The sunny days above treeline on the resort’s wide-open slopes were long and heady, the patio perpetually full of fashion-conscious types power-drinking white wine and shucking fresh mussels hauled from a coast that could be seen from the mountain on rare, smog-free days. Everything was larger than life there, including the people.
Characters were everywhere, starting with the chanchos de cadenas (chain pigs), a bedraggled, barefoot lot that stumbled like zombies along the shoulders of the approach road during snowstorms, and that for the equivalent of two cents affixed chains to your vehicle’s tires with broken tools. There was the platoon of American instructors in the ski school, a French-Canadian who lived in a snow cave above the first chairlift, a handful of down-and-out pro racers from Europe. The ambience was both international (the ghost of racer Spider Sabich ruled the slopes; the celebrated and once-frequent visitor had been shot dead in Aspen, Colorado, by actress Claudine Longet) and, like all foreign ski destinations, uniquely local (drunk on pisco, the mountain manager rolled the new $150,000 German grooming machine on its first day of operation).
There was history. I learned that Norwegian and British engineers introduced skis here during the construction of the trans-Andean railway in 1910. Public consciousness of the sport caught up in 1913, when a Chilean diplomat who’d lived in Norway organized a ski tour to the popular Maipo volcano; then Germans and Austrians in conjunction with well-to-do Chileans, started the Ski Club of Chile, and used mining roads to build cabins at Farellones and shape the first resorts, like Portillo. A gaggle of French skiers had more or less built this place by hand during Chile’s sweltering summers.
The weather? Apparently no North American knew what El Niño meant the year I was in Chile, but I had a front-row seat: as I’d seen on television, the first storm of the year had sparked unprecedented flooding in Santiago, destroying barrios and upscale neighborhoods alike, carrying people away in the process. At Portillo, the storm dropped nearly ten feet of snow onto otherwise dry slopes; it all slid, killed some police in a patrol shack, destroyed a lift, and submerged the road under twenty-five feet of icy cement. It took weeks to clear. This pattern was repeated all winter, with ski areas closed for days at a time. At mine, life rose and fell around the single máquina available to clear all roads and parking areas. Snow blew in so hard during one hellacious three-day tormenta that the bull wheel of the main chairlift was actually buried; the lift cable and suspended chairs emerged from the snow as if from underwater. A man trying to uncover his car ended up so deep that by the time he reached the vehicle’s roof he had to be rescued from the snow pit he’d dug.
Frequent earthquakes tended to shake snow loose from all but the most tenacious slopes, heightening avalanche conditions. When the glasses hanging over my bar started rattling, someone would yell terremoto! and we’d all run outside to safety. Just as often, we would exit only to discover that the shaking was a military helicopter coming to evacuate another victim of a peculiar local trend: people regularly skied into lift lines out of control at outrageous speeds, and injuries abounded. My on-mountain activities were dominated by shoveling off flat roofs, placing bamboo poles where someone was likely to hit them, and removing the doors from various structures to use as backboards to strap down the latest lift-line victims. Out of bounds? There was no such thing. We could go where we wanted, and people did, followed by a squadron of hopeful Andean condors.
And yet, so much was great. The endless sunshine between storms, the endless western view in the mornings, and the endless nights—which seemed bottled, ready to be uncorked at will. You had but to say the word fiesta and a party would happen. The people were warm, friendly, sincere, and only occasionally dangerous, especially the smiling, tanned, oh-so-intense women—married ones in particular.
The skiing was beyond my wildest expectations, and the frequent closures meant we often had the mountain to ourselves. Bottomless powder could be found days after a storm on the right slope. There was the 1,000-vertical-foot couloir above the area, a pilgrimage we made on full-moon nights so that you could drop into the slot just as la luna pulled directly overhead. On such occasions, things often had an electric-blue halo around them, an artifact of ingesting magic mushrooms shipped north from Chile’s austral rain forests. It was full-tilt crazy but also endearing: a culture struggling to preserve itself on one hand and trying to emulate the materialistic trappings of norte americanos on the other. For a rube ski fanatic with little to compare it to, it delivered the experience of a lifetime.
The very reason for ski bumming.
AS EVEN NONSKIERS know, skiing can be a consuming passion. Just what, then, is the shape of this fixation? Start here: instructors and coaches obsessed with technique; gearheads beset over the minutiae of equipment and design; other skiers simply and singly preoccupied with the various attributes of terrain (piste, moguls, steeps, chutes, glades) or jargon-laden meteorology (orographic precipitation, upslope storms, pineapple expresses, katabatic winds). Some ski writers are consumed with the physics of snow itself, penning columns on crystal formation and configuration and the temperatures at which it happens; water content and related phenomena like rime, graupel, and sleet—even the angle at which the Earth leans away from the sun in order to cause winter (known as axial tilt, it’s 23.5 degrees). There are abundant places in which to explore these notions, including some twenty national and international ski and snowboard titles that clutter magazines racks in North America alone—more publications than those devoted to surfing, skateboarding, hiking, and climbing.
Evidence of this peculiar mania lies in a glut of “I’ve been there” me-bris: ski gear and roofboxes adorned with resort-logo stickers; hats constellated with ski-area pins; jackets hung with clattering collections of weather-worn lift tickets. Likewise, there’s no end to the bizarre collateral that says “I’m a Skier.” Bumper stickers announce, “I 1 Big Dumps” and “If Hell Freezes Over I’ll Ski That, Too.” Auto knick-knacks like license-plate brackets and seatbelt covers scream “Ski Utah” or “Ski Tahoe,” turning vehicles into rolling chambers of commerce for the mountain ranges of their drivers’ fancy.
What is it about this particular badge—one rarely encountered in other individual sports like surfing or climbing—that so appeals to skiers? Here’s a clue: since you don’t see stickers claiming “I’ve been to Rogers Pass” or other favored lift-free snow stashes, perhaps it has to do with skiing’s conspicuous infrastructure and the fact that ski resorts are—or once were—built to attract like-minded individuals. While in some cases skiing was merely grafted onto pre-existing mountain locations, in others whole towns have sprouted solely because of the sport.
Society makes it hard to live simply and in the moment, so ski aficionados of all stripes are usually making some kind of sacrifice to get their fix. Which is why ski bums take perverse pleasure in the identity of a couch-surfing, dumpster-diving existence; the greater the sacrifice, the richer the reward. Some hang onto the ideal their entire lives, proudly wearing it on their sleeves, while others cover it up with the onion skins of career, family, and other facets of existence. But like a jungle tribe suddenly forced to relocate to a city and wear suits, true ski bums never lose a sensitivity to the perceived threats to their simple traditions. The kind of threats that progress and development ultimately deliver.
Mike Berard, a writer, photo contributor, and one-time editor of Canada’s skier magazine, still has a self-confessed obsession with the ski-bum life that almost always finds its way into his columns and features.
“This rootsy, cool, vibrant part of my life really stands out now that everything’s more complicated,” he says, alluding to ski-bumming’s Peter Pan qualities. “When all you had to do was ski, or wake up to a shitty job you were only doing so you could ski, life was carefree and simple.
“I met a construction worker in Fernie, [British Columbia] who exemplifies the ski-bum dichotomy,” Berard continues.