Learning How To Ski as an Adult Was Scary, but I'm Forever Grateful

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.

Adult Onset Skiing

I am not one of the lucky ones who skied from the time I could walk. Nope, I grew up on the edge of the Southern California desert, made from equal parts dusty ponderosa forest and saltwater. The rugged San Bernardino Mountains were my family’s regular playground, hiking and camping in our giant orange tent, as much as our frequent trips to the coast, where my dad had a sailboat in Dana Point.

Winter was not our wheelhouse—despite the fact that the San Bernardinos are home to the gritty small-town ski resorts of Snow Summit and Big Bear. In junior high, some of my friends started telling stories about learning to ski and snowboard. I cornered my father in his perpetual reading post on our hot patio, surrounded by flowers and grape vines carefully coaxed from the dry soil.

“Dad, why don’t we ever go skiing?”

A lifelong product of orange groves and waves himself, he replied, only half-joking, “You can stand in a cold shower and rip up $20 bills for the same effect.” I never brought it up again.

Then I followed my sister to Montana, landing in Missoula in the middle of the longest temperature inversion I’ve still ever lived through. For the uninitiated, during an inversion, an ice fog from some kind of frigid hell settles on valley floors, encasing vegetation and car windshields in crystals so thick it appears the world has died from hypothermia. The surrounding mountains, meanwhile, poke through and bask in the sunshine. I didn’t even own a real coat at the time. 

I learned to ski, at first, just to escape the damn ice fog. The first time I drove up to Snowbowl, a low-budget mom-and-pop joint above town, I wore an extra pair of my sister’s snow pants. Given that she was smaller than me basically everywhere, they required looping a rubber band through the buttonhole to give me an extra quarter inch in the waistband. I remember thinking that if this tight purgatory was what skiing was, I wanted no part of it. I clomped awkwardly up to the bunny hill with my feet encased in stiff plastic rental boots, following a ski instructor I hoped wouldn’t make me feel even more incompetent than I already did, towering as I was over the tots zooming around me. 

Whether I was ready to graduate from the bunny hill or not, I met my sister in the afternoon at the bottom of the rickety two-person lift. When I tried to ski off the chair, I promptly fell in a heap that required the people behind us to take emergency evasive maneuvers.

As I painstakingly made my way down the only beginner trail on the mountain (“beginner” being a rather loose interpretation for it), with adept skiers and snowboarders flying past in sonic rushes of wind like shiny sports cars passing a jalopy on the highway, I must admit I understood the cold-shower-and-shredded twenty-dollar-bills sentiment.

But then. Then… The smooth glide of a ski turn when I finally figured it out. That sensation, at the top of the turn, that I thought maybe was the closest humans come to flight. And the sense, at the end of the day, that all restlessness had been spent, blood moving languorously and lungs rinsed clean, heart full and mind blissfully quiet.  

I didn’t give a damn about the tight ski pants on the ride home.

I began going to the mountain, then, not just to get out of the inversion. I went because I had to. Snow fell in my dreams and built up in drifts behind my eyes, edging out the desert heat from my bones. I began to love the sunless skies because they carried snow: more ways to discover what my body could do in harmony with a certain angle of slope or particular pattern of frost ghosted trees.

Over the years, I’ve found other adult-onset skiers like me. We don’t always have the best form or know the right lingo. You can probably pick us out of the crowd that way. Most of us have slightly traumatic memories of small children skiing the pants off us as we gingerly snowplowed down the “easy” runs. But damn, do we have one hell of an appreciation for the sport—maybe in a way unique from the skiers who grew up with it. Not that it’s a contest or anything. But if it were, it might be the only ski contest I would win.

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.