This unsettling trade-off is the new reality for most mountain towns, and it drives the most obsessed skiers into the unfettered realm of the backcountry, or to remoter towns where the tide of change hasn’t risen too high. “Itinerant” is part of the credo: ski bum and ski gypsy were always one and the same.
These notions are mined endlessly in ski media, and though much of skiing has become the aegis of the wealthy, even these folks can relate. Connecting with the ski-bum ethos is maintaining contact with the grass roots; celebrating the core and its dedication to gravity. Above all there is this: ski-bumming’s essence—the compelling human arc of struggle and survival to achieve a certain idealistic end— never grows old as a storyline.
The National Film Board of Canada’s 2002 Ski Bums, shot in and around Whistler, British Columbia, follows an eclectic cast of oddly nicknamed characters from their resort life to the high-alpine world beyond the ropes to investigate the attitudes and emotions of those for whom snow-riding isn’t just a way of life, but life itself. Although much is gleaned from the subjects’ candid comments, including how and why they regularly walk a tightrope between life and death in the mountains, the movie’s true charm lies in its depiction of cliché: an indigent ski bum living in a van or squat, eating peoples’ unfinished food in the lodge cafeteria; making soup from the free hot water, ketchup, and crackers available; and poaching the bathing facilities of high-class hotels.
Almost predictably, the filmmakers are ski bums themselves. Portraying this lifestyle is nothing new. Dick Barrymore’s 1969 movie, Last of the Ski Bums, followed a tradition begun by ski-film icon Warren Miller, who built a multimillion-dollar empire on the movies he churned out each year in Sun Valley, Idaho (where David and Jake Moe were also stationed when they started the ski bum’s bible, powder). Miller and his ski-bum buddies lived in tents and trailers, hunted (with guns) for food, and made pocket money where and when they could by instructing, shilling books of self-penned ski cartoons, and, eventually, touring Miller’s celebrated annual movies through ski towns. Though Warren is no longer personally involved, the fall classics bearing his name now play to thousands in every major city on the continent.
Ski bumming’s storied history reaches well back into the sport’s literary tradition and possibly as far as its modern roots. As author Peter Shelton has noted, “ski bum”—a decidedly postwar phrase first mentioned in Ski magazine in 1948 (“Inside Report: Ski Bums Wait Table, Ogle Heiresses”) and immortalized in a 1950 Life magazine pictorial set in Sun Valley (“Life Visits Some Ski Bums”)—quickly acquired succinct definition: anyone who wanted to ski so badly they were willing to give up anything to do so.2“The word bum came out of the Depression, but the meaning took a turn after World War II,” Miller is quoted as saying. “A lot of people hit the road then, and it was almost a badge of honor not to be locked into the 9-to-5 . . . The words freedom and ski bum are inextricably intertwined.”
In 1962, when skiing was still considered a fringe activity, Sports Illustrated published “The Oldest Ski Bum in the World” about New York–based Leon Vart, a Russian artist whose path began when he found a discarded ski in Moscow at age thirteen. He may or may not have been the oldest person, but his was a story emblematic of an esoteric subculture barely on the public radar as skiing and resort development entered their Golden Age:
‘Because I am poor, I must live among the rich.’ At 73, [Vart] can afford such candor. It’s about all he can afford, since ski bumming is a hand-to-mouth life . . . He relies on ingenuity (the next best thing to money) to get around and stay comfortably lodged. His lean, tall figure moves with ease and grace, though his blue eyes are faded from the glare of snow and sky. . . he has bartered his services as a painter, translator, correspondent, waiter, baby-and-dog-sitter, and ski instructor for the privilege of skiing in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and across the United States and Canada.3
Readers at the time likely saw Vart as a Beat Generation holdover, but today’s skier—rich or poor—would have little trouble recognizing a kindred spirit.
Arnold Lunn, an early doyen of British mountaineering who first skied in 1896 in Chamonix, France, made much of the superior sensations afforded by sliding down a mountain, an act he believed could turn even the tamest terrain into acceptable challenge if not sheer, heart-thumping terror. Although the terminology never arises in his abundant and erudite writings, a ski-bum mindset was at the heart of it for Lunn and the cadre of well-to-do, sport-mad Brits who became the unlikely promulgators of skiing’s recreational birth in the Alps. Unbelievably, in the preface to the 1949 second edition of The Mountains of Youth, Lunn is already mining the raw-to-this-day lament of ski-bumming’s purist soul as an innocence lost to the march of progress, infrastructure, and organization (which, ironically, he contributed significantly to), offering up his own prose as a glue to hold the tribe together:
Skiing, as I have tried to show . . . illustrates the Spenglerian distinction between culture and civilization. Every great cultural cycle begins when a nomad tribe settles down . . . It is the economy of the farm, the village and the small city which gives birth to great Art . . . It is from Nature, from Homer’s ‘life-giving’ earth that Art draws its inspiration, the inspiration which vanishes in the giant cities of a dying civilization. Ski-ing has passed through the Spenglerian cycle. It began as a culture in contact with Nature. In the Gothic phase of our sport we skied on snow moulded only by the natural agencies of sun and wind, frost and thaw. . . In those days, we skiers were as scattered as the primitive communities in which culture is born. Today we struggle in télépheriques and funiculars as crowded as the slums of our megalopolitan civilization, and the surface on which we ski is nearly as hard and quite as artificial as the city pavements which mask the kindly earth . . .
For the ski-runner the snow is no inert mantle on the hills . . . It is alive with a multiple personality. He learns to love the snow as a friend and to wrestle with it as an enemy. . . The genuine initiate of the mountain brotherhood has always been in the minority, and I doubt if the multiplication of Ski-hoists and Chair-lifts has either increased or decreased his numbers. Those for whom this book was written will always escape from the pistes. Mountaineering is not a substitute for religion but it has some of the characteristics of a devout cult. The true initiates recognize each other not only when they meet in the flesh, but also when they meet through the medium of the printed word. 4
Where Lunn beat around the bush with lofty prose, however, others simply lit it on fire. As the literary world’s best-known ski bum, Ernest Hemingway was the patron saint of the genre. In the mid-twenties, Hemingway spent two winters in Schruns, Austria, inculcating a serious ski addiction and subsequently popularizing the mindset in stories like “Cross-Country Snow”: “When have you got to go back to school?” Nick asked.
“Tonight,” George said. “I’ve got to get the ten-forty from Montreux.”
“I wish you could stick over and we could do the Dent du Lys tomorrow.”
“I got to get educated,” George said. “Gee, Mike, don’t you wish we could just bum together? Take our skis and go on the train to where there was good running and then go on and put up at pubs and go right across the Oberland and up the Valais and all through the Engadine and just take repair kit and extra sweaters and pyjamas in our rucksacks and not give a damn about school or anything.”
“Yes, and go through the Schwarzwald that way. Gee, the swell places.”5
The swell places indeed. Oh, and is it coincidence that Papa Hemingway eventually moved to Sun Valley to finish out his days? (Not that most ski bums end up blowing their brains out; mountain living is generally mind-blowing enough.) Still, Hemingway had it right: ski bumming was at its best and most raw when you were on the move in a foreign land; this was adventure by its very nature.
IN CHILE I’d landed in an outlaw life where everybody looked out for themselves and took nothing for granted.