A Ski Writer's Journey

Thoughts on why we do this.

I woke up before my family on that chilly November morning, and sat at my computer with a cup of coffee as the sunrise filled our living room with light. I was checking my telemark blog’s Instagram for the usual reasons, hoping that I might have a few likes, maybe a few new followers.

Instead I had a message. It was a note from a fellow telemark content creator. He had been offered a recurring column at a mainstream ski magazine but wasn’t sure if he was interested in it. And wondered if I might be.

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Excitement fluttered in my stomach. But I immediately felt I couldn’t take the opportunity. Much of my writing to that point was focused on telemark, but also the demise of outdoor media at the hands of VC firms. Like the one that owned this particular magazine.

So I sat on the decision, and phoned a mentor a few days later for guidance, committed to passing on the offer. Though we had never met, his voice was steady and familiar. He told me he had begrudgingly accepted an interview that ran at the big mag, but that he still thought little of it.

Then he surprised me. “Hear them out. They do what they want,” he said. “If I was your dad, and I’m not your dad, I’d tell you to take it.”

By the end of the call I was telling my mentor that I wanted to keep contributing to his outlet, too. He sighed. “Just go in with your eyes open,” he said.

Two-and-a-half hours after accepting the column, and immediately after I returned home from work, I was again at my kitchen table, drafting my intro article. That night and the next morning I spent roughly four hours compulsively editing the eight-hundred-word piece, regardless that it wouldn’t run for a month. By the next afternoon, I had another 1800-word article completed, ostensibly a history of telemark bindings that doubled as a manifesto of my free-heel philosophy. My editor at the time responded with an email outlining the onboarding paperwork and what they would be willing to pay me.

Soon the column went live, and I was turning out overwritten articles at a remarkable clip. I was waking up in the frozen hours before dawn to draft pieces while my kids still slept; I was sneaking in writing sessions at my day job. Within weeks my biweekly cadence went to weekly. My pieces were often met with little fanfare from the publication, and were never edited rigorously. But they were often attracting thousands of reads. And I was getting paid to write about—of all things—telemark skiing.

All the while the magazine was producing a steady churn of short articles with titles like “Watch: Skier Gets Chased By Persistent Grouse,” and “Sponsored:4 Myths You’ve Probably Been Told About Heliskiing.” I continued writing defiant pieces on why people choose a less optimized way to ski, and defended telemark’s heady roots.

Still, questions hung in my mind. While I had declined a trip to Japan where I would have been tasked with social media posts and submitting fluffy travel pieces, I did accept several best-of assignments. Was I as transgressive as I imagined, or had I become another cog in a mass media wheel?

Many months later my editor at the big mag and I are having a gut-check on what the future holds at the magazine. His ever-present if uneasy smile and perfectly coiffed hair fill my laptop’s screen. We discuss my one-hundred-plus article run, and changes at the parent company, many of which were publicly reported weeks prior. Though things are okay now, I’m likely to see the entire staff quit if certain things happen, my editor says. Though it wouldn’t be a decision made lightly because, as he puts it, they are still getting to do what they want to do.

I close my laptop and pace my living room after our conversation ends. And I wonder what they actually want to do. Was it their dream to write core ski content? Or the trending news that actually fills the site?

My editor had told me that when new guidelines were announced in the meeting, he was forced to turn off his camera because he was visibly angry.

But he was staying on.

I quit the next day.

With a single light on in the dark living room I scroll Substack with the idea that, in the wake of leaving the big mag, maybe I should start one. I slide through the site’s feed, looking for something interesting. And the algorithm has already found me. Images of big glacial cirques roll by next to headlines like “Is UTMB Growing Running, Or Ruining It?”

I choose a name for my site and begin publishing a half-dozen pieces I had set aside for this moment; articles that would have had little place at the big mag, a site I still frequently check out of habit. They are all attempts at more literary writing, and I fear they will be ill-suited to outdoor readers. But I post them anyway.

The playroom is still a mess even though the kids went to bed hours ago. I get up from my computer and walk over there again to clean up the clutter, but I get an idea for a passage as I put away a pile of stuffed animals and a rainbow tutu.

Soon, I’m back in the playroom, almost finished, when another anecdote on skiing dances in my mind, something I am compelled to write down, something I need to share, no matter the size of the audience.

I leave the room again. And I go back to my computer. And write.