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In Search of Powder: A Story of America's Disappearing Ski Bum
As a recent college graduate and fledging newspaper reporter in the Lake Tahoe area, Jeremy Evans became immersed in ski bum culture—a carefree lifestyle whose mantra was “Ski as much as possible.” His snowboarding suffered when he left for a job in the Portland area; and when, at twenty-six, he suffered a stroke, he reexamined his priorities, quit his job, moved back to Tahoe, and threw himself into snowboarding. But while he had been away, the culture had changed. This book is Evans’s paean to the disappearing culture of the ski bum. A fascinating look at a world far removed from the larger culture, it is also a curious account of a passion for powder and what its disappearance means.
Evans looks at several prominent ski towns in the West (including Crested Butte, Jackson Hole, Telluride, Lake Tahoe, Park City, and Mammoth) and the ski bums who either flourished or fled. He chronicles the American West transformed by rising real estate costs, an immigrant workforce, misguided values, and corporate-owned resorts. The story he tells is that of quintessentially American characters—rejecting materialism, taking risks, following their own path—and of the glories and pitfalls their lifestyle presents.
Evans looks at several prominent ski towns in the West (including Crested Butte, Jackson Hole, Telluride, Lake Tahoe, Park City, and Mammoth) and the ski bums who either flourished or fled. He chronicles the American West transformed by rising real estate costs, an immigrant workforce, misguided values, and corporate-owned resorts. The story he tells is that of quintessentially American characters—rejecting materialism, taking risks, following their own path—and of the glories and pitfalls their lifestyle presents.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
256 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 24, 2019
Though the idea of the book starts as an interesting study of the skiing lifestyle and what it’s like to make ends meet in a ski town, it eventually disintegrates into stereotypically misogynistic and objectifying (as most skiing culture tends to be). Seems us ladies only serve to be accessories in the story of ski bums, or reduced to giggling (underage) fangirls who can only be compared, for apparently a lack of better metaphors, to supermodels in Sports Illustrated. Try harder.
March 6, 2022
Interesting book. I'm not going to say this book is a great piece of literature. It's not. It's interesting though for people who have an interest in skiing. I grew up in the ski world you could say. I was no ski bum, but I grew up around them at a small resort that attracted Vegas and LA people. AND I SKI. I really liked learning about the different people and locations. There could have been more human stories in the book. What about the people who stayed around ski resorts and it became very dead end and now what??? The few they did profile seemed to fair okay, but many stay too long at the party and don't! I visited Telluride to ski in the mid-90s and chatting with the locals it was already becoming a disaster for locals price wise with famous people moving there. In fact, I was at the movie theatre and stood two feet from Christie Brinckley after in a snow globe type setting. She was just married and she was as gorgeous as on tv/magazine. I liked learning about the Jackson Hole skiers who were really pushing the envelope of the sport. I feel like Park City wasn't really accurately represented, but it was interesting to learn more about it. I grew up in Utah and PC was a destination in the 80s for even summer activities already. If you want to compare it to Vail and Aspen though, I guess it was a sleepy ZERO cheap destination. Utah was very much a ski destination before the winter olympics. It just likely changed the profile up several notches. The geology was always the best though. HA HA.
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March 3, 2011A review of mine that appeared in the Missoula Independent:
The first time I went skiing could best be described as me tumbling down a small hill while happening to be wearing skies. I enjoyed the 10 or so subsequent descents, but I haven't skied since. I mention this as an explanation of why, after reading In Search of Powder, I desperately want to ski again. The seductive menace of the slope has always allured me, but it wasn't until Jeremy Evans' tersely lyrical descriptions of mountains and men that I feel motivated to strap on a pair of skies and give it another shot.
In a sort of beatnik travelogue voice Evans conjures the life of the ski bum: a hedonistic outcast, usually in the throes of some drug, promiscuous, seeking an existence of undiluted adventure. Above all, the archetypical ski bum is out for fresh powder. Beginning at Crested Butte, Colo., the author brings to the page a troupe of colorful ski bums: Wall Street investment bankers, trustafarians and down-and-out construction workers taking menial jobs that won't interfere with skiing. The ski bum's destination is a good and furious slope, and once he finds it he gets a job nearby, ideally as an instructor or lift monitor.
Evans is outstanding at conveying the excitement of these underground enthusiasts: at Heavenly Mountain (now just Heavenly) Resort at Lake Tahoe, he tells of the Face Rats, a group of young skiers founded in the '60s and hellbent on imitating freestyle champion Jean Claude-Killy. The author revisits Telluride and its seedy ski bumming culture of the 1980s, when the undeveloped city was a notorious drop point for Mexican drug-runners and would inspire the hit song "Smuggler's Blues".
But the heyday of sex, booze and the search for powder is vanishing, Evans asserts, for a number reasons: immigrants willing to work resort jobs for less pay, second home-buying near the finest ski areas and the shifting priorities of resort owners "focusing on amenities other than the sport itself." He believes that it's not just ski bums who are disappearing, but also the ski towns that they created. In the chapter "Resorting to Madness," he gives a detailed history of the Ski Arms Race that had small, family-run slopes competing with the Big 4 resort stockholders, and were forced either to mimic their competitors' excesses or go bust. It was during this period in the late '70s and early '80s, Evans says, that skiing itself enjoyed its peak popularity—thanks to an aging baby boom generation eager to empty its savings accounts—and has been declining ever since. And, although his take on Wall Street's usurpation of ski bum-friendly locales is thorough and engaging, it seems largely parenthetical as he momentarily loses sight of his subject amid a confusing vortex of greed and cynical politics.
In Jackson Hole, Wyo., he finally concedes, the plight of the ski bum is not so stark, and it is in this last chapter that Evans fully expounds his views on the psychology and modern twist of ski bumming, especially in distinguishing ski bums from pro skiers. Evans follows the daring exploits of the Jackson Hole Air Force (JHAF), a group of skiers who spent their days navigating the Tetons, comprised of some of the biggest names in ski bumming, including Benny Wilson, who would disguise himself in a Halloween costume to evade ski patrol, Whitefish native Micah Black, and Dougie Coombs, whom some believed to be the best skier in the world. The rockstars of the JHAF made a career out of skiing for the sake of skiing and were sometimes given gear by famous outfitters and shot by local documentary film companies like Teton Gravity Research.
Considering that this is a book about a sport not usually admired for its hardboiled disposition, In Search of Powder has no right to be so trenchantly written or poignant. But it is. The author, a journalist and avid snowboarder who decided one day to stop social-climbing and start enjoying, neatly crystallizes the mythic story of ski bumming in a way that is reverential yet unaffected, using the actual voices of actual ski bums to tell a story of powder and power.
There is, unfortunately, one problem: ski bums aren't necessarily disappearing.
According to many skiers and in recent articles from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Park Record (plus Chelsea Clinton's husband, who was publicly denounced for deciding to go ski bumming all winter), ski bums are making an impressive comeback. The argument could be made that Evans' compulsive skiers and the media's accidental ski bums (recession-plagued individuals who find jobs at resorts) are two entirely distinct classes of skiers. Still, if it seems that In Search of Powder tries to resurrect something that is not quite dead in order to give it an air of doomed nostalgia, it can easily be overlooked for Evans' filial devotion to pioneering ski bums. Regardless of the veracity of his thesis, Evans has written a smart chronicle of an intimate exodus, comprised of disillusioned people seeking out the best of all possible snow.
The first time I went skiing could best be described as me tumbling down a small hill while happening to be wearing skies. I enjoyed the 10 or so subsequent descents, but I haven't skied since. I mention this as an explanation of why, after reading In Search of Powder, I desperately want to ski again. The seductive menace of the slope has always allured me, but it wasn't until Jeremy Evans' tersely lyrical descriptions of mountains and men that I feel motivated to strap on a pair of skies and give it another shot.
In a sort of beatnik travelogue voice Evans conjures the life of the ski bum: a hedonistic outcast, usually in the throes of some drug, promiscuous, seeking an existence of undiluted adventure. Above all, the archetypical ski bum is out for fresh powder. Beginning at Crested Butte, Colo., the author brings to the page a troupe of colorful ski bums: Wall Street investment bankers, trustafarians and down-and-out construction workers taking menial jobs that won't interfere with skiing. The ski bum's destination is a good and furious slope, and once he finds it he gets a job nearby, ideally as an instructor or lift monitor.
Evans is outstanding at conveying the excitement of these underground enthusiasts: at Heavenly Mountain (now just Heavenly) Resort at Lake Tahoe, he tells of the Face Rats, a group of young skiers founded in the '60s and hellbent on imitating freestyle champion Jean Claude-Killy. The author revisits Telluride and its seedy ski bumming culture of the 1980s, when the undeveloped city was a notorious drop point for Mexican drug-runners and would inspire the hit song "Smuggler's Blues".
But the heyday of sex, booze and the search for powder is vanishing, Evans asserts, for a number reasons: immigrants willing to work resort jobs for less pay, second home-buying near the finest ski areas and the shifting priorities of resort owners "focusing on amenities other than the sport itself." He believes that it's not just ski bums who are disappearing, but also the ski towns that they created. In the chapter "Resorting to Madness," he gives a detailed history of the Ski Arms Race that had small, family-run slopes competing with the Big 4 resort stockholders, and were forced either to mimic their competitors' excesses or go bust. It was during this period in the late '70s and early '80s, Evans says, that skiing itself enjoyed its peak popularity—thanks to an aging baby boom generation eager to empty its savings accounts—and has been declining ever since. And, although his take on Wall Street's usurpation of ski bum-friendly locales is thorough and engaging, it seems largely parenthetical as he momentarily loses sight of his subject amid a confusing vortex of greed and cynical politics.
In Jackson Hole, Wyo., he finally concedes, the plight of the ski bum is not so stark, and it is in this last chapter that Evans fully expounds his views on the psychology and modern twist of ski bumming, especially in distinguishing ski bums from pro skiers. Evans follows the daring exploits of the Jackson Hole Air Force (JHAF), a group of skiers who spent their days navigating the Tetons, comprised of some of the biggest names in ski bumming, including Benny Wilson, who would disguise himself in a Halloween costume to evade ski patrol, Whitefish native Micah Black, and Dougie Coombs, whom some believed to be the best skier in the world. The rockstars of the JHAF made a career out of skiing for the sake of skiing and were sometimes given gear by famous outfitters and shot by local documentary film companies like Teton Gravity Research.
Considering that this is a book about a sport not usually admired for its hardboiled disposition, In Search of Powder has no right to be so trenchantly written or poignant. But it is. The author, a journalist and avid snowboarder who decided one day to stop social-climbing and start enjoying, neatly crystallizes the mythic story of ski bumming in a way that is reverential yet unaffected, using the actual voices of actual ski bums to tell a story of powder and power.
There is, unfortunately, one problem: ski bums aren't necessarily disappearing.
According to many skiers and in recent articles from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Park Record (plus Chelsea Clinton's husband, who was publicly denounced for deciding to go ski bumming all winter), ski bums are making an impressive comeback. The argument could be made that Evans' compulsive skiers and the media's accidental ski bums (recession-plagued individuals who find jobs at resorts) are two entirely distinct classes of skiers. Still, if it seems that In Search of Powder tries to resurrect something that is not quite dead in order to give it an air of doomed nostalgia, it can easily be overlooked for Evans' filial devotion to pioneering ski bums. Regardless of the veracity of his thesis, Evans has written a smart chronicle of an intimate exodus, comprised of disillusioned people seeking out the best of all possible snow.
March 10, 2016
This book is a story of disappearing ski bums in the Colorado and Utah areas due to various reasons.The book talks about the reasons for a drop in the number of ski bums as well as the day to day life of a ski bum. Jeremy Evans does a very good job at persuading the reader to believe that the lifestyle of a ski bum is obtainable. I like the fact that Mr. Evans once quit his job and moved back to Tahoe to become a ski bum like many other potential readers. This book would be enjoyed by ski bums and people thinking about taking part in the culture of skiing. Those looking for an action seeking ski book should not waste their time on this read. I dislike how the book is pretty much a reflection of his own story with little other characters that never come to life. I also dislike the fact that he criticizes ski resort economics and puts a lot of the blame of disappearing ski bums on money chasers and tourists. With that being said, Mr. Evans is a very great storyteller and makes most of the story come to life. I could see this book being made into a documentary on the life of a ski bum. This book would not be useful for a school curriculum due to the topic of skiing, however, examples could be taken out to demonstrate good storytelling skills.
August 28, 2014
Great exploration of ski bumming, from history to developement to current state. At times the book meanders and feels a bit scattered and unfocused. Jeremy weaves in a decent amount of soap-boxing, which at times made me feel unable to form my own opinions based on the facts. But the beautifully crafted character descriptions of all these eclectic ski bums overwhelmingly drew me in. I wanted what they have. Jeremy elegantly captures the ways ski bumming changed these guys and vice versa. How it shaped their growth as people and provided a form of expression for their carefree, rebellious inclinations.
Totally inspiring and extremely informative from a historical perspective, this book is perfect for any snow lover, especially those looking to devote more time.
Totally inspiring and extremely informative from a historical perspective, this book is perfect for any snow lover, especially those looking to devote more time.
September 13, 2016
As somebody who going on fifteen straight seasons (first seven in Alta/Snowbird & now going eight in Jackson Hole) in the Rockies this book is quite a good read.
It talks about how the everyday skier is a dying breed, I work nights so I can pull off 130-40 day ski seasons. It is getting tougher & tougher these days, the good places are becoming more like upscale resorts & less of ski areas for the everyday rider. It is not the affordable winter activity anymore that I had as child growing up. I am glad to see somebody wrote a book about this.
It talks about how the everyday skier is a dying breed, I work nights so I can pull off 130-40 day ski seasons. It is getting tougher & tougher these days, the good places are becoming more like upscale resorts & less of ski areas for the everyday rider. It is not the affordable winter activity anymore that I had as child growing up. I am glad to see somebody wrote a book about this.
February 12, 2011
GREAT book.. some disconnected writing at times, but amazing review of the ski bum culture through history and what has caused it to go away. If you ever stand in a lift line and notice all the foreign countries that the liftee's are from, or note that you are renting a house/condo from someone who obviously has the place as a second home.. this book is worth reading.
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October 14, 2015If you are interested in journalism, the craft of non-fiction writing, or the social history of sports or towns that change with both time and money/sponsors invading the sport... Then you will enjoy this. Good writing, Evans keeps moving so you get to know the towns and characters of historical snowy America.
September 14, 2015
Received as a gift from someone who knew me as a wannabe ski bum. (30+ years ski patrolling, mostly part time with many years of 60-90days skiing) I looked forward to reading this book, finally got it off mey shelf and was not disappointed great characters. I found it a little depressing to find that Jeremy felt the glory days of ski bumming were gone.At least for most US young people.
September 11, 2011
This gave me insight into my own nearby ski town, South Lake Tahoe and that's why I picked it up. I didn't enjoy the writing and felt the book needed more editing. But it does do a nice job exploring a unique subculture and the opposed ideals inherent in developing popular destinations.
January 4, 2014
I couldn't put this book down. This book explains why the glory days for ski bums is over by explaining the economics of the ski resorts that they rely on.
May 15, 2014
True that.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews