The plan came together on a cold and crisp Christmas Eve. It was one of those nights when it seemed almost too cold to snow and snow it did not. In fact, it hadn’t snowed much at all that winter and as a result not a single local ski lift was turning. Not the local hill Mt. Spokane, just a short drive away, and not Silver Mountain just a bit farther down the road in Wallace, Idaho. Not even Sandpoint’s Schweitzer Mountain Resort had a single chairlift running or ski run open.
My friends and I were enjoying beverages at a dimly lit bar on Spokane’s South Hill — the kind of bar that was crusty around the edges and happy to serve on Christmas Eve. We were all young then, either home from college or still living in town just a few years removed from high school. Most of us grew up skiing as much as we could get away with. We skied on weekends, we skied on school holidays and, without our parents knowledge, we even skipped school and skied some weekdays.
Yet, here we were, on Dec. 24, and not a soul in our group of friends had logged a single day on the slopes. The conversations never wavered too far from the painful lack of precipitation that winter and what could be done about our collective lack of ski turns.
Finally, after several rounds of winter warmers, we arrived at the obvious solution. A powder seeking road trip!
There had been a lot of talk that evening. Talk about where to go. Talk about who would go. Talk about how to get there, how to get out of work, and even how to ditch your family on Christmas Day.
By the time I rolled out of bed that Christmas morning, the talk had filtered out and there were just two of us left with a full commitment to do what it took to find powder turns.
One of my good friends with whom I had grown up skiing, Chris, and I had connections to some other ski friends who had moved to Jackson Hole, Wyo. after just a couple years of college and were living the ski bum lifestyle at one of the country’s most iconic ski resorts.
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We had called them that previous evening and confirmed that indeed there was snow on the slopes and skiing to be had. So it was after a morning of family Christmas activities, which seemed to last forever, we snuck out of our respective houses and loaded up my trusty late 70’s Volkswagen Rabbit and headed out on the road.
It’s important to remember that the days in which this road trip took place were the days before cell phones, before the Internet and before information about where to find the best chance of powder were just a click away.
In the time of this road trip your best bet to find anything out about chasing powder was either to check the reports in the local paper, which were always a day old and limited to what few areas they chose to list, or to track down the snow phone number of whatever resort you wanted information on and then punch those numbers into a handset tethered to the end of a coiled cord.
Neither option was particularly effective. So it was with only a vague idea of what ski conditions we might find that we headed out on the 10-hour-long drive. Of course, we did know the most important thing: there was skiing available. So we drove off with giant grins of snowy anticipation. First, we drove east through Montana, then south through Idaho and finally east again into Wyoming.
After a long day of what had been mostly uneventful driving, we descended down a snow-covered road in the dark of night only minutes from our destination when a herd of elk suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
Pumping the brakes instinctively, I sent the little car into an uncontrolled spin through the herd. As we rotated around helplessly there was an almost palpable sense of impending doom, which filled the cool air inside the cockpit of our powder transportation machine.
Somehow, we miraculously spun a complete 360-degree rotation and came to a stop in the middle of the road as the majestic beasts bounded into the field around us. It had been a close call but nothing could stop us now. Visions of steep powder-covered slopes lie just within our reach.
These days, being a road-tripping, snow-sniffing, storm-watching cer-tified powder hound has become almost an art form with a variety of sources one can use to follow the impending dump of the great white fluff so many skiers live and even sometimes die for. There are sites such as opensnow.com, “a team of weather forecasters who write local blogs, make inch-by-inch forecasts, and send powder alerts … so that you can catch powder every day.”
You can also visit bestsnow.net to find what Powder Magazine calls “The most complete, comprehensive and objective guide to snowfall, and both prevailing and expected snow conditions, at North America’s ski resorts ever published.”
Over at powderchasers.com you can sign up for powder alerts delivered to your email inbox, find helpful tips in forums and links to weather radar satellites featuring up to date images of where the storms are now. Of course, if you want to keep an eye on things close to home or even across the country, most ski areas now feature live streaming webcams with up-to-the-minute images of what is happening on the slopes, a vast improvement from punching those digits into the wall-mounted phone and listening to a recording of already past weather events.
The motivation that drove us into Wyoming Christmas Day was simple: We were just trying to find an open ski area. However, there’s a myriad of other reasons to head out on a ski road trip.
There’s the pure joy of heading off to do something spur of the moment without months or years of planning.
There’s the anticipation of seeing new places, skiing unknown and previously unexplored ski slopes, meeting and making new friends, and experiencing new foods, cultures, traditions, accents and in some cases even languages.
While Chris and I were seeking only the basic freedom of skiing, we ended up experiencing many of those other bonus items along the way. We skied steep and rocky chutes of a kind we weren’t used to seeing at home. We rekindled friendships with people we had grown up around. We even rang in the New Year with new friends from places all over the globe. Oh, and let’s not forget the all important ski favorite: fresh powder.
After a fun-filled and snow-covered week-and-a-half of amazing turns with inspiring friends, we had to face the music. We pinned the skis into the trusted roof racks, crammed wet crumpled gear into the hatchback and hit the road again.
As anyone who has ever made the drive back to Spokane from Jackson Hole will tell you, there are several passes to negotiate along the way, and on this particular drive each and everyone of them was in full white-out blizzard status.
Following that white-knuckled drive and the many days of skiing the steep and deep, we were exhausted and as happy as anyone has ever been to return home and crawl into our beds.
We all know that feeling, the one you can get only when you’ve been away from home for a spell. The feeling that your bed is the best bed there’s ever been. The funny thing was when we made it back out onto our now-open and snow-covered local slopes, the feeling was much the same.
But the time away spent skiing somewhere else brought with it a fresh appreciation for how great our home ski hills were. It’s just one final reason on a long list of them for why you should sit down right now to do some powder-chasing research and plan your own epic road trip! N
By John Grollmus
Photography By Freeride Media
As Featured In: 2019 Winter/Spring SPO Edition