Whatever Lindsey Vonn, Bode Miller, Julia Mancuso, and Andrew Weibrecht are getting paid, the sport of skiing (or at least the industry) owes them more. Not since, well, ever has the sport been as high as it is today. Neither, thanks to Shaun White, Hannah Teter, Kelly Clark, and Scotty Lago, has snowboarding. But it’s skiing that’s the darling of the media–and not just ski racing. Even the venerable skidlympic sport of ski bumming is getting its 15 minutes from mega-media outlets such as ABC News and the New York Times.

“The Vancouver Olympics have thrust a spotlight on the sport of skiing,” intones a clearly constipated Martin Bashir, perhaps feeling particularly dyspeptic after his fellow Brits mistook the first eight days of Olympics for a pub crawl and only found one medal, “but beyond the competition is the spirit…” Indeed, there is no more spirited skier than the dude Bashir is introducing, Glen Plake, as “America’s ski bum”.

For an all-too-often clueless dinosaur media outlet, the piece isn’t half-bad, and it’s probably because they let Plake do most of the talking. Plake has always shot his mouth off at the hip, but more wisdom comes out than most people give him credit for, and as he’s matured into his 40s his take on the sport has become more nuanced.

Well, let’s not go that far. But Plake still nails it when he says, “Skiing is a dumb hick sport that takes place at the end of a dirt road.”

We forget that at our own peril.

Then there’s the Times, which has a piece on the American renaissance in ski bumming called “The Return of the Ski Bum”. Give the Times credit. ABC likely picked Plake because his visibility is higher due to wide release of The Edge of Never, but barely addressed the movie. The Times ski bum piece is based on real reporting of a legitimate trend–across the country, the number of foreign ski area workers is down and American skids is up.

At Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, for example, there are only six foreign workers this season compared to 200 two years ago. Vail hired 60 percent fewer over the same period. Just 15 percent of Aspen employees are from elsewhere vs. 26 percent in the past.

“High unemployment in the United States, coupled with policy changes that make it more difficult for seasonal foreign workers to get visas, has brought about the return of the American ski bum,” writes Katherine Bindley. “Recent college graduates, laid-off young professionals and resort residents who have also lost jobs have jumped at the opportunity to bus tables, park cars and sell lift tickets here and in other Rocky Mountain resorts.”

Ski bumming is a decidedly mixed lot, and the response of the new snow immigrants to their life in the eight-people-in-a-two-bedroom-condo mountains is also mixed. Some are clearly hooked (just wait until they experience summer) and some are already longing for the career traditional. But maybe, who knows, maybe they’ll tap into one of the best gifts of these two years of economic dumpster diving and reassess what’s really important in life. Not that it’s skiing–as Plake points out, other than making people happy, it’s pretty useless–but it might be. It just might be.

Tagged as: skiing, snowboarding