. So you can kind of just start asking questions. And I think a lot of times in doing the research for this book, I would drop into a ski town and maybe have a friend of a friend or somebody that I would know, and just kind of asked them, who’s the dirtbag? Who is the person who’s been here forever, who’s got some good stories? And I think in almost any situation that I got into, people are pretty eager and pretty willing to tell their stories and open up. And in skiing, you have a built in five or ten minutes sitting next to a stranger. You can just kind of start talking to people in a way that I think we don’t always have and a lot of venues these days. You just gotta start asking questions.

Miller: There’s a place called the Chalet in Aspen that kind of epitomizes a version, maybe a vanishing version, of ski bum culture. Can you describe the place?

Hansman: Absolutely. The Skier’s Chalet was a hotel that was built in the sixties, it was kind of this fancy schmancy mountainside retreat, rich and famous people would come into Aspen and stay there. Over the years it got faded and broken down, some real estate investors bought it in the early 2000s. And right around that time this group of guys who I have some connections with weedled their way into the Skier’s Chalet, and convinced the developers to let them lived there in the hotel rooms for cheap rent until they decided to knock it down and develop it into high rise fancy housing, what they were planning to develop it into.

And so these guys have been living in slopeside hotel rooms for going on 15 years now, kind of beating the system. And they have this kind of idealistic dirtbag lifestyle. They’re right on the mountain, they can all kind of walk or ride their bikes to their jobs in town. But it’s this really fragile existence because they don’t know when the developer is gonna knock it down and change it, and there actually has been some votes recently to move on with the new development. I go back in the book to this idea of “The Dream,” and they’re kind of living The Dream. They have cheap rent right by the mountain, but it’s in this really on the edge existence, and they don’t know how long it’s going to exist for. So that for me kind of really epitomized this idea of: it’s really great, but you don’t know how long it’s gonna last.

Miller: One of the things that’s so striking about that is how long the people who have lived there, and some people have come and gone but some have been there for a while, how long they’ve lived such a tenuous existence. I mean it could have been torn down 15 years ago. But there are people who have been there always having this shadow hanging over them. Any day the bulldozer could come.

Hansman: Yeah, and I think it’s really hard. One of the things that I dug into in the book that was super interesting was the brain science behind why people get really attracted to this kind of lifestyle, and who might want to be a ski bum. And one of the commonalities is this idea, they call it “anti-social behavior.” It’s not that you don’t like people, it’s that you don’t play by the rules very well, and you don’t key into normal society. And so many people I know in this world, maybe myself included, kind of fit into that mark. And I think a lot of those people do too, where you are a little bit more comfortable living outside the norms. But I think it is also really hard. I think it wears on people. I think that’s one of the big questions in the book and I think one of the overarching ideas is how long can you kind of hold on to something that has been a dream? When do you have to let it go?

Miller: What would be lost in your mind if a place like the Skier’s Chalet disappeared? I guess what I also mean is, if the people, mainly guys, who were in places like that, if they didn’t have a place on a mountain?

Hansman: Yeah, I think it’s so many things. On an economic base level, it’s this idea that people who work in the towns working the kind of service jobs that need to exist to keep a place like Aspen or any kind of recreation/mountain/vacation town going. If those people can’t afford to live there, the whole ecosystem crumbles. And then there’s this cultural aspect too, this idea that if the real diehards and the people who really love it the most, who are those dirtbags who prioritized this thing over everything else, if they can’t make it work, then what’s, then who can? What happens to the soul of the sport and activity and culture, if the people who really love it the most can’t make it work?

Miller: How would you describe the relationship between the very rich, for the most part, ski tourists, or second or fourth or tenth homeowners in these places, and the dirtbags or ski bums? Where are their points of interaction besides the lift ticket person or the bartender or wait staff? Where else do they interact?

Hansman: There are those transactional interactions. When I was living in mountain towns and working these jobs, it was really easy to get cranky at the crowds or the people who are showing up on weekends and jamming everything up. But often those are also the people who support the ecosystems. There wouldn’t be restaurant jobs if there weren’t people coming in.

And then, one of the interesting things about skiing is that everyone’s on the same mountain. You kind of have this place where, regardless of who you are, you’re kind of doing the same thing. Which I think is interesting. It doesn’t happen a lot of other places.

Miller: You note that people have been talking about the death of the ski bum since, at the very least, the early 1970s. So for 50 years. Are we actually closer to a real end now? Or has something about the precariousness of this life has always been embedded in this life, and maybe is even part of the allure?

Hansman: That’s a question I’ve really kind of been wrangling with and in doing the reporting for the book and also now that it’s out in the world kind of talking about it. I think there’s two factors there. There is, like you said, this constant narrative of “I was the last person who got it good.” Pretty much everyone I talked to, regardless if they moved to Sun Valley in the 60s or to Vail in the 2000, everyone was like “I was the last. After me, it kind of all went downhill. I was the last one.” So I think there is this kind of constant, “you should have been here yesterday” sense of it.

Miller: Or “I liked it the way it was, and then things started changing and I wish it were-” I hear this all the time about cities. “I liked City X the day I moved there, that’s why I moved there. And then other people, a day later, moved there, and they changed the city I moved to.”

Hansman: Absolutely. You want to get into Narnia and then shut the door behind you. Which, like you said, is common in so many other places.

But I think on top of that there are all these factors that are making that skiing existence tangibly harder. Climate change is kind of the biggest one, this overarching factor of, if we don’t have winter, we don’t have skiing. These factors are accelerating and we’re kind of falling down on our job of dealing with it. And then the economic inequality in a lot of these towns has always been skewed, and it’s kind of continuing to grow even faster. I started working on this book in 2018 and 2019, and when the pandemic hit, I was like, “Oh, is skiing gonna be relevant in a global health crisis? And it turns out that Covid has kind of pressurized all these factors that are impacting skiing in terms of Zoom Booms and people moving to mountain towns who can work a Seattle or San Francisco salary and pay for different housing levels. And it’s really pressurized the way we treat and value frontline service workers. I think in a lot of ways, the things that make holding onto this lifestyle hard have been hard for a long time, but even in the past two years, they’ve gotten tangibly harder.

Miller: So let’s hear a little bit about your own story if you don’t mind. As I noted in my intro, in 2005, you left the East Coast chasing, you write, “A conflagration of all the things you want to feel: the rip of gravity, independence and interdependence, the adrenaline that comes from risk.” What did you find when you arrived?

Hansman: Like you said, right after I graduated from college, I grew up in Massachusetts, and I was working as a raft guide in the summers in Maine, and a guy that I kind of worked with said he could give me a job working at Beaver Creek, in the Vail valley in Colorado. Not really knowing anything about it, just knowing that I had kind of been here my whole life, I was kind of obsessed with this idea of living in the mountains and really doing the thing. I moved out there with two of my best friends from college.

It’s interesting now, looking back, because I can go back and say “Oh, that was the best time of my life. We were just skiing and hanging out with friends all the time. It was great, it was full of adventures.” But I was really conflicted when I was there, not sure if I was on the right path, not sure if I was good enough. So I think the idea of living the dream and getting to do the thing you’re obsessed with all the time is not as simple as it might seem from the outside, or as simple as we might tell stories about it. And you know, I got to ski every day, I had this great group of people around me. But I was also working a crummy job and getting harassed at work, and not making enough money, and stressed out that I was going to get hurt all the time. So there were these very noticeable highs and lows, and I think those just escalate the longer you stay on that path.

Miller: One of the inescapable phrases you use is Peter Pans, the idea being that organizing your life around skiing is a version of never really growing up. But then there’s a flip side to it, that you can also see this as a kind of monkish devotion. You have a great encapsulation of this tension. You write this: “Is extending adolescence a recipe for a stunted unsatisfying future? Or is the singular focus of the lifestyle a kind of grace?” How do you think about the different answers to what seems like an impossible question to answer? How do you reckon with that question?

Hansman: I think I think it is impossible, and I think part of why it is impossible is because there’s not one clear easy answer. That thing that can be toxic and childish and destructive for one person can be this really kind of like community building, meditative, right path for somebody else. You go into a book thinking that you’ll have some kind of clarity or closure at the end. And I think for me, one of the big things about it was that there are commonalities in people who want to do this kind of thing and reasons why people are drawn to it. But there’s not one right way to move through it for anybody.

For me, you know, I watched these people that I was a young adult with grow up and try to have solid jobs in this field that they had chosen, and try to buy houses in expensive towns and try and have kids, and figure out how to not be Peter Pan. And I think one of the biggest things is you don’t get everything. Maybe you do get to ski every day, but you don’t get financial stability. Or maybe you do get this great group of people, but your job isn’t very interesting. And there are plenty of people who are full on Peter Pan, who never have grown up and are at the bar every day after skiing all day, working crummy jobs and worried that their knees are gonna blow out. But I think that when you actually dig into it and meet people, the stereotypes break down a little bit. Everyone’s kind of trying to figure out their own path through it all.

Miller: You also include stories of people you’ve known who died while skiing. You have the story of your friend Sally Franklin who was in a terrible accident nine years ago and is still dealing with the effects of a traumatic brain injury from that accident. How did all that affect the way you thought about this activity that you love, that’s so much tied to your being?

Hansman: Yeah, that’s something I still wrangle with and wrestle with and try to decide. After my friend Sally that you mentioned was in a really traumatic fall in the Jackson Hole Backcountry. She was in a coma for more than a month and she still is struggling with her new life after it. And for a long time after that accident, I had to really think about whether I did love skiing and why. Why this thing that is expensive and dangerous and problematic in all these ways was such an important thing to me. And it really made me dial back my personal risk level.

And in some ways, because I decided to still be committed to it, it made me kind of really focus on the things that I do love. And I adjusted my behaviors for sure. I don’t ski some things I might have skied before. But I think it made me really focus on the things that do feel good about it. And I think that that would be part of that is kind of growing up in this world where the dangers are real. I don’t think there’s ever a good kind of justification or reason for getting hurt or dying in the mountains, but I think that you do have to be aware of that if you’re gonna also try and chase the good parts of it.

Miller: When you arrived in Colorado in 2004, how much did people around you talk about fear or loss or depression?

Hansman: Very little. And that’s a conversation that I think is changing, and has to change in that world. There’s a section in the book about the mental health aspects of being in that world, and I think that’s one of the most interesting parts that I dug into. There are these very real consequences of being in the mountains, and there’s also a lot of lower level fear and trauma of not fitting in. There’s a fairly big, in a lot of these places, culture of alcohol and drug abuse. And there are these things that can be really, really hard. And part of the kind of living the dream idea or culture is this kind of concept that every day is the best day, and everyone’s having an awesome time, and if you’re not, there’s probably something wrong with you. And I think addressing that can be really hard, especially if you don’t want to ostracize yourself from that community. But a lot of people that I talked to when I started to dig into that, almost everyone had some dark parts that they were wrestling with that they felt weird about talking about, that was sort of one really big commonality.

You mentioned that a lot of the people in the Chalet are men. There is this hard man, adventuring, pushing limits culture, and I think it can be really scary in that world to talk about things that don’t feel good. I do think those conversations are changing. But I think that that is something that holds people back a lot, and kind of exacerbates those scary parts.

Miller: I want to go back to climate change, which you noted earlier. You write at one point: “The biggest imbalance of climate change, in almost any capacity, is that the burden is not spread out fairly,” and you note that “that absolutely extends to skiing.” In what ways?

Hansman: There’s a geographical way. Somewhere like Mt. Ashland in Oregon, which is low elevation, community owned and run, they don’t have a ton of money and funding for big infrastructure projects, for snow making, for adapting as the snowpack changes. And somewhere that is managed by a big corporate resort entity can have the flexibility to weather a bad winter or something like that, or adapt. A lot of these places are looking at summer recreation too. The places that are often the most vulnerable to those climate impacts are the least able to pivot around them. And we’ve seen a lot of small skiers closing because of that. And I think that then hollows out the rest of the ski world, because then you don’t have as many of these kind of feeder resorts where people can start to learn how to ski.

And so I think as we look into the future, thinking about what’s going to continue to exist in the face of climate change, who has the ability to kind of be flexible, what are the policies we have in place to protect those things? I think it’s all this sort of tricky equity question.

Miller: It has snowed, meanwhile, 21″ on Mount Hood in the last 12 hours alone. What goes through your mind, or maybe in your body, when you see numbers like that?

Hansman: This just goes back to the obsession thing, but I still get so excited about winter. Memory is short. It can be hard to remember a bad winter in a really good one. I was up on Snoqualmie Pass yesterday, and it was absolutely dumping snow. You’ve got California seeing record breaking December just now. And there’s the physical body response to it. And then there’s also, snow is water, we need these kinds of cycles that are important for our whole sense of viability out here.

I was thinking a lot about how much of a whirlwind this past year has been, and that we’ve kind of flip flop from these raging temperatures this summer to these kind of unprecedented rain events and snowstorms this winter, and I think it’s just gonna get weirder and more uneven. And this is one of the things that have kind of a hard time balancing. In the face of these largely negative things, I still want ways to find joy and excitement. And I think skiing, for me, is often that thread, to give me a way to know what’s going on with climate, and also give me a way to still love it and still feel excited and feel like I want to be invested in it.

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