I Am the Best Skier On the Mountain
By Collin Hockenbury
There is no limit to the fun or the misery you can experience while skiing.
Skiing. What a concept. Connecting two planks to your feet and then sliding very fast down a snowy mountain covered in rocks and trees—not to mention people holding GoPros on selfie sticks in front of their faces who cannot see the rocks and trees. Sometimes I think of the person who invented skiing pitching the idea to their friends. (It’s widely believed the indigenous people of Scandinavia were the first ones to ski. This was back in the Middle Ages, before selfie sticks.)
“Hear me out. We connect planks to our feet and then slide down the mountain very fast instead of walking. We will call it skiing.”
“…How high are you, Craig?”
“Reasonably.”
Kudos to Craig for his perseverance. He was onto something. The world took his idea and ran with it. Or slid down the mountain with it, I guess. These days, hundreds of years later, the planks are very nice. Olympic athletes compete on them—Scandinavians are some of the best in the world. And people like me use them to run into trees.
That’s where this is all headed. It starts with Craig. It ends with me. Running into a tree.
As you would probably guess, I am not a world class skier. I do not “shred.” I am from Kentucky. I am what the French call les incompétents. But I have been skiing enough times to love it.
I learned in Colorado when I was about 10, from a guy whose name was probably Thad (descendant of Craig). That’s when I began to grasp the basics. Pizza to stop, French fries to go. Wear a helmet and long underwear if you want to keep the parts of you that matter most sufficiently protected and warm. Drink a lot of water and take the occasional Gas-X with it. If you’re thinking of attempting something and the voice in your head says, “You are going to do the splits and rip your overpriced snow pants and it is going to hurt and people watching you from the lift are going to laugh and maybe spit on you,” it’s probably best to stay in your lane. Having said that, do not always trust your inner monologue. Mine is often cruel and unnecessarily specific.
I have held onto those lessons that began 20 years ago and I have (mostly) evolved beyond the pizza. But being from Kentucky is a problem. There are no mountains that rival the Rockies. There are only small hills where people watch fireworks in the summer wearing camouflage hats with a dip in. So I get to ski a few days a year if I am lucky, and I start those ski trips off rusty.
This ski season I went on two trips. Each for a bachelor party.
Bachelor parties are interesting in themselves. You know many of the people at them very well. You do not know many of the others at all. Combine that dynamic with skiing, which we have already established is insane, and it’s tempting to want to prove yourself. This can lead to devastating consequences.
As someone who had evolved beyond the pizza, I chose to prove myself—on my first run on the first day of the first bachelor party. This was a bad choice for three reasons.
1. I was rusty.
2. Mark was the bachelor (lowercase “b”) on the first trip. He is a phenomenal skier. As his college roommate and longtime friend, I have witnessed this many times. One of the new guys, Connor, grew up skiing a lot. He is even better. Keeping up with the pair of them would be no small feat.
3. We were at Snowbird, a challenging mountain even in the best weather conditions, and we were stuck in a thick cloud like the ones you fly through on a plane. Clouds lead to icy terrain and what the Thads of the world call “flat light.” When you cannot see shadows on the snow, it’s hard to tell where the ground is flat and where it’s bumpy.
Mark and Connor dropped into a steep run and I sent it over the crest in pursuit. About 14 seconds later, I skidded over a bump I could not see and tomahawked down the hill end over end, like a slinky down a flight of stairs, losing both skis in the process. In Thadanese, this is termed a “double eject.” (You lose points for this. We will get to that.) Confidence shaken, butt cheeks like frozen hams, I proceeded to take two more nasty spills that could leave the rest of the group with only one conclusion about me as a skier and as a man.
That night, after we checked into our Airbnb and decompressed over a couple of Natural Lights, we turned on a documentary called G.N.A.R. The title is an acronym: Gaffney’s Numerical Assessment of Radness. Three pro skiers from Squaw Valley, California—Shane McConkey, Robb Gaffney and Scott Gaffney—invented the game of G.N.A.R. because they felt the ski industry, particularly the pro circuit, was becoming too serious and losing its purpose, which is having fun with your friends.
G.N.A.R. is a points-based game that the Squaw locals played against each other on the mountain. As local Greg Lindsey explains it, “The radder you are and the more you embarrass yourself, the more points you get.”
How to earn points
- Ski various “lines” (Thadanese for ski paths). The harder the line, the more points you receive.
- Complete tricks as you ski said lines. Robb Gaffney: “If you do a Daffy on the Middle Knuckle, you’re gonna get an extra 50 points.” (I do not know what this means.)
How to lose points
- Backslap: -50
- Lose two skis / double eject: -2,000
- Tomahawk (two full rotations or more): -2,000
- Day-ending fall or injury: -3,000
Extra credit points (ECPs)
- Wear a “fart bag” (one-piece ski suit): +50
- Ask a stranger who has the best goggle tan in your group: +500
- Be “a good skier and a good son.” Ski a line worth 500 points or more while talking to your mom on the phone: +7,000
- Ski a line butt naked, AKA “The BN.”: Total undisclosed
- Tell a stranger, “I’m the best skier on the mountain,” after you ski a line: +500
G.N.A.R. helped me see things in a new light. The next day I decided to have fun rather than prove myself. So I set off with my friends Ryan and Marc (not Mark, the bachelor—two different guys) for the trees, my favorite place to ski. My headphones were in and I was feeling great, weaving in and out of tree trunks, dodging branches and logs with relative ease. Doing the bull dance, feeling the flow. With just one tree left to clear before a bare patch of snow (it was literally the last tree in the forest), I caught an edge, took the tree trunk straight to the side of my face, then ragdolled out of the shade, into the sharp Utah sunlight and onto the hardpack. Another double eject: -2,000.
Ears ringing, I ripped off my helmet and felt around my face to make sure it was still intact. The helmet tumbled downhill as if to say, “I have also decided you suck, and I am out of here,” while Marc chased after it on his snowboard. Luckily all I had to show for my greatest ever wipeout was a hickey-like scratch on my jaw and a big slice on my (ski) helmet, once Marc had recovered it 500 feet away. The tree would have dropped me if I was only wearing a beanie like a hard-o. Ryan stood there wide-eyed as we comprehended this together. After a short stretch of silence, I realized I was okay. “Dude,” Ryan said. “That was awesome.”
That was also the last time I truly ate it this ski season. I made it out of bachelor party #2 unscathed, with a better perspective and as a better man, if not a better skier. 2023 will come after a modest six ski days in 2022. I will not do a Daffy on the Middle Knuckle next year, or any Knuckle for that matter. I will still not know what that means. I will still be from Kentucky. I will be rusty once again.
To be completely honest, I’m not sure where I was going with any of this. Perhaps it is a call to persevere, as Craig did so long ago. Perhaps it is just a chance to stick a lot of my favorite YouTube clips in a single blog post. But if I had to hazard my best possible guess, I would say it is about having a good time doing the things you love. Trekking through life knowing you are from Kentucky and that you are not the best skier on the mountain, but that you can still enjoy the moment as the best skier on the mountain does, and that the fun will far outweigh the misery in the end. As long as you wear a helmet. And long underwear.
