Leaving Jackson Hole
There are two sides to every ski town: the
entrance and the exit
By TOM BIE

Parents, tourists, and friends from the city are quick to point out that living in a ski town makes you a lucky person. Thus, spending seven years in one makes you really lucky. And ski historians may one day concur that if those years were spent in the Northern Rockies at the end of the 20th Century, living amid the powerful combination of El Niño and a thorough re-birth of the sport, then you were luckier still. And finally, if those years were spent in Jackson, Wyoming, in the place where everyone wanted to be, where the combination of great skiers and great terrain was unparalleled, well then, you were the luckiest of all.

December 18, 1993. It's 7 a.m. and 30 below and the skin on my thumb and forefinger just froze to my car key. Not that it matters; the car wouldn't have started anyway. Forty minutes and alternative-transportation later, I step out of the tram at the top of Rendezvous Peak into a wind that could blow the hair off a bison. But nobody seems to care because we are at the top. Being at the top of Rendezvous is where you want to be, where opportunities are infinite and where even on the worst day you remember a thousand reasons why you took up skiing in the first place. Looking down at the clouds, I cannot imagine another place on Earth where the mixture of good friends and good snow leads to a more certain joy.

I've been gone more than four years now. I've since spent two years in Steamboat, another beguiling ski town. Still, I cannot know Steamboat like I knew Jackson. I came to the 'Boat under different circumstances. The relationships built later in life aren't like those fashioned in the first few seasons in a ski town, working behind the bar or in the basement of a ski shop where the waxy scent of a thousand pairs of rental skis burns permanently into memory. And I didn't go out in Steamboat like I went out in Jackson, all liquored up at the Moose watching snow fall outside, wondering where in Wilson the party will move to after the band stops playing.


Jackson has an edge to it that few people know. Like most ski towns, its underworld is populated by freaks and addicts whose love for skiing can't be measured. They take that first turn off the tram and go straighter, harder, and faster than the rest because beating everyone to the bottom means beating them back to the top. And like I said, the top is where you want to be.

The culture of Teton Pass is no different. Hiking north and making it up that final pitch past the tower to peer down the gut of Glory Bowl—you know right then that regardless of what happens on the way down, regardless of snow conditions, you just accomplished more than most that day. Both you and your dog have the smiles to prove it.

Was it all good? Not always. There were hours spent in smoke-filled rooms listening to Widespread Panic during which we'd reconfirm the righteous life and carry on about the nobility of poverty and powerlessness and this and that. Meanwhile our friends in Wall Street and Berkeley were stumbling over their millions for a little seed capital. We just kept on skiing. We stepped over dollars to pick up nickels and whatever else was left in the tip jar.

"Ah, but what they're missing," we'd say. Pity the poor bastards, stuck in suburbia with the spouse and the mortgage and the strip malls. But often what our friends missed was great skiing and little else. We had the tribal camaraderie that only a ski town can deliver. But we also had uncaring landlords and employers who felt it was their job to shut off the faucet. We endured endless egos moving into town and saying only three words to their builders: "Make mine bigger."

And there was the joy and suffering of ski-town dating. Even my best relationships never outlasted football season. But the mountains were always there. And it's hard to say goodbye, to resign those times to mere memory. There were too many turns with too many people to let it all fade.

Yet fate would preserve an element of it on celluloid. Teton Gravity Research's first film, The Continuum—the music, the snow, the skiing, the scene—oozes the heart of Jackson in 1996. And if you were there you were a part of it, and it was a part of you. Beyond all the industry hype, beyond the magazine articles and movie premieres, one of the greatest things TGR has done is to document a special time and place in history, something even their biggest detractors readily admit.

It's not just the movie stars who make Jackson. For every Micah Black or Tommy Moe or Doug Coombs, there's a Mike McCloud or Justin Watsabaugh or Scott Fabrizio—people you've never heard of who ski like the wind because that's all they've ever wanted to do, and Jackson Hole provides it in unlimited doses.

It's a cliché to say that people make a place, but it never felt more true than in Jackson. It's also a cliché to say you don't know what you had until it (or you) are long gone. I now understand what I treasure most about Jackson: making those first few turns on a deep day, and those who made them with me.


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Tom Bie is a former Senior Editor of Skiing and present publisher
of The Drake.