The Death of the Ski Bum, And Imagining Their Return

Shrouded in cliché and nostalgia, at once our heroes and our foil, the ski bum has become so legendary that its true nature is now nearly impossible to grasp.

At once foundational, mysterious, and perhaps more lately dosed with a dash of irrelevance, this countercultural figure inhabits a sort of purgatory in the modern skiing consciousness. Subject to both reassessment and wistful regard, nothing else might strike the ski world with ambivalence as much as the ski bum. 

But this figure and their moment—complicated as it may be—remains the primordial fire the modern ski world descends from. And in that lies the issue. And an opportunity.

As skiing ever sheds its esoteric, funky past and occasionally, if fitfully, takes stock of what its history means, our world—skiing and otherwise—pines for counterculture. And as the skiing Aquarians, latter-day partying hippies, and the like have faded from view, a vacuum has emerged, hinting that a reimagining of the ski bum could not only give skiing a much-needed subversive authority but perhaps complete their partial revolution. Just as it’s needed most.

The ski bum marks the culmination of skiing as counterculture.

In that yesteryear world of straight-and-narrow requirements, this beaming figure stood as a repudiation of the usual path, a warrior against conformity, the crusader for living for your own moment. It was the ultimate opt-out, defined by a rejection of the Cold War world. As Woodstock came and went, many embraced an escapist, f-it attitude, and retreated from the prospect of a boring, desk-bound atomic death to the snowy, post-Aquarian refuges, to the as-yet undiscovered mountains.

This lore is now foundational; the entire skiing culture, from brands to writers and everyday skiers, revere these figures and their moment to this day.

But this image, this notion of the ski bum, becomes problematic when viewed through a more critical lens, revealing a more complicated reality. Not only can the ski bum of old hardly be plugged into our current milieu; in a world that struggles with the fitful coming to terms with implicit bias and an honest acknowledgment of the past, our reverence for the ski bum begs for a reassessment. Maybe most obviously, even if some ski bums indeed took on a tramp ethos, the lifestyle was only for a privileged sort. Undoubtedly, there existed true wandering vagrants in this realm, but the ski bum of lore was typically almost always white, usually male, and often enjoyed the parachute of family money. 

And the supposed loosely defined discovery of these Western Mountain regions by this cohort in the 1960s and 1970s disregards not only the rugged ranchers and miners who came before, but more so the original inhabitants, the indigenous Americans, who only a few generations prior had been part of an unbroken legacy that lasted thousands of years before being nearly wiped away by genocide.

The scope of these pressing modern acknowledgments, coupled with the brutally exclusive nature of modern ski town life and the ever-present and constantly obvious ramifications of climate change, has ushered in a thoughtfulness (in some circles) that has rendered the ski bum’s nonchalance a relic of guilt-free times. Moreover, the modern ski world, and the world at large, has all but abandoned the ski bum and their ideals, eschewing their and their contemporaries’ subversive leanings for something more conventional as the zeitgeist ever moves that direction.

Still, these realities do little to assuage the place this figure holds not only in the ski culture, but in the greater counterculture. Taken at its most pure, the ski bum encapsulates not a meaningful disregard for any group or credo, but simply a burning desire for freedom, for wildness; for living as one pleases from moment to moment, and for leaving all else behind in the name of single-minded devotion to passion. At its broadest and most innocent definition, the ski bum is nothing more than the searcher of ultimate liberty.

But not only was the ski bum and their original counterculture a complex mix of aspiration and entitlement; their ethos is now all but gone. Priced out of real estate and rentals, those living just to ski have hurdles unseen to previous generations that tread the same path. And the bastions of the ski bum are slowly being subsumed into an economic machine so focused on profits that nothing else seems to matter. Conglomeration has made skiing at resorts mostly unaffordable. And lodging in these communities, whether long term or short, is priced for the most affluent. 

But it’s not only the machinations of big business that have rendered the ski bum endangered. Core ski culture has itself dealt their ideal a lethal blow. From outerwear to gear quivers, skiing has slowly but completely turned toward conspicuous consumption and gear determinism.

Though style has long played a part in the ski experience, the notion of brand-name coolness and ski-the-right-ski ethos has led to a never-before-seen feasting on gear and appearances. The market has thus been flooded with consumables and notions of what’s cool, all to feed an unfathomably large outdoor economy.

Not only has the ethos of independent journalism and mellow mom-and-pop ski areas been leveled by the industry-wide quest to join in on the gear sales gravy train, this doctrine has also seeped into every corner of the ski world, not least of all skiers themselves. Being a bum with one lowly set of skis and boots is tantamount to being a beater or a gaper in a ski culture now so bent on looking and acting a certain way.

Perhaps most tellingly, the dive bar is now a rarity in ski towns, replaced with high-end brasseries whose clientele spends more time chatting about the country club and their gardeners than skiing. 

It’s all part of a now-established pattern of tearing down what came before. It perhaps points to a fallen world; that the best days of the ski towns are behind us, and that the ski bum is but a problematic artifact of a bygone era, an endling if not already extinct. 

But as ski towns face this fate, and as these idyllic hamlets succumb to the pressing desires of monied agendas, where humble, normal people can’t make a living anymore and skiing ever borrows from an emerging conventionalism, an opportunity exists to build something better and new out of the ashes of the ski bum philosophy, where a reimagined, resurrected, reincarnated ethos can be molded into something modern but that still holds close the original core tenets of freedom, modesty, and passion.

Call it anachronistic, call it what it is—an absolute dream. But there exists a latent power to change the narrative.

Skiing doesn’t need to take place only at glitzy resorts with their crushing lift lines and over-priced amenities.

Après isn’t mandated to occur in overly Instagrammed, see-and-be-seen establishments.

We don’t have to panic and line up for every powder morning (ski pass required). We don’t have to own something because it is in a buyer’s guide.

Skiing can take place at local hills, in the wilds, away from the distractions. We can bring our own food and our own beer. Hell, we can brew our own beers and grow our own food. We can buy what equipment we need, not what we are told to want. And more broadly, the powers that be—our political systems, our social media conglomerates, our emerging AI oligarchs—desperately need a counterpoint.

A counter to their culture.

Perhaps we’ve always lived in a fallen world in the West, where ski dreams–where the American Dream–are rendered, but never fully. Perhaps the legacy of unbroken promises and unrealized revolutions is part of the fabric of this place we have created. And maybe it is the nature of countercultures to remain but a taste of what things could be like if the machinations of the mainstream could be disrupted en masse. But these may ever be visions not of how things could be, but of our dreams incarnate; the most ephemeral notion that is eventually only as real as our memories.

And the easy-going ski towns and the ski culture of old may indeed already be forsaken to memory. No truly affordable ski town remains; nowhere has the instant gratification of social media not permeated. Nostalgia aside, the ski counterculture we once knew, or perhaps created in our minds—the world of the ski bum—is gone.

But an opportunity exists to push forward. We don’t have to participate in the mainstream; we don’t have to be drawn into what the hordes are doing. We can ski in ways, and by means outside of what is presented to us, and in doing so, we can draw attention to the issues long overlooked by our culture and strive to make things better.

While we can look at the modern discourse as the death of the skiing counterculture, we can also see clearly that the mainline narrative thirsts for a modern alternative. 

Yes, the ski bum of old is dead, and their ethos not only doesn’t fit neatly into the current paradigm; it is already extinct. But in its place may a mindful purity predominate in at least a few earnest souls; may the transcendence of life on snow and an understanding of its soul live on outside of a consumables-first mindset. 

This spirit never became mainstream as it was, but its modern rebirth–the notion that freedom, and the equality of seeking such; that the liberty to be who you are shall be available to all–can live on.

Without its reimagining and continuation, not only are the ski towns and ski resorts the bastion of a fallen ethos, but next could be us skiers.

And we have the power to be otherwise.

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, ‘Does Skiing Matter When The World Is Burning?‘.

Related: More From The Brave New World of Skiing