Skiers Are The Weirdest Creature Alive, And We Know It

When I was a very small child all I ever wanted to be was a crime fighter. All my heroes reined in the bad guys and I wanted to be just like them; Batman, Superman, Spiderman, and every member of the X-men. More important than superpowers, a superhero needs to don a costume whilst saving the day. In my adolescent mind, the only suitable option for my superhero suit was, of course, my pajamas.

And since nearly every superhero wears their underwear on the outside of their suit, I pulled my underoos over my PJ pants. A superhero also needs to protect their secret identity; I needed a mask. So, I fought crime with my little brown eyes and my little tufts of brown hair poking through the leg holes of tighty whities pulled over my face. And somehow this is not the weirdest thing about me, not even close. Because I am a skier and skiers are the weirdest creatures on earth.

Perhaps you’re thinking, Ok, Underpants Boy (not my superhero name by the way), I’m a skier and I’m no weirdo. Sorry, pal. Yes, you are. Think about it long and hard. Have you ever looked at someone shouldering their skis and judged them for their improper technique? That is odd and we all have done it. Where do you stand on the sunglasses over vs. sunglasses under the beanie debate? I know you’re a weirdo because you just answered out loud. In your life, how much time have you devoted to thinking about gloves and socks? There’s a good chance that you talk about the weather and parking more than a Midwestern grandfather.

I bet you own more ski jackets than suit jackets. How many different words and phrases do you use to describe snow? I am a 38-year-old adult (debatable) who regularly uses words like “rad,” “dude,” “sweet,” “sick,” “dope,” “whack,” and “gnarly.” Recently during a phone chat, my father told me it hadn’t yet snowed in Chicago. I told him it was nuking in Colorado. It seemed like a normal thing to say, but then we started to talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

It’s not just our jargon and fashion that makes us skiers so damn weird. There is also something peculiar about the way we move, or rather where and when we don’t move. Unique to every mountain but universal to all of skiing is the unspoken rule of the stop and wait. Don’t furrow your brow, you know what I’m referring to. Picture yourself and your ski buds at your local hill. Before you start your wiggles, there is some amoeba-like gathering and meandering chatter, options are tossed about until a plan is made.

Then, everyone skates off and the schlooshing begins. But after an indiscriminate amount of time, everyone stops at a specific and well-known area, the stop and wait, though no one ever mentioned it. Maybe it’s a certain patch of trees or the old lift line or a bench set in the woods or the meadow after a traverse; wherever it is your group always stops there. And once everyone arrives and after a bit of goofball laughter, you begin to ski again. Until, of course, you skid to a stop at the next stop and wait. And so it continues until you reach the lift and it starts all over again. And the skier who blows past the stop and wait is a real dickalope and has broken this sacred skier contract.

When I ski Aspen, my home hill, my pals and I click in and lean on our poles after unloading the gondola. Then we’ll ski something cruisy to the dark-side traverse and regroup at the top of the Bell Mountain Ridge. And then we’ll regroup just moments later at the toe of the Ridge so we can take in the view of the town. Then we ski the Shoulder, zip through the bottom of Spar past Kleenex Corner, and wait above Upper Little Nell at this truly nondescript location where the cat track kind of shades into the run but also kind of doesn’t. And then, if we decide to ski the bottom of Super 8, we’ll stop on the cat track above the gully. No one talks about any of this. We just do this. Every single time. Where do I click the “I am not a robot” button?

Maybe we stop and wait because we use it as an excuse to quit the campfires in our quads. Maybe we like the view. Maybe we need a snack or a quick tree pee or maybe we want to point at some line way off in the distance with our pole. I think we stop and wait because skiing is the world’s greatest individual team sport. Sure, we make our turns solitarily but never in a vacuum. We stop because we love to watch our pals and because we want to share the experience. And we desperately want to giggle and goof around with a group of like-minded oddballs. But what do I know? I’m just some weirdo trying to fit tighty whities over his goggles.