Ski Bum Culture Survives Despite Decades of Systematic Siege
One day your abandoned mansions will house our livestock, and the Creator will laugh gleefully as our perfect powder 8s stretch on towards infinity.
If we can ignore an unappealing headline, Heather Hansman’s recent article “Ski bum culture hits reality” is well-written and addresses several crucial issues plaguing mountain folk. Her good work even acknowledges how ski resort communities provide an extreme example of the problems most Americans now face: systematic scams, utter unaffordability, environmental degradation, endless uncertainties, and the unfortunate fallouts thereof.
“Institutionalized insanity further enslaves all Americans, and even our beloved ski bums are feeling the boot,” is the headline I would have chosen, but only a pathetic propagandist would warp another writer’s words to sell their own ideas.
Case in point, let’s look at the hideous headline Hansman’s article was reprinted under in Jackson Hole’s hyper-commercialized propaganda rag: “Ski bum culture does a face-plant in tourist town reality.” That’s what the well-paid witches and warlocks at the JH Daily conjured up. Reading that line got my mental locomotive underway steaming.
To my eye that headline seems to imply that outdoorsy, humble, working class folk are somehow to blame for the unsustainable absurdities plaguing mountain towns across the American West. Like all avid snow sports enthusiasts I cannot accept false claims that members of my tribe took an embarrassing fall. As an unapologetic ski bum and self-actualized wizard, I feel the need to speak up.
Have we ski bums truly “face-planted” into “reality” or are we still successfully ducking the ropes of societal insanity? I applaud all of my peers doing their best to steezily maneuver down steep, icy slopes through dangerous moguls formed by the deluded imaginations of greedy gapers and government goons. Ride it out, friends. Ride it out!
Perhaps we ski bums are aware of something which most folks miss. Maybe we know that “living the dream” is one of the few healthy, sane responses to finding oneself immersed in an American Nightmare brought on by the inevitable end of a pathetic, short-sighted, money-worshipping, warmongering, environmentally-catastrophic empire.
Perhaps we ski bums can help other folks break free from the BS and find some solace amidst these unfortunate circumstances. Nationwide most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, homelessness is at an all-time high, and the same can be said of drug abuse: ski bum culture has not only survived but thrived under these conditions for quite some time.
Of course it wasn’t always this way. Our prosperity — and sanity — has been under siege for decades, and anyone who tells you otherwise should not be trusted. Some of us can remember what is was like before power-hungry bureaucrats and profit-driven plutocrats took to the slopes, lined up for an epic Chinese downhill, and yard-saled spectacularly. We ski bums are just trying to avoid getting caught up in that shit show while it plays out.
Like Heather Hansman, I embraced the counter culture and ran off to the mountains in the early 2000s. I moved from Minnesota to Jackson Hole with $1500 stashed in my $1500 station wagon, and immediately found a decent job and an affordable room to rent — $450/mo — in a house full of more seasoned ski bums. My one year sabbatical before enrolling in Medical School morphed into a new way of life: a profitable future shamelessly peddling pharmaceuticals couldn’t compete with the natural, guilt-free high of schussing through perfect powder snow with other fun-loving folks.
Nowadays that same little room rents for upwards of $2k per month: 4-5x more than 20 years ago. Lift tickets at JHMR went from $70 to $200: almost a 3x increase. Food costs, fuel and utility prices, insurance premiums, property taxes, and the interest rates set by usurious devils: across the board and around the country — not just in “tourist towns” — everything has gotten stupidly expensive.
Obviously wages have not even come close to keeping up with “inflation”, which is just another way of saying “currency devaluation”. We can’t blame the ski bums for that. The Federal Reserve — a private bank masquerading as a government entity — sets monetary policy, not Billy the blazed up boot fitter.
My first landlady in the Hole was a quintessential mountain mama. She told us tales of what it was like back in the 70s and 80s when folks were welcome to camp out up Cache Creek all summer long. Nowadays free camping is rare within a 30 mile radius of most ski towns, and even paid camping is expensive and severely limited. Public lands abound, but all you can legally do there is walk around.
Private campgrounds have been replaced by overpriced condos. Whole blocks of affordable housing have been torn down and turned into hotels. Property tax hikes have even the coolest old heads who bought in decades ago tossing and turning at night. Sleeping covertly in a vehicle on the streets has even been criminalized in most mountain towns. Tight restrictions on land use make trying to throw up tiny houses and yurts a herculean task. Affordable housing options would abound if the government goons simply stopped stealing so much of our money and got out of the way.
The ski bums did not lobby for these taxes, developments, and restrictions. Karens, NIMBYs, money grubbing developers, and corrupted governments have severely curtailed our freedoms and quality of life. It certainly wasn’t Carl the quirky line cook.
Twenty years ago, most service industry and blue-collar jobs in mountain towns were filled by passionate skiers and snowboarders, and those jobs paid a living wage. Now desperate illegal immigrants and J1 workers threatened with deportation upon termination are bearing the brunt of that labor. Typical wages are — unsurprisingly — inadequate, and an open Southern border guarantees a steady stream of poorly paid wage slaves. There is plenty of money in mountain towns, but actively working for a living is not nearly as profitable as speculating in the markets, filing for government grants, or simply owning shit.
We can’t fault the ski bums for that one either. Contrary to the stereotype, ski bums know how to work hard, and we know how to make ends meet. Though some of us enjoy making fun of wealthy kooks, we get along great with all other working class folks and we abhor all forms of slavery, especially the covert kind. Freedom, fun, and friendship are our MO.
Come to think of it, the ski bums did not shut down the world economy in 2020, ramp up poverty globally, or conjure up — and steal — trillions of dollars of pandemic response deficit spending. There are no ski bums associated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and our gain of function research is pretty much limited to pot plant potency.
We didn’t wage a multi-pronged, multi-year bioterrorist propaganda campaign. We didn’t shut down most of the health care system while heavily subsidizing society’s sick obsession with Covid. We didn’t demand that folks stay home, shutter their businesses, avoid their loved ones, wear dehumanizing masks, and inject unsafe, ineffective gene altering substances manufactured by shady companies shielded from liability.
The corporate media, corrupt government, and their friends in big pharma orchestrated that pileup. The Teton Media Jerks who put out the Jackson Hole Daily profited handsomely off of those Covid-era fairytales, and were fully complicit in carrying out the worst crimes against humanity since the horrors of World War 2.
Let it be known.
Ski bums also did not decree that mountain town property values — and property taxes — must double in the wake of the highly-profitable plandemic. Local dirt pimps, government goons, and fat rats fleeing the cities did that.
Furthermore, ski bums are — I am proud to say — staunchly anti-war. We were not consulted when hundreds of billions of dollars were laundered through a tragic proxy war in the Ukraine. Only the dumbest among us fell for the latest military-industrial complex fraud, but even they aren’t slurping up that absurd story anymore.
Generally, we ski bums do not support funding either side of the Israel/Palestine atrocity, or any other conflict for that matter. We opposed the Iraq War from the outset, and we all thought the 20 year occupation of Afghanistan was rather wasteful and silly since opium poppies grow just as well in the American West.
If getting the USA addicted to opioids was the goal all along, we may as well have avoided all that violence and expenditure by simply legalizing homegrown smack. Like many things in modern America it would had been horrible for Americans but great for the economy.
Ski bums wouldn’t have left billions of dollars of equipment behind in Afghanistan either: we’d have thrown a massive party with an epic fireworks display before loading up those vehicles and embarking on an epic backcountry adventure across the Himalayas.
Ski bums may not be the best at balancing our check books, but we did not fail audits for the last six years in a row. The Pentagon did that. Ski bums did not announce that we had lost $2.3 trillion the day before two airplanes magically brought down three skyscrapers. All three of those skyscrapers inexplicably stuck their landings perfectly. The controlled demolition of the World Trade Center preceded the controlled demolition of the middle class.
We ski bums are well aware that folks willing to sacrifice the American way of life (and American lives) in their insatiable pursuit of power and profit cannot be trusted to do anything but serve themselves at the expense of the rest of us.
Ski bums did not pass the invasive Patriot Act or funnel trillions of dollars down the military-industrial-complex rat hole. We ski bums have not been waging an endless global War of Terror. If Dick Cheney and the rest of the neo-cons spent more time skiing and less time scheming, this country would be in a lot better shape than it is.
The ski bums did not crash the economy back in 2008 by claiming that bundles of junk mortgages were AAA-rated securities. We did not bail out the “too big to fail” banks or implement the QE Infinity monetary policy to keep an inherently fraudulent financial system afloat. We did not give huge, low-interest loans to massive corporations so they could buy up shares and keep the stock market soaring despite a crumbling currency and real world economy.
When it comes to climate change, we ski bums live some of the most sustainable, lowest impact lives in modern America. Yes, we have a peculiar penchant for travel but we can’t afford to embrace conspicuous consumption, invest in polluting industries, fly around in private jets, pretend our brand new EVs are eco-friendly, profit off of endless wars, or maintain 15,000 square foot mansions with heated driveways in the high country.
While we are on the topic of climate, it is also worth noting that ski bums have not been actively modifying the weather on an ever increasing scale since the 1940s. Those of us who study history and the skies overhead can confidently say that corporations and governments have been playing god with the weather for longer than most of us have been alive.
With all this talk about climate change in the media and weird weather overhead we ski bums are rightly concerned. That said, it is not very scientific to ignore decades of documented weather modification, the many moods of the Sun, and myriad other factors that affect Earth’s climate.
Strangely, the corporate media wants us all convinced that CO2 is the only factor of any importance, and that our only salvation is carbon taxes, global government, and geoengineering. For those that don’t yet know, geoengineering is actively manipulating the climate with the stated intent of counteracting climate change. Surely these technologies would never be weaponized or used in the pursuit of profit and power. Psyche!
We ski bums stand to make no money or gain any power off of these purported planet-saving initiatives, but governments and corporations have positioned themselves perfectly for precisely that purpose. When further jacking up the cost of living, killing off the global poor, and playing god with the weather doesn’t actually save the planet they’ll just move on to another scam. It will probably involve blaming AI for the exploitation and extermination of broad swathes of the populace. We ski bums will weather their storms.
Something tells me that mountain towns won’t solve “affordable housing” until we address the fatal flaws in America’s foundations. Maybe instead of ridiculing the ski bums for actively avoiding the rat race, folks of a more mainstream disposition might take a good long look at the teetering mound of absurdities currently pawned off as reality.
The rich get richer while the poor get ground down and die off. The media says they should have just worked harder.
The money loses half its value every few years because it is only backed by the full faith and credit of deeply indebted government charlatans and the real scam artists pulling their strings. The media wags their tails in unison like good little bitches begging for table scraps.
The same people spying on everyone and waging endless wars say they must save the planet from bad weather by sending the cost of living soaring through the stratosphere. The media turns trees into trash churning out mountains of propaganda selling that story.
Someday soon another bioweapon emerges, and this one is actually serious. The media does its part to maximize profits, consolidate power, and make sure “my body, my choice” only applies to abortions and gender-reassignment surgeries.
Suppressed energy technologies collect dust in government warehouses while absurdly wasteful electric cars explode in the streets. The media applauds societal progress.
Civil unrest erupts when the depopulation agenda is fully exposed. The media condemns these radical extremists while the true terrorists host underwhelming orgies in their slopeside monstrosities.
Meanwhile, on some secluded mountain far from the fray a small group of friends step into their skis and start ascending above the absurdity.
The real ski bum culture will survive. One day your abandoned mansions will house our livestock, and the Creator will laugh gleefully as our perfect powder 8s stretch on towards infinity.
Amen.