Skiing Has a Nostalgia Problem—Why the Future Deserves More Attention

How do we, as skiers, often meet the future's roiling, dark-seeming tide? By retreating to the comforting past. 

You'll hear it in lift lines and see it on internet forums. The "golden years" are prized by everyone who's lived long enough to watch the sport change. The prevailing attitude, it seems, is that skiing has become worse and will continue getting worse, so we may as well cling to the trinkets, songs, and mementos that conjure wilder, freer days.

In ski resort auctions, outdated Riblet two-seaters are gobbled up for handsome prices. Ski brand marketing has begun to echo the edginess of the '90s and early aughts, with shaky, handheld camcorder footage snaking its way into product reels. It's telling that one of the most influential bands in ski culture, the Grateful Dead, had its first apex of popularity decades ago.

This temptation to slip on the rose-tinted goggles makes sense. There are mounting challenges in skiing. Mountain towns remain a flashpoint of the affordability crisis. The slopes are crowded. Corporations are continuing to nibble at every corner of the sport, looking for new paths towards monetization and shareholder value. Meanwhile, a force looms that might do away with skiing as we know it: climate change.

The potency of nostalgia in skiing is such that I, at a ripe 28 years old, even get wistful when I hear about the fun that happened before my time.

Once, during a bygone decade, my dad and his buddies drove from Colorado to Wyoming. At Jackson Hole, they bounced down the Hobacks through bottomless snow, their skinny skis diving in and out of the powder.

The resort wasn't a world-renowned destination yet, and there were no lines. They skied so much that at the end of each day, they immediately passed out instead of carousing like the college kids they were. My dad's stories join several others I've heard from the wizened generation, each with a similar, unspoken thesis: the party's over, and I missed it. At least there's a bit of stale beer left over in that Solo cup?

But then—there it is!—signs of life in skiing beyond a dizzy nostalgia trip. A stoked grom slides by. A 30-year-old, unburdened by expectations of what skiing should be, discovers the sport anew. Oh, and the powder—it doesn't arrive quite as frequently as it used to, but when it does, it delivers the same bliss. The closer I look at everything that's happening in skiing right now, the more I see glimmers. Each one suggests that skiing’s spirit and oddball participants can't be brought down. 

Away from the glow of smartphone screens, a ski magazine renaissance is beginning to take shape. POWDER closed in 2020. Then, improbably, it reappeared. This fall, we put out our fourth issue since the revival, and humbly, we think it's great. Read that issue, of course, but also grab a copy of the myriad other ski and outdoor magazines. To borrow the Mountain Gazette's catchphrase, "Print Ain't Dead," it's just on the back foot, operating in new ways and finding readers who'd rather cozy up with glossy paper than scroll a dopamine slot machine.

None of this, mind you, was guaranteed. It took a small army of skiers—both young and old—who believed that good, thoughtful stories about our shared sport ought to stick around. Against the odds, they have.

Simultaneously, the ski movie landscape has exploded. You did, at one point, needed film and plenty of helicopter fuel to make a killer ski movie. Now, a few lightweight cameras and a drone will suffice. Coupled with free publishing platforms like YouTube, just about anyone can make and release a film. Bundles of smartphone footage count.

Visual media was once a four-lane highway. Today, it's a kaleidoscope. There are vlogs, narratives, and tight ten-minute cuts with no frills. While keeping up with this autumn deluge is hard, it's comforting knowing that, for every taste, there's a corresponding film. Want to watch Nikolai Schirmer straightline a couloir that's narrower than a Subaru Outback? His YouTube channel is waiting. Tired of seeing dudes in the spotlight? Go grab a ticket for Girl Winter, the women-led ski movie tour.

Discussions of the past also conveniently leave out for whom they were glorious. If you were a white, male, straight, upper-middle-class, college-educated skier with parents who could bankroll your adventures, the mountains were, indeed, an unrivalled nirvana. But that's a narrow slice of all the people on Earth. And many people, once they get off the bunny slopes, fall in love with skiing and later find that the silly sport changed their lives. That's worth sharing, and thankfully, the aperture of who an avid skier can be has slowly widened, even as difficult conversations remain.  

There are other high notes. Daron Rahlves' beloved and bruising Banzai Tour is back, a sign, to me, that nature is healing—similar to the dolphins that appeared in Venice’s canals during the pandemic as tourists went home. (Actually, those dolphins were debunked. But it’s a nice idea.) Travis Rice finally invited skiers to participate in the Natural Selection Tour, and the result was mind-blowing. The local bid to buy Mt. Bachelor from its corporate owners that didn’t work out may have been a doomed lark. Within that effort, though, there was something whimsical and boundless, the sense that communities, not companies or overlords, could author the future.

Cataloguing everything beautiful in this moment doesn't negate what came before. Skis helped hunters tromp through the woods thousands of years ago. To become what they are today—vessels that deliver pure, unadulterated fun—a million small revolutions had to happen. Sun Valley installed the first chairlift in 1936. Warren Miller began cranking out ski movies about a decade later. Visionaries like Jason Levinthal and Mike Douglas helped bring twin-tips to the masses just before the turn of the century. 

Those sacred memories can stay sacred. I won't stop returning to Matchstick Productions' Push, the first ski movie I remember watching and my perennial favorite. If my dad wants to remind me about that one time at Jackson in the 1970s, I'll pause to savor and listen, stuffing down my envy. At the same time, history is happening right now. Yes, nothing about this moment is perfect, but we should enjoy it and, maybe, help shape it.

Or, to put the idea in terms I better understand: Picking your next run is awfully hard without looking away from the turns you just made.