This story update is part of the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Classics, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read “We’re Here. You Just Don’t See Us,” by Latria Graham here.

OUTSIDE: Writing about the dynamics of race, class, and social justice for an outdoor magazine seems like a tough assignment. How did you find the balance?
GRAHAM: This story addresses a mistaken idea many people have—that Black people don’t participate in the outdoors. I knew I could present a nuanced perspective based on my lived experience. I grew up in the outdoors. My father was a farmer; I worked at his farm stand. And I’m a hiker, snowshoer, backpacker, cyclist, and more. The data is there. Black people do things in the outdoors. It’s just that on the East Coast and in the South, where the majority of Black Americans live, there are fewer parks than in the West. I wanted people to know that. I refuse to live without sharing knowledge that I know could make someone’s life better.

You say you’ve been a “disciple of landscapes” for as long as you can remember. Disciple really stands out for me. Why did you choose that word?
I think of nature as my life’s church. Nature has a lot to teach us, and it shapes my worldview. Everything in nature is connected. Humans love to forget it, but we’re part of that connection. A disciple is one who is studying, constantly learning. I’ve studied the outdoors for a long time, and even though the word has been claimed by Evangelical Christians, who are mostly Republicans, I wanted to take it back. As someone who has dealt with floods, fires, and tornadoes—all of which display the power and sheer magnitude of nature—I know there’s a higher power. It’s my teacher.

Your descriptions of your childhood home and the characters in it evoke joy for you. In a relatively dark essay, how did it feel to recall those happy things?
“We’re Here” is about showing how my family has been a part of the outdoors for a long time. I wrote some of those passages as a way to celebrate people who aren’t with us anymore. They can no longer engage with this space—it’s a reliquary for them. But I’m going to take this little memory and make it real by putting it in the pages of a magazine. And the essay feels even more powerful to me now because, since I wrote it, I’ve lost the thing that brought me outside in the first place: my father’s farm. I had to auction it off.

I get very sad thinking about that. The farm rooted you to the land.
Yeah. But for a moment in time, I was able to catch this comet in my hands. In the essay, I get to tell you what living and growing up there felt like. And I get to put the people from my life, like my grandma and my aunt, in the story. Their pictures, too. My grandmother had never seen a picture of herself in a magazine, and she died not long after the piece was published.

At one point, you write about your family being “shaped by the soil,” which you say is “red from the violence of southern history.” Is it hard to find beauty in such a horrifying past?
I grew up in a region where a person can be killed for being the wrong color. That’s been the case since 1526, the year Spanish explorers brought the first enslaved people to a colony on the Atlantic coast. But the landscape where those things happened is beautiful and fertile. I’m talking aesthetics, music, food. It all goes back to that dirt, and being able to sustain life in a temperate climate. The South will never be just one thing, and as a writer I’m determined to hold both parts—this entropy—in my hands.

What was it like to write this for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű? Was there a part of you that thought these people will never get it?
I’ve been doing this explanatory exploration of both social and geographical policy my whole life. For instance, in 2015, when police in North Charleston, South Carolina, killed Walter Scott—a Black man with a traumatic brain injury—no one in my family had ever protested before. I did, and I wrote about it as a way to try and figure out the world I’m in and how I fit. It was like that with șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. I wanted readers to have a full, accurate picture of what’s going on with Black people and the outdoors. And for anybody who picked up the magazine and invested the time trying to puzzle through this with me, I have total regard.

Was it well received? Do you think people understood it?
Yeah. But I also got death threats. Apparently, some people weren’t able to just take the magazine and throw it in the trash—they had to threaten me. But I’m willing to die standing by my truth, because I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong talking about these things.

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In April, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, a hunting education and advocacy organization, circulated a press release offering a $500 reward “for reports or information leading to a conviction of those responsible for illegal trail construction on public lands.” In other words, the national nonprofit placed what amounted to a bounty on mountain bikers building illegal trails.

The Colorado chapter of BHA sent the press release directly to two publications: Boulder’s Daily Camera newspaper and the Mountain Ear, which services Nederland, a town 18 miles up Boulder Canyon. The bounty technically applies to the entire state of Colorado, but the memo indicated that it was targeted at trailbuilders in the national forests around Boulder and Nederland.

Both towns are hubs for outdoor recreation. The Roosevelt and Arapaho national forests, which comprise 160,000 acres of public land, offer ample hiking, skiing, hunting, and fishing. They are the country’s third-most visited forests, with an estimated 7.5 million annual users. Nederland in particular is popular with mountain bikers: the parking lot for the West Magnolia trail system, a prominentÌęnetwork of singletrack, overflows with cars every weekend from late spring to mid-fall, and the nearby Front Range trails see ample bike traffic as well.

But in the vicinity, like just about anywhere with a mountain bike scene, locals have built secret, illegal trails. These see far less traffic than the sanctioned trails. I spoke to a local resident who builds illegal trails, who wished to remain anonymous for this story. He told me he enjoys the creativity, solo time in nature, and challenge that comes from cutting the clandestine paths.

There’s a long history of social trail-building in the Nederland area, says Josh Harrod, president of the all-volunteer mountain-bike-focused Nederland Area Trails Organization (NATO). “I would say 90 percent-plus of the trails we use up here started as social trails—the elk and deer ran through, then hikers followed, then bikers followed suit,” he says. “Social trail construction is kind of the fabric of the local trail community. NATO doesn’t sanction it, but I don’t think it’s ever going to stop.”

It was these trails that interested BHA. The read, “For years we’ve been hearing from public lands agency staff and our members that illegal trail building is rampant in many areas of the state and proliferating. Elk herds and other wildlife are suffering as a result. [The $500 reward for turning illegal trailbuilders in] is one small step we can take to try and help moderate and hopefully deter additional illegal trail construction activity.”

Local mountain bikers were angry. “Those guys are out there walking around with guns. When they put a bounty out, it’s a bad look,” says the trail-builder I spoke with.

Bikers felt the reaction was overblown. The trail-builder I spoke with describes his renegade trails as harmless labors of love that only he and a few friends know about—could they really be getting in the way of wildlife? And why was one backcountry user group launching what felt like an offensive towards another?

The trails in the Nederland area are, like most trails across the mountain West, more crowded than ever. In their press release, BHA cited a quote from Gary Moore, executive director of the Colorado Mountain Bike Association, saying that bikers’ options are limited in the state. And popular renegade trails do occasionally get retroactively sanctioned by the Forest Service, according to multiple mountain bike groups.

Sanctioning new trail construction is a complicated process that can take decades, says Meara McQuain, executive director of the Headwaters Trails Alliance in Grand County, Colorado. If the HTA wants to build a new trail on federal land, it takes its idea to the relevant governing land agency. If the agency is interested, they’ll do a public survey to determine engagement. Then, the trail goes through a process mandated by the National Environmental Policies Act to evaluate its potential impact, with scientists and researchers—including archaeologists, hydrologists, botanists, and wildlife biologists—weighing in. The study findings are released for public comment, and if anyone protests, the project goes into a public objection period. The federal agency makes modifications, if necessary, and the leadership of the land management agency makes the final decision. All of this can take anywhere from three to 15 years, says McQuain. (The process looks different for state and private land.)

Research shows that trails can impact wildlife in dramatic ways. In the 1980s, a Colorado State University biologist named Bill Alldredge started near Vail, as ski resorts and trail systems started expanding. He and his team radio-collared female elk with new calves and then had humans hike through their preferred grounds until the cows showed signs of disturbance like standing up or walking away. Of the elk he studied, about 30 percent of their calves died when their mothers were disturbed by humans—and when the disturbances stopped, the population recovered.

A 2016 of wildlife studies spanning four decades found that human traffic on trails forces animals to flee, limiting their feeding time and forcing them to expend valuable energy. And a out of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, from earlier this year found that mountain biking ranked second only to ATV use in disturbing elk populations in a 120,000-acre parcel of land east of town.

Whether all illegally built trails negatively impact wildlife, we don’t know. But Kriss Hess, the BHA member who sent the press release to Boulder and Nederland papers, argues that while many of these trails might only see a little traffic in their early years, it’s not uncommon for them to eventually wind up on mapping apps and grow in popularity, impacting wildlife years down the line.

“We’re not trying to be aggressive with this, but we are extremely concerned about the we’re seeing across the state in elk and mule deer and other populations,” says Brien Webster, BHA’s program manager and Colorado and Wyoming coordinator. “Our wildlife and land management agencies are maxed when it comes to capacity, so it’s extremely difficult for them to post up and stop riders from accessing an illegal trail,” says Webster. They’re hoping the bounty might help the agencies manage the issue.

BHA also hopes to create and distribute maps and other educational materials that might help different user groups better understand how elk see and use a landscape. In August, they released a 15-page “” with maps showing critical wildlife habitat and national conservation areas with social trails built through them. BHA is also considering placing educational signage at existing trailheads in areas with high rider concentration where illegal trailbuilding has occurred.

But the Boulder Ranger District has no formal or informal agreement with BHA, and it would be illegal for BHA to do any kind of trail maintenance, add signage, or install cameras, according to Reid Armstrong, public affairs specialist for the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests. Armstrong also pointed out that several recent bills have increased the Boulder Ranger District’s funding and that they are focusing their efforts where they feel they are most urgently needed, specifically on infrastructure projects and wildfire recovery and mitigation.

And Wendy Sweet, executive director of the Boulder Mountainbike Alliance, said that publishing maps of illegal trails may have the opposite of the desired effect. “If the mountain bike community sees this memo, the first thing they will do is want to check [those trails] out,” she says. Sweet had multiple meetings with BHA members prior to the publishing of this memo to talk about how all of the various stakeholders in Boulder County could work together to create trails safe for wildlife, and felt the release was in bad faith. Plenty of other factors place strain on wildlife, like development in the wilderness-urban interface, increasing backcountry use across all user groups, wildfire, and a changing climate.

Since releasing the bounty, Webster says, nobody has been turned in. Instead, “BHA has had some really good conversations with folks within the mountain bike community who are trying to address this in a meaningful way,” he says. “It has helped us think about our objective, and to focus more on education than the bounty aspect.”

Aaron Kindle, director of sporting advocacy at the National Wildlife Federation, thinks BHA isn’t being heavy-handed enough. “What happens when someone says, ‘My actions don’t count in that spot; I’ll do what I want.’ What if other folks started seeing those guys never getting punished?” he says. “The beauty of having public lands is that we’re all responsible for taking care of these landscapes.”

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When people ask me if I like using my , I tell them, “Yes, but it has strained my friendships.”

That’s not a lie. Imagine inviting me to go skiing, and as you’re confiding something important to me on the chairlift—about your affair, say, or how obsessed you are with your new teardrop trailer—I keep responding distractedly, “Yeah? Oh yeah?” while fiddling with something in my pocket. Or worse, we get to the top of a run, and just as we’re about to do the one thing that makesÌęyour life worth living, I yell, “Wait one sec! I need to calibrate my boots!”

Fumbling for my phone, I open my Carv app and go to “Calibrate.” I click on an image of my right or left boot sole, then begin teetering precariously on one foot while lifting the other and waving it from side to side. When Carv tells me I’m calibrated (meaning
 I’m not sure what), I repeat the process on leg two. Only then am I ready to drop into whatever run we’re about to ski—that perfect corduroy, beckoning us to tear downhill at 40 miles an hour; or 1,200 feet of bumps, softened by the early-afternoon sun; or first tracks through six inches of untouched powder, which we showed up 90 minutes early for. But first I need to hit the record button, so that Carv can collect data on my skiing.

Exasperated, you take off before I’m finished. That’s OK, because like Samantha did for Theodore Twombly in the AI rom-com Her, Alex, my Carv girlfriend, croons lovingly. “Are you ready to ski, Tracy? Let’s do this,” she says. As this scenario repeats itself throughout the course of our ski day, I become more and more annoying. But I won’t apologize, because Carv is improving my skiing.

I’ve believed myself to be a shredder since I was a 12-year-old riding the ski bus sans parents to 500-acre Pomerelle Mountain in southern Idaho. But aside from one season, when I trained a few times with a masters race coach for , I’ve pretty much improved my skills through feel, which isn’t ideal. (Well, that plus chasing around my husband, a former ski racer and cat-ski guide, and askingÌęhim to teach me how to ski steeps without overturning or to watch me carve and critique me.)

That’s why I latched on to Carv when the brand’s PR rep sent me a unit this past winter. Setting it up was easy: all I had to do was insert the pair of footbeds it came with into my alpine boot shells and attach battery packs the size of old-school flip phones to my power straps. Sensors in the footbeds then talked to the app on my iPhone; as I pressured my skis through each turn, the app picked up on my various deficiencies. (The device itself is $149, and the app costs $199 a year.)

Right off the bat, it humbled me. When I ski groomers, I feel like I’m going a least 50 miles an hour. Carv, however, clocked me at just 37.5. I also thought I had a pretty solid Ski IQ (Carv’s lingo for how good you are). But early on, I was consistently ranking in the high eighties, compared with the highest score recorded, 165. According to the app, my score put me in the Green Guru level. This was so disconcerting that I begged my favorite ski partner, Stephanie—a bona fide ripper who raced on the same high school team as accomplished big-mountain freerider Chris Davenport—to tell me how bad I was, no stroking my ego.

“Tracy! You’re a beautiful skier! Incredibly smooth,” she said. “You may jump up a bit side to side and not dig your edges in enough, but you’re one of the best women I ski with!” Then, because I needed more assurance that I’m not dog breath on PTEX, I had her try out my system—my boots, my skis, and my Carv app on my phone.

Shockingly, Stephanie ranked in the Green Guru category for her first few runs, too. But then she started concentrating on carving and jumped to Carv Cadet (level three of 20).ÌęWith her every improvement, my self-confidence dipped lower. Why was I skiing so poorly (according to Alex), when I felt like a soaring bald eagle chasing Steph down the slopes? I’m a perfectionist, so a few days later I went out again with the single goal of scoring above 88.

Carv offers all kinds of tips on how to improve your skiing. The two it gave me consistently were to initiate my turns earlier and to ski with my legs parallel. “Take the energy from the old, turn to the new,” it advised. And “imagine you are skiing on railway tracks.”

I started playing with these, dialing way back on my run choice—from blacks to a green. Then I intentionally incorporated another of Carv’s lessons: Alex kept telling me I needed to improve my “edge similarity,” so I clicked the “Show Me How” button on my phone and read about it.

I learned that edge similarity is key to arcing, “because it allows your two skis to work together to provide better balance, instead of fighting each other.”ÌęThe app went on to explain: “For carving turns, a high edge similarity score will give you greater freedom of movement to angulate further and reach higher edge angles.” A common problem many skiers have is that they try to edge just by angulating at the hip (something I’ve been taught to do throughout the years). But the edge-similarity video showed me that rolling your inside knee toward the hill improves your grip on the snow and helps you rebound from turn to turn.Ìę

As soon as I started doing this, my flow improved, thanks to more rounded turns and more connection to the snow. My knees also pointed headlight-style down the slope, and I could feel myself initiating earlier. Lo and behold, when Stephanie and I got back on the lift and I checked my Ski IQ, I’d leapt up two levels, to a Carv Cadet with a score of 115.

Alex adjusted her coaching to my new expertise and gave me some new tips to incorporate. “Experiment with faster speeds to topple your legs faster and further at the start of each new turn,” she said. (“Toppling” was a new term for me, too. I watched a video about it on the app. It means moving your center of gravity to initiate edging.) I did a few more green runs and kept my score above 115. Then I took what I’d learned to a blue run and then black run.ÌęOn each, my score dropped back down into the mid-nineties. My clear struggle is carving when I’m flying downhill. I can still tackle black groomers and double-black trees; I just can’t do it as well when I’m hauling.

But it’s also important to remember that carving isn’t the point in that kind of terrain, where jump turning, floating, and straight lining are much more helpful. What’s more, on some of the best skis out there—like Atomic’s Bent Chetler—you wouldn’t want to carve. Ski with a jibby style? You’d suck, according to Carv. Not a fan of turning? Don’t bother with the app. The point of Carv is to teach you to turn. That’s best done on groomers. But there’s so much more to skiing than what’s happening with your boots and skis, like mindset, aggressiveness, and overall flow. So while the app does drill down on the fundamentals of turning, it’s probably not for skiers who want to dive into 45-degree chutes, float through powder-filled glades, or etch down cliff faces.

Ultimately, Stephanie and I don’t really care if we carve like cadets when freeskiing together. She texted me after her test and said as much: “Having an app or devices on you like this takes away from the Zen of skiing, when you’re in the moment and not thinking about how well you did or how you can improve. You’re just going and feeling. That’s what I love about skiing.”Ìę

I always want to improve myself—it’s a gift and a curse. And I know there’s a lot I can fix about my skiing. Carv definitely helped me identify this and showed me how to get better. Sometimes, when my kid is at ski team and I’m alone for the day, I don’t mind the opportunity to work on technique. But I also love just going out and ripping around with my expert friends. During those times, I don’t want to be thinking about improvement, but about how great skiing feels.Ìę

So my final assessment of Carv is this: it’s great for beginners just learning to ski (șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű had someone test it for just that purpose), for intermediates wanting to level up or learn to carve as opposed to slide, and for perfection-obsessed experts. Personally, I’ll keep using it on days when I’m skiing alone and hankering to improve.

But when it’s time to go out and fly through the clouds, I’ll ditch Alex for freedom. Chances are, thanks to Carv, I’ll get that—with better technique.Ìę

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My ten-year-old daughter, Hollis, was standing on the ridge above the double-black-diamond East Face at Colorado’s Steamboat Resort, muttering to me through clenched teeth that she wasn’t going to ski it. Hollis can ski that kind of terrain; the cliff- and rock-riddled slope wasn’t the problem. What was freaking her out was the pack of 12-and-under boys from the local junior freeskiing program, who themselves had just skied the face and were circled up with their coaches at the bottom of the run, talking fluidity, line selection, and how much air they planned to catch at the junior regional freeride competition happening in Steamboat the next day.

The funny thing was, not one of them was watching Hollis. But I understood the fear that froze her and made her feelÌęunable to start her first turn down the run. Like her, I had once been a little girl in the throes of prepuberty who both felt the drive to push herself athletically but also internalize all the bullshit that came with growing up female in America.

One of the reasons my husband and I had signed her up for the freeride development team, Devo, back at our home mountain, Eldora, was because we’d recently seen her morph from a girl who cared little about what others thought into one who often returned home from school in tears and falling apart. It seems that fifth grade might be the year girls learn the power of bullying each other—and Hollis had been on the receiving end. (I’ll also note that Hollis has done her fair share of playing favorites and leaving other girls out.) When I later discovered, through other parents, that Hollis had been crying at school but not telling me, I panicked.

I know from raising two other kids that only bad things can come from them withholding such important information. So in hopes of building Hollis up, my husband and I enrolled her in Devo, thinking it would be a good antidote to her suffering. She’s been skiing since she was a toddler, and the sport is a huge part of our family’s identity. As my husband and I both know, ripping around on snow is one of the best ways to make lasting friendships. When she joined the team in December, she immediately showed signs of feeling better. She’d get up without complaining on mornings before practice, when we’d have to hit the road to Eldora by 6:30 A.M. to avoid the weekend crush of traffic. Things continued to improve, and then she got a jolt of inspiration.

Two months after she started training with the team, we sat down to watch some of the women’s events at the Winter Olympics. We snacked on salt-and-vinegar chips as her eyes locked onto the strands of face-framing hair each woman pulled to the front of their helmet. Affectionately known as “” (or “beauty strands,” as snowboarder Chloe Kim opts to call them), they ensure the world knows that it’s a woman throwing these unfathomably huge, technical tricks. Hollis found her brush and had me braid her hair while she carefully held two front pieces apart. Now they always hang outside of her helmet (and dip in her ski-break French-fry ketchup—thanks, ladies.)

Then there was their skiing and riding. Kim made history by winning her second Olympic gold medal in the halfpipe with her twisting cab 900 melon grab (an insanely difficult spin, with a grab and 2.5 rotations) and soaring a double cork 1080 (three 360’s). And Chinese-American skier Eileen Gu made history, too, when she became the first athlete to win three medals in three different freestyle-skiing disciplines at a single Games, with tricks like her double 1620 (four and a half full rotations and two off-axis flips), which she had never performed outside of practice (and which French skier Tess LeDeux first executed at the X Games in January, becoming the first woman ever to land one in competition).

This time, thanks for real, ladies: Hollis is now obsessed with landing a 360 and executing sporty hand drags, both of which keep her mind off things like painful school fights or stealing my iPhone to watch strangers apply makeup.

But more importantly, as we sat on the couch watching the Games over multiple nights, with Hollis snuggled into my side and her bearded dragon, Audrey, on her lap, she got to see what real female support and camaraderie look like. She stood up and cheered when silver and bronze snowboard medalists Julia Marino, from the U.S., and Tess Coady, from Australia, sprinted to hug New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott after she won slopestyle, also making history as the first-ever Kiwi to win gold at a Winter Olympics. When all of Sadowski-Synnott’s competitors piled on, Hollis spontaneously hugged me (careful not to crush Audrey). And when LeDeux crumpled to the ground in tears after losing gold to Gu in the big-air competition, Hollis cried, “That’s not fair!” But Gu showed Hollis how to be the ultimate good sportsperson. She went to LeDeux and tried to console her, kneeling beside her and rubbing her back.

Through it all, a little girl who’d been struggling to hold her center during her first real experiences with bullying saw women at the highest level of competition supporting and championing themselves first—because that’s what it takes to be an Olympian—but also respecting, holding space, and caring for their competitors, regardless of who won or lost.

It took me back to Hollis and her first freeride competition.

At the bottom of her scouting run, she insisted she was too scared to compete. My intention all along was to present her with the option, not force her to do it, and I told her as much. At bedtime that night, she seemed iffy. But the following morning, she got up, dressed herself, ate breakfast, and went with her team to the venue. When her name was called, she skied along the ridge, dropped in, and linked a few turns before crashing. It took forever for her to dig herself out of the snow, recenter, and keep skiing. But when she got to the end of her run, everyone cheered for her. You could see that camaraderie going a long way in a little girl trying her best to navigate tweendom with compassion and composure.

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There’s a lot of math that goes into hurtling down an icy, 40-degree face. If you’re racing on the pro circuit, your coach is constantly calculating things like g-force, ski angle, body angle, and turn shape. That same feedback would also help average skiers who just want to smooth their turns or make it down a black-diamond run, but until recently, it’s been hard to come by without a World Cup coach or spendy private lesson. Now, a handful of companies are developing tools to bring expert-level ski coaching to your smartphone.

Learn to Carve from a Computer

A month ago, I got my hands on the Carv system to see how well this ballyhooed app works. Retailing for $149 plus a subscription of $199 per year, the tool consists of boot-shaped inserts that fit between your shell and inner boot and link to a tracking unit that clips to your booster strap by a small cable. The tracker unit interfaces with an app that provides computerized feedback on your technique and offers suggestions on how you can improve—either after you ski or while you’re skiing.

After an easy, 20-minute setup that included calibrating the boot to the tracking unit, I was ready to Carv my brains out. At the top of the lift, I hit “Record” on the app, and for the duration of my run Carv tracked my overall “ski IQ,” which was based on things like how well I edged, how round my turns were, and how consistently I initiated a turn. Then, back on the lift, I could watch a video tutorial that focused on a problem area, based on my scores (from 0 to 100 percent). Not only was the game of constant improvement fun, but I also found that I noticeably sharpened my skiing skills.

Others clearly think so, too. Demand is currently outpacing supply, says Carv’s CEO Jamie Grant. “We’ve sold out every season since launch [via Kickstarter in 2016].” So far, 20,000 Carv members have skied over 621,000 miles, measuring over 50 million turns.

For those who’d prefer a flesh-and-blood coach over Carv’s velvety-voiced AI, there’s Givego, created by Salt Lake City-based entrepreneur Willie Ford in 2020. It works by connecting users to certified sports coaches, instructors, and professional athletes. When skiers send Givego a video of themselves doing whatever skill they’d like to improve (carving trenches, shredding steeps, floating through trees), the coaches provide personalized feedback. (Givego is free to download. Experts set their own price for consultation; the average is $20 for an hour.) “I started skiing last season after moving to a mountain town from Alabama,” said user Kyle Rusak, who found it challenging to maintain confidence at higher speeds and used the app to connect with Jeb Boyd, one of the best pro instructors in the country. “I was amazed at how helpful his advice was. After a couple of short, asynchronous sessions, my skiing improved substantially.”

And then there’s Skeo, developed by a Swiss tech company and two-time World Cup champion downhiller Bode Miller. Designed for professionals (racers, coaches, and instructors), it’s also great for recreational skiers. The system tracks data on a skier’s stamina, turn quality, ski-to-snow engagement, style, and body position with a set of sensors that affix to the user’s skis and chest. The retail price is $449 for sensors, mounting brackets, a chest sling, and a charging pad. Similar to Carv, the analytics land on your smartphone.

Skis That Think

For the past few years, brands have been working to put coaching tech directly into the skis. In 2018, Rossignol joined forces with a company called Piq to embed motion sensors that tracked important metrics, including speed, turning angles, transitions, and the g-force of each turn, into the materials of a ski. An integrated computer analyzed skiers’ technique and sent data to their smartphones so they could study themselves later. But then Piq went out of business, and “the app worked for a while, then started crashing,” said Alpine Category Manager Jake Stevens. “So we pulled the plug.”

But ski designers aren’t giving up. Since 2018, Elan has been working on a smart-ski prototype equipped with sensors that give skiers real-time readouts on things like body balance position, edge activation, ski flex, dynamics, and turn phases. When finalized, the setup will allow audio guided coaching on snow. Global brand director Melanja Koroơec said Elan is the only ski company with the patents for the tech it’s creating, and that it’s still tweaking the sensors to make sure the ski will fly without hiccups when it debuts. Come launch (“soon,” but the exact date is TBD), the company expects the skis to take tech-assisted coaching well beyond what’s on the market. Competitors “offer mostly gadgets that may measure movements of the skier and their position as an add-on technical solution,” Koroơec said. “[But] they are not using readings directly from the skis.”

From the Boots Up

In 2015, Atomic started working on the industry’s first “smart ski boot” with biomechanics experts from Salzburg University. The goal: to create a boot that can help skiers become more aware of their balance and where they can apply more pressure for better performance. The result, the Hawx Ultra Connected, talks to Atomic’s free Connected app, which then relays information to the skier. “This product is great for the target consumer because you can dissect your skiing down to each individual turn and compare exactly how you ski versus the best in the business—like ‘benchmark’ athlete Daron Rahlves, who won World Championship gold in the Super G in 2001,” said Atomic’s head of boot development in Austria, Jason Roe. “Your run is also boiled down to an overall carving score that is a direct reflection of how well you ski. It’s quite addictive to keep your score at the level you want it to be.” Expect to see the Connected in use at various Canadian ski schools this January, and it should be available in the U.S. soon after.

Looking to the future, Elan believes there will be increasing demand for technology that puts skiers’ progress in their own hands. “We live in a data-centric world, and people are already constantly learning, evolving, and honing in on their skills from the feedback provided by technology,” Koroơec said. “Products like smart skis will provide real-time feedback. This allows skiers to learn at an accelerated pace.” When challenges like COVID and supply chain issues start to resolve, prepare for a wave of skiers ripping down the slopes, their personal coaches softly purring from the pockets of their coats.

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Warning: This story contains graphic details that may be disturbing to some readers. If you or someone you know is struggling with alcohol addiction, visitÌęÌęor call 1-800-662-HELP.

My brother, Chris, was somewhere between his bedroom and the morgue when my plane took off from the Denver airport, headed for Las Vegas. When I landed, my stepdad was there to get me. We drove to my parents’ house, in Henderson, Nevada, in silence. That morning at 9:30, my mom had walked into Chris’s room and found him dead, lying faceup on his bed, his mouth, neck, and chest crusted with blood.

My mom started screaming, first at Chris and then for my stepdad. He came running, saw Chris’s body, and dialed 911. When he called and told me what had happened, a sound came out of my body like nothing I’d ever heard before, and it kept coming as I crumpled against the wall. My eight-year-old and her friend were playing on the grass outside the kitchen window. I texted the little girl’s mother to come get her. Within an hour, I was on my way to the house where my brother had lived for the past three years, and where, on the morning before he died, he’d taken his bike out for a ride.

It wasn’t a long ride, just a half-hour spin through my parents’ neighborhood. Later I’d learn that he did this almost every morning. He’d leave just after dawn, before the desert heat rose up and paralyzed everything. He’d pedal three blocks in one direction, then turn and do four, then back across five or six, then home to my parents’.

By the time he had adopted this daily ritual, there weren’t many things that made him happy. But my mom said that he was happy when he rode his bike. And though our relationship had become strained by then, I have a text from him dated March 18, 2020, that reads, “When this pandemics over lets plan on riding a little of the Katy Trail out near St. Louis.”

Chris died the following May, as COVID-19 raged. That message is hard for me to read, because it shows that my attempt to help him wasn’t in vain, just too late.

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Powder DaysÌęis the November pick for the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Book Club. You can learn more about the book clubÌęhere,Ìęor join us onÌęÌęto discuss the book.

A few months ago, an acquaintance who follows me on social media asked, “Are you independently wealthy? I mean, you do a lot of skiing.”

I’m not, but his assumption was fair—skiing is more expensive than ever and increasingly inaccessible to all but the wealthy. It would take a long time to explain how my husband and I managed to forge a life that revolves around skiing for us and our three kids, including becoming ski bums in our early twenties, clinging to those selves as we built a family, and finding ways to work in the ski industry during that time, thereby gaming the system in our own little ways to get the cheapest season passes and gear possible. Now it turns out I can skip that explanation, thanks to Heather Hansman’s superbly reported and lyrical new book , which looks at how difficult it’s become for mountain-town locals and devoted dirtbags to find a way to keep skiing.

Powder Days is part anatomyÌęof a “skid” (Jackson, Wyoming, slang for a ski bum), part examination of the changing culture and economics of the ski industry, and part ode to a lifestyle that Hansman once had but left and may never again be able to recover. Hansman is an accomplished writer and environmental columnist for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, and her first book, , hangs on a solo pack-raft trip she made on Utah’s Green River; in its pages she waxes poetic about the beauty surrounding her and reports on water issues that vex the West.ÌęPowder Days adheres to the same format, only Hansman’s voiceÌęshines more here, an indication of how fully she is in her element. A lifelong skier, she grew up digging her edges into blue-ice runs on the tiny, East Coast mom-and-pop hills her parents could afford to take her to. She kept skiing through high school, and in college, she’d wake up “in the post-party, predawn dark to drive across Maine and New Hampshire just to ski knobby backcountry lines in the White Mountains.”

After college, skiing brought her west, following a conversation around a campfire in Maine, where her “future boss” told her he could get jobs for her and her friend Katie in Colorado. The womenÌęwere good skiers, and wily, and for several years during Hansman’s twenties, her sole focus was skiing, which she supported by working a series of different jobs (from liftie to guest services toÌępatroller) at Colorado’s Beaver Creek Resort. It was the kind of life that ski films by Matchstick Productions and Teton Gravity Research used to herald: work, party, scrape by, and ski as much as possible. But along the way, Hansman grew weary of the scraping-by part and scared she’d “wake up at fifty, still grumpily scanning lift tickets and bemoaning the lack of snow.” She became an editor at SkiÌęmagazine, a job that set her up perfectly to both ski more and learn the inner workings of the ski industry. A few years later, however, she left SkiÌęand moved to a city.

That’s when her life choices began to torment her, and the crux of the book comes into view. For 250 pages, she toggles between examining the existential dread she feels over never becoming the kind of skier who embodies “the soul of skiing”—that raw, slightly stinky, always hungry, but most dedicated skier in the sport’s societal strata—and all of the forces that threaten the survival of the ski bum. These diehards have all shunned the trappings of the middle class—from benefits to college educations to homeownership—in favor of doing whatever it takes to spend every winter day chasing something currently at great risk: snow, preferably powder. Finally, burdened by the fear that she gave up too much when she pivoted her life away from skiing, Hansman takes to the road to see if she did turn right when she should have stayed left.

As she makes her way from Vermont to Colorado, and from Montana to West Virginia, we meet people who took the path she didn’t. Each one, to a fault, is lovestruck by snow, deeply introspective about their life choices, and a ripper. Yet each is plagued by forces in both the world at large and the ski industry that threaten their precarious existence. Hansman lingers on them long enough for us to understand their reasons for shunning a more comfortable life in favor of skiing 150 days a year.

But the real importance of this book is apparent in the difficult-to-read yet clear-eyed reporting on the ski industry. Hansman’s gaze is unflinching as she calls out the white and wealthy niche market the industry caters to (more than half of resort skiers earn annual incomes of over $100,000, and 87 percent of them are white) and the housing crisis hurtingÌęski towns (, for instance, showed that the gap between what an average household could afford and the median price of a home there could grow by up to 400 percent in the next decade). She looks at the high rate of alcoholism, addiction, and suicide in such towns—Hansman reports that Aspen alone “has three times the national average of completed suicides”—and the accelerating climate crisis that many ski companies simultaneously contribute to but are trying to battle. Ultimately, you see that the heart of skiing’s myth, which dates back to Warren Miller sleeping in the parking lot of Sun Valley, Idaho, is barely beating, and where it is, its remaining open arteries are quickly stiffening.

It’s all so stark and depressing that toward the end of Powder Days, I wondered if it was even possible for Hansman to find something for us to be hopeful about. In the end, she does and she doesn’t. To find out, you’ll have to read this beautiful, aching, and honest portrayal of a skier wistfully longing for something she gave up and an industry that seems to be devouring its own soul. You’ll find some heroes hangingÌęon to the reason so many of us started skiing in the first place, and a few pocketsÌęthat are still managing to preserve the magic.

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The log on my son Hatcher’s phone says he tried my number eight times on the afternoon of March 15, yet the calls never came through. As I found out later, he’d suffered a head injury while skiing at Colorado’sÌęEldora Mountain Resort, was completely confused and disoriented, and was trying to reach me.ÌęThe calls that didn’t connect were probably made from somewhere on the mountain. He didn’t get a good signal until he reached the parking lot.

Three of us—my husband, Shawn, our nine-year-old daughter, Hollis, and I—had been skiing at Eldora earlier in the day, and we were driving home. Hatcher, 18, had come up later than we did;Ìęto my surprise, he’d texted me saying that he’d gotten over the upset stomach that had kept him home when we left, that he’d scored one of the parking passes the resort required because of COVID-19, and that he’d “probably see you soon!”

“I’m so glad!” I texted back, but I actually was hoping he’d ditch his family and hook up with friends. It had been a bad year for Hatcher—a combination of pandemic disruptions and losses in our family—and he was overdue for some fun.

The log shows that after the eight attempts, he tried texting. But I was driving, so I missed those as well. Finally, he called Shawn, and when they connected, what we heard was terrifying.

Hatcher was dissociating, on the verge of tears, and he had no idea what he was doing. He kept asking us how he’d gotten where he was and why he was there. He said he could see the car—the one we were in, about sevenÌęmiles away from him—parked in the lot. He announced that he was going to walk over, start it up, and drive home.

With fear in his voice, Shawn said, “No, Hatcher, we have the car. We’re driving it. And we’ll come get you.” Hatcher repeated the same nonsensical plan, and we knew something was very wrong. We did a U-turn as soon as we could and floored it back to Eldora. We kept Hatcher on the line and reached a longtime family friend who runs the Eldora Nordic Center, which is perched low on the mountain’s eastÌęside, and where I’ve worked as a part-time Nordic instructor for several years. We asked her to run out, grab Hatcher, and bring him indoors. That helped ease our immediate panic, but we still had no idea what had happened to our son.

During the 15-minute drive back to Eldora, we discussed possibilities. Teens are teens, we live in Boulder County, and weed is legal—could Hatcher have gotten intoÌęa bad strain? Or was he suddenly having a psychotic episode? Not impossible, given that there’s some mental illness in the family tree. Oddly, the one thing that didn’t occur to us was that he’d hit his head.

We should have thought of that immediately. Where we live, concussions are very common. The kids start ski and mountain-bike racing in grade school. By high school, these young athletes are intimate with taking risks, and kids in many families we know have suffered concussions.ÌęAccording to the Micheli Center, head injuries account for up to 20 percent of the 600,000 annual skiing and snowboarding injuries in the United States (for children that figure is 22 percent), and 22 to 42Ìępercent of all ski-related head injuries are severe enough to result in either loss of consciousness or clinical signs of concussion. But we’d been lucky—neither Hatcher nor our oldest son, Scout, had ever had one.

Arriving at Eldora, we ran to the Nordic Center and found Hatcher. He was visibly unscathed; even his helmet was free of scratches. But my middle kid, who likes to explore complicated topics like existentialism and the histories of both World Wars, couldn’t remember his sister’s age—“She’s seven and in fourth grade”—or his height and weight—“I’m five foot two, 185 pounds”—or why his family was staring at him with frightened faces. Well, maybe because he was wrong about Hollis’s age and he’s five foot sixÌęand weighs 130. He also thought Trump was still president.

Fortunately, ski-patrol personnel showed up soon after we arrived. They put a neck brace on him, loaded him into a sled, snowmobiled him across the base of the mountain, and unpacked him at their headquarters.

From the outside, HatcherÌęlooked fine—minus his worried expression. Then hisÌęquestions began:ÌęWhat day is it? What happened? Where am I? Why do I have this neck brace on? Patrol determined that he’d sustained a concussion; they didn’t know how, and we still don’t, but one possibility was that he was hitting jumps in the terrain park, biffedÌęa landing, and smacked his head on solid snow.ÌęAfter an hour in the patrol room, he started to seem better, so a paramedic (assisted by a doctor reached by phone) decided it was OK for us to drive him toÌęan emergency room 50 minutes away in Boulder, rather than wait for an ambulance.

Soon we were in the waiting room, with people staring because, as Shawn said, Hatcher seemed punch-drunk.ÌęHatcher said he needed to use the restroom, so Shawn guided him to it. When he finished, Shawn needed to go, so he told Hatcher to return to the chair he’d been sitting in. But when Shawn came out, he found Hatcher wandering around aimlessly. When Hatcher saw him, he said, “Dad! Why are you łó±đ°ù±đ?”

Later, sitting inside a private room, Hatcher and I were waiting to hear the results of his CAT scan when his behavior started to get weirder. Dressed in an exam gown and lying in a hospital bed, he would lift his arm every 40 seconds or so, look at his watch, and ask, “Is today Monday? Do I work? Did I blow it off?”

“Yes, it’s Monday,” I’d say. “No, you don’t work, and no, you didn’t blow off your boss.”

Then, looking at his gown and pinching a bit of the fabric, he’d ask, “What’s this?” Later, when we finally left his room to head through the lobby, he shook his head and said, “Whoa! I’m in the emergency room?”

It was all so bizarre. But what really got me was when he tried to piece together how he’d ended up at the hospital.

“So patrol found me and called you?” he said.

“No, you called us, and we came to you.”

“Oh, man. I’m so sorry you had to do that.”

“Don’t worry about it, Hatch. It was no problem. We love you.”Ìę

“Well, thank you guys for rescuing me. I couldn’t have done it on my own.”Ìę

And that’s when I came within a forced smile of crying. Because what really happened was that Hatcher—with his rattled brain—rescued himself.

It appears (though we’ll never know) that no one saw him crash, hit his head, lose consciousness, or struggle back up. No one noticed a dazed kid moving from wherever he fell to the Nordic Center parking lot. And no one heard the fear in his voice as he called and recalled his parents.

I got stuck on the sadness of this for a few days, and then I decided to try and understandÌęit better. While Hatcher recovered on the couch—doctor’s orders for him were to chill out and not move much or do much—I called the neurology department at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. Dr. Christopher M. Filley, the department’s director of behavioral neurology, helped me grasp what might have happened.

“From what you told me, your son did not appear to be sufficiently injured to prompt someone on the slope to stop and see how he was doing,” he said. “Because it seems no observer can provide any information about the event, and because he does not remember what happened, it cannot be determined with certainty what actually took place. I emphasize that I defer to his doctor with respect to the diagnosis and treatment of this young man. But if I were to speculate, it is plausible that your son could have hit his head, sustained a concussion, and then been in an acute confusional state,Ìęmeaning that he was awake but not fully lucid. A person in this condition could conceivably get down the mountain and call for help, because the brain will sometimes fall back on relatively automatic behaviors—what it knows to do well from repeated past experiences.”

A doctor in the ER had called Hatcher’s repeated questioning perseveration,Ìęwhich can be caused by damage to the frontal cortex, the region of the brain that controls a person’s self-awareness and inhibition. Without such control, someone who perseverates finds it difficult to stop a particular action and switch to another.Ìę

Filley described what was probably going on inside Hatcher’s head.

“The brain consists of about three pounds of soft, gelatinous tissue inside the skull,” he said. “It floats in cerebrospinal fluid to help protect it from injury, but when the head is subjected to a blow or jolt, the brain can still be damaged.” With traumatic brain injuries, including concussions, the damage typically occurs deep in the brain, where the connections between neurons are stretched, and this may have been what happened to Hatcher. In some people, Filley explained, the brain surface is also damaged, because the brain is thrust against the bones on the inside of the skull.

According to Hatcher’s CAT scan, he sustained no bleeding or bruising, only a concussion, perhaps because he had a helmet on. Head injuries from skiing or other impact sports can be much worse. A friend suffered a severe concussion after hitting a tree while skiing, andÌęthe resulting injury caused such intense vertigo that, for a long time, he could only walk down a hallway with his head sliding against the wall. And after the last of multiple concussions, another friend’s son had to sit in a room with double-blackout blinds for a month to avoid crushing migraines. “He still struggles, had some lasting cognitive deficits, and has to take daily medication that causes weight loss, so he can’t gain weight,”Ìęhis momÌęsays. “It changed his whole identity.ÌęHe went from identifying as an honors student and athlete to a struggling student with a brain injury and no longer an athlete.” The good news is that he recently went on a two-week skiing road trip with another of Hatcher’s friendsÌęand sent his mom videos of himself skiing powder and loving life. “He’ll be OK,”Ìęshe says, “but that journey is rough.”

As for Hatcher, after 24 hours, heÌęstopped perseverating, although he still can’t remember anything from two days prior to his injury, only flashes from the day it happenedÌęand not much from the day after.

On doctor’s orders, for two weeks he had to lay low, avoid mental stimuli (screens and books), and make sure he didn’t do anything that could cause him to fall and sustain a second brain injury. If this happens while a person is still symptomatic, it can result in “second impact syndrome,” which can cause death. So we’re urging Hatcher to use extra caution even after his full recovery time is complete.

What I’m happy to report now is that Hatcher is up and about, as seemingly healthy as ever. Some friends have warned that new symptoms can emerge weeks after the original injury. I’m crossing my fingers and watching him closely. And I’m endlessly grateful that when he crashed he was wearing his helmet. But we’ve also had some long conversations about the importance of doing any outdoor activity with a friend. If Hatcher had, there would have been an account of his injury, and I wouldn’t still be lying awake at night, imagining the worst-case scenario.

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Hell hath no fury like social media does for a well-meaning Brooklyn mom and writer who sharedÌęher story about living in Boulder, Colorado, during the pandemic.

This harsh truth became apparent on March 8, when The Washington Post Magazine ±èłÜČú±ôŸ±Čőłó±đ»ćÌę about moving with her family from Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood to Boulder, where she lived for most of 2020 and into 2021. The articleÌęis an amiable part ofÌęa special issue on spring travel, but an army of trolls, angry Boulderites, and Front Range truthers took to their devices to rip it to shreds. Their insults—which showed up in the story’s comments section and on social media—ranged from “lmfao did WaPo really just publish a whole ass article about some yuppies moving from one place to another” to “I’m almost in awe of how clueless this woman is.” We reached out to Miller, who said she hadn’t read the comments (good idea!), to find out how it feels to be the victim of a Colorado landslide.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű: Did you have any idea your piece would be greeted with such over-the-top vitriol? I mean, it’s not like you stomped on a kitten. Why are people so fired up?
Miller: I honestly didn’t think a lot of people were going to read it. It’s a travel issue of TheÌęWashington Post Magazine—who even reads special issues? But it ended up on the ±ÊŽÇČőłÙ’s home page, I guess, and got traction. I was expecting some pushback, like, Here’s this white, privileged woman writing about fleeing the pandemic,Ìębut I didn’t think Boulderites would get really angry. I thought they would understand that this was meant to be a fun fish-out-of-water piece.

Have you read the comments on the article itself, on Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms?
Oh, God,Ìęno. I never read the comments on any of my stories—and I don’t for this precise reason. Because I think people have strong feelings about things, and they use those platforms to express those feelings. I don’t need to engage with that. If people have constructive feedback, I’m happy to hear it, but those platforms are often used only to vent.

Do the reactions change the way you feel about Boulder or Colorado or people in general?
It’s funny, right? There’s a part in the story where I talk to a guy who was dressed up in drag on a street corner, who’s standing near two opposing groups of protesters. I asked him why he was out there, and basically he said, “Because there’s too much tension and animosity on the other corners.” To me, that’s Boulder. It’s that open-mindedness and sense of freedom, and people are able to be who they are. I guess if the story is getting that kind of negative reaction, that’s contrary at least to this one gentleman’s view of what Boulder is.

I thought Boulder or Coloradans would understand that every place is incredibly complex, and that in a 2,000-word story—which is first person and based on my specific experience—all I can do is describe what happened to me. If you want a story that’s about what it’s like to live in BoulderÌęand be a longtime Boulderite,Ìęand youÌęobserve the changes, that’s a story worth writing and thinking about. But that’s not a story for the spring travel issue of a magazine put out by The Washington Post. That’s a hardcore feature that you report when we’re not in a pandemic. That wasn’t the story I was asked to write, and it’s not what I wrote.

I’ve heard people calling you out for not having a real connection to Boulder. For example, they took issue with your use of formal names for trailheads, like the Walter Orr Roberts Trail, which locally is known as NCAR, which is a reference to its location behind the National Center for Atmospheric Research lab.
But for readers of The Washington Post Magazine, this is a travel story, and if you’re traveling to Boulder, you need to be able to easily locate the things that are referenced in it. In terms of trailheads, it doesn’t matter what Boulderites call it. You have to be able to Google it to know where you’re going.

I thought this comment from an angry reader of your storyÌęwas hysterical, because there’s some truth to it: “They were so into it [Boulder], they actually think it’s interesting.” I’ve been to Park Slope, and I have to say, it’s a lot more culturally stimulating than Boulder.
It’s not really fair to criticize one place for lacking aspects of the other. Both cities have special things to recommend them, though I wouldn’t say broth tonic is one of them.

OK, having lived 13 miles west ofÌęBoulder for 17 years, there are a few things that I have questions about. Starting with: WhatÌęthe hell are “hiking sandals”?
They’re like Keens or Tevas—basically sandals, open-toe, with tread, and people wear them hiking, and everyone I saw on the trails last summer wore them. I called them thatÌęinstead of their official names, because I didn’t want to give free publicity toÌębig brands.

Look, the fact that I’m calling them hiking sandals and saying the Walter Orr Roberts Trail and not NCAR—this shows we are outsiders. That’s the point. The story is about the fact that we are New Yorkers who don’t belong here, and who on that day were ruining the experience of people who were hiking with us. It could not be more self-aware.

Where did you read that the average summertime humidity in Boulder is zero percent? Several weather websites say it’s in the 40 to 50 percent range.Ìę
I found that informationÌę.

Ah, I see. This site is talking about the “feels like” humidity of Boulder in summertime. From someone used to eastern humidity, that’s probably accurate—that is, it would feel like zero percent.
Totally. In New York during the summer, it’s like standing in the shower all the time.

You mentioned that you can drive 4,000 vertical feet in Rocky Mountain National Park “in just a few minutes.” You also mentioned how harrowing the drive was for you. Where were you that you climbed that high that quickly?
That is directly off the website for Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. That’s from the base to the highest point above the tree line. And it did not take us more than 15 minutes to get from the entrance of the park up to above the tree line.

In the story, you mention letting your kid “jump in” the Blue River in Breckenridge, and that you kept “one eye on him and another on the quaint shops and cafĂ©s.” That’s a real river with a strong current, so this part confused the heck out of me.Ìę
We’re talking about the part of the river that’s right in downtown Breck. All the kids were down there, playing in that river. They were all wearing their hiking sandals. [Laughs.]

I’ve seen comments from people demanding that you “check your privilege.” They also call you “tone deaf” for saying things like, “It was an opportunity for us to test-drive a new kind of existence, even be a different kind of family.” What would you say to them?
I would say that I do check my privilege in the piece. I even use the word! And again, it’s a travel story. The point of traveling is to try on a different existence. I think that’s something a lot of people might be interested in doing if they had the chance. Or if they were lucky—and privileged—enough to have family willing to take them in during a pandemic.

One commenter wrote, “You shouldn’t be writing CO articles yet, your voice is that of an outsider and it hurts to read.” Should only insiders be allowed to write about Boulder?
Then it wouldn’t be a travel story. It wouldn’t be a story for people coming to check out Boulder. I’m sure the insider would have lots of cool recommendations—which, it turns out, I wasn’t able to experience or know about because of the pandemic. From the jump, I make it clear I’m an outsider and that’s the point of view you’re getting.

I noticed that you left some of Boulder’s less perfect stuff out—the year-round homelessness problem, all the millennials who swarmed Boulder Creek last summer, completely disregarding the mask mandate. Did you not see these things, or did they not fit into the narrative?
I’ll answer the second question first. Again, because this was written for a time when people can travel to Boulder freely—that is, post-pandemic—you hopefully won’t still have the kind of University of Colorado chaos you mention—that is, the people in Boulder Creek. But, yeah, I was well aware of the university and problems students can create. As for the homeless problem, I guess
 put it this way:ÌęI’m coming from New York, so what I’m seeing here is what I’m seeing back home.

What was your takeaway from all this?
Don’t read the comments! Other than that, all I can say is that I recognize both our privilege and our outsider status. It’s all there in the story. And, yes, Boulder has shown us a different kind of existence—in a really good way. But we’re still going back to New York.

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In 2017, Matt Sterbenz was heading up a company he’d founded, 4FRNT, a successful ski brand known for launching the freeskiing movement. 4FRNT’s skis are crisp, light, and torsionally stiff—and, like pretty much all skis, they’re also made of materials that are horrendous for the environment. The vast majority of the brands constructing the tools that move us across snow use some of the most polluting materials on the planet, such as petroleum-based resins, plastics, and carbon fiber. Sterbenz had to use these, too, because no alternative had yet been created. But a businessman named Charles Dimmler was about to hand him a solution.

Dimmler is the founder of Checkerspot, a company that uses algae to bio-manufacture oils that can be used in polyurethanes and textile coatings. Polyurethane makes up the plastic components in a typical ski, and it’s traditionally made of petroleum-based chemicals, so it has a large environmental footprint: According to one German lifecycle assessment, the production of a single ski emits about 60 pounds of carbon (in comparison, burning one gallon of gasoline emits 20 pounds). Ski manufacturing also typically has a very large water footprint, a long supply chain, and generates huge amounts of waste. The irony is striking: Building skis and other winter hardgoods contributes significantly to the climate change wreaking havoc on our ski seasons.

But Dimmler and Sterbenz were about to make a breakthrough. The company that emerged from their collaboration, WNDR Alpine, uses renewable energy to fashion boards with sustainably harvested aspen wood from Utah and polyurethane made from algae, not petroleum. The brand is also reducing waste in its manufacturing process (in 2020, WNDR diverted 1,200 pounds of trash from the landfill). Its efforts seem to be resonating with consumers: Last year, WNDR sold out of the most popular sizes of its Intention 110 backcountry ski. And in 2021, with backcountry skiing predicted to explode (see p. 33), the company expects the same.

WNDR isn’t the first snowsports brand to innovate with the environment in mind. In Europe, Capita Snowboards’ factory runs on 100 percent green energy, and Grown Skis uses eco-friendlier basalt instead of carbon fiber, sustainably harvested wood, and glues made from pine tree resin. Among U.S. brands, Mervin and Niche lead the way. Niche, founded in 2010, builds its snowboards from sustainably harvested wood cut near its factory in Utah, uses basalt as well, and digitally prints its top sheets using water-based inks. It also partnered with a company called Entropy Resins to create its patented Snappy Sap Bioresin, made of renewable materials from the industrial waste streams of the paper pulp and biofuels industries.

Mervin (parent company of Lib Tech, Gnu, and Roxy) uses the eco-friendliest materials available, produces zero hazardous waste, and runs its operation primarily on wind and hydroelectric power. It also formed an extensive recycling program, as well as a sawdust-to-soil compost program. Together, such innovations have taken these brands to the next level in eco-friendly manufacturing. What will it take for everyone else to catch up?

Too Big—and Small—to Change

Some big ski brands are taking steps to make the hardgoods industry greener. Atomic’s North American Brand Manager Sean Kennedy said, “Atomic uses tons, literally tons, of recycled plastics in our ski boot assortment. We also power all of our ski presses with reclaimed wood [from factory scraps], and the excess heat from this process is then recaptured to heat our entire factory and adjacent facilities.”

Völkl has eliminated hazardous substances from many stages of production. Rossignol uses wood cores from certified sustainable sources in its Black Ops skis, 100 percent recycled steel in its edges, and 30-percent recycled plastic in the bases. And La Sportiva switched from carbon to wood in all of its skis, and is using FSC-certified woods for the 2021 line.

Yet the vast majority of brands use plastics and resins made from toxic petrochemicals. Experts estimate it can take 500 to 1,000 years for these materials to decompose in a landfill. So brands still aren’t addressing one of the industry’s key environmental hazards.

“As an industry with a future dependent on consistent winters, our industry is uniting around climate change and we’re working hard to give every brand opportunities to step up to meaningfully address it,” said Chris Steinkamp, director of advocacy for Snowsports Industries of America’s ClimateUnited initiative.

But “stepping up” isn’t that simple, said WNDR co-founder Xan Marshland: “Economically, our industry is a drop in the bucket compared to larger ones, like aerospace or automotive. There’s not much incentive to innovate beyond what’s already available.” According to NPD, the ski and snowboard industry generates $2.3 billion in annual revenue (compared to, say, the apparel industry’s $368 billion).

And even if suppliers did make changes, “larger brands will require more time to get adequate infrastructure set up to support a new [production] process,” said Marshland. For larger brands, which can produce more than a million pairs of skis every year, obtaining enough green materials also appears to be a challenge. Niche, for example, uses a resin-hardener called Recyclamine that allows skis and snowboards to be fully recycled. “I’m not sure the supply chain is large enough yet for everyone to be able to switch,” said founder Ana Van Pelte.

The Upside of Small

In some ways, greening a company is easier for new brands that are starting from the ground up. Mervin founder Pete Saari said, “Working towards sustainability and nontoxic, recyclable boards has been part of Mervin’s DNA since we began in the early ’80s. We knew we were going to be building every day, so we didn’t want to work with toxic resins or materials for personal safety and health reasons.”

The brand was broke when it started, Saari says. “[But while] scarcity and ‘no money’ sounds bad, when it comes to creating motivation to maximize material usage, it’s a strength.” From the beginning, Mervin was able to “scour the world of materials,” looking for ones that met both the company’s performance and sustainability standards. Today, it’s a profitable business.

And now WNDR has created a line of skis with its AlgalTech technology, using plastics derived from oils secreted by microalgae. These plastics replace conventional materials derived from fossil fuels (carbon fiber, plastic, polyurethane), and create a ski that has a short supply line, high performance, and a lower impact on the environment than traditional skis.

But all of these companies still impact the environment simply by manufacturing something. That’s why Cyrus Schenck, founder of Renoun Skis, believes there is no such thing as a truly green ski (or snowboard). In his view, the best thing skiers can do is ride the skis they already own longer. “The average lifespan of a pair of skis is 100 days, yet the average American skis 2.7 days a year,” he said. Most buy skis far more often than once every 37 years.

Schenck scoffs at the idea of stopping ski production entirely, “but a company can offset skis and shipping by buying carbon credits,” he said. Renoun does what it can to green up its manufacturing, but ultimately, Schenck believes the best way brands can minimize impact is by encouraging skiers to ride their boards longer and participate in takeback programs (which WNDR offers) when they’re done.

Getting It Done

Of course, creating products with dramatically lower environmental impacts and encouraging customers to use them longer aren’t mutually exclusive. And Mervin, Niche, and WNDR believe that it’s possible for other companies—including long-established ones—to make changes to shrink their environmental footprints.

The main excuses from bigger brands? Cost, accessibility, and scalability. Four decades after starting Mervin, Saari said, “Even today we find there is some resistance from the business community on sustainable efforts, with [some] studies by business experts saying that consumer purchasing decisions aren’t significantly impacted by environmental efforts or practices.”

Niche’s Van Pelte added, “I don’t want to name any names, but bigger companies than ours have the money and resources to do more and better than we do, and their failure to act on pushing the technology further is really unfortunate. They should be putting their money where their mouths are and stepping up to the plate, if they truly care about the environment as much as they claim to.”

WNDR, for one, is willing to share its technologies for the greater good. “Six or seven brands throughout the snowboard and ski space” have reached out about partnerships to incorporate AlgalTech into their product lines, said marketing director Pep Fujas. This bodes well for giving greener skis a bigger share of the market.

And though it may take time, Van Pelte believes the environmental methods Niche and others use “are absolutely stuff that anyone could adopt and put into practice. It might be more expensive, but the more people who adopt it, the easier and more affordable it will become.”

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