I knew something was off about a month ago. It was a pain in the butt. Literally. I pictured the tendons in my hamstring desperately clinging to my sit bones like old rubber bands. You remember the orange ones we to wrap around old checkbooks and stacks of correspondence back in the late 1900s — stretchy and pliable, until the day they turned brittle and snapped like a dried-up twig.

But after a fresh hit of snow, I wasn’t thinking about tendons or rubber bands. I was too busy cutting first tracks while choking back gulps of snowflakes that clumped together like sticky rice in a sushi bar. I skied six glorious days in a row, giddy as a schoolgirl. No hamstrings on a powder day.

Then, on the last run of the last day before a ski vacation to Jackson Hole, the tendon had had enough. There I was, charging down Payday through a chonky mess of mashed potatoes on my way to meet friends for apres. My ski caught an edge and I suddenly felt a pop and a tear. The old rubber band holding my ass together had finally snapped.

I had zero intention of canceling the trip to Jax. I could stand, sit, walk (gingerly) and hold a martini glass. My friends had rented a ski house on the mountain, a Scandi-chic “cabin” that was part Stein Eriksen, part Lil Wayne. My bestie from NYC was joining, and she and two other women who were friends of the host, weren’t planning to ski at all, so I would at least be in good company.

I decided if I couldn’t ski, I could participate in a different way — a way that did not involve hamstrings or Black Crows or old Hestra gloves patched up with duct tape. A way that instead involved fur coats, shearling wedge booties and cowboy hats.

For once in my life, I would experience a ski town in a way I’d previously sneered at on Instagram, on Main Street, at the Vintage Room and pretty much any locale that served Veuve Clicquot next to an outdoor firepit.

I would be a bougie ski bunny.

Skiing may be the one thing that gives me street cred in a mountain town. Without it, I’m just another woman in mirrored sunglasses and Moon Boots limping around the gondola and trying not to trip in front of the Mangy Moose Saloon.

Which is exactly what I became.

My friends and I pushed our way through the packed bar and tried to blend into the sea of Stio, Arc’teryx and ruddy-cheeked locals. We found a few stools at the bar and piled our vintage furs onto one of them. A crusty dude seated next to us rolled his eyes as my friend’s overflowing YSL handbag had the audacity to bump into his elbow.

The next day, our host suggested we take the gondola up to the top for lunch. Skiing was out, but riding the lift dressed like extras from “Yellowstone” felt like the next best thing.

Crossing the bottom of a busy trail with an injured hamstring felt as tenuous as dropping into Daly Chutes. And every bit as humbling. As skiers whizzed by us like stock cars on a crowded track, I had a flashback of myself doing the same thing to pedestrians at the bottom of Home Run. For a moment, I tasted what it felt like to be a fish out of water, or a Fischer ski that had run out of trail, as it were.

That’s when I noticed a group of six women walking across the snow ahead of us. To my chagrin, they were dressed head to toe in Kemosabe hats, fur jackets, new boots, eager smiles. Just like us. In a sea of hardcore rippers, park rats and ski bums, we’d finally found our tribe: our fellow bougie ski bunnies.

My friends and I tumbled into the gondola. A guy poked his head inside and asked if we minded riding up with three old dirtbags. Before we could answer, they piled in, all scruffy beards, mismatched ski gear and poles that looked like they’d been involved in a bar fight with a grizzly bear. They looked at the three of us and asked what we were doing in Jackson. From the looks of the three of them, I knew exactly what they were doing. And if I’d had an intact hamstring, I’d have liked nothing more than to follow them to the secret stash.

“We’re going to the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar tonight,” said one of my friends. “Is that where the locals go or …?” she asked, letting the question trail off like a cloud of French perfume.

The outburst of laughter that followed let us know that that is most certainly not where the locals go.

Floating in a gondola, in a place that was neither here nor there, I felt like an American in Rome asking for directions to the Olive Garden. The truth was, in that moment, I wasn’t a dirt bag or a local or even a skier. I was just a woman suspended 100 feet in the air trying to live her best life, hammy be damned.

The gondola carried us higher and higher up the mountain — us in our fur coats, them in their duct-taped gloves, all of us headed to the same place.