Saying Goodbye to Your Favorite Skis

John Bresee is too busy as lord of the Backcountry.com realm to return my emails, for which I am both understanding and sympathetic, so I’m just going to poach something from his blog without asking. Isn’t that what you do in this new media world? Well, it’s for an excellent cause. This is good writing, darn good, and peoples need to read it for themselves, rather than the self-indulgences they’ve come to expect here. Release the hounds if you want it removed, JB.

In this short piece, John prepares to say goodbye to his skis, but like all good ski writing, it’s not about the skis themselves, but the life they help lead and the guy who rides them. All you bloggers and aspiring freelancers, pay up:

The wind off Swaner Nature Preserve had a November bite this morning. The dark clouds were vogueing above Square Top like it was a winter day. Just idle posturing, no snow fell, but the threat was real and strange for August in the desert. I stopped at the ski rack in the garage to do a quick gear check. What’s going to the Park City ski swap? What do I need to replace?

Sadly it looks like it’s time for my XXXs to wrap up their career. They were a gift from George at Rossignol. He said, “I’m sending you some new tongue depressors, I think this fat ski thing is going to take off.” Seven years later, hundreds of thousands of vert on their scarred bases, one serious injury, two near avalanches, three jobs, four countries, four A-stars, one Bell JetRanger, three pairs of bindings and countless ski resorts…and some kid is going to take them off my hands for $50. There ought to be a graveyard for skis like these; a solemn resting place for workhorses that have done more than their duty. In these hammered bases I see my ski history, each weld represents a gamble that paid off or a bad decision narrowly won. The TGR sticker on the tail is from the Harvest year when my allegiance to one movie company was strong, but it’s scratched to hell and I think I’m past my sticker days.

But next to the XXXs is a spanking new pair of Atomic ReXs with Naxo alpine touring bindings. I skied them three days in the spring and they grooved like pole dancers through every type of snow. But I have yet to use their super-slick touring functionality.

My wife gave me a pair of Atomic TMeXs with Burnt Mountain TeleBulldog step-in bindings. I whaled and flailed my way down the mountain like a movable yard sale, but I can now say I drop the knee. Riding in my pack they felt as light as a pair of cross country skis and every step in the bootpath was easier. They make the peaks seem a little nearer, a little more accessible.

The final pair in the rack is the absurdly wide Fischer Big Stix 10.6. They wait for the deepest days that are sure to come. I live five minutes from the gondola…fifteen minutes from first tracks. The strange weather of this summer hopefully bodes well for an insane winter. And that’s the heart of the Big Stix—deep in the 60” storms, days when crashed snowboarders bob and flail in the bottomless pow like ocean buoys in a hurricane.

But I’ll need something new to fill the slot left empty by my XXXs. Time to begin my new history.

Thanks George.

Read more good writing at JB’s blog.