No Longer Adrift
Sometimes Things Come at you Unexpectedly
By Matt Hansen
The storm, in its strength and prodigiousness, was completely unexpected. Sweeping across the Snake River Plain of southeast Idaho, the blizzard walloped Grand Targhee in the dead of night.
We were already buzzing from the day prior, when the Targhee time machine fired up nine inches of Wydaho’s finest with no lift lines. We cackled with delight about finding first tracks on every run; from the top of the chair, all we had to do was shift our downward trajectory about 20 feet right or left of our previous tracks. That night, after heaps of nachos and pasta, we went to bed fat and happy without bothering to check the weather. Meanwhile, a rogue wave approached in the darkness.
The next morning, we awoke to a resort that was fully buried. It took two hours for the plow crew to clear the access road and parking areas, and then another two hours for ski patrol to run avalanche mitigation. As we waited in the lift line with the rest of the snow-crazed addicts, patrollers skied up to the chair after their control routes, covered in snow, eyes wide and breathing heavy. I saw one patroller give his partner a look of disbelief as he moved his hand back and forth over his head. Then they addressed everyone in the lift line: “Make sure you ski with a partner! And avoid the flat spots!”
The official tally was 22 inches, but descending off the top of the Dreamcatcher chair on our first run, it was easily twice that. I was more than a little alarmed when my 13-year-old niece—in town for a regional ski race, which was canceled that day—went completely submerged, Bugs Bunny-style, popping back up several seconds later with a gasp and a giggle. All around us, people wallowed in the deep snow. When you could finally pick up enough speed to link a few turns, the only thing that mattered was being able to come up for air. Watching my ski partners, I could only see their mittens, two black dots floating downhill amidst a sea of white.
These dots of mittens, on March 25, 2023, will forever be burned into my memory, alongside the other deepest days of my life. Such experiences are full confirmation of why we give so much of our time, money and effort just to ski. To be in the right place at the right time, after years of sacrifice and dedication, so that we can seamlessly and joyously roll into one of the biggest powder days of our lives.
In my 48 years on this planet, there are only two things that I’ve been longer than I’ve been a skier: a son and a brother. Skiing is such a huge part of my identity that I can’t imagine life without it. Every year, one of the most serious considerations in my little orbit is how and when I’ll get my season pass. I have a hard time taking warm-weather vacations during the winter because: What if it snows while I’m gone? Any future plans of where to grow old, if I should be so lucky, must include the close proximity of a chairlift and skin track.
Throughout my years, this love of skiing has been reflected back to me by my family and friends, many of whom are crazier for snow than I am. For decades, I saw that same reflection through Powder magazine. Powder fueled my passion as a child, and understood the energy I felt waiting for school to get out so I could go skiing again. The magazine stayed with me through college and afterward when I moved to Jackson Hole, living on floors in ramshackle homes with broken septic systems, scoring cheap gear at the annual ski swap, and learning the ropes of backcountry safety and journalism. In 2004, Powder hired me as a staff editor, and it came to define most of my life for the next 16 years.
So when the former corporate owners killed the magazine back in November 2020, it felt like a beacon of light had been snuffed out. I felt unmoored and set adrift, like Tom Hanks in Castaway when he loses Wilson. Wilson!!!! Wiiiihhiiihhiiilllssoonn!!! This ideal that defined ‘the other ski experience’ my entire life was suddenly locked in a box and shoved into the back of a dark closet, yet another casualty from Covid and the continuous drip-drip-drip of fleeting dopamine hits on social and digital media.
And yet, there were more skiers and snowboarders hungry for powder than ever before. Resorts and trailheads were being overrun. Avalanche courses were selling out, as was ski and backcountry equipment. All of this, I wondered while waiting in another lift line, and no Powder magazine?
Earlier this summer, when Powder’s longtime Director of Photography David Reddick asked me to help him relaunch the print title, it swept in like that big storm at Grand Targhee: unexpected and exciting, with a healthy dose of trepidation.
If the last three years have proven anything, it’s that people do not need Powder in order to ski. I do not need Powder in order to ski. But it sure can help make sense of it all and remind us that, as snow-addicted weirdos, we are no longer adrift. With this issue, Powder embarks on a new chapter, relaunching as a once-per-year print title. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for coming back to the magazine after a three-year hibernation. If this is your first Powder ever, we welcome you to what we hope will be a lifetime of reflection of your love of skiing.
On our final run of the day at Targhee, we descended skier’s left off the chair to where it drops off into a series of chutes and cliff bands. My brother went first, blowing up the snow like a breaching humpback. As I skied down through the choke, I leaned a too hard into an untouched pillow of snow and felt the unmistakable downward tug on my ski tips, sending my weight too far forward followed by the inevitable…click...of a binding release. I tomahawked over my tips, doing everything possible to keep an air pocket while also trying to remember precisely when and where my ski came off. I landed upright as if sitting in a bathtub, my discarded ski luckily found just up the hill. Seconds later, my niece barrelled in smoothly with no hesitation. She skied her own path, spraying me as she floated by, and let out a hoot of laughter.
She doesn’t need Powder either. But maybe, she can find something in these pages to help her make sense of it all.
Powder to the People.
The above article runs as the Intro page in the current '23/'24 print issue of POWDER. Purchase your copy HERE!
