Latest The Ski Life

Long Live the Ski Bum

By R. Scott Rappold

My name is Scott and I am a ski bum.

I am at my computer writing this instead of on the mountain for ski day number 50 because lately I feel the need to say something.

Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. 

Are ski bums really a dying breed? PHOTO: Mitch Warnick

It’s become fashionable among outdoors writers to wax philosophical about how the dream of being a ski bum is threatened, how the ski bum is either extinct or on the verge of extinction, driven there by the high cost of living in ski towns, the lack of housing in such places, the lack of jobs that allow one to ski every day and the ongoing impact of climate  change on our winters. 

Books like “In Search of Powder: A Story of America’s Disappearing Ski Bum,” by Jeremy Evans, and “Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns and the Future of Chasing Snow,” by Heather Hansman, have propelled the debate. It seems every former ski bum who had to get a job is weighing in on the demise of the ski bum. 

“Where have all the ski bums gone? Maybe they’re already gone – to those innumerable places that aren’t famous yet. Maybe they’re grinning at the ironies Evans describes. And maybe they’ll do it right this time, use ‘In Search of Powder’ as a primer, and think twice before they decide to make a place nice and famous – and in the process destroy their own habitat,” wrote Wayne K. Sheldrake in the Summit Daily News. 

“The ski bum lifestyle is threatened to the point of extinction,” wrote Jackson Hogen on the website Real Skiers.

But I know lots of ski bums. And they know lots of ski bums. My Instagram feed is full of people who ski every single day. Visit a major resort on a powder weekday and experience the lines and crowds. Not all of them are vacationers from Dallas or techies from Denver taking a mental health day. 

So I decided to write this to show the ski bum is alive and well. But first, we need to define “ski bum.”

What is a Ski Bum?

The top post on Urban Dictionary defines a ski bum thusly: 

“One who works for low pay in exchange for benefits, for example, free ski passes or the coveted multi-area season pass as well as good deals on gear. As always the best things in life are free. This type usually supports itself in the off season by planting trees or other things sometimes in the bathroom/attic. Occasionally these people will engage in activities to simulate skiing, i.e. dragging your buddy behind an F-350 down a dirt road on 206 Dynamic skis and a water ski rope.”

Then there’s the “professional ski bum”: When a person with a full-time professional career (i.e. doctor, engineer, lawyer) spends all their extra money and free time on high-end ski gear and ski trips. Professional ski bums live for winter and will spend any amount of money and PTO to indulge their powder hound desires. Within reason. Professional ski bums are differentiated from regular ski bums by their desires to also own a home, have a girlfriend, a nice car, a career, a retirement plan, and to smell nice.

But if you work, and don’t ski as often as you’d like, are you really a ski bum? 

I asked my good friend Holly Battista-Resignolo, a Breckenridge resident for 30 years and publisher of magazines Mountain Town and Mountain Women. She skis 35 to 40 days a winter and considers herself a ski bum. 

“I don’t know if there is a fixed definition of ski bums. Ski bums are folks who are dedicating their lives to getting up on the hill in some way shape or form every winter,” she says. 

Ski bum merit badge: Living room petex repair on a ski-cation. PHOTO: Mitch Warnick

Challenges of Ski Bumming

When Battista-Resignolo and her husband moved to Breckenridge in 1990 to be ski bums, they couldn’t find a place to live. They worked on the hill and tried employee housing. They rented a room in a house. They lived in a trailer. They looked everywhere, from Fairplay to Leadville to Kremmling. It took a long time to finally find a house they could actually afford. 

And that was 30 years ago. Imagine a ski bum being able to afford a home in Breckenridge today. 

“Housing has always been a crisis up here. It’s definitely harder now than ever, with the cost to buy a place,” she says. 

But they made it work, raised three kids, and skied as much as possible. She knows a lot of ski bums. They come to Summit County with dreams of living the Warren Miller lifestyle, but wind up working as ski patrollers, ski instructors or bartenders by night. Others work hard all summer, saving money so they can ski all winter. 

“Most ski bums have three jobs and they work their schedules around skiing,” she says. 

The ones that don’t have to work skiing around a job: “Those are trust-funders.” 

She agrees it’s become much more difficult to be a ski bum in the classic sense. Those who arrive in Summit County with such dreams don’t last long. 

“I think if you’re showing up fresh with expectations of making tons of money and being able to establish yourself in some fine lodge, that’s a pipe dream,” she says. “Most people who come here as a ski bum only last 2 or 3 years at most and then they’re out of here.” 

A Lifelong Approach

It behooves me at this point to describe my own path to ski bummery. 

A Chicago native, I moved to Colorado at the age of 30 having never once put skis on snow. 

My first winter here, working for The Colorado Springs Gazette, some co-workers enticed me to go to Monarch Mountain, when they used to have a free lift ticket day once a season. I took a half-day lesson with a bunch of 4th-graders. After an hour the instructor turned me loose on the unsuspecting mountain. By closing time (and I skied every minute of that day) I was skiing blues.

ski bum in 2022
Ski bums will arrange their schedules however they need to in order to ski as much as possible. PHOTO: Mitch Warnick

I was hooked. This was what I wanted to do as much as possible. I worked for 10 years, paying off my car and student loans. I got married. We paid off her car and student loans. We didn’t have children. In 2013 we moved to the San Luis Valley and my dream of being a ski bum at Wolf Creek, which gets the most snow in Colorado, was realized. 

But I was lucky. My wife would work another seven years supporting my habit. We bought a house in the tiny town of Del Norte, right before the current real estate boom. 

So yes, luck is a big part of my ski bum journey: marrying well, finding an affordable house, and having zero debt. Bad luck played a part too. I lost my brother, then both my parents in a short period of time, and found myself with a modest inheritance I never wanted or imagined I’d have. My wife was able to leave her job, and today we are ski bums together. 

We still base our entire year on skiing as much as possible. Buy a $2,000 mountain bike to ride in the summer? Nope. Take a lavish European vacation? Nope. Like squirrels we stash our nuts for winter. 

I was lucky. I was unlucky. But I had a plan with an end goal and it worked. I usually ski 100 days a winter. 

“To Keep You Young”

My good friend Bill Quintana rarely misses a day at Wolf Creek. He grew up on these slopes and spent his 20s ski-bumming in South Fork.

Back then, $40 a month got him a room with four roommates and a little weed gifted to a liftie got you on the slopes. Those things have changed but he still considers himself a ski bum. 

“To be up here every day is just what everybody wishes they could do and just a few of us get to do that and have fun at it,” he says. 

Most of the ski bums he knows are retirees. They worked their whole lives and now ski every day on aged knees. 

He doesn’t see the ski bum going away, even if, at 52 with knee problems like many ski bums, he averages 75 days instead of 100 like he used to. 

“I still think if you want to be a ski bum, whether you have money or don’t have money, you’ll find a way to do it,” he says. 

He works all summer and guides hunting trips in the fall, all to be ready to follow his passion on the hill when the flakes arrive. 

“It keeps you young,” he says. “As you get older, if you let it go, just like anything, you don’t get it back. You’ve got to do it as long as you can because we’re all limited in how old we are with our physical abilities.”

Long live the ski bum, an essential niche in this great industry, even if it’s no longer Warren Miller style — living in the parking lot of Sun Valley and catching rabbits to cook for dinner. Skiing can’t live without them.

Another essential piece of the skiing world? Indie ski hills.

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