Tabla de contenidos para January 2017 en Powder

Home to three of Montana’s four largest ski areas, Yellowstone Country claims bragging rights to some of the most sublime skiing in North America, with a limitless mix of terrain and a snowfall that often exceeds 400 inches per year of pure, light powder. And if that weren’t enough, the small towns that make up this skier’s paradise offer the biggest hospitality around. BIG SKY Visit Big Sky, Montana and experience the Biggest Skiing in America® at Big Sky Resort with more than 5,800 acres of skiable terrain and 4,350 vertical feet. Keep exploring with over 50 miles of trails at Lone Mountain Ranch, perfect for Nordic skiing, snowshoeing or learning to mush a team of sled dogs. BRIDGER BOWL Organically grown and locally owned since 1955, Bridger Bowl has…

Driving on U.S. Highway 395 in a blinding snowstorm, the shadows darting between roadside lamps seem like a pack of lurking yetis, but they are an entirely different beast. These are the Chain Monkeys, men and women who brave the cold, snow, and wind to chain-up mountain-bound drivers before the going gets steep. Steve Miesel is one of these stewards, patrolling the exit off Highway 395 to Mammoth Lakes, California, with a wrench, headlamp, and the occasional can of chili. The 56-year-old moved to Mammoth over 30 years ago to ski and work at a chalet and began securing tire chains soon afterward to fund his mountain adventures. Miesel’s knees are shot and his ski career long gone, but these days the smiling Californian gets his kick helping city-slickers to…

A very earnest A-list professional skier recently told me that he was trying to figure out how to stay in his profession without dying. Which is rational and healthy and also really sad when you realize he’s ultimately talking about making pretty pictures to sell skis and goggles. Professional skiing is not one of those businesses, like longline fishing or firefighting, where high-risk scenarios are mandatory. Or at least it doesn’t need to be. Like pro football players, pro skiers have become pro skiing’s biggest (unintentional) victims. So maybe we should set them free: free from dodging freight-train slough on lines nobody would ever hit for fun, free from POV cameras, free from Instagram, free from doing interviews where they explain what they really like best is shredding with their…

1. You demand everyone follow the light, even though nobody has slept at reasonable hours for days and you’ve successfully sapped all the fun out of skiing. 2. Traveling with you is an extremely high-maintenance affair that requires a full support staff, all the car’s space, and outrageous airport fees. 3. You’re a sensitive, delicate flower. We get it. You’re an artiste. 4. You can’t throw a snowball worth shit. 5. You’re maniacal, unsafe, obsessed, and frequently yelling at innocents about “Getting the shot.” 6. You have a secret one-turn wonder location and demand everyone be blindfolded before taking them there. It’s usually about 10 steps from the road. 7. Your private Instagram screeds are legendary, but you still post more than anyone. 8. You make this magazine real pretty.…

MIDWINTER, MID-MANIA, MID-BACCHANAL, at the top of my favorite run, I met someone. Time slowed and started to mean something else. Not long after we were introduced, I went to visit her. On a Monday night after work, we skinned up a groomer by headlamp. We were the only ones for miles. The stars overhead and the city below added a glow to the dark sky. We had started at the base of the ski area, at 8,000 feet. My lungs burned. I struggled to hold a conversation while she floated effortlessly up the mountain—all smiles and banter. I pretended to be cool. A couple thousand vertical feet later, we reached the top. It was windy and somehow darker. We went into an empty, cold warming hut. It was…

The empty, remote, unexplored mountains in the U.S. are dwindling. Among the few unknowns left include the La Sals, an island of snowcapped peaks in the middle of a red desert in southeastern Utah. Last winter, Colter Hinchliffe and Tim Durtschi spent two weeks exploring Utah’s second highest range. Photographer Nic Alegre joined them for one week. Aided by snowmobiles, the trio covered the range’s 10-mile span, mapping out a list of spots to ski—technical descents off 12,000-foot peaks, barren slopes for backcountry booters, rocky fingers ideal for mini golf lines. Fifty miles from the popular climbing and mountain biking town of Moab, the trio saw few other people once up in the mountains. Their photos reflect the striking contrast between elements. “The best part of it was just that…

Magnus Graner and Pär Peyben Hägglund were stuck. Road-tripping from Finland to Eastern Russia to shoot with production company Level 1, the two young Swedes were stalled at the Russian border for an improperly registered rental car. In danger of losing their Russian visas, they weighed their options: Turn around; sneak through another border crossing; or spend a few days in Finland finding a taxi to take them the rest of the way. As part of The Bunch, a tribe of Swedish skiers bringing backyard skiing to the big mountains, they had ignited the ether under today’s ski scene with tricks that skirted the line between weird and innovative—bending, pressing, and sliding their skis in ways no one thought possible. Now it seemed they’d finally met a barrier they couldn’t…

Not to get all meta on y’all, but this was easily the most concise, yet open-ended assignment letter an editor has ever sent me. In a recent email, Powder Editor John Clary Davies asked me: Why is skiing important? And why do we ski? Holy cow, that’s beautiful. Spare as Hemingway, philosophical as Kant. So: Skiing is important because it’s in the Olympics, which means America gives a shit about it every four years. America: Fuck yeah. OK, that’s why skiing is important to nonskiers. For skiers, it’s important because it gives us a reason to go on living. Seriously. Humans possess an innate need for joy, and skiing is the method with which we achieve said joy—never mind the homicidal wind slabs, exorbitant costs, finger-lopping bouts of frostbite, and…

On the evening of September 14, 2015, I was sitting at home watching TV when my phone rang. Six days earlier, I’d had surgery on my left leg, just above my calf, to remove a large chunk of melanoma, which I’d been diagnosed with earlier that summer. The incision was six inches long and so deep and gnarly I nearly fainted when I saw it for the first time. During the operation, Dr. Robert Andtbacka, a surgeon at the University of Utah’s Huntsman Cancer Institute, had also removed a single lymph node from my left groin to see if the melanoma had spread, which would make it a much more serious situation. I wasn’t too worried. I’d always been healthy and active, but when my phone rang, I knew immediately…

THE CLAMORING SOUNDS OF OPEN MIC NIGHT steer my friend and me toward Rafters, the legendary bar at Red Mountain Resort where patroller Sparky Steeves is wailing on the guitar and half-empty pitchers of beer sit scattered atop a few amplifiers. A dog scurries along the worn wooden floorboards as an old ski bum, still in his ski pants at 10 p.m., staggers to a table with his fellow comrades. Locals filter in and out as the evening wanes, and I see a guy pull three nuggets out of his pocket, rolling a fat joint in plain view. It’s loose here. We began our journey 12 hours ago in Salt Lake City. What looked like a final spring storm in a banner season had me slamming the gas pedal north…

The Who: Even grandmas get into it. Nancy McDowell, 72, has kid skis mounted to a medical stand with an attached toilet seat designed as a roadster, styled out with a pink Easter basket on the handlebars. Her silver hair is poofed straight up by the wind as she takes off down Central Avenue during Cabin Fever Days in Martin City, Montana. There’s also the gruff biker dude in a leather speedo racing on a chopper trike, a bathtub with girls in bikinis behind a shower curtain, and a crowd favorite—a rock ’n’ roll band speeding down the course performing “Highway to Hell.” Here in “the Canyon” just outside Glacier National Park, you’ll see just about everything as mountain folk ski wildly on barstools to stem the madness of winter.…