The Ski Journal • Volume 13, Issue 2 • SELF-CENTERED TO THE EXTREME

I buy the argument that skiing is better when shared with friends. Sure, the argument goes on about friends on a powder day. Should I stay or should I go?

Like it or not, skiing is inherently selfish. The advantage of skiing with friends lies strictly in our ability later in the day to rhapsodize about how great it is to be on the mountain, confirming something we already know to be true. The shared experience is fun. Camaraderie makes for a nice après buzz. Subjectively, we may have interpreted the day insofar as our own neural pathways could meld the collective sensation. But I wasn’t watching you. I wasn’t even watching me. My mind was somewhere else.

Skiing is transcendent. Ski journalists have been attempting to describe the indescribable for centuries. Hell, even Hemingway struggled putting it to words. Hemingway, who could make poetry out of sitting in a boat, failed to speak to me about what I feel on a mountain.

Warren Miller said skiing is pure freedom. I think this is only a part of the equation. When we float down a mountain, surrounded on all sides by works of nature no man could recreate with paint, words, or a lens, when we hydroplane just above the ground, flying with the aid of snow, we become something more than we are. There is a fusion of what we are doing, what we are thinking, what we are dreaming that takes place by which our body acts independently of our conscious thought processes.

We return to the same ski hill season after season, year after year, lifetime after lifetime. Starting down a familiar run is akin to passing through a door, behind which the room is always changing. The mountain is alive. The trees are vital and changing. The snow we ride on today was last week’s ocean water, and home to next season’s fish food. Our turns land softly on snow that will never again look or behave quite the same. The sun will reflect across a crystalline display that fires up our adrenaline and endorphins and poetic nature as we crash lovingly through blankets of something we cannot describe. And when we do this perfectly, we don’t stop to think about what it is. Because our minds cannot comprehend what it is. Just how it feels. And it feels good.

And we do this all because we are selfish. Because very little in life can set us free and hone the sharp edge of our winter wits like a day spent careening down a vertical snowfield. For 99 percent of us, nobody is there to take a photograph to confirm our greatness. Or terribleness. I don’t spend my free time on a mountain to give a good goddamn what you think of me. I will share your stoke, will buy you a beer, will change my whole life to travel the world skiing with you on occasion. But I ski for me.

Photo Caption: Brody Leven, Stairs Gulch, Wasatch Mountains, UT. Photo: Adam Clark

The Ski Journal - Volume 13, Issue 2

SELF-CENTERED TO THE EXTREME

Issue List