Tabla de contenidos para February 2016 en Powder

CHAMONI X , FR ANCE FEBRUARY 1 , 2015 Just a few days before Jason Thompson and Forrest Coots were lapping more than three feet of fresh snow at La Flégère in Chamonix, France, last February, locals were playing golf on the green grass of the valley floor. The season was off to a poor start—it had been weeks since the last snowfall—when temperatures plummeted and an overnight storm crept through the French Alps, dropping enough snow to blanket the mountains from well above tree line down into the basin. The next morning, with the storm still raging, Thompson, Coots, and two others were up early enough to get first tracks. Howling winds swirled through the trees as the crew searched for pockets of powder. “I felt completely weightless in…

FARELLONES, CHILE IT’S THREE IN THE MORNING AT BLUE TAMBO, a popular discoteca in Farellones, Chile. I’m looking out a small window opened to the frigid night air that frames Santiago’s nocturnal cityscape, home to 7 million people, a dozen miles below. Thickly polluted air, the ceaseless grinding of commerce and construction, and innumerable burning lights fill the basin. But the quaint mountain town of Farellones sits perched above it all, separated from the city by a vacuous, black expanse of icy desert air, seemingly closer to the stars above than to the sprawl below. Turning from the window, I enter the chaos of Friday night at Blue Tambo—music blasting, people screaming, sweaty bodies jammed together dancing or reaching desperately toward the bar. A new song comes on and everyone…

“IT HAPPENED IN SUN VALLEY, not so very long ago. There were sunbeams in the snow and a twinkle in your eye.” Glenn Miller crooned these lyrics in 1941, only five years after Sun Valley opened as America’s first destination ski resort. Little did he know, a lot would happen in this little ski town in Idaho in the decades to come. The world’s first chairlift was installed in Sun Valley in 1936. Warren Miller lived in a trailer in the ski resort parking lot for two winters. Ed Scott, who invented the first aluminum ski pole, started Scott Sports in Sun Valley in 1958. Dr. Bob Smith, an orthodontist who designed the first ski goggle, founded Smith Optics in Ketchum in 1965. This magazine first published there in 1971.…

The best ski tune comes from your local shop. The guys and gals in the back room have the skills, machinery, and forearms to make sure your skis haul ass and bite an edge. And when sharks attack, leave it to your ski shop guy to fill the nasty core shot. But what if you just want a wax job? Throughout the season, snow temperatures change, which can dictate the glide of your skis based on the wax you use. Plus, it’s always advantageous to sharpen those edges before the beer league final, or after you ski across the parking lot because you’re too damn lazy to walk. Then again, maybe you just need an excuse to escape to the garage to drink a beer, listen to some tunes, and…

IMAGINE A WORLD where drones fly overhead while you rip a steep line through powder-stuffed trees. A tiny camera inside the drone captures footage of you, making even the average skier look like a breakthrough performer in a TGR flick. Magically, within a day or so, a polished, edited video appears in your inbox, primed to score a gazillion likes on Facebook. That is the world Jason Soll envisioned. And it becomes reality this winter with the launch of Soll’s Silicon Valley tech start-up, Cape Productions. While dozens of ski resorts are in the midst of writing policies that ban the use of personal drones, others are finding ways to incorporate them. This winter, skiers at resorts like Squaw Valley, California, and Fernie, British Columbia, can hire Cape’s team of…

WHITEFISH, MONTANA, is one of the best towns in skiing. Downtown is as remarkable for what it has—all local kitsch and quirk in old two-story wooden buildings that line Central Avenue—as for what it does not: anything corporate. You’ll have to go elsewhere for Lululemon, Saks, or Starbucks. But recently I was walking into town with my brother, who has lived there for nearly 15 years, as he was pointing out the obvious: Whitefish was changing. Construction was underway downtown on a new 21,000-square-foot, $15 million City Hall building, as well as an 89-room, three-story hotel. Meanwhile, Whitefish Mountain Resort was having a hard time hiring for the winter. Vacation rentals had overtaken a once cheap housing market for dedicated skiers, making living in Whitefish unaffordable for most seasonal employees.…

WHEN AN 18-YEAR-OLD “SICK” RICK ARMSTRONG moved from his Colorado hometown to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the winter of 1989, the middle-of-nowhere ski resort was not on the public’s radar. Skiers, of course, knew of the mountain’s steep 4,000 vertical feet, thanks in large part to the photos taken by Wade McKoy and Bob Woodall and footage from Greg Stump that documented a genre of rowdy, wild big mountain skiing that has since defined Jackson. But to the general public, the Wyoming cow town was just a place to stop for lunch on a road trip to Yellowstone National Park. The only people skiing there were cowboys and dirtbags. And skiers, including Armstrong, liked it that way. Today, things are different. Not only is Jackson Hole marked with a giant…

1. OK, that’s it. You’re done sitting around reading magazines and dreaming about living in a ski town. You’re going to pack your bags and move to a place where the beer flows like wine and beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano. I’m talking about a little place called… a. My crappy local ski hill. ( Jump to #4) b. Powpow Kickerville Huckertopia. ( Jump to #2) c. Europe. ( Jump to #9) 2. Good for you! You’ve got some money saved, your tall-tees/Randonee ski gear packed, and your housing lined up already? a. Well, if by “housing” you mean my college roommate’s best friend’s cousin Bob’s couch, then yes, it’s on! ( Jump to #5) b. My parents bought me a condo. I’ll just put whatever…

PHILOSOPHER ALDO LEOPOLD’S land ethic shaped how I interact with the wild. Judith Butler released me from what society says it means to be a woman. And Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism gave me faith that this silly earthly existence can mean something. Being confronted with their ideas about this puzzling, uncertain world made me the human I am. When I showed up to the University of Pennsylvania, everything was intimidating. I was a young woman from New Hampshire, a small-town skier marooned in the big city of Philadelphia. My new peers wore business suits to class in anticipation of their impending, inevitably successful interviews with Goldman. My professors’ minds were quite literally the best in their fields. Even the elitist, gothic Ivy League architecture screamed at me: You aren’t good enough!…

SKIER Dana Flahr LOCATION Engelberg, Switzerland SKIER Sam Cohen LOCATION Haines, Alaska SKIER Mattias Hargin LOCATION Engelberg, Switzerland SKIER Sean Pettit LOCATION Valdez, Alaska SKIER Dale Talkington LOCATION Newton, Massachusetts SKIER Marcus Caston LOCATION Alta Backcountry, Utah SKIER Todd Ligare LOCATION Haines, Alaska…

AMONG PROS, industry heavyweights, and eccentric locals, there is no shortage of recognizable characters in Utah’s Cottonwood Canyons, but one of its most visible individuals is a hitchhiking snowblader with a flair addiction. If you’ve driven up Big or Little in the last five years, you’ve probably seen Burke Weir, a 51-year-old costumed canyon jester with a propensity for short skis. The self-professed “casual commuter” ditched his truck in 2010, biking and snagging rides roughly 120 days a year to slide around Alta, Snowbird, Brighton, and his home mountain of Solitude. Weir fell in love with a pair of Kniessel Big Feet while working in a San Francisco ski shop in the ’80s, but after burning out on California, the part-time solar energy worker brought his blades to Salt Lake…

ERIC POLLARD—skier, artist, designer, cinematographer, and producer— relishes his role as a dad. One morning last spring, Pollard made his toddler daughter, Isabella, breakfast, and then sat with her in the living room, listening to old records, reading Winnie the Pooh books, and playing with her toys. All of his attention was focused on his daughter, a rare moment of rest with Pollard’s busy lifestyle. Since he was 15, Pollard, now 32, has traveled the world to ski, influencing the sport with his multi-directional and ultra-fluid style of moving down the hill. He’s been designing skis and apparel for almost as long, and used his personal aesthetic to create ski graphics and clothing that helped drag the ski industry out of the doldrums of design and into a more thoughtful,…

THE WHO: Miscreants. They are also line cooks, ski reps, pro athletes, business owners, and classy ladies who reveal their inner gnar—all with a good heart and hearty liver. There are a lot of assholes, too. Because all of the skiers in the Pain McShlonkey Classic, at Squaw Valley, California, cheat. Every damn one of them. At the gun blast, they take off from the starting line high on the mountain—skating, pushing, shoving, and tomahawking in costume. If it were easy, it’d be called skiing. On snowblades, the race to the finish is complete mayhem, and things get a little rough. In 2012, Daron Rahlves, the most decorated downhill racer in American history, took out my legs in the first few minutes. But it’s all good; it’s for charity. Past…

In a cabin up an offshoot of the Dryfork River, in a corner of West Virginia’s Canaan Valley, 13-year-old Resi Anderson lowers her head to say grace over a plate of venison made from a deer her dad shot from the front porch. “Thank you, God,” she says, “for this food we’re about to eat, and thank you for snow and for powder skiing.” In the Bible, Canaan was called the Promised Land. And the Canaan Valley, a 13-mile line break in the craggy West Virginia landscape, feels something like that. The valley is the highest east of the Mississippi. It’s ringed by shaggy peaks and holds three ski hills—Timberline Resort, Canaan Valley Resort, and White Grass Touring Center—within 15 minutes of each other. You might disregard skiing anywhere on,…

EMMA DAHLSTRÖM COMES FROM A TINY SWEDISH VILLAGE where nobody knows what freeskiing is. Or at least they didn’t until Dahlström showed up as the only Swede in the women’s ski slopestyle finals at the 2014 Olympics. “Emma is hungry and always looking to improve her skiing,” says fellow Swedish freeskier Henrik Harlaut. “She’s shown the girls in Sweden they can do anything if they work hard and have faith and dedication.” After a fifth-place finish at the Olympics, Dahlström won X Games slopestyle gold in Aspen in 2015 and was ranked first overall in women’s slopestyle last year. Now 23, Dahlström will be one to watch when X Games makes its Scandinavian debut in Oslo, Norway, in February. I was an alpine racer until I was 8. I thought…