For the past five years I’ve had a bit of a come-apart every spring. The snow melts and I realize that maybe I don’t want to do “the seasonal thing,” attempting to ski all day every day for the rest of my life. In the spring of 2015, I was in the midst of an especially good version of this meltdown. I had been working in Alta, Utah for three consecutive winters. In the corresponding summers, I would cobble together work doing everything from buying fancy Vermont beer and shipping it across the country for a rich businessman, to landscaping, and even software engineering. I had figured out how to live winter-to-winter chasing the best snow and skiing 150-200 days a year.
In the spring of 2015, I began to seriously think about what I wanted from life further down the road. A family? A cabin in Vermont? A real job? I gave myself an ultimatum. I would spend the month of May driving around “The West” and I would point my life in some direction. I didn’t even care what direction, but I knew I couldn’t keep living the “bum” lifestyle. I realized that a full-fledged dirtbag lifestyle wasn’t a sustainable long-term plan. And I didn’t want to fall into that trap.
With all the amazing and practical choices that ran through in my mind that spring, I somehow instead decided to attempt to break the record for most human-powered vertical feet skied in one year. This decision launched me into the next 18 months of my life. I spent the summer living in Vermont, training and preparing; financially, mentally, and emotionally. When the snow started to fall in December, I took my level 2 avalanche course and began putting in some real ski days with over 10,000 feet of climbing.
On January 1, 2016 I was as ready as I could have been. I decided to head out solo on my first day and ended up skiing 11.4k. Spending the entire 9 hours of the first day completely solo was peaceful, yet also served as a wake-up call. I was embarking on a wild yearlong mission and while my friends would help push me when they could, at the end of the day it would be just me that would be setting the new bar for human-powered skiing.
Over the course of the next year I had some of the best days of my life. They were also amongst the most difficult. I spent the first few months skiing arguably the best powder of my life in and around Alta. I pushed myself to my absolute limit with the full support of my touring buddies. A “standard” day might begin with a dawn patrol with a couple friends. Around 9 they headed to work and I would ski a few runs solo. Then around noon, another friend or two would meet up that had just gotten off work, or finished skiing the resort for the day and wanted to ski some powder. I’d ski a few more runs with them until they were tired and finished for the day. At around 3, my total would hover on average around 9,000 feet logged for the day, as I transitioned to the final and most mentally difficult run of the day. I pushed myself to take that last run day, every day, knowing that if I didn’t push now I would fall behind later in the year.
I hit a few obstacles throughout the year, as expected. From the start, I tried to factor-in a bit of wiggle room to meet my goal of 2.5 million, but in reality didn’t have much room for error. At about 40 days into the year I broke two bones in my hand. I was able to get a cast and continue to ski daily still maintaining an average of 8.5k per day. In June, I was skiing daily in Colorado. That June, Colorado had an unseasonably warm spell that melted nearly all the snow. It was a bit sketchy. I was left skiing solo on thin strips of snow booting-up scree, and spending a good bit of time crying and trying to figure out why the hell I was doing this.
I landed in Argentina in early July just as winter was beginning. With newfound energy that only winter’s crisp cold air and low filtered sunlight provides I was back at it. I spent 6 weeks in Las Lenas, in a townhouse packed with 8-16 local and gringo ski bums. I skied 3,000m peaks and deep dry spine lines. A few warm storms rolled through, and I migrated south to Bariloche, Argentina. I spent the next 6 weeks skiing out of the stunning huts around Cerro Catedral including the legendary, Refugio Frey.
Spring comes early to South America, and in October I hopped over the Andes into Chile, rented a camper van and spent the next month skiing towering volcanoes. Some were long extinct with deep valleys and long descents. Others were so active that at the summit, if the wind was blowing in the right direction toxic gas momentarily cleared allowing a clear look into the crater and the bubbling lava. On my last week in South America, I broke the 2,000,000 mark and set the new record from most human-powered vertical feet skied in a calendar year!
With my appetite for corn skiing sufficiently satiated, I headed back to the States. I was hoping to ski a few days in Colorado and then head “home” to the Wasatch. However, more unseasonable warmth and dryness forced me back into vanlife and searching for volcanoes, this time in the Pacific Northwest. I spent November traveling between Mount Bachelor and Mount Shasta, scoring some amazing powder days and bluebird corn skiing.
By Thanksgiving, I heard rumblings of snow in Utah. I made the slightly risky fast choice to drive there not knowing base conditions, relying more on a good looking forecast. Luckily, my gamble paid off and it didn’t stop snowing for the next two months. As December wound down, I was squarely on track to hit 2.5 million vertical feet on December 30th. To play it safe I put in my biggest day of the year and skied 14.4k giving me only 20,000 feet until New Year’s. I ended up hitting my goal a day early on December 29th!
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