Tabla de contenidos para Winter 2020 en Powder

BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, perhaps the final issue of Powder, our parent company will have ceased operations of the magazine indefinitely. The founding editors published the first issue of Powder Magazine in Sun Valley, Idaho in 1973. They called it “a celebration of powder skiing … the finest variety of skiing there is. To us, powder means freedom, with an emphasis not on how you do it, but just doing it more.” Forty-nine years later, we couldn’t agree more. Yet the world looks different than when the first issue was published. It certainly looks different since the last time most of us skied together. So, we must adapt. Skiers are good at this. We know how to find and adjust to a new line. With that in mind,…

NEED A JOKE? How about some trivia? Maybe a riddle? Perhaps you’ve misplaced your season pass and didn’t even realize it. Drop a glove while lighting that rollie? Lost a child? Your husband? Maybe you’re just looking for some amateur ski art to inspire you. What you need to do is to consult an inimitable multimedia hub: the ski lift whiteboard. That’s where, at the bottom of any chair worth its salt, in impermanent, dry-erasable ink, you’ll find what you’re looking for—or, more likely, what you weren’t looking for at all. Because the ski lift dry-erase board is full of surprises. After all, it’s truly the manifestation of ski lift operations as art—the best example of why the occupation is unlike any other. That’s because while on the job, lifties…

CONSIDER THE TURN.The bare-bones, no-frills, functional purpose of turning a ski is to control where you are going, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to manage your speed. Now imagine you had retractable, tail-mounted snow-combs that you could lower by degrees to drag in the snow. You wouldn’t need turns to slow you down at all. By deploying your tail brakes with a wireless controller built into your gloves, your poles, even your helmet, you could point ’em straight downhill on bunny slopes, groomers, or the steepest of the steep. No worries. But that’s not the point, is it? Turning your skis in long arcs or making quick slalom squiggles is only partly about practicality. It’s also about how it feels to make a turn. It’s about rhythm and pressure…

ON APRIL 7, nearly 400,000 Americans had already been stricken with COVID-19 since the disease was first detected on U.S. soil in February 2020. Of those, 12,757 had died from it—and yet that was just the beginning. Entire swaths of the economy were shut down, including every ski area in the United States. At my grocery store in Jackson, Wyoming, the canned goods and TP and paper-towel aisles had been ransacked as if the apocalypse was coming. People were nervous and scared, uncertain about public health, if they would be able to pay their bills, or when they could send their children back to school. In Bozeman, Montana, my mom was battling a chronic illness that had worsened under the stress of the pandemic. My family couldn’t travel to go…

MY NAME IS HANS LUDWIG, sometimes known as the Jaded Local, and I’m an addict. For 25 years, I have been part of an operation that distributes a habit-forming substance to the public. I regret nothing. I was born in 1972, the same year as POWDER Magazine, and I grew up skiing at Winter Park in Colorado. In 1990, my best friend, Troy, and I moved to Steamboat Springs to pursue a life of mogul skiing in pastel outfits, smoking weed, and the near-free in-state tuition at Colorado Mountain College. (They paid for your ski pass if you got a B average!) We became ski buddies with a hyperactive kid from Mammoth named Nate Wallace. Nate had somehow finagled a room in the ultimate ski-bum pad in town at the…

We invite you to use the space above to reflect on your own experience as a Powder reader. Share them with us, if you’d like, or with your friends. Or tear this out and keep it for when you need a reminder of who you are, what you are part of, and what it means to be a skier.…

THE PEOPLE I SKI WITH are dreamers, revolutionaries, fun hogs. Sometimes I wonder if they really exist. They’ve dedicated themselves to something as ridiculous and important as skiing. They’ve crafted their life around it. It’s a beautiful life. The people I ski with teach me how to ski, and I’ll never forget those lessons. You should always keep a candy bar in your pocket. You should always wear your helmet. Some of the people I ski with are kids. They’re not my own kids, and sometimes they’re not very good. They always teach me something. Some of the people I ski with are better than me. They know that. I know that. It’s harmonious, most of the time. The people I ski with are my favorite people. They’ll sing karaoke…

CRAMMED AMONG GALLONS OF ICE CREAM and sides of beef, we shut the door of the walk-in behind us. Our frosted breath filled the small freezer as we giggled; we were pretty sure our maître d’, Sam, wouldn’t find us in here. It was mid-February in Alta and the snow wouldn’t stop falling. Guests at the lodge were missing flights, the chairs weren’t spinning, and anxiety mixed with the staff’s anticipation of skiing bottomless powder in a wildly unproductive collision of mischief. Over the past 48 hours, we couldn’t breathe without bumping elbows with crabby guests and, subsequently, crabbier-by-the-moment staff. On top of it all, we weren’t sleeping. The cocktail of altitude and round-the-clock Howitzer and hand charge blasts left us bleary-eyed and restless. Late dinner shifts bled into dreams…

I’M ON THE PLANE HEADED HOME RIGHT NOW. The melancholy is starting to sink in. It feels like a pair of sunglasses that make the world seem less sparkly. Or a heavy, wet towel around my neck that I can’t get dry. I’ve just spent a few exhilarating days sleeping in a backcountry hut surrounded by toothy, snow-covered peaks near Whistler, British Columbia, alongside some of the most fun people I’ve ever known. My face still hurts from laughing at ridiculous late-night jokes and summit dance parties in howling wind, my belly aches from too many skin track candy snacks, and my legs flag from repeated days of out-all-day ski touring. Those are good feelings, sensations that I don’t want to fade away or forget. I barely slept each night…

Special thanks to Sam Cox and Hans Ludwig.…

It had begun to occur to Trevor that he might have Progressed The Sport too hard.…