Has The Humble Ski Blog Taken Its Last Breath?

Screen grab via Wayback Machine of Steve Romeo’s TetonAT

“When Steve Romeo launched TetonAT.com in 2006 to document his journey seeking cutting-edge ski descents in the Tetons and other prominent North American ranges, his vision was an anomaly,” mountaineer Brandon Wanthal, a backcountry enthusiast with his own personal blog, Ten Thousand Too Far, wrote in The High Routelast spring. “Since the advent of mountaineering, climbing, and skiing, the sharing of beta was once relegated to personal journals, mountain community logbooks, and, eventually, print. With the Internet’s boom, once hard-to-access information found a broad reach. It’s not hyperbolic to claim that by sharing their adventures, a few key members of the outdoor community positively impacted the lives of millions.” 

Romeo was one of those quietly revolutionary chroniclers, and also a much loved member of the backcountry community, working at the stalwart Skinny Skis shop in Jackson for some 14 years, and with Teton County Search and Rescue, before passing away in an avalanche in 2012, a loss that still reverberates throughout the skiing subculture.

The Konsellas' Take on Colorado Backcountry Skiing

Others would pick up Romeo’s mantle as time went on, including a couple from Crested Butte, Colorado, who were then in the process of skiing each of the state’s fourteen-thousand foot peaks. They chronicled their journey on a website that would soon become broadly influential, 14erskiers.com.

Brittany and Frank Konsella’s 14erSkiers was borne out of Brittany’s fourteener quest, which she began in 2006. From there, the couple began documenting their wide range of backcountry descents. “At that point, only one other person (Lou Dawson) had skied all of the Colorado fourteeners, though Chris Davenport was well on his way to finishing,” Brittany Konsella says over email. “I had a feeling I could be among the first to complete this project and I knew documentation was key to legitimacy.”

The duo took to the web to bring their adventures to life. “We were doing trip reports on TGR, and then we were asked to do blogs on a website for a film company I was working with (Thrillhead Creations),” Frank Konsella told POWDER’S Derek Taylor in 2015. “When they stopped running, we wanted to save all the work we had done there, and 14erSkiers.com was born.” 

From there 14erSkiers became a powerhouse in skiing content, showcasing a breadth of trip reports seldom equalled. But the site was always more than that. The couple’s plethora of skiing beta occasionally gave way to gear dissection, travel discussions, and book reviews. The Konsellas would even write their own, Backcountry Ski & Snowboard Routes: Colorado, published in 2017. 

But even that was transcended by Brittany’s coverage of the catastrophic injuries she sustained after her idled car rolled over her at a trailhead in July of 2019, breaking her neck and femur. Confessional as much as it was inspiring, her series titled “Unlucky Lucky” was an intimate perspective on injury, recovery, and redemption. 

“Aside from posting trip reports, we used the blog to chronicle experiences. We wanted to capture some of the reality of life, which isn't always candy and roses,” says Brittany. 

“My 2019 injury was the most massive injury I'd ever experienced. I knew it was an important journey to share and at the time I was unsure if I actually would be able to recover enough to perform at the level I was performing prior to my injury,” she notes.
But Brittany indeed recovered. In a February 2020 post, she detailed her post-trauma care, where after discussion, her doctor said, “I think you should get out and ski. I think it will help you mentally.”

“So, what did I do?” wrote Konsella. “Well, the next day I went skiing.”

With breadth as well as depth, 14erskiers has thus entered the pantheon of core ski blogs, alongside TetonAT, and even WildSnow, the venerable site created by legendary ski mountaineer Lou Dawson, who ironically officiated Brittany and Frank Konsella’s wedding.

WildSnow's Undying Influence

Indeed Dawson’s WildSnow may remain perhaps the most successful example of the personal ski blog. Dawson–who was the first person to ski from the summit of each of Colorado’s fourteen thousand foot peaks, a journey undertaken from the late 1970s to early 90s–started the site in 1998 before converting it to a blog in 2004. There he would eventually post more than one million of his own words to WildSnow over a nearly twenty year span. But the site was also known as a digital meeting place for the backcountry skiing subculture not only because of its thoughtful comments section; the blog would come to include the work of dozens of other writers, encapsulating the backcountry movement in a fashion few if any other sites could emulate.

“Part of the legacy was kind of an honest take of the core aspects of ski touring, ski mountaineering,” Dawson reflected in an interview last August. “I was looking at how people really lived in these mountain towns, everything from family issues to land use and then the actual way we ski, and the way we wanted to ski.”

WildSnow’s nearly 20-year run as an independent site would come to an end though, seeming to bookend the long golden era of the ski blog. Dawson would sell the site to friend and WildSnow contributor Doug Stenclik, owner of eminent backcountry retailer Cripple Creek Backcountry, who then sold the blog to AllGear Digital, a conglomerate of gear review websites, in 2022.

“Unfortunately for the website and for Doug that was a time when internet advertising was really changing, and it was really hard to monetize blogs. Banner ads were harder to sell and there wasn’t much money,” Dawson says. “Most of the companies were throwing everything into social media, and still paying good money for ads in printed magazines, which always surprised me.”

Alas, in a world–and world wide web–that has changed remarkably over the decades, the ski blog, like most blogs, has seemed to ebb as the digital zeitgeist has moved on, and in a new age of artificial intelligence, the path forward seems as fraught as ever. “I hate to say it, but I think social media has made it very difficult for the written form–people seem to have a short attention span,” notes 14erskiers’ Frank Konsella. “It's too easy for people to just consume a bunch of photos and videos on their phone and move on. AI is another problem.”

“It's just a matter of time when social media becomes infiltrated by AI,” Brittany Konsella notes. “AI is blurring people's sense of experiences–it's less clear what's real and what isn't, what's human reality vs machine generated. These are the things our society will have to combat in the future.”

Still, the personal ski blog is far from dead. Looking over my own, a heartfelt if self-absorbed endeavor that I sadly don’t put much work into anymore, I feel both sheepish and proud. Aside from the rushed formatting and rough quality of the writing, one thing becomes abundantly clear; I didn’t put words to a digital page about skiing on a whim. I was unavoidably influenced by a cadre of core ski blogs–both new and old–that, in their endeavor to share their perspectives on skiing via writing, broadcast the genuine core of the experience.

A Look Into the Future Of The Subculture

And while the personal ski blog, like the blog in general, seems to have seen its moment come and go, their memory and continuity–however quiet–stands as a testament to the intrinsic, human value of sharing skiing through writing. That mantle has been picked up anew by a fresh corps of bloggers. From Alex Kaufman’s (aka Weird Foothill Guy) SimpleSkiing.com, whose subversive style of skiing has garnered attention from Outside and the Denver Gazette, to the continued existence of Craig Dostie’s EarnYourTurns, a site that while no longer actively posting, acts as an archive of core telemark content and Couloir magazine articles, the ski blog lives on. And writers like Brandon Wanthal’s expansive Ten Thousand Too Far marks a modern zenith of the format.

The ski blog remains, as does the elemental power of the written word. Asked to articulate his thoughts on the importance of writing in the outdoor culture, Dawson, now an elder statesman of the backcountry movement, says “let’s call it this; I think it’s foundational.”

“A lot of people, maybe the majority, get most of their information from watching videos now rather than reading. But the written word is a unique way for the human being to express themselves, and there’s just nothing that comes close to it.”