The Off-Limits Nature of Politics In Skiing—And What It Means In A Fraught Time

In July, POWDER, the long-running if more lately resurrected skiing periodical—once perhaps the most core title in all of snowsports—ran an article that broached what may be the most problematic topic in all of skiing: politics. 

The piece was entitled “The Unexpected Ways Trump Tariffs Are Affecting Skiing.” There, in mostly unremarkable language, gear editor Max Ritter briefly detailed several impacts the Trump administration’s new tariffs might bring to skiing outside of higher consumer prices. Ritter noted possible supply chain disruption, and wondered if domestic ski area operators themselves might see higher costs from their European suppliers as the next ski season came ever closer.

While critical of the administration’s tariffs, Ritter’s stance only went so far; his most damning assessment referred to them simply as “a never-ending saga.” And Ritter concluded the piece in similarly modest terms, noting that “manufacturers, markets, and investors just don’t like uncertainty. Neither do we [skiers], especially not when it makes skiing more expensive than it already is.” 

But the article’s moderated tone couldn’t stop a volatile internet hivemind–ever cocked for reaction, and often unwilling for a ski publication to take on politics–to dive in.

“Another far left article from Powder..Surprising,” one user wrote on Facebook sarcastically. “Let’s roll back to last year when Powder was on the SAVE THE PLANET GLOBAL WARMING WAGON.” Another commented on the article hyperbolically that “Powder magazine is now liberal propaganda.” 

But perhaps the most telling comment–at least from a ski culture standpoint–came from one Matt Barry: “Powder, keep your BS political opinions out,” Barry wrote. “We have enough shit online that’s political. Stick to snowsports.”

Skiing–in its broader discourse and written form–has long had a tepid relationship with politics. The current publishing landscape, framed by social media-leaning online outlets that are often part of large conglomerates, or even the assets of publicly traded companies, has left much of skiing’s literature aimed at softer, more SEO-favorable topics, often prioritizing gear and destination listicles. 

But even historically, when the sport had a more subversive bent, skiing’s written craft rarely jumped into the fore. The earliest, decidedly countercultural issues of POWDER, running during the Watergate scandal and the Fall of Saigon, stuck to skiing, covering the far-flung ranges and small mountain towns then the scene of an escapist ski bum movement. Later, during the technologically ascendent 90s and 00s, POWDER, like many titles, turned more toward gear, stoke and an internet facing. And as the core ski culture seemed to ever focus on the rebellious tenets of good times, marijuana, and après imbibing—and naturally picked up the mantle of larger issues like climate change and wider questions of inclusion—skiing became characterized both glowingly and as disparagement as a haven for default liberalism. Moreover, as most mountain communities have trended deeper blue in American electoral politics, some have come to feel that the skiing subculture keeps conservatism at arm’s length, viewing its values–even the less extreme, less jingoistic versions–in hushed, don’t-ask-don’t-tell tones. 

Today, as the wider political discourse further degenerates, ski media and its readership appear to have less appetite than ever for delving into the political mire. Rare is the ski article on politics; rarer still is a healthy debate on the topic. But skiing is unavoidably impacted by politics. From land use to development, affordable housing, and climate change, the long escapist sport and its communities are subject not only to legislature and statute, but the subculture itself is framed by how these topics and ideals are discussed and resolved. Or, perhaps more accurately, how they are avoided and left unsolved.

Skiing’s inability to incorporate politics into its own discourse seems borne on a duo of factors: entrenchment and escapism. Beyond the simple desire many have to treat the sport as an escape, the political dialogue in skiing has long been muted both by the perception of a settled debate on core topics—perhaps the overriding example being climate change—and the attitude from some that skiing’s apparently overly moralistic liberal bias suffocates opposing views, leading those in opposition to avoid topics that otherwise appear resolved. 

But the fraught marriage between politics and skiing is nothing new, and legacy ski media itself rarely broached the topic. That avoidance is multifaceted, and a cadre of skiing’s most influential writers—Lou Dawson, Craig Dostie, and Peter Kray—illuminate this arc. Dawson and Dostie both long-helmed core skiing outlets; Dawson with his eminent ski mountaineering blog WildSnow, while Dostie’s backcountry skiing magazine, Couloir, was the first of its kind, a periodical so influential it marked the genesis of terms coined by Dostie now ubiquitous in skiing, like earn your turns and alpine touring. Together, these two titles helped steer the nascent modern ski discourse.

Kray himself may not be a household name in the skiing world, but his influence on it is unmistakable. Long regarded as one of the most thoughtful, poetic, and able writers in the ski canon, Kray covered the sport widely for decades at legacy titles like Couloir and Mountain Gazette–where he served as editor and still contributes. A self-defined Teddy Roosevelt republican, the Santa Fe-based Kray’s 2014 novel, The God of Skiing, marked a quiet halcyon moment for ski literature. Few other authors have as deeply and thoughtfully explored the subculture.

And Kray has been the rare ski writer to delve into politics, notably in a 2007 profile of Dostie that ran in Couloir, an article Dawson noted as “truly a good read and doesn’t dance over interesting points about Craig, such as him being a Republican functioning in a business that’s as liberal as a recycled hemp convention.”

Kray’s article and Dawson’s reflection amounted to mere moments in ski media’s long trajectory, but were nonetheless telling. While perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Dawson’s assessment pokes at a liberal-leaning core ski culture. And while the larger ski world is much more difficult to characterize with its astronomical costs, large percentage of out-of-town enthusiasts, and complicated local politics, many agree that skiing’s discourse has long leaned that way. 

For his part, Dostie—now an elder statesman of the telemark world—has for years carried the mantle of skiing’s conservative, saying over email that he has long felt an aversion to ski culture itself because of what he asserts is its liberal bias, and what he characterizes as the ski world’s inability to incorporate other perspectives, a sentiment that unavoidably affected how his publication would incorporate political topics. 

“There are assumptions made about what a person endorses based on skiing. I’m opposed to most of them,” Dostie notes. “So, while I am a skier, a telemark skier even, I do not espouse the political allegiances of the outdoor crowd. I love the outdoors, mountains, etcetera, but abhor the blind endorsement of climate change and the actions expected of me as a Nature lover. Build nukes (thorium-powered, what I call sustainable fission), not windmills. Solar for home, not industry. Batteries for backup, not transportation. None of these align with the outdoor industry. Thus, there may be a culture, but I’m not a member.”

Dostie’s heterodox perspective began in earnest in the 1980s, when he began ski mountaineering with the Sierra Club in Southern California. Dostie came to find the Club’s tactics and ideals—often eschewing huts and other wilderness infrastructure—constricting, characterizing the legacy conservation group’s aim as to “cordon off the wild places under the auspices of protecting them, but that came with restrictions to access.” 

“It sounded reasonable,” Dostie says, “until I found I needed permission to do practically anything in the Sierra.” 

Dostie started Couloir in 1988 as a Sierra Club-affiliated backcountry skiing newsletter. But the publication-in-miniature tapped into something bigger, quickly growing from a humble Xeroxed pamphlet to a bona fide magazine, covering the fledgling modern backcountry snowsports scene in a way no other outlet had before. And, via Couloir, Dostie would forge his own path, and broadcast his own views.

“When I started le Chronicle du Couloir [the original name of the newsletter] I soon realized I could have a platform to promote my vision of enjoying and protecting the wilderness on my terms, not theirs. So I pushed huts and access out of bounds, the latter being a political hot potato until Jackson Hole caved and opened their boundaries,” Dostie remembers of the magazine’s influence on ski culture.

But, at Dostie’s behest, Couloir did not directly cover politics. “I purposefully avoided politics. My political leanings were already out of bounds in the 90s and have tipped into the void since 9/11,” he says.

With that objective, Dostie would exclude from Couloir perhaps the most momentous ideological topic in all of modern skiing—climate change. “By the early 2000s, there was a subtle push to promote and warn of global warming. I steadfastly refused and edited any such reference out, or declined submissions promoting that,” Dostie notes, before clarifying his stance on human-caused climate change. 

“Personally I don’t agree with the climate change party line. While I do agree man has done things to create unusual atmospheric conditions, I do not believe our collective carbon footprint is the cause,” he says.

While the modern, typically internet-bound ski discourse—with its focus on search engine optimization and online monetization—is little poised to delve into deeper, ideological subjects, the ski culture’s historical hesitance to approach political topics is more complicated. For one, like in Dostie’s case, there appears to be a penchant for those opposed to perceived conventional wisdom to avoid those subjects. But skiing’s escapist bent has also played a role, stymying demand for ideological debate. 

Peter Kray—measured and good-natured—notes that while he has danced with how politics and skiing intersect, he understands the hesitance many seem to have for the topic in an evermore vitriolic landscape. “It makes sense to me why we don’t talk about it that much because it’s so divisive right now,” he says. “People want you to pigeon-hole yourself as one thing or another.”

Furthermore, Kray’s experience points to how skiing itself, especially in practice, approaches the apolitical. “When you get on a chairlift with somebody, in that ten-minute chairlift ride, they might tell you something they haven’t even told their own children. It’s almost like a confessional. We get on the chair and we just feel free to delve into these weird, weird parts of life,” he notes.

“It’s fascinating to me that someone could tell you about how they survived cancer, or when they met Elton John or some crazy story. And they’ll tell you that because they feel comfortable in that space and you’ll never see them again. But rarely do you hear people talk about politics.”

Kray concedes that there is something to acknowledging the connection between skiing and ideology; “I do think we’re all responsible for our politics,” he says. But he is also quick to assert his opinion that skiing is largely important as a salve against an often heavy wider world, in large part by being isolated from it.

“I still feel like skiing might be like a little safe haven for us right now,” he says. “It might be a place where we can leave the news cycle behind. I don’t know, to each their own. I think my biggest issue is that nobody seems to listen to the other people anymore. Nobody’s saying ‘hey, explain to me why you feel this way.’”

Eminent ski writer Lou Dawson, whose WildSnow.com charted the zeitgeist of the modern ski touring movement for over twenty years, mirrors Kray’s sentiment, feeling that the political discourse obscures the simple enjoyment endemic to skiing.

“In terms of politics, I was always very careful, especially as the years rolled by, to not turn what I was doing into a forum for a lot of really rancorous debate, almost getting to the point where people would express things that could be considered hate,” he says.

Dawson himself rarely, if ever, broached politics directly at WildSnow, and his recent memoir, Avalanche Dreams, similarly focused on experience. Still, he wasn’t averse to delving into topics with at least a sprinkling of political adjacency, like land use and the effects of increased backcountry participation. But Dawson says he purposefully aimed to illustrate the joy of ski touring, considering the sheer amount of negativity the world already harbored.

But Dawson’s approach was unavoidably influenced by his own perspective on political topics–and affected both what topics he chose to cover and exclude. “My own goal with what I wanted to do with ski journalism was to stay on the positive side, take that tact, and I wanted to be the place where you could go, and you wouldn’t get lectured about [things like] climate change,” he notes.

While Dawson notes he is not a global warming denier, his ideals mirror not only the ski discourse’s aversion to the political, but also wider cultural tides surrounding moral grandstanding. “I don’t like being lectured about this stuff,” Dawson says, referencing climate change debates. “I don’t mind reading about controversy but when the journalist takes a side and starts yammering and coming down on other people’s points of view without it just being a balanced discussion, I don’t ultimately like that.”

Dostie goes a step further: “The inclination to support the Climate Agenda leads to the need to restrict people’s freedoms to save Mother Earth,” he opines. “This controlling, authoritarian ideology aligns with lots of political agendas that are far beyond mere concerns about the snowpack.” 

Though their approaches to political topics certainly contain notable contrasts in tone and execution, figures like Dawson and Dostie—both of whose work was widely influential to the modern ski discourse, especially its written form—ushered the ski discourse through what they included in their titles, but also what they excluded. 

Both writers and their platforms avoided politically charged topics like climate change, leaving them with little debate or counterpoint, something the discussion may have long pined for. Regardless of the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is human caused, the debate over how the outdoor community engages with global warming is to this day not settled. 

Asked if he thinks there could be a productive forum for discussing politics in skiing, Dawson responds in the affirmative. “There’s no reason there can’t be places where that’s going on,” he says, though he states he’d rather not participate. “I don’t really care to partake, but everything from global warming to parking, there’s certainly debate and discussion to be had, and why shouldn’t there be places for it?”

To say that skiing never dives into politics would be unfair. While the wider discourse may avoid the topic, either due to escapism or out of ideological avoidance, and most writers only dive in so far, if at all, ski media does occasionally cover politics. Besides POWDER , outlets like SnowBrains, and SKI have run articles on the current administration’s tariffs and legislation and ruminated on what effects they may have on the outdoor community.

But where skiing has touched on politics outside of trending news latelyseems to be in safer topics that dovetail with, and perhaps follow, the stance taken by brands. While the ski writing world picked up the political mantle last summer when the Republican-backed ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ included several iterations subjecting millions of acres of federal land to possible sale, the movement against the measure was widespread and transcended political boundaries. Email inboxes the ski world over were filled with appeals from brands, magazines, and the like against the measure, leaving the topic an easy one for publications to cover without risking blowback. 

Where skiing seems less willing to go—not unlike the wider world—is into debatable topics that don’t pander, practice avoidance, nor trade in absolutes. And in the current landscape—vitriolic, censoring, and with little avenue for moderation—a skiing subculture never prone to politics may be less willing to stomach debatable topics than ever. 

The discussion would surely not be improved by accepting fringe, conspiratorial, or racist perspectives. But mirroring broader tides, a long-fomenting backlash has risen over the tone of the discourse; progressive ideology with the best intentions, even with scientific backing, has been interpreted as pandering, preachy, and even authoritarian, just as those with views that question apparently settled debates are characterized as objectionable, leading those with minority views toward avoidance rather than discussion.

Skiing is, in part, beautiful, even transcendental, as an escape from the mundane. But what could come from a skiing subculture where publishers pushed writers to explore political topics? How could the discourse improve if there existed more researched, sober-minded takes on how politics and skiing intersect? And how can the ski culture better listen and debate these topics instead of ignoring them, pandering to readership, or reacting aggressively?

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, one that stunned many,John Clary Davies, then editor-in-chief of POWDER, penned a piece entitled “A New President, A New Season.” Within, the veteran ski writer did something seldom endeavored in the skiing discourse. He explicitly wrote about politics.

The article can assuredly be interpreted along ideological lines. To some it may at first seem divisive, or myopically liberal in a ski world perhaps overly stereotyped that way. To others, it may read as defiant, even courageous, in the face of a president-elect who openly wished ill against their opponents. 

But what the article inarguably delivers is a commentary from the intersection of politics and skiing.

“Wednesday felt like a day of mourning—for decency? For progress? For democracy? The POWDER staff and I spent the day in the car headed toward Mammoth in a state of bewildered sorrow,” Davies wrote. “I couldn’t help but scroll through the reactions of my friends and followers and read the stories about what a Trump presidency was going to look like. I felt sick.”

Where many could have then turned away and escaped into skiing—as many now do, and many always have—Davies instead leaned into the storm. After elaborating on a day spent away from the world at Mammoth, he concluded in wider terms.

“I won’t pretend the day meant more than it did—it was just a single day of skiing. I know that we cannot retreat into the mountains and distance ourselves from the realities of our country,” he wrote, later continuing: “We know to be grateful for days like the one we just had, to never take them for granted. We also know that now, more than ever, we’ll have to fight with everything we have to protect our ability to have them—to be proponents for clean air, healthy water, and snowy mountains. I don’t know what exactly that looks like, but as we returned to the world, one thing above all else was abundantly clear: We had a lot of work to do.”

Agree with Davies or not, appreciate his tone and language, or find it partisan, his piece is not only an example of the simple transcendence of free speech, nor an endeavor perhaps now brave in a world somehow more vitriolic than it was just nine years ago. The article stands as a testament to where skiing and politics indeed meet.

It brings to light notions of how the topic can, and deserves to be written about; that these articles can act as a reference point for the discussion of who we are as skiers, and how the discussion of our craft, never prone to delving into politics, is perhaps incomplete without it.

About The Brave New World of Skiing Column

This article was written by POWDER writer Jack O’Brien for his bi-weekly ‘Brave New World of Skiing’ column. Click below to read the previous column, ‘Consolidation and Affiliate Marketing Upended Outdoor Media—Now Audience-Driven Content Is Having a Moment‘.

Related: Consolidation and Affiliate Marketing Upended Outdoor Media—Now Audience-Driven Content Is Having a Moment