Articles by cydwhit
It’s a clear night on the mountain and the chairlift sparkles in the moonlight as ice crystals grow along the cables. There’s an ermine hunting behind the mid-station, leaving a patter of tiny footprints on the fresh snow in front of the lift shack. The weekend lifties have a habit of eating...
We've all been here:
So who's your favorite boot wizard?
On a related note:
If you hadn't noticed, I'll be doing a weekly art piece Sundays here on Newschoolers. Last season I kept it pretty straightforward with a single comic page every day. This season I've been switching it up with...
I own two aprons. One is for cooking, and the other is to wear when I work on toys. Through the summer it carries a thick coating of bike lube, intermixed with some brake fluid stains and stanchion grease. The pockets fill up with spare master links, the retainer clips for brake pads, and frayed...
While I'm hardly a veteran backcountry skier, the biggest thing I've learned from my time setting bad skin tracks and volunteering on our local Search and Rescue team is that systems help build margins of safety. The more routine you can build into planning your backcountry endeavors, the less...
Intro
Two weeks ago I wrote this piece with some thoughts for folks who were pushed into buying backcountry gear by last year’s season-ending pandemic. So if you haven’t read that, now’s a great time! Last week Sklar wrote this excellent piece detailing some of the impacts COVID has had on the...
I was supposed to write a comic this week. I storyboarded out plot line after plot line, made lists of stereotypes, racked my brain until I was left doodling little Slayer S's in the margins like a bored middle-schooler. The news that Powder, Bike, Surfer, and Snowboarder are shutting down over...
Every autumn I like to put together a rough list of ski season goals. They range from the very specific “Land a 360° every day I ski inbounds this year” to the very vague “Ski something that puckers my butt pretty good, but not too much.” Usually, there are eight or nine things on that list that...
Last week I published my graphic of the "Six Types of Pre-Season Skier." And, while apparently some of you felt seen (shoutout to my Ski Druid Squad!), some folks felt left out. Which makes sense, dividing anything into just six categories is reductive. But 12, well, with 12 there's something...
The abbreviated 2019-2020 ski season left a whole bunch of previously happy inbounds skiers with no alternative but to pick up some form of backcountry skiing. That looked different for everyone, some folks went all in, bought themselves a full setup, and started skinning up mountains. Others...
Every year as Fall bends towards Winter and the first snowflakes start to form skiers everywhere emerge from their summer languor and start to prepare for the ski season. But we're all a little bit different, and we all react to the imminent return of skiing in our own unique ways. So which one...
Note: For all you non-American NS’ers out there, I’m not as familiar with your political systems, but I do know that the outdoor industry is big enough to make significant changes under any form of government. So the details might be different, but the point is the same.
The garden hose was...
It's ski movie season, and as exciting as it is to go watch the latest crop of shred flicks, they get a little predictable after a while. So liven up your viewing experience with this handy BINGO card:
A huge thanks to everyone who contributed ideas in my original thread!
This year my NS...
I put on my ski boots yesterday. I put on my full ski kit actually, clomped around the living room for a bit, shot some reference photos for a poster. And then, mission accomplished, I went and sat at my desk in my ski boots for a while. I haven’t worn my inbounds boots since the beginning of...
I think that maybe the whole point of skiing is the fact that it’s ephemeral, it’s short-lived. For most of us, we can only make turns for a set number of months out of the year, and even within that short season, we’re still just chasing fleeting moments of pleasure. Looking back from the tail...
It's Sunday! Time for some comics!
With the whole "end of the world" thing happening, I took another break from user-submitted ideas, to deliver some common skier problems in this new age. I for one can't wait to don my studded leather harness and roam the wastelands with my dog playing a...
There’s a common superstition among skiers to never call “Last Run.” If you do, chances are you’ll do something stupid or get hurt in a freak accident. Instead, we’ve developed our workarounds: “Two more, but skip the last?” “Want to make this run our second-to-the-last?” “Call it in two?” We...
It's Sunday! Time for some comics!
Wash your hands, stop buying up all the toilet paper, and don't be too butthurt if your season gets cut short.
Here are links to the last seven weeks of comics:
"Randoms"
"Revision Revisited"
"History"
"Cycle"
"Thanks"
"For the 'Gram"
"Jerry's...
Spring snowpack stability has me hankering after bigger lines, longer tours, more consequential days. At the same time though, summery conditions in the valleys have me looking back at the bulk of my backcountry ski season in retrospect, trying to suss out the highlights, evaluate my decision...
It's Sunday! Time for some comics!
This week's page is just a collection of random ideas, some from your comments, some from personal experience:
For the record, I've never skied a hill with nasty yellow jackets, so that one comes from hearsay, shops will never understand park skiers, if you...
The phrase “ski bum” gets thrown around a lot. I remember explaining to my parents that I was going to Hood on the Spring Pass for a month, that I was going to sleep in my car and work on the internet and ski every day. I was so proud of myself, so excited. But they were aghast: “You’re just...