the Offering

By Mike Horn

It’s not much to look at. Maybe 80 square feet of melamine walls, nooks and crannies, still spackled in mud from last spring’s final turns and sloppy walk back from the lift. The carpet looks like a remnant one might find under a highway overpass, worn to a dark sheen by the endless shuffle of ski and snowboard boots day after day, and year after year.

A few candy wrappers and discarded handwarmers linger in the corner. A lone ski that lost its mate leans against an edge-nicked swatch of deeply textured drywall. It smells of soggy boots, swampy Gore-Tex, and maybe a hint of stale PBR. It smells like…home.

When I moved to Crested Butte in 2000, I lucked into a job at a restaurant on the mountain where I could finance a ski pass and stash my gear. That first job was at the Avalanche, arguably the mountain’s most legendary gathering place for people who had decided to dedicate their lives to sliding on snow. So many of my “coming of age in Crested Butte” stories revolve around the Avalanche, where I first learned my way around the mountains. It was the perfect gig for a fledgling snowboarder with his first season pass—my shift didn’t start until 3 p.m., so I could ride all day and still scratch out a living. The gig also came with access to hallowed ground. In the loft above the restaurant, a “locker room” (more like a dark, dingy den) served as the cultural hub of the Avalanche. It was accessible by employees only, a rule that was strictly enforced by the old guard and fresh faces alike.

All of a sudden the new guy from an old mill city in Massachusetts had something in common with these folk. I was beginning to understand how transcendent skiing and riding could be, how you could get lost in a string of powder days accentuated by mind-boggling turns and leg-burning nights slinging food and drinks to a boisterous crowd. How the swooping arcs, pillowy drops and exploding crystals would be imprinted in my memory forever. I was too immersed in those moments to know their significance at the time, how much life was simplified once the snow started to fly. Living storm to storm, shift to shift, turn to turn….

On those rare, coveted days when billowy turns frosted our faces like goggle-wearing cupcakes, I’d show up for my Avalanche shift looking like the mountain chewed me up and spit me out. Icicles lingered in my wooly beard and scraggly long hair, which inspired one of the Avy’s legendary line cooks to bestow me with the nickname “Ben Hur.” The snow-to-serving flip was like snowboarding’s version of Clark Kent transforming into Superman and back again. Except I was no Superman on a snowboard, unless you counted all the times I caught my front edge and sailed headlong down the hill, crunching my ribs like a bag of potato chips more than once. I managed to stay (mostly) uninjured and slowly learned to navigate the mountain from friends and mentors who patiently guided me through all the slides and slams and occasional soft landings.

I was getting my footing off-snow, too. I was locked into working at night, so I could ride seven days a week if I wanted to. Many of the most passionate skiers and riders at the Avy worked Thursday to Sunday, because as I later learned from a legendary Swedish snowboarder, “pro snowboarders don’t ride on the weekends.” On a trip to British Columbia that same snowboarder also showed me the art of sleeping in a snowboard travel bag stuffed with clothes and blankets. It’s like a cocoon! I digress….

Back at the Avy, the employee loft served many purposes: ski and snowboard gear storage; employee dining room and happy hour hub; napping quarters to sleep off a hangover in between shifts; and other extracurricular activities that will remain unsaid. It was not a family place in the traditional sense—the scene was PG-13 on a good day. But it was a family place in the sense that we were all there for (mostly) the same reasons, and were bonded together by shared passions and the shared burden of hard work, long days, and even longer nights. Sure, there were arguments and fist fights and one time a bear broke in, ate all the ice cream, and pooped on the floor, but other than that it was a pretty functional community rooted in mutual respect. 

For now, the Avalanche era is in the rear view but locker-room life is alive and well. It’s a little different for me now, 20 odd years later. I share a locker with my wife and two kids, our skis and snowboards and boots and helmets Jenga’d together just right or the door won’t close. My kids are more likely to get handed Girl Scout Cookies at 8 a.m. than come across a scary ground score or half-drank PBR, but this is still the home of ski and snowboard bums after all.

It is a gathering place where my belief in mountain culture and community is replenished season after season. The energy is palpable and downright frantic on powder mornings, never mind on the weekends when hordes of groms are suiting up for ski and ride school. Kids and adults jockey for space in the narrow alleys between walls of lockers. Ski gear, lunchboxes, coffee cups and snack wrappers are strewn about as if a snownado just ripped through. Thirty minutes later and the locker room is mostly empty, put back together and eerily quiet. 

Let’s be clear: renting a slopeside ski locker is a luxury that feels like a necessity. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a year-long rental for under $750, and it only goes up from there, but there’s still a waiting list. Some of the locker offerings fall into the more “rustic” category (like mine), and then there are more bourgeoisie options with “member’s only” access where people can have a more curated experience. Sigh…. 

It all feels a little excessive, until you watch a family scrambling for the bus from town to the mountain, all sweaty and shiny, slipping and shuffling in ski boots with goggles all fogged up and askew. Dad’s grumbling under his breath while the kids whine that it’s “tooo haaard” to carry their own gear. Mom and dad both carry a rat’s nest of gear with a perfect execution of “the offering”—skis and poles stacked like firewood across both arms as if making an offering to the snow gods. This is all fine and good until it’s time to enter the narrow, chaotic confines of the bus. If you’re lucky, there’s a seat. On a powder day? Fuhgeddaboudit. Now mom and dad are aisle surfing up the mountain, skis helicoptering around like Samurai blades, pinballing back and forth while the kids each clutch onto a leg. Are we having fun yet?

Spending the winter living out of a locker certainly doesn’t solve all that. It adds to the expense, and the enjoyment, of what is already a prohibitively expensive sport. And yet, for my family, it’s worth it. I get to see friends multiple times a week whom I might only see a handful of times throughout the year when the lifts aren’t spinning. My kids spend their winters romping around with their ski buddies and mentors they don’t realize are mentors quite yet, immersed in the peripherals that make skiing and riding more than a sport, and a mountain more than a destination. I like to think they’re taking something meaningful away from the experience, even if it’s just a fistful of Thin Mints for breakfast with a few turns mixed in.