“I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am.” — Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, “On the Waterfront”
Jess Jalbert moved to Park City from a small mill town in northern New Hampshire. It was 1995, and she was 19 years old.
“Before I came here, I’d never even heard of the term ski bum,” she said.
But she understood the feeling deep in her bones.
“I was fresh out of high school and had no clear direction for my future,” she said. But something about the Wasatch Back drew her in and fed her soul. She found herself hiking, running and ski-touring in Daly Canyon long before the Montage or Empire ski lift came to be.
Jess said the idea of working a day job or going to school gave her extreme FOMO. So she skied all day and worked all night.
“My friends back east thought I was crazy.” But then, Jess was always a bit of an oddball, biking and running alone. “People didn’t get that,” she said.
In Park City, Jess found a like-minded community of oddballs.
“Park City was a different place back then,” Jess said. “Affordable and simple. No traffic, no reservations, no lift lines, most of us living in old miner’s shacks.”
She made a career working in restaurants, eventually raising three daughters here.
She said the ski bum lifestyle has changed.
“Now, most ski bums are actually wealthy retirees living in mansions,” she said. About as far from the definition of a bum as you can get.
“But we all share that feeling of being connected to the mountains,” Jess said. Heck, even the O.G. Warren Miller, who lived in a van in a ski-resort parking lot, was said to dislike the term because he worked way too hard to be considered a bum.
Listening to Jess, I started to wonder. What does it mean to be a ski bum now, in the days of exhorbitant ski town cost of living, the uncertain snows of climate change and the constant demands of society to bend to its norms?
I recently finished reading a book that explores the question. “Powder Days,” by Heather Hansman, a former editor at Powder and Skiing magazines, crisscrossed the country from Vermont to Utah to meet the people who’ve forged their lives out of snow and ice. What she found were all kindss of ski bums, in all kinds of places, still stoking the fire of their passion.
In one passage, she describes a day of skiing at Silverton in Colorado — one of the last true skier’s mountains in one of the last, true ski towns.
Our first run is a glory lap of untouched snow. … I get waves of vertigo in the featureless, open slope. I try to soften my knees, to trust the slope and to give in to gravity. … It feels like I want skiing to feel, even though my lungs explode. Everything is glowy and full of delight. The whooping, sweeping downhills, sure, but also … the beers afterward, the guys who helped me get my car unstuck. It feels like a place I could get lost in for awhile.
She tells the story of Dolores LaChapelle, a 1970s pioneer of powder skiing and a guru of a concept called “deep ecology.” For LaChapelle, this included the notion that skiing connected us to something greater than ourselves — the Earth, gravity, fresh snow, bliss — and to a genuine sense of purpose. Skiing could be a way to understand how we fit into the world, how we co-exist with nature and other cultures. She called this bond with nature “tuning.”
For some, it’s all about a separation from nature in the name of control and conquest of place. LaChappelle urges us to embrace the exact opposite. She wrote that skiing powder was much more than a metaphor for living—it shows us how to live. LaChapelle cautioned that if we continue on an arrogant path of owning and destroying nature, we’ll ultimately destroy the very water and air that we need to live.
Three months after moving to Park City to try on my own ski-bum fantasy, I had a season-ending ski accident. It was during the throes of the pandemic — at a time when I knew almost no one. Shuttered in my apartment, I felt the walls of my ski dream folding in on me.
My PT introduced me to a sports therapist she knew. In my first Zoom session with the therapist, I lamented, “I don’t know who I am if I can’t ski.” She looked at me and said, “Kate, skiing is not who you are. It’s what you do.”
At the time, I thought this was a great insight into the realities of the situation in which I found myself. Today, I’m not so sure.
My mind drifts back to last weekend — when I’d gotten separated from my friends in a moment of powder-day frenzy at Deer Valley. I decided to take a lap through the woods just off Lady Morgan. Halfway down, I stopped to catch my breath. I stood like a deer in the headlights, listening to the silence, my skis disappearing into the soft pow — my own moment of “tuning.”
I felt completely at home. In this place. In my body. I looked up at the sky through a filter of snow-covered pines just before I pushed off, letting the snow, the gravity, the bliss carry me. In moments like that, I know that a ski bum is exactly who I am. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.