Can anyone really be a ski bum anymore?

[Djongo Unchained]

I made $8/hour and paid $300/room. Now it’s $25 and $1000.



Now the Mexican’s do everything, send the money home and don’t ski.

1. Fairly close to my arc in JH. 1990 working for the JHSkiCorp. $8 and Benefits. No raises or colas.
Working for myself today starts at $25 and up depending on job.
For a skier who could build stuff, JH was a great town to bum in. Always plenty of work.
2. This. Actually a few do, but just occasionally.

[Foggy_Goggles]

As usual, Dunfree (who used to be the TGR intern guy, right?) has some wisdom wrapped around taking a jab at me. Which is cool, being the internet and all. We are really saying the same thing

Some of us just don't see that much differentiation between "middle class dude with a wife, maybe kids, who skis 60 days a year and lives in a suburb" and "middle class dude with a wife, maybe kids, who skis 60 days a year and lives proximate to a ski area or just in some not quite urban area"

There really is no difference other than the choice of where to live. I see a lot of people justify there idiosyncratic suburban life by rationalizing not being able to make it the mountains for one reason on the other. What I see is a simple choice.

[XXX-er]

There really is no difference other than the choice of where to live. I see a lot of people justify there idiosyncratic suburban life by rationalizing not being able to make it the mountains for one reason on the other. What I see is a simple choice.

Actualy there is a difference

Its having no compromise as to what you do and when

becuz you have chosen no job and nobody counting on you

so when its going off ... you go off with it

[Mofro261]

As usual, Dunfree (who used to be the TGR intern guy, right?) has some wisdom wrapped around taking a jab at me. Which is cool, being the internet and all. We are really saying the same thing

There really is no difference other than the choice of where to live. I see a lot of people justify there idiosyncratic suburban life by rationalizing not being able to make it the mountains for one reason on the other. What I see is a simple choice.

dunfee and dunfree are not the same and one is Hugh Conway.


And to quote some runnin' with the devil- sometimes the simple life ain't so simple.

Simple would have been not skiing. I often feel like I didn't choose this, it sort of chose me.

[Foggy_Goggles]

dunfee and dunfree are not the same and one is Hugh Conway.


And to quote some runnin' with the devil- sometimes the simple life ain't so simple.

Simple would have been not skiing. I often feel like I didn't choose this, it sort of chose me.

The internet makes much more sense now. Hi Hugh. Thanks for the goggle lens. Hope things are well with you!

[Buster Highmen]

Between us we had maybe $100 left, each a duffle bag
and a disposable blanket, the blankets bequeathed to
us by Doc. Mine was burlap, Jon's was some sort of
synthetic. We were less than prepared.

Jon didn't say much. Jon never said much, but when he
did, it was a carefully harvested collection of verbal
fruits, most more funny and acidic than sweet. As far
as I was concerned, he was about the perfect
travelling pal.

There's something about hitchhiking that makes my
inner dog feel like he's got his head out the window
at 45 mph, tongue and ears flapping in the wind.
Happy. Free and happy.

The boundless glee was tempered by the knowledge that
we sat on the freeway, one of us a weed of a human
with a head full of blond bedsprings and another
greasy dirtbag with a pair of skis. People were not
queuing up to give us a ride.

So we sat. And sat and sat. Then we'd get a short
ride. From Missoula to Drummond. Sit, walk, stretch
sit. Drummond to Phosphate. Sit, walk, stetch, wait.
Phosphate to Deer Lodge, Deer Lodge to Anaconda,
Anaconda to Butte. Most of the rides weren't m
emorable. There was one guy about our age in a new BMW
2002 packed to the gunwhales with camping gear, jawing
on about finding America and exploring. I was green
with envy. I didn't have a car and had 3 jobs to pay
for college expenses. Our trip was
part fancy and part illicit pragmatism.

We got dropped off outside of Butte. The weather was
changing, decreasingly sparse cold clouds blowing in,
occasional sleet and biting wind.

A big white dual axel truck pulled over, commanded by
a big rancher type in a white cowboy hat. In that
native drawl, he told us to throw our stuff in the
back and hop in. We did as directed. Leery of
alienating the locals, we kept most of our remark
s low key, but the driver proved to be a right on guy.
Didn't give a crap about long hair, about what we did
or any of that superficial stuff. He was glad to lend
a hand to get us somewhere and proud that
Americans roamed free. Jon's eyebrows bounced around,
somewhere between choreographing and telegraphing our
mutual surprise.

As we started up the pass over the divide, the weather
worsened. Snow started bailing down, wads of sloppy
glop gooing up the windshield. The rancher leaned into
the steering wheel and drove with focus, the big rig
slithering around in
the couple of inches of snow. It looked really ugly
for a while, but then we crested the divide and
dropped down to lower elevations. Now it simply snowed
lightly as our benefactor pulled off in Whitehall. He
was headed South to his ranch.

Jon and I were less than thrilled at the prospect of
being dropped off in a snowstorm in a strange Montana
town as evening was falling. It showed. The rancher
read our faces and offered the advice to go ask at the
Town Pump, an instance in a chain of
cheap gas stations.

As the rancher drove off, Jon and I shrugged off the
suggestion and headed for shelter under a bridge.
Within 15 minutes, it was clear that our flimsy
blankets did little more than kleenex. We grabbed our
stuff and hoofed it over to the Town Pump, le
aning into the wind and snow.

Thes Town Pump was nothing but a trailer with a booth
glommed onto the middle of it. The booth held a dutch
door that was occupied by a grizzled old man.

[Buster Highmen]

As we approached, we could see the silouette of a
woman with thinning hair in a rocking chair. She
looked like a big featherless bird in a dimestore
orange mumu.

We asked the old man if he knew of a cheap hotel or
place to stay. Through rotted teeth, he laughed. Being
reticent, Jon dumped the joy of interacting with this
slice of Americana on me. I chuckled and did my best,
carefully inspecting my feet.

He continued talking, random things spewed out,
interspersed with coherencies regarding the snow and
dying town. Then he began to ask questions: "where're
ya frum?", "whar ya goin?", "whuddya do?...". Then he
said, "well...maybe..." Then his wife cut
him off.

Shrieking like a crow, she spat "Don't you
dare...don't let them in.
..no..noooo!" And she carried on at length.

As Jon and I backed away from the door, the old woman
leaned forward into some dim light. We had seen that
she had been riffing something in her clawlike hands.
Now in the light, we could see it was a wad of bills
gripped in a row of raw knuckles.

I stumbled out an apology to the old man and turned
around to walk back to the bridge. But the old man
staggered up and barked out for us to come back.

Jon and I looked at each other indeterminant. The old
man bellowed, we looked at the snow, then gave one
another that resigned grudge look. We turned around to
walk back to the trailer, fearful of the snow.

The old woman continued to shriek and wail. The old
man threw crumpled beer cans at her and ordered us to
come through the dutch door. When he opened it, more
beer cans fell out as he gripped the doorsill to keep
from falling over.

He was stinking drunk. The cans were Lucky Lager.

[Buster Highmen]

I climbed the stoop and stepped through the door into
the trailer followed by
Jon. The smell hit hard, mixing dirty dishes with
stale cigarettes, despair,
spilled beer, urine and mildew. The old woman sat in
her rocking chair,
rhythmically squeaking and catatonically stroking a
fistfull of bills.

Jon and I clomped in and dropped our duffel bags. You
could taste Twilight
Zone.

The old man's mottled stubble looked like pigskin in
the dim light. With
shakey, nicotine stained fingers, he offered us some
Lucky lager and then a
Pall Mall each. We accepted. I tried to hide my
hesitation.

We cracked our beers and settled in to trying to make
small talk. The snow
came down in bales outside and we were thankful to be
shielded from it. The
old woman mumbled and squawked, rocking in her chair,
still stroking the wad
of bills and lurking in that phlorescent mumu and pink
fuzzy bedroom slippers.
Surely these were scenes cut from the color version of
Eraserhead. With a
tiny tuft of hair tied up on her head and a serious
beak for a nose, I couldn't
shake the vision of a big featherless baby bird.

Talk ranged from weather to business to food. We were
ravenous, but the smells
were overwhelming. Between the old mans breath that
stunk of rotted teeth and
distilleries, his body odor and a pervasive reek of
urine, the thought of food
came and went. The old man offered us food and ordered
the woman to serve us.
With a volley of verbal abuse, she got up, stuffed the
bills into her bathrobe
pocket and shuffled into the kitchen area.

The old man related how he was being put out of
business by the glossy new gas
station across the street. He was losing a price war
in which he was sure that
the chain store across the street was selling gas at a
loss. He had even lost
his own business already and was now working for
another, but cheaper chain,
Town Pump. He sucked at beer after beer, attempting to
slake the bitter taste
of corporate strangulation.

The old woman clunked two bowls down on the table in
the kitchen and called us
over to eat. Jon and I rose from the broken down couch
and stepped up to the
kitchen table. We sat down to look into bowls of
watery broth with a few
veinous chunks of meat bobbing among the potatoes and
carrots. Nearly
tasteless, we gratefully chowed down and repeatedly
thanked the woman and
complimented what was the thinnest, wateriest soup
I've ever had. Fortunately,
Jon's quiet demeanor struck some maternal chord in the
old gal and she sat down
with us to bask in our company. We made abominable
small chit chat, repeatedly
thanked her and retired to the couch again.

Time had passed and it was late. Jon and I were
exhausted from being on the
road, nodding off while the old man drank and regaled
us with stories of mining,
hunting and setting up businesses. The depression,
reconstruction, the war and
then the post war boom passed through his renderings
of time. Now was the
twilight of his time and he knew it and somehow all
that desparation, sweat,
toil and exasperation came to be focused into this
dank and stinky trailer
dug into a red Montana foothill.

Finally, the old man stumbled off to the back room. In
my blinking
snippets of broken sleep I had really lost any grip on
reality. Shattered
chunks of what was real and what was dream mixed
incomprehensibly and I was
dizzy in exhaustion. Jon lay on the couch, I on the
floor, almost into the
continuum of sleep.

Then... CRASH, thump, screams, "Goddammit, get off
me"..."RAPIST" she
screamed. I sat up, glazed, confused, not knowing what
to do. More
bumps and screams. I looked at the door to see it was
still closed,
but couldn't understand what the hell was going on.
Then I heard them
more clearly. The old man was trying to mount.

The screams, epithets and thumps were the most heart
rending sounds
I had ever heard. Desolation wracked the walls of the
trailer and echoed down
long halls of regret. Jon and I looked at each other
not knowing what to do,
whether to intervene, call the cops or grab our stuff
and race off into the
night. It had stopped snowing.

Then the old man grumbled and yelled, some more thumps
and sounds of agony
came out of the bedroom and he gave up to come out
into the little living
room in his tank top and boxers. He ripped open the
case of beer and grabbed
another can, sobbing about his life, his failures the
futility of it all.
Sucking on the beer, he shook with hopelessness and
grief. I was paralyzed
with awe and confusion. He fell from his stool and
continued to cry.

Finally, I was able to utter some weak consolation,
but the old man had passed
out and lay snoring against hist stool. Jon and I
covered him up with his
coat and stared at each other. It was too much for
words.

[TahoeJ]

dunfee and dunfree are not the same and one is Hugh Conway.

Ha, I wonder how often people confuse poor Ryan Dunfee with dunfree. And yeah, I always kind of figured the latter was an HC alias.

[core2]

One time when I was bumming in Montana with my buddy we stayed outside Butte and ended up in a trailer near the local gas station one night. We got to listen to a drunk old man try to plow his wife as we tried to sleep. Those were some fond bumming memories for sure.

[muted]

my father in law loves to pass his ticket off to people in the parking lot
I think it's his inner cheapness wanting to share with others or to justify not skiing bell to bell.
he's the guy always approaching random people being like, "do you need a ticket today?" and so many people are horrified
which is hilarious to watch while I eat my sandwich that he got up at 5:30am to make before we are first in line no matter what the conditions

In Jackson? That is awesome. I never had good memories of clipping tickets there, people would always be disappointed when they realize I'm being nice to them for a monetary reason. Smiles tuned into frowns quickly, although some people were happy to give it up. I would have loved for someone to just offer it.

[dunfree]

There really is no difference other than the choice of where to live. I see a lot of people justify there idiosyncratic suburban life by rationalizing not being able to make it the mountains for one reason on the other. What I see is a simple choice.

I see a dude who justify's his mountain lifestyle sacrifices (well, his middle class job in the mountains) every fucking chance he can because he can't leave his ubercompetitive suburban mindset in the fucking suburbs - and like a good suburbanite - thinks where you live defines who you are, not what you do there. and last poll thread you made, you sure weren't killing it on skidays foggy.

[XXX-er]

. Do they get every powder day? Nope. .

If they don't get every pow day cuz of work/money/ family commitments they are not ski bums period

they are just living the same life as the rest of America in the suburbs

except they don't live in the suburbs

maybe the Suburbs of some mountain

[dunfree]

If they don't get every pow day cuz of work/money/ family commitments they are not ski bums period

ding ding ding ding

work is work. banging nails or sitting at a desk is the same. it's just arguing what town/suburb/city is better outside of work and who has the better coworkers or whether you think hanging out with skibums/artists/businesspeople/fashionmodels/whatever social circle rubs off on you positively.

[garyfromterrace]

Great thread, thanks for starting teleb10.

Juneau, AK?

Terrace, BC?

I love you man.

The L man said to me on ski day " we live too well to be ski bums ... we are skiing Gentlemen "

The L knows!

Some interesting discussion here indeed. I think I fit the stereotypical definition of a ski bum for a number of years at Tod Mtn/Sun Peaks. Perhaps 6 seasons. But that has to be taken with a grain of salt as I worked crazy hours for 7 or 8 months (lots of 60 - 100 hour weeks) just so that I could afford to do nothing but ski during the winter. I also worked instructing (very part time) to save the 600 or 7 hundy for the season pass.... so is that true ski bumming?? Whatever, I certainly considered myself a ski bum and I would count the days I didn't ski to figure out how many days I got for a number of seasons.

It gets sort of blurry though when I consider that my entire adult life I've considered myself a ski bum. I live for this shit, and sure there's been a great many of my 40+ years of employment when I've been "full time". That didn't stop me from banking overtime (and I got a lot of it many months) and skiing or boarding or tele-ing every possible day that I could. There was also quite a few years that I lived a fair ways from the ski hill (250km 1 way) but was on EI in the winter, worked my ass off in the summer and skied as many days as possible. I also lived in Calgary back in the late 80's/early 90's and would drive the 1 way, 100 - 200km to Fortress, Sunshine, Louise or camp out in the parking lot... that was ski bumming in my eyes. I was seasonal yeah, but was far from an itinerant, broke bum.

Is the stereotypical definition (broke, dirtbag, hobo) correct? No, I don't think so. The ski bum definition has morphed a shit ton in the few years (geologically speaking) that it's even been a thing. I've skied with a great many ski bums that happen to post on TGR in Vermont, WA, BC and they aren't all smelly, destitute 25 year olds. Smelly yes, but nowhere near destitute in most cases

Finally, I'm moving back to Terrace next year for good. I'll be retired and do not plan to miss any ski days (barring unforeseen circumstances). Will I be a ski bum? Fuck yeah, I've been dreaming of this my whole adult life.

[ddsnake]

Has anyone posted the Charlie Ager video yet? I can't be bothered to read this whole thread, if it's been posted, I apologize.

[core2]

You haven't bummed if you've never had a sugar sandwich.

[Hott Butt Mud]

Has anyone posted the Charlie Ager video yet? I can't be bothered to read this whole thread, if it's been posted, I apologize.

This thread is full of old ski bums of years past.

I always like this edit. Charley is a bum god.

I used to make soups at Alta out of all the free lunch packets, relish and shit. #core

[BCJC]

This thread is full of old ski bums of years past.

I always like this edit. Charley is a bum god.

I used to make soups at Alta out of all the free lunch packets, relish and shit. #core

And your user name was born.

[raisingarizona13]

And your user name was born.

HAHA! Now that's a damn funny post.

[willywhit]

I have vague memories of hangin with Justin at Stowe back in the day.
I know my OG Stowe buds knew him well.

[Djongo Unchained]

Sweet, big, carvy bumps on long skinny skis, hammering the fall line.

Now that's good livin' right there.

[2FUNKY]

Sweet, big, carvy bumps on long skinny skis, hammering the fall line.

Now that's good livin' right there.

Word

[rideit]

I came to the realization this year that I am now more of a bike bum than a ski bum. I love powder days, but I LIVE for riding. I work more in the winter than in the summer...

[skifishbum]

im more of a fish bum these days myself
and i think this is the first when those days outnumbered the ski ones
i could just buy a pass this season
but why give up one of the bestest ski bum jobs evearz
that fer 4 early am hours or so a week gives ya a great one gratis

"if youre passionate bout something you probably make life decisions based around that passion"
which could or could not involve various degrees of bummery