SEPTEMBER 04: Intro
Pity poor autumn as it rolls into a ski town, delivering the heavy burden of hope. As temperatures drop and mornings take on the texture of broken glass, the collective mindset of a mountain community shifts, crossing that threshold separating summer from fall, apprehension from desire, good from better.
A ski town come September is an anxious place, when even the
simple act of wearing a sweater feels like a contribution to the cause, just one more way to help pull snow from a reluctant sky. Residents start making turns in their sleep, floating through that snowy dreamland until they finally wake to the sound of geese honking outside their window and the sight of four fresh inches on their front yard. In the meantime, they’ve got the pages of a magazine to get them by—a convenient vessel bringing winter until winter can come to them.
Much about skiing has changed since I wrote my first piece for Powder more than 10 years ago. Thirty-something ski mountaineers making technical turns down a 20,000-foot peak in Asia now share the sport with groups of 12 year olds sessioning their way through an air-filled afternoon in the terrain park. Yet much remains the same. Though various aspects of skiing may seem splintered at times, together they are pushing the sport to the farthest arteries of possibility, defining in the process an activity and a lifestyle that is larger by far than any of us ever imagined.
After 32 years on the shelves, some people still want to know what Powder magazine is all about. So I will tell you. We are that indescribable sensation first thing on a waist-deep day when you push off from the lift, haul ass down a cat track, and launch into an open bowl so filled with promise that you wouldn’t trade your next 10 turns for anything on earth. We are the feeling that fills a bar late on a Friday night when there’s a party raging inside and a storm raging outside and everyone keeps looking out the window just to stare at fat flakes drifting through darkness. We are every working stiff whose head moved him away from a ski town but whose heart remains there and always will. We are both the kids dropping into halfpipes and the ones stuck somewhere the mountains aren’t. We are the sound of ski boots kicking up a ridge at dawn. We are East and West, backcountry and frontcountry, Argentina and Alaska and Aspen. We are not just words on a page, we are the feeling you get after reading them. We are the language of winter. We are skiers.
Welcome home.–Tom Bie