Photo by Lee Cohen/leecohen.com
Who needs a posse of bros? There’s a singular joy to enjoying the mountain all by yourself.
Sad things happen every day at ski resorts. Toboggan rescues, for one. Clueless simpletons buying tickets at the full retail price, for another. For sheer pathos, though, nothing rivals the solo skier—especially when he skis up to a lift line, croaks out a tentative Single? and gets no response whatsoever, only condescending looks. Single? he asks again, louder but more desperate, before turning around and slinking to the back of the maze.
Skiing by yourself invites humiliation and shame—not unlike the scene in “The Lonely Guy” when Steve Martin requests a table for one, horrifying the
maitre d’ and triggering a spotlight to follow his forlorn march through a hushed, staring crowd. How pitiful is the solo skier? Try this from the website for Midwest Mountaineering: “Eating alone is not good; drinking alone is worse; but worst of all, by a country mile, is skiing alone. Is there anything more likely to move even the most callused heart to tears than the sight of a skier without a buddy? No, we don’t think so either.”
I think what Midwest Mountaineering is trying to say is that the specter of flying solo makes the heart—normally a cardiovascular organ—abandon the whole blood-pumping thing and commandeer the tear ducts’ job. Which is pretty drastic shit.
So, too, was the reaction to a recent Skiers Journal forum on skiing alone. “I allmost allways [sic] go with other people,” wrote a respondent who even felt the need to give her letter l’s companions, “Riding the lifts alone makes me sad.” Another whimpered, “I ski alone about 70-80 percent of the time since not too many of my friends ski or snowboard *sigh* I need new friends.”
Wow, am I some kind of misanthropic creep when I ski all by my lonesome? I certainly didn’t feel like one that day last February. I hadn’t made arrangements with anyone else because I’d planned to work that day. But a surprise 16-inch dump rightly pushed career to the back burner.
The billowy drifts blanketing the path to the gondola promised an epic powder day. Did I really need the company of another carbon-based life form to validate the experience? Nah. Turns out, I need fellow carbon-based life forms to give me cuts in line. While the gondola queue stretched a heinous length, it looked tolerable to me—what with my friends Scotty and Catherine standing up front. I sidled up to them as if they were waiting for me, and wound up skiing untracked snow more than 20 minutes and 60 people earlier than I deserved. All because I was a streamlined, one-man operation looking out for no one but me. Go, me, go!
My spontaneous threesome skied one run and boarded a triple chair together. At the top of the triple, Catherine said I shouldn’t wait for her. So I didn’t. I blasted down fluff like a random missile. In thigh-deep conditions, the old saw, “there are no friends on a powder day,” never rings more true. Scotty and Catherine had lost their usefulness to me, and I coldly pushed onward, eventually joining Tanya and Stu for 30 face-shots, then forsaking them to jump a buried snowfence with J.J. and Burglar. Solo skiing is like solo sex. Caring only about number one, you take matters into your own hands. You exist only for your own pleasure.
The posses were fluid, mutating like cells. I stayed in J.J. and Burglar’s orbit for only a couple of runs before finding myself alone again. I knifed into Captain Jack’s, where meaty accumulations were sloughing off trees and thumping to the forest floor, a phenomenon Telluriders describe as “branch-a-lanches.” I floated down the puffy marshmallows with my iPod blasting. I didn’t feel remotely lonesome. As Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
Another time, a few years ago, Telluride experienced an ugly blizzard—stinging pellets of snow blowing horizontal with a vengeance. The storm seemed to fly in on the wings of spite. Most folks in town that morning probably stayed indoors. My ex-father-in-law, who was staying at my place, peered through the rattling windows at the blizzard and said, “You must be totally crazy or totally dedicated to go out there.”
I nodded, pulled my neck gaiter over my chin, and stepped into the maelstrom. Yeah, it was nasty. But I was going powder skiing. I didn’t mind if 70-mph blasts slapped all pigment out of my face. The walk to the base area revealed that the snow was graupel, which falls not as artsy little hexagons, but as sharp, conical-shaped ice bits. Graupel is powder that hurts.
In the cult book Deep Powder Snow, Dolores LaChapelle described a graupel storm as follows: “The wind is screaming in, horizontally, and it’s impossible to see a thing unless you ski in the trees, because they give definition to the white-out. Practically no one skis in this kind of weather unless they happen to know about graupel snow. Sitting inside a ski lodge, looking out the window, it seems utterly miserable….Going up the lift is torture… But once on top it’s total bliss all the way down.”
I boarded a chairlift with a guy who was clearly a local, but no one I’d ever met. We slouched low on the lift and tried to hide within our Gore-Tex. The blizzard howled and gusted. Eventually, the chair glided through a protected fold of conifers, affording enough silence for my chairmate to speak.
“The skiing’s excellent today,” he said, as a crust of rime built on his goggles. “It’s crazy that the tourists hate weather like this.” Imitating the distinctive accent of Texas, a state that for various reasons has gotten under Colorado skiers’ collective skin, he said, “Hay-ull, I can’t see where ah’m goin’ and there’s too much damn snow to turn.”
Me, I don’t mind Texans. If they don’t want to ski in storms, hey, more fresh tracks for me. But I do mind when skiing is told from the point-of-view of a Houston trophy wife. The ski industry marketing machine often wants to deny the existence of storms when it should be celebrating them. So it portrays the sport as all sparkly and clear and hatless, where people ski without goggles in happy families or groups. Seldom do we see what I enjoy becoming: the laconic loner squinting down a vicious storm.
I actually have plenty of friends to call whenever I want to make sociable turns. (Living in a ski town for 14 years is a good way to ensure you’ll always have a mate available.) While I’ve never actually struggled to find a partner, I suppose lots of people do. Perhaps you’re one of these losers. Perhaps your spouse doesn’t ski. Maybe you live on a Florida beach with snow-phobic friends. Maybe your name is Eleanor Rigby, and nobody likes you.
Whatever the cause, the problem of partner-less skiers is gaining more attention. SnowJournal.com has a link called “the hook-up” to put traveling skiers together. Stratton, Vermont, features a free “ski-with-a-buddy” program that pairs singles with mountain hosts. The sessions last two hours before the host leaves to help other invisible wallflowers pretend they have a friend.
Whenever they make news, solo skiers invite a lot of abuse. Aspen skier Aron Ralston sure caught a raft of shit when that boulder trapped his arm, leading to history’s most discussed amputation.
And remember the first week of 1998 and the two-pronged news story that turned ski helmets from accessory afterthought into a multi-million dollar business? Both Sonny Bono and Michael Kennedy died of massive head injuries after hitting trees; Bono while tree skiing his last run and Kennedy while skiing around playing football with a water bottle! Afterward, an accident expert allowed that Kennedy was “probably more of an outright danger to himself,” but that Bono, skiing alone, may have been fatigued and perhaps was pushing his body’s limits. He concluded that “both made bad choices.”
WTF!?! It’s astonishing to hear Kennedy’s moronic folly equated with Bono’s innocent decision to ski one more by himself. But that’s how the snowsports establishment views skiing alone: You sign your own death certificate the instant you can no longer say, “I Got You, Babe.”
Me, I’d never go backcountry skiing alone. I wonder if a buried avalanche transmitter makes a sound if no one is around to hear it. I fear the millions of tree wells waiting to swallow me head first. Plus, I’ve read an analysis of off-piste fatalities in France in which the cryptic “Remarks” column blames deaths on such nasty factors as “30 meter fall in bad viz,” “carried into lake,” “crevasse/head injuries,” and, yes, “skiing alone.” Even the National Safety Council, which normally concerns itself with the lead and glass shards in kids toys, has weighed in against solitary riding in the backcountry.
Resort skiing, though, is another matter. The last time I skied alone, I tore around Telluride ski area for a couple of hours. With no one to wait for, I straight-lined across fluffy mogul tops. When that strategy led to a 200-yard-long, cart-wheeling yard sale, no one had to wait for me. As Truman Capote memorably wrote, “I don’t like to ski with other people because I don’t want to be conscious of them. I don’t want to be worried about being behind them, or ahead of them. Skiing gives me a terrific sense of freedom—and I would define that freedom as not having to be around other people.”
Being around other people is fine by me. I cherish my ski partners. They never make the slow stem-christies or sing the show tunes that Truman Capote’s ski partners likely did, and for this I am grateful.
But when my bros aren’t available, skiing still is, and I’m happy to do it by myself. I know I’ll get negative reactions. Disapproval. Pity. A vibe that my decision to go solo is no less misguided than David Lee Roth’s. Their judgmental stares will make me briefly uncomfortable, but the feeling will soon pass. Hell, if I cared what other people thought, I’d go ahead and ski with them.
While Rob Story actually has friends with whom he can ski, he has never really objected to accusations that he’s a misanthrope.
