Chairlift Chatter: How to Find Dopamine When Your Off-Season Won't End

Intro.

If there’s a common thread that ties our staff together (other than the obvious of our employer and our mutual obsession with skiing), it’s that we’re all passionate writers, believe it or not. It’s true that while you might read mostly gear pieces from Max, news from Ian and Matt, and news, with a sprinkling of gear and feminist propaganda from me, we all enjoy branching out from time to time.

For some time now, the four of us have been considering how we could ‘branch out’ or write a sort of weekly column that scratched our creative writing itch, and allowed us to deliver musings about, really, anything that felt more relatable, personal, and human. It was in this conversation that I realized that the majority of my coworkers (given, our staff is entirely male except for myself) had never seen Sex and the City. 

Flabbergasted, I explained to them the premise of the hit TV show, which follows columnist Carrie Bradshaw and her three closest girlfriends (Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha) through the many trials and errors of dating in New York City. Each episode is one of Carrie’s columns, touching on a different topic and tied together by the overarching theme of Sex, and the City. 

I watched as their eyes glazed over, just as they had when I told them they should really pick up a copy of Vogue sometime, too. 

If your eyes have also glazed over at this point, bear with me. I’m not here to indoctrinate skiing with my feminist agenda (at least not today), but rather to introduce you to our new, and very loosely planned out concept.

We’re going to write columns. Probably every week. About skiing. That’s what we know right now, and as this idea evolves, we hope you’ll evolve with us. 

So, although I consider myself more of a ‘Samantha’ than a ‘Carrie’, consider this a welcome to our columns, whatever they may be about, tied together by a common and true love of skiing.

Without further ado, enjoy the first edition of Chairlift Chatter, my new column for POWDER.

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How to Find Dopamine When Your Off-Season Won’t End.

At one point in time, I was an avid whitewater kayaker.

I lived and breathed kayaking for every month of the year I could paddle. I used to compare it to doing drugs, although parts of it might have been healthier. For months in the summer, I’d disappear from my normal circle of friends in favor of friends who paddled. All my plans were made around paddling, and it took priority over anything and everything else. It was all I could talk about or think about.

Then, just as drugs also can, it started to take my friends away from me, one by one. It was always the safest people, the most dialed paddlers, that passed away in freak accidents that felt like they should happen to anyone but them. And it destroyed me, bit by bit, my own close calls feeling more and more like they’d eventually take me too. So just like an addict who’s found themselves in too deep, I too, had to quit.

I’ve never felt the way I did about kayaking about anything else, at least not a sport. I felt such a deep love for it, and yet, it also broke my heart over and over and took away pieces of me as I experienced loss after loss.

I’ve been skiing for as long as I can remember. It was never really a choice; it was always just something I’ve done. I didn’t really fall in love with the sport until I was a teenager, but even then, it still just felt like a given, not a wild thing to be pursued.

The older I’ve gotten, the more skiing has become not just a given, but something I actively curate my existence around. Skiing has never been an all-consuming, ego-driven obsession in the same way as kayaking was. It’s been a slow, steady love that’s grown deeper over time and become a release, a safe place, a constant. Isn’t that what love is supposed to be?

Yet, as I watch the forecast turn from snow to rain week after week, and the days in December tick by that I still haven’t skied, that familiar feeling of obsession returns. I find myself grasping for dopamine in this never-ending, dark, wet off-season from hell, the way I did for paddling. 

Desperate, I asked my therapist for ways to find dopamine that didn’t involve spending lots of money (retail therapy), eating lots of bread (did you know eating carbs can give you dopamine?), doom scrolling (social media’s dopamine hits aren’t quite the right flavor anyway), overtraining (your body will force rest days if you don’t take them, it turns out ), or drinking & smoking copious amounts of weed. Like any mountain-town refugee now in therapy, I’d become painfully self-aware of the ways I had used adrenaline-fueled sports, like kayaking, to achieve this high in the past, and now in my supposedly healthier, more balanced era of life, I’d simply turned to other things that masqueraded as ‘healthy’ or ‘productive.’

My therapist’s solution? Cold water. Of course, it was. 

Years of kayaking in PNW winters had upped my tolerance to cold water in a way I was often proud of. I’d even jumped in the Snake River one Wyoming winter, clinging to its snowy banks and watching the seconds tick by on my watch.

I was skeptical that a little dunk in the Deschutes would benefit my mental state, but I did know how popular the practice had become. Every neighborhood in Bend, it seems, has a ‘thermal lounge’ where you can pay an ungodly amount for a cold plunge and sauna.

So, I woke up one morning, put on my swimsuit and sweatpants, made a cup of coffee, and drove to the river. I walked into the ice-cold (roughly 39 degrees!) water and felt the feeling leave my toes, feet, and legs quickly.

The cold almost burned. I lowered myself in up to my belly button, and sat, trying to breathe for as long as I could stand it, which was only about two minutes. When I started to think my toes might actually fall off, I leapt from the water and, despite the still very cold, rainy morning air, instantly felt much warmer. 

There’s no moral to this story yet. The jury’s still out on whether freezing my toes off in the Deschutes this morning started my day as positively as if I’d eaten a few croissants for breakfast, or hucked myself off a waterfall in a tiny, plastic boat.

Maybe the real lesson is that if you also find yourself considering unhealthy ways of finding dopamine hits because your local ski area hasn’t opened, take my therapist’s advice and jump in some cold water instead.

And for those wondering, if I’m a Samantha, Matt is most certainly Carrie, Ian is Charlotte, and Max is Miranda.

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