The Cold-Weather Counterculture Comes to an End
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704312504575618473051895654.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
NOVEMBER 19, 2010
By DARRELL HARTMAN
Not so long ago, any young man who was so inclined could ski all
winter in the mountains of Colorado or Utah on a pauper's budget. The
earnings from a part-time job cleaning toilets or washing dishes were
enough to keep him gliding down the mountain by day and buzzing on
cheap booze by night, during that glorious adrenaline come-down that
these days often involves an expensive hot-stone massage and is
unashamedly referred to as "après-ski."
He had a pretty good run, the American ski bum, but Jeremy Evans' "In
Search of Powder" suggests that the American West's cold-weather
counterculture is pretty much cashed. From Vail to Sun Valley,
corporate-owned ski resorts have driven out family-run facilities,
and America's young college grads have mostly ceded control of the
lift lines to students from south of the equator on summer break.
Mr. Evans, a newspaper reporter who himself "ignored the next logical
step in adult life" to live in snowy Lake Tahoe, identifies with the
graying powder hounds that fill his pages, and for the most part he
shares their nostalgia for the way things used to be.
During the 1960s and 1970s, in alpine enclaves like Park City, Utah,
and Aspen, Colo., hippies squatted in old miner's shacks and clashed
with rednecks. In Tahoe, Bay Area youths developed the liberated
style of skiing known as "hot-dogging," while in Jackson Hole, Wyo.,
stylish Europeans such as Jean-Claude Killy and Pepi Stiegler went
one step further, inspiring generations of American youth to become
daredevils on skisand, eventually, to get paid for it.
Whether these ski bums intended to or not, they helped popularize the
sport and make it profitable. What followed was reminiscent of urban
gentrification. As the second-home owners took over, property prices
outpaced local wages. Today's would-be ski bum faces prohibitive
commutes, and immigrant workers have taken over the sorts of menial
jobs that carefree skier types once happily performed.
Skiing and snowboarding aren't even a ski resort's main attraction
anymore. Rather, they are marketing tools used to boost real-estate
sales and entice tourists who would just as soon go on a cruise or
take a trip to Las Vegas. Four corporationsVail Resorts, Booth
Creek, Intrawest and American Skiing Co.run most of the big
mountains. Even Telluride, once considered remote and wild, plays
host to Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise and a parade of summer festivals.
In 2002, Hal Clifford took the corporate ski industry to task in
"Downhill Slide." Mr. Evans's book incorporates Mr. Clifford's most
salient findings, but his oral-history method limits his view of the
topic. Mr. Evans would have done well, in particular, to mine the
obvious connections between ski and surf culture. (Dick Barrymore's
landmark 1969 film, "Last of the Ski Bums," was more or less an
alpine remake of the classic 1966 surfer documentary "The Endless Summer.")
Like surfing, skiing first went from sport to lifestyle during the
1960s and thus came of age with the baby boomers. They made skiing
sexy and rebellious, and then they made it a big business. Two of
America's most exclusive mountain resorts, Beaver Creek (in Colorado)
and Deer Valley (in Utah), opened around 1980right when baby boomers
hit a sweet spot in terms of athleticism and net worth. Now, as they
age, golf courses and luxury spas have become de rigueur in big ski towns.
Another boomer legacy is the entire notion that the old-fashioned ski
bum was a blessed soul who somehow belonged to the natural order.
More likely, his was just a brief, Shangri-La moment. For ski towns
in the West, the real problem is what will happen as the prosperous,
once free-spirited baby-boomer generation begins to wane.
--
In Search of Powder
By Jeremy Evans
Nebraska, 226 pages, $16.95
.
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