ϳԹ

Kaufman has a hack for balancing family life, entrepreneurship, and skiing while living in the burbs.
(Photo: Brad Kaminski)
Kaufman has a hack for balancing family life, entrepreneurship, and skiing while living in the burbs.
Kaufman has a hack for balancing family life, entrepreneurship, and skiing while living in the burbs. (Photo: Brad Kaminski)

The Weird Foothill Guy Believes His Style of Skiing Is Better than a Day at the Resort. We Tried It Out.

Published: 

Alex Kaufman, a suburban dad in Denver, descends slopes with barely any snow, using discontinued plastic skis. This method, he says, is far more fun than a day at the resort, so we accompanied him on an outing.

New perk: Easily find new routes and hidden gems, upcoming running events, and more near you. Your weekly Local Running Newsletter has everything you need to lace up! .

Whump! My face plant is sudden, a cartwheel of flying ski poles and curse words into powder. The sting of snow on bare skin jolts my eyes open, and I hear a chorus of woo! erupt lower on the slope.

“Yeah, Fred!” a voice bellows. “You were a little too far forward—remember to keep your weight back.”

I brush myself off and schuss down the powdery hillside to my two companions, wondering how my 38 years of skiing experience seemingly evaporated in an instant. But I have little time to nurse my bruised pride—my new friends are already making their way up the slope for another run. I struggle to keep pace as we trudge toward the summit of this wooded hillside in Genesee, an upscale neighborhood in Denver’s western suburbs. I look to an adjacent hilltop and see the familiar elliptical sides of the Sculptured House, the mansion built by architect Charles Deaton featured in the 1973 film .

The guy in front of me, Wade Wilson, is a wiry real estate agent from nearby Golden. In front of him is Alex Kaufman, also from Golden, who dishes out rapid-fire advice as we climb. Keep your weight over your arches, not the balls of your feet. You don’t edge the turns like on a normal ski, you just kind of waggle your knees. Don’t worry if you hit a rock, just let the skis do their job.

“You’ll get the hang of it, I promise,” Kaufman says. “Everyone sucks their first time.” Kaufman, 45, is a father of two, a youth soccer coach, and the chief operating officer of Kaufman Asset Management, a company that invests in affordable housing. But I’m here because Kaufman is also a budding social media celebrity in the U.S. skiing world, where fans know him as the Weird Foothill Guy.

The Weird Foothill Guy only boasts about 11,000 followers across his channels, but his audience includes ski-industry heads of state, outdoor journalists, and even a few official resort accounts. I started following him in 2023 and quickly became obsessed with his online musings. Like many snow-sports aficionados, he regularly posts about the shoddy state of American skiing: massive lift lines, $48 cheeseburgers, and miles-long traffic jams on Interstate 70, the main artery connecting Denver with the resorts. “Economic vitality!” he once tweeted next to a video of a January traffic jam that stranded some motorists for ten hours on the freeway.

But most Weird Foothill Guy content promotes Kaufman’s highly unorthodox style of backcountry skiing—one that seems to defy logic. He skis up and down slopes that are just a few miles from downtown Denver—hillsides with so little snowpack (and so many rocks and stumps) that your daredevil nephew wouldn’t sled down them, let alone tackle them on skis. Yet Kaufman navigates this terrain three or four days a week during the winter, often on his lunch break or before work. He floods social media with photos from these micro-adventures, alongside captions that express his radical view on the sport. Basically: Resort skiing sucks and I’ve discovered an amazing alternative. 

Kaufman’s brand of skiing—which he calls Simple Skiing—relies on a bizarre plastic ski called the Marquette Backcountry, which looks like a cross between a child’s toy and a float pontoon. He did not invent these strange skis, but he has become their strongest evangelist. He keeps a small fleet of them in his garage, and lends them out to anyone who wants to try them, including me. Descending on them presents an ample learning curve, as I have just discovered. Ascending is similarly challenging. You don’t use climbing skins. The skis have fish-scale-like divots on the bottoms that grip the snow, similar to the ones on some cross-country skis.

Wilson and Kaufman speed ahead. Kaufman is wearing a pair of basketball shorts over tights and a flannel shirt. An orange handkerchief flutters from his back pocket. “I have the bandana in case hunters spot me,” he says. “I never wear ski pants—you get too hot.”

I soon learn this lesson, as my core temperature spikes under my preferred backcountry outfit. Snowmelt from my crash drips down my back and soaks my long underwear, and I wonder: Is this really better than a day at the resort?

I find my answer at the summit. Wilson and Kaufman have waited for me, and as I reach the top, I look down from our perch. Below us is I-70, packed with cars; a serpentine line of red brake lights stretching to the horizon. The traffic is barely inching along, and the nearest resort is still 45 miles up the road. I shift my gaze to the snowy slope below my skis. We’re completely alone, shredding untracked powder just 25 minutes from downtown Denver.

“We’ll be home eating breakfast before they’re in the parking lot,” Kaufman says. “C’mon, let’s hit another run.”

Kaufman (right) and Wade Wilson scout backcountry-skiing lines on Genesee Mountain, outside Denver.
Kaufman (right) and Wade Wilson scout backcountry-skiing lines on Genesee Mountain, outside Denver. (Photo: Courtesy the Author)

I came across the Weird Foothill Guy when he posted photos of his ski tracks on a McMansion-covered hill south of Golden called Green Mountain. The images made my jaw drop. I grew up in Golden and frequented that slope; it’s where locals went to smoke weed. The winter snow cycle on Green Mountain is similar to that on hillsides across the Front Range: storms dump a few inches—heck, maybe even a few feet—but the Colorado sun always comes out and turns it to mush within a couple of days. Green Mountain is no ski slope.

Scrolling through the Weird Foothill Guy’s feed, I saw similar images from hillsides I know well: Lookout Mountain, the Dinosaur Park-n-Ride, even North Table Mountain. A spreadsheet he posted showed that he was closing in on 100,000 vertical feet of climbing for the season, all of it done in the Denver suburbs. I’m a lifelong Colorado skier, and the data and images boggled my mind.

I messaged the Weird Foothill Guy on Instagram in early 2024 to ask about the skis. He gave me something of an ultimatum. “I may make you see/touch the odd skis if not ski on them in order to cover the topic,” he wrote. I agreed.

We spoke on video chat. Kaufman talked a mile a minute, bouncing from one topic to the next about his skiing and skis: the Marquette Backcountry has been out of stock since 2019; you needed to study terrain and snow conditions to find the right places to use them; but if you were dialed, you’d never deal with the madness of a ski resort again.

“I don’t know what else to say. It’s just a better experience, because I never sit in traffic,” Kaufman told me. “I had a pretty busy workday today, and I still got to go skiing.”

By the time of our call, Kaufman was already pretty accustomed to media attention. A handful of local outlets had written about him, but for an altogether different reason. During the pandemic, he became semi-famous across the ski world for operating an Instagram account called Epic Lift Lines. There he published images of skier gridlock at areas owned by Vail Resorts and became the focal point of a backlash against ski-industry consolidation and the overselling of season passes.

“It was mostly staffers at Vail Resorts who were sending me the pictures,” said Kaufman, who shut the account down after 18 months. “I predicted it was going to happen when they slashed ticket prices
by 20 percent.”

The premonition came from Kaufman’s own career in the ski industry. Before turning to real estate, he was a 20-year veteran of marketing and public relations at small-to-medium-size resorts in the West and New England.

“Whenever someone died on the slopes, I was the one who had to tell the media about it,” Kaufman said. The job thickened his skin. It also taught him how to thrive on social media, and how to promote himself with digital content—skills that came in handy when he launched a podcast about the industry, called Wintry Mix, in 2015. Working for resorts also allowed him the freedom to ski, something he’d done since he was a child. But when Kaufman left the outdoor industry in 2015 for real estate, his free time evaporated. He and his wife were living in Vermont, and they had two small children. He sought a new way to ski, one that didn’t eat up hours of the day.

Kaufman’s brand of skiing—which he calls Simple Skiing—relies on a plastic ski called the Marquette Backcountry, which looks like a cross between a child’s toy and a pontoon.

Through friends, Kaufman met a group of skiers who used Marquette Backcountry skis to adventure in the forests near the Mad River Glen ski area. He bought a pair and mounted telemark bindings to them. Initially, he was unimpressed. He crashed, skidded out, and struggled. “I tried them on a mogul run at Jay Peak and it was a complete disaster,” he said. “I thought, I’m going to die on these things.”

But after one season he learned how to pilot them on the hills near his house. He also discovered that on downhills, the skis had one major advantage. Unlike traditional alpine or backcountry skis, which feature sharp metal edges and slick bottoms, the Marquettes have plastic edges that slide down fresh snow, no matter how thin the coverage. Kaufman began experimenting with them in his backyard.

“Behind my house there were these chutes where you can get maybe 200 feet of vertical up and down,” Kaufman says. “You could do laps on it literally out my door. I did that poorly for one season and learned what they were good at and what they were bad at.”

Kaufman improved on the weird skis. Rather than go on adventures that lasted for hours, he’d simply find a hill with favorable snow and then sprint up and down it a few times during a break from email. After two seasons, he had mostly abandoned resort skiing and even backcountry adventures, instead gravitating toward his multi-lap backyard sessions.

“Skiing became part of my day, but not all of my day,” Kaufman says. “I can coach my kid’s soccer team and go look at properties and have a totally busy day—but I still got to go skiing.”

In 2019, Kaufman relocated from Vermont to the Denver suburbs, where there were dozens of potential ski hills just a short drive from his front door.

Gear journalists seemed confused by the Marquette Backcountry when the strange ski appeared on the market in 2010. “It’s not a cross-country ski. It can’t be classified as alpine, either,” wrote one ϳԹ reviewer.

The ski’s inventor, David Ollila, envisioned a snowshoe-ski hybrid when he began tinkering with designs in the mid-nineties. Ollila, who devised early models of action-sports cameras, lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where the rolling terrain and massive snowfall make for tricky backcountry travel in winter. He sought a device that could grip its way up a hillside and then slide down the other side. He experimented with designs and materials for more than a decade before finally getting the ski he wanted in 2009. But even Ollila knew that his skis weren’t for everyone.

“No big company would have ever brought these things to market,” Ollila told me. “They are heavy and dumb and slow.” His company, Snapperhead Inventions, eventually produced 6,000 pairs of them at a small factory in Marquette. Most of the sales were local, but he also found customers in New England. “A smattering of people told me they’d tried them in alpine terrain, but not out West,” Ollila said. “It was like a cult thing.”

But Ollila never guessed that a seemingly innocuous marketing decision—to use the word backcountry for his product—would eventually land him and his skis in legal trouble. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as early as 2006, online retail giant Backcountry.com began filing trademark-infringement lawsuits and sending cease and desist letters to companies using the word to market everything from dog food to apparel. The company ramped up its legal campaign in 2017, and in 2019 served Ollila with a trademark lawsuit about his skis.

Rather than surrender, Ollila fought back, using Facebook to alert his customers of the lawsuit. Other brands started their own online crusades against Backcountry.com, and the movement sparked a boycott and backlash. In 2019, Backcountry.com tamped down its aggressive legal strategy, and its CEO at the time, Jonathan Nielsen, fired the law firm overseeing the suits, according to news reports. (Backcountry.com did not respond to questions about past litigation.)

That year, Ollila brokered a deal with Backcountry.com for the company to sell his skis. As part of the agreement, the retailer donated money to two nonprofit groups Ollila founded for innovators in Michigan.

Kaufman followed Ollila’s plight as it played out—by 2020, he was regularly posting videos and photos of himself skiing hillsides near Denver, and had adopted the nom de guerre Weird Foothill Guy.

Between 2015 and 2019, Kaufman had purchased several pairs of the skis, regularly emailed with Ollila, and even invited the inventor to appear on his podcast to talk about the legal ordeal. But after the online retailer purchased the ski brand, Kaufman noticed that the product became harder to order. In 2021, the company’s website simply said that the skis were sold out. “If these things had been called the Local Yokel, you could still buy them,” Kaufman says.

Fearing that the skis might disappear forever, Kaufman began buying up new and used ones on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and elsewhere. He amassed a fleet of 11 pairs, plus a collection of boots and bindings.

He continued to post images and videos of his backcountry skiing to social media, often with a blanket invitation to anyone who wanted to join him. Every winter, people would message him about his crazy ski lines. Wilson, 42, was one of his first converts. He started skiing with Kaufman in 2020 after taking him up on his invitation.

“I’d watched his videos for weeks and was finally just like, ‘I’m gonna call this guy,’” Wilson said. “I had to come to his house super early. I had to try the stuff on. And I quickly realized I liked it.”

Kaufman told Wilson and his other followers that they needed to buy the skis, either from Backcountry.com or the secondary market, before they disappeared from circulation. Eventually, Kaufman became something of a broker for used Marquette Backcountry skis, connecting buyers with sellers he met online.

“Here I’ve solved this problem that people have with skiing,” Kaufman says, “and you can’t buy the skis anymore.”

Showing off his fleet of Marquette Backcountry skis, which allow him to tour without skins
Showing off his fleet of Marquette Backcountry skis, which allow him to tour without skins (Photo: Brad Kaminski)

By 2022, it had become nearly impossible to find the skis online. Kaufman launched his own social media campaign against Backcountry in late 2023 and early 2024. He tagged the company in photos of him skiing untracked powder on the discontinued skis. He sent emails to various Backcountry addresses and pinged employees on LinkedIn. He also gave interviews.

The day before our meetup in February, a story appeared on the website of the National Public Radio affiliate in Park City, Utah—home of Backcountry—about Kaufman and his skis. In the piece, Kaufman replayed the trademark saga and accused the online retailer of snuffing out a recreational tool that could revolutionize skiing.

“I’ve never heard anything back from them,” Kaufman told me. “Not one response.”

He came up with theories behind the silence. Some were conspiratorial—they know these skis will take business away from resorts, and the industry doesn’t want that—and some were banal—maybe they don’t care about one weird guy on the internet. 

After our interview, I reached out to Backcountry to ask about Kaufman, and after several weeks I received a response. Nobody at the company had heard of him. Due to turnover in staff, nobody knew if anyone had ever received his emails or seen his angry tweets.

“Backcountry is now aware of Alex Kaufman and is happy to have a conversation with him,” a media representative told me.

Rather than go on adventures that lasted for hours, Kaufman would simply find a hill with favorable snow and then sprint up and down it during a break from email. After two seasons, he had mostly abandoned resort skiing.

When I asked about Kaufman’s repeated inquiries about the ski’s availability, or the potential for future sales, a company PR rep said, “Backcountry is not in the business of gating technology or impeding sport.”

As for the Marquette Backcountry ski, the rep told me that the product had officially been discontinued in 2021 or 2022 after unimpressive sales. “The skis appealed to a very niche market and languished on the website for 2.5 seasons with deep discounting,” the rep said.

After selling the skis to Backcountry, Ollila effectively walked away from the product, and he declined to answer questions about the online retailer’s distribution of his invention. But he was heartened to see Kaufman become an evangelist for it.

“I think he’s one of the smartest and most wily and persistent characters out there,” Ollila said. “He’s the cult skiing hero you didn’t know you needed.”

After an hour of flailing, I finally get the hang of the big dumb skis. You really do have to keep your weight slightly back, but not too far back. When you run over a bush or a stump or a rock, you must fight the urge to tense up and instead relax and let the pontoons float over the obstacle. Turning the skis requires incredible leg strength, and sometimes it’s best to just point them and go.

I also begin to wrap my head around the connection between Alex Kaufman and his style of recreation. He repeatedly asserts that his pursuits are eminently practical, a solution to his desire to fit skiing into his overpacked schedule.

But evangelism is rarely rational. Kaufman tells me that he’s been a dedicated skier since he was a kid. He was a competitive mogul athlete and ski bum in his teens before entering the industry in his early twenties. That’s thousands of ski days, hundreds of pairs of skis, countless hours spent at resorts. For a sizable portion of the skiing population, the constant repetition of lift lines, powder chases, and traffic jams might grow old. A much smaller percentage, however, would actually try to do something about it. A minute number would find a real solution. And only a few would want to share it with the world.

After our final run, I look at the hillside and see our ski lines—perfect S’s carved into powder. According to my Strava, we’ve climbed and descended 1,500 feet in 90 minutes. We high-five, hug, and replay the session—typical post-ski-day stuff. Only our ski day lasted an hour and a half, and we’ll be home in about 15 minutes.

Kaufman quickly loads the gear into his minivan, and we drive onto Interstate 70 back toward Denver, speeding past ski traffic heading the other direction as we descend to town.

Want more of ϳԹ’s in-depth longform stories? .

From November/December 2024
Filed to:
Lead Photo: Brad Kaminski