Why Ski Season Hits Harder the Older You Get

The alarm dutifully sounds as the dark, cold, and quiet hour of 5:00am comes to pass. Going to bed last night, the sky could not have been more full of snow. And it kept falling. Nearly two feet of fresh powder lies on the deck and in the driveway; who knows how much fell four thousand feet higher in the mountains. I gently wake my wife as I arise, hurrying in the lightless room to put on gloves, jacket, hat, ski pants.

With little time to spare, the snowblower fires right up. The driveway is hastily cleared, making way for exit. Scrambling, my wife grabs her things for the day, more throwing them inside her car than packing them. Snow still fills the air, driving to Earth with purpose.

Driveway cleared, and car ready, the silence is broken by a soft cry. Inside my pocket, a baby monitor shows a little one rousing. No, my wife and I aren’t heading to press glass today; she bids farewell as she makes her way to work. And as multitudes rush to the mountains, powder hungry, I return inside, chores barely finished, to greet the morning with my baby boy.

The sun rises on a beautiful powder day, and I’m digging in at home with my cherished one-year-old. I wouldn’t trade this for anything. Still, I’m filled with the dissonant anxiety of missing out. Something in me wasn’t prepared for this; I didn’t read about the transition to becoming a ski town dad in POWDER. That surely wouldn’t have made for great reading for most. But like many facets of paternity, I’ve had to experience this for myself, just like many have before me. And in our youth-centric world of skiing, where precious little about aging is written, filmed, hell, even talked about, this lonely reality sets in all the more. Besides the flow of apres beers, the ski world mercilessly gulps from the fountain of youth, like my now graying self once did.

It makes sense that the skiing narrative is so oriented toward the young and unattached. At its highest levels, the sport requires a physicality that starts to escape us as the clock approaches 40. Even many of the oft-romanticized ancillary ski town endeavors–things like après bravado and late-night intoxicant-fueled trysts–require a sprightly disposition, not to mention a blissful freedom from many adult responsibilities. Thus skiing and its culture is the embodiment of vigorous youth, giddily stumbling home after last call as the snow flies, second star on the right, straight-on till first chair in the morning.

But things unavoidably change. At a certain point, most of us move on. People make decisions, sacrifices and–yes–unfortunately, occasionally settle, all framing the complicated reality of mountain town adulthood. Nights out became evenings with our spouses. Powder days till noon turned into rushed resort tours at daybreak before work. And waiting tables with the fastest crowd in town evolved into various 9-5s so we can pay the daycare bill. As far as the typical ski narrative is concerned, those of us who’ve moved on to the next phase of life have entered a sort of protracted if early irrelevance. 

And that makes for a fitful metamorphosis. There exists little framework for understanding what growing up means in a ski town. Most of us came to this life to avoid responsibility, and those we witnessed going down the straight and narrow seemed to be giving up the dream–and were rarely seen again. They had new lives, new friends, new children. And it was often a mystery what even happened to those people or what they now do. 

But little did we know, one day we wouldn’t want to stay up all night, or that we might have to keep an eye on our cholesterol. Or–good God–that we’d want to have kids. 

Jokes aside, this evolution is a beautiful part of ski town life. But it can be confusing grappling with this reality when the ski world outwardly shirks these responsibilities. Many ski town locals–friends, relatives, colleagues–to their credit, choose not to have the same obligations. And more broadly, films and articles about our subculture are rife with the glorification of living–and dying–for skiing; the discourse often imbuing the culture with a sort of myopia toward the complexities of responsibility, adding an overdose of live-for-the-moment ethos into the ski narrative that doesn’t always match with the regular adult sensibilities and realities almost all of us eventually succumb to. The existing paradigm often portrays these stories theatrically and one dimensionally, framing them as the height of passionate skiing; the embodiment of the culture’s hero mythos.

The slightly aged, present, and responsible parent doesn’t fit as easily into ski lore. And that can leave those of us in that cohort feeling a little adrift as we enter that stage. Because we want to be good parents, and we want to ski. 

But there’s more to life than skiing–I don’t have to tell you that.  Eventually chasing romance, good times, and powder are supplemented with the often mundane, even difficult obligations of real life. Our parents get old and sick. Our friends even get sick, or struggle. Just like we might.  Our kids come into this world, changing the scope of our lives’ meaning from then on–and absolutely for the best.       

And skiing is always there, but not like the ski media likes to show it. Regardless of the incessant march of the clock–but maybe because of it–it’s easy for the ski culture to neglect the deeper parts of life when skiing is so easy to frame as endless good times, or generically heroic in the face of mortality. 

But life in the mountains, and life in general, is a mosaic. You could jump into the cliché; you could say that skiing does reflect life as improvisation, or that it is a transcendent endeavor, and all about the moment. But the true beauty of our full existence–the fight for meaning, the endurance through sorrows, the redemptive quality that so embodies being–can’t be illustrated in ski porn or Instagram filters–but it’s there in every ski town. That real life is happening all around us, and constantly.

I’ll still wish I was up there. Missing a powder day might always sting a little. Maybe I haven’t fully made my peace with moving on from my life devoted just to skiing. 

But in just a few years time, I’ll be accompanied on powder days by a ski partner I held during his first moment on this planet. And we’ll have this crazy, confusing, beautiful thing together.