Articles by cydwhit
Happy spring break everybody, and good luck!
And just to be clear, I don't have beef with folks who are new to skiing, or "gapers." Skiing needs to be more inclusive.
But hey, if you're going to come to a small mountain town with limited healthcare networks during a global...
When I started writing again for Newschoolers last winter I made a rule for myself: no news, only opinion. I didn’t want to interview people and report things. I wanted to cover the more touchy-feely side of skiing that I think sometimes doesn’t get enough attention.
But sometimes there’s a...
Are they good jokes? Probably not. Are they stupid jokes? Probably. Whatever. Here ya go!
And here's a few more from the last time I put on my dad hat.
In my life, I’ve been privileged to make turns with some pretty decent skiers. And one thing that’s stuck with me is the divide between skill and talent when it comes to skiing, or just about any other sport. It’s something I’ve run into over and over, in different contexts throughout my life...
Every ski season that I spend in the backcountry, the degrees of separation between myself and avalanche incidents and fatalities shrink. I think that's true for a lot of backcountry skiers, things get more and more personal over time. The last few weeks have been terrible. We've lost a lot of...
The gusty east wind breaks just before dawn, and the clouds pop for a few moments just after. The peak is illuminated in golden hour light for a brief glimpse, but no one really notices. Usually, by now there’d be a few groups working their way up the skin track, breaking trail and appreciating...
For years I’ve struggled to illustrate the experience of skiing truly deep, blower snow. It’s not that hard to take a decent photo of someone skiing powder, and it’s even easier to fake a decent photo that looks like someone is skiing powder. But from my perspective as an illustrator, it’s damn...
Last year I wrote about how magical having a “home hill” can be, how special it is to feel like you have a stake in your ski resort, to be invested in its soul. And then last March all the ski hills, from the mom-and-pops to the blown-out mega-resorts shut down. When they reopened this winter...
I get it, you were just too busy skiing to get your crush a V-day card. We've all been there. So I made some ski-specific cards you can print out real quick. Run down to the grocery store, grab some flowers, and slap one of these bad boys on 'em. Boom, great gift! You can even tell them that you...
Traditionally this is the time of year when we see next year’s gear trickling onto the slopes. During a normal season, journalists would already have spilled thousands of words on what we saw at SIA, and the forums would have spilled thousands more, castigating us for not getting more...
It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m skinning uphill in the dark on a dead man’s skis. The rest of my group is ahead, I could see their headlamps before they turned the corner on the old logging road and continued onward. I’d pulled over to fiddle with the ancient Silvretta bindings that my...
I woke up excited to go skiing. It had been a tiring weekend, I was ready to unplug, go wander up a new mountain, and make some turns back down. An hour into the climb we bailed, turned back by terrible skiing conditions, terrifying avalanche conditions, and a general lack of motivation. As we...
The longer I ski the more I’m convinced that the entire activity of skiing is just a challenge devised to force people to control their bladders for an unreasonable amount of time, and then pee in weird and uncomfortable locations. It’s all just one long battle against urine.
Generally peeing...
The other night the dog started barking in the middle of the night because she is an idiot. I got up to see what was going on, and when I looked out the window I was struck by the beauty of the groomers working in the moonlight. And then I remembered that my favorite bedtime book as a toddler...
It’s still dark when we meet in the grocery store parking lot, the early shift is in there making donuts already, but other than my idling Outback the parking lot is still. We’re a motley crew, two snowboarders, three skiers, in an assortment of yard-sale outerwear and Ross specials.
There’s no...
This week has been hard for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. I'm beat.
But when I feel like shit I paint. So here are five more snow safety posters. Same deal as last time.
These are just simple reminders to check your gear, read the avy report, think through each day's risks, and turn...
The tow truck dropped me off in Bozeman, and the driver, in the manner of all tow truck drivers, took too long to write down my credit card number on his grubby noteboard. I had to stand embarrassed by my stranded car while Wal-Mart shoppers wandered past. He left Roxanne, my Subaru in a distant...