On a Sunday afternoon in October, I snuck out for a run. It was tank-top weather when I left my house in downtown Durango, Colorado, and I expected it to hold. I drove north into the mountains, and as I crested a hill 15 minutes in, the sky turned gray and cracked with lightning. The temperature reading in my car dropped 20 degrees, and the rain hitting the windshield was so thick I could hardly see the road. My phone buzzed in the cupholder. It was a text from the friend I was meeting: “WTF, DWG.”

DWG stands for , the nom de plume of Jeff Givens, a local real estate agent turned amateur meteorologist who has much more power over my life than anyone running a WordPress blog should. His website offers weather forecasts, blow-by-blows of storms, and roundups of precipitation totals—with a heavy dose of personal opinion. Sometimes the posts are excited updates: “Saturday 4:30 am: It’s not over yet! The closed low-pressure is spinning over Arizona early this morning.” Sometimes he’ll take a deep dive into the variability of La Nina, the cooling pattern in the Pacific Ocean that tends to bring dry winters to the Southwest, or the difference between Canadian and European forecasting models. Sometimes he’ll answer requests from fans who ask for specific forecasts within their individual microclimate. In the forecast the day after my Sunday soaking, Givens walked back what he’d posted the day before, responding to the razzing he’d received from readers. You don’t get that from the Weather Channel.

Followers who subscribe to his email list might get three updates a day when storms are firing, sometimes time-stamped 3 A.M., 9 A.M., then noon. I read every one. And I’m not alone. Givens has 19,100 subscribers. The local population is about 19,500, and that includes children.

Givens is more accurate than any other weather source around here, and that makes him arguably the biggest celebrity in my smallish town. Our collective excitement crescendos with his forecasts, and whether they lead to joyful or disappointing experiences outside, we piece together a postmortem in the days that follow. Sometimes he sends the whole town into a spiral. Like any forecaster, occasionally he’s wrong. I’m on multiple ski-planning text chains that dissect his accuracy. “He never admits when he’s wrong,” one friend complained. “I just don’t like his syntax,” another told me, while her husband admitted to obsessively reading every post. “Too many emails!” several others said. “How can you get mad at him, he’s doing it for free,” someone countered.

He is a common denominator: a folk hero and a prophet and the person to blame when your plans go to shit. Everyone I know has an opinion about his forecasts. And I mean literally everyone.

Yesterday at the doctor, as I shivered in my gown, the nurse asked me how the weather had been on the way over. “Durango Weather Guy says it’s supposed to get bad this weekend,” she said, unprompted.

I needed to understand how this faceless man had become a ubiquitous and mercurial guru—and wormed his way into the brains and hearts of my community. So I emailed Givens and asked him to meet up.

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Auden Schendler, one of the biggest climate advocates in the outdoor industry,��doesn’t start his new book, Terrible Beauty, with any of the myriad lessons he’s learned over decades of environmental work. Schendler, who is vice president of sustainability at Aspen One (parent company of Aspen Snowmass), doesn’t drop into scare tactics, or data, or the myriad ways global warming is harming recreation, business, and our ability to thrive. Instead, he opens with a camping trip in the Utah desert with a couple of buddies, chasing down dirt devils for the sheer glee of being outside in a storm.

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The book goes on to examine the ways we need to approach environmentalism if we want to experience that joy in the future. In his 25 years heading up sustainability initiatives for one of the ski industry’s biggest corporations, Schendler has been at the forefront of climate action. He converted Aspen’s utility to renewables, convinced its tissue supplier to stop cutting down old-growth trees, and led the outdoor industry in political lobbying. But he says we need to do more. A lot more. Corporate sustainability is failing, he says, and individuals aren’t leveraging enough of our personal and political power because we’ve been cowed into thinking we don’t have any. And now, the clock is ticking. According to Schendler, modern environmentalism is broken—but he has some ideas about how to keep it moving forward.

Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul is a book about citizenship, the pursuit of purpose, and uphill battles you might not win but have to keep fighting anyway. It’s a book about right now.

What do you hope people take away from this book?

I want to suck people into the joy of the universe, then give them that technical payload on climate in a way that motivates them. When you ask people, “What do you care about?” It’s things like community and family and wild places. But when you ask them, “What are you doing to protect those things against this existential threat?” they throw up their hands. I wanted to give people tools to figure it out. So there’s a bunch of stuff about banks and how the financial sector impacts climate change, but this is a book about the human experience. I’m trying to say modern environmentalism is failing, but what can replace it? Can it be exciting?

Let’s talk about that failure. You’ve that skiing is toast, and that we’ve failed on climate as a society. How do we go forward in the face of that?

When you’re in a movement that’s losing it’s not glamorous, but this is where I think there’s a connection to the outdoor world. The purpose has to come in the doing of the thing. It’s like type 2 fun. It’s not about winning or losing—I think in any human endeavor it’s very rare to be able to say,��“yes, we won.” Instead, we have to think about it like a practice. We’re improving the world. As much as a day in my life as a climate fighter is depressing, it’s also fascinating and weird and filled with these odd twists and turns and micro wins and crippling losses. There’s a lot of glee in getting into mischief.

You argue that the ways we’ve largely been doing environmental work, particularly corporate sustainability, isn’t actually addressing the root causes of global warming. How do we change?

When we discovered that CO2 was going to be a problem in the fifties, we should have started getting off [fossil fuels], but we didn’t because we were misinformed, or because politicians were bribed, and since then we’ve been working toward targets that are in line with what the fossil fuel industry would want. For instance, in my world, the outdoor world, you could say, “let’s talk about recycled skis,” but that doesn’t really move the needle. Instead, we need to be publicly lobbying our peers and elected officials on climate.

What can someone like me, who isn’t part of a big business or advocacy group, do to move the needle?

My prescription is this: You get a six pack and you get a few smart friends, and you ask each other “Where do we have power?” You come up with an answer, then dismiss it if it’s not to scale.

Think about environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who said “I’m going to sit in this one spot for a year.” That helped. You have to just try some stuff. The question is really: Do we want to be citizens or not? Can you go to a town council meeting and talk about the planning and zoning board? You can’t just sign an online letter and call it good. You have to do real stuff and move your body and get out into society, instead of giving into the inclination to stay in or avoid confrontation.

That requires bandwidth, and there are people who don’t have that, and that’s OK too. Revolutions don’t come from 100 percent of the population mobilizing, it’s typically 4 to 9 percent, and that can make a difference.

Bandwidth, and who has the ability to act on climate, seems like a really big part of the conversation.

When climate is forcing you into survival mode, you don’t have the leisure that humans need to thrive. You can’t just be recovering from the last fire or flood all the time. This is environmentalism writ large right now. You think I have the luxury to care about climate? I can’t feed my family or pay my health care bills. This gets to the broader question of whether we’re actually taking care of each other, and we’re not.

The tension in the book is that the thing that could destroy us is also a fundamental opportunity for change as a society. How do you walk that line?

The cover of the book meant to express that. Like, “Damn, this thing is kind of fucked up, but it’s still beautiful.” I think about Tolkien’s idea of the long defeat, and how we’re in this long battle of good versus evil. We’re slogging through Mordor. I think this is humanity’s biggest project but we’re still making things better. It’s going to be uncomfortable and hard, but it can still be full of purpose and joy.

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Time slows down in the summer. Where I live it’s too hot to do much unless you’re out early in the day or late in the evening. It seems like everyone else is on vacation, and the academic back-to-work creep of September is still off in the distance.

In short, it’s the perfect time to laze about in the midday heat—for long afternoons of reading on the porch or hiding out in the dark in front of a fan watching a movie.

And this summer we have a lot of good options.

What Books Should I Read This Summer?

My neighbor spotted a mountain lion on our street when she took the garbage out the other night so I have been thinking a lot about human-wildlife interaction. It helps that I’ve been reading , Julia Phillips’ novel about what happens to two sisters when a grizzly shows up on San Juan Island.

The story culminates when their diverging reactions to the bear—fear and fascination—split them apart. To understand which of those reactions I should realistically have to my local predators, I’ve also been reading Brandon Keim’s non-fiction tale, . On the surface, the book is about how we can better live with wildlife, but really is a charming dive into all the way animals interact with each other, and with us. We’re not as far apart as we might seem, according to Keim.

If summer has you thinking about plants more than animals, check out Olivia Liang’s new book It’s a whirlwind essayistic mashup of the history of cultivating and colonizing plants, and the ways gardens have been an important source of liberation and inspiration and survival, all set against the background of Liang’s own quest to rehabilitate a historic garden in the depths of COVID. She fumbles a little when she tries to address warming summers, but she makes up for it in her lush descriptions of growing things.

If gardens (or nonfiction) aren’t exciting enough for you, the perfect summer read might look something like Liz Moore’s which incorporates summer camp, family drama, and a set of missing siblings into a twisty, hard to put down thriller. Moore’s language, and her knack for building character and scene give it that jumpy feeling of stepping outside the campfire’s light and wondering what’s around you.

Indie Flicks and Summer Blockbusters

Movies more your summer speed? In , Amy, a visiting New York consultant, in town with her negligent fiancé, develops a reciprocated crush on Loren, a fishing guide barely skating by in Jackson Hole. The summer light of the Tetons is a character all its own, and the film nails the details of skid life (multiple jobs, insecure housing, the performative localism of second home owners). But the best parts are the painfully tender ones about the shiny, hard-to-achieve appeal of a place like Jackson, and about the ache of not getting to live all the lives you can imagine for yourself and having to commit to just one.

Speaking of films, we could talk about , this year’s biggest tease of a seasonal blockbuster (Why don’t they kiss? Why don’t they talk about climate change?) But the real standout from the movie is the music.

Summer, in my house, is weekend road trip season and the Twisters’ soundtrack feels like exactly what you should be playing on a Friday night when you’re driving down a dirt road hunting for a campsite.

There are a couple skippable bro-country bombs, but there are also standouts from Oklahoma artists like Wyatt Flores, and a Shania Twain song that sounds exactly like a Shania Twain song should.

Perfect Podcasts for Long Drives

If you’re not a music in the car person, and if you’re already missing the drama of the Olympics, there are a couple of podcasts that might scratch your itch. Consider , about mechanical doping in bike racing, or , a CBC podcast about, um, broom doping, in curling, the most adorably Canadian drama ever. They both fall into my favorite category of podcasts: twisty investigative journalism where no one gets hurt or killed.

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One of skiing’s great joys is storm chasing. You watch the weather roll in across the radar and then beeline for the ski area to try to catch it just right, riding the wave of snowfall and temperatures and wind. But how do you decide which resort to hit—and when to get there—to score fresh tracks? How do you avoid getting stuck in Little Cottonwood Canyon traffic or Stevens Pass slop with all the other powder hounds? Steven Conney, AKA “Powderchaser Steve,” a snow forecaster for skiing app OpenSnow and a diehard storm chaser has some answers. For the past 30 years he’s been packing up pre-dawn, watching telemetry and traffic, and traveling last-minute across the country in the pursuit of powder. He’s been known to ski in Idaho’s Sawtooths one day and the Sierra the next, all in the name of fresh tracks. Conney’s life may or may not be relatable—he’s a retirement-age guy with a flexible job and multiple houses—but his advice, honed over years of watching storms and making trips, can be.

You’re not alone, so think about where the crowds might be heading, and what storms might fly under the radar.

Chasing powder was a game for me when the Internet first started. All I had to rely on was radar. I would look and see how much snow people would get in the Pacific Northwest or Sierra, and then guess what the Rockies would get as the storm moved across the country. There’s so much information out there—and so many other skiers doing the same —now that it’s harder to chase a storm in a relaxed way. Your best odds are when storms start at 5 A.M. with 0 to 1 inches on a snow report and 10 inches by 10 A.M. The crowds don’t catch on until later that day or the following.

Head for the (small) hills.

Last year I spent more time at smaller resorts—you have a better chance of getting lucky at a mom-and-pop resort. During the week big resorts used to be empty, but it’s changed a ton. Everything gets tracked out more. There’s no differentiation between mid-week and weekends. Another part of the formula is what will open. There’s nothing worse than being at the deepest resort in the U.S. with nothing open. That’s the worst thing. Sometimes you’re better off going to a smaller ski area with less avalanche-prone terrain.

Don’t just look at snowfall. Check out wind and temperature, and consider challenges to mountain operations, too.

So much goes into the formula for figuring out where to go: Is this mountain actually going to open? How much snow is going to fall? How cold are the temperatures, and how much wind is expected? Wind is probably our worst enemy. It changes the conditions and quality of snow, and it impacts lift operations. Quality of snow at��elevation is more important now due to climate change. Storms are warmer and wetter,��so I’m looking at the temperature more now. You can’t base your decision solely on how deep it’s going to be, especially in the Sierra. There have been deep storms there I haven’t chased because I knew it would be too wet, and I knew mountains wouldn’t be open because of avalanche control.

Get your information from the right places.

In most states the snow telemetry (SNOTEL) sites are extremely helpful. Webcams can be unreliable, and they don’t account for wind. Before the internet, I had a black book loaded with phone numbers of highway plow trucks, night auditors at hotels, and gas stations. I used to drop off six-packs to hotel clerks. It’s always best to have a connection on the hill, because they’re going to tell you in real time what the conditions are like better than a webcam. I’ll call the hotels, but you have to make sure the person you’re talking to at a hotel is a skier.

Don’t commit too soon. And have your go-bag ready.

Never plan a trip beforehand, because��you’ll end up getting skunked. Be prepared to chase at the last minute, even two or three hours before a storm. You have to stay flexible. There have been plenty of times when I’ve turned around. If I do a last minute reversal it’s usually based on webcams and snow telemetry sites. I don’t always know the night before where I’m going to be the next day. I get up super early to look at these telemetry sites or sometimes I do it on the road. Of course the car is pre-packed, that’s just common sense.

You don’t need ski-in, ski-out accommodations.

Here’s another little trick: I don’t always stay at the��resort where I think it’s deep.��I’ll stage between resorts where it’s cheaper, outside the ski area, equidistant to multiple ski areas. I stay in Pocatello or Idaho Falls, if I don’t know if I’m going to Teton or back to Utah.

But you do need snow tires, and to fly into an airport big enough to land planes in a storm.

If you’re flying in from out of state, it’s probably best to avoid small airports unless you can nail the specifics of the storm. Rental cars never come with snow tires. I’ll walk on the floor of the rental car place and check tires. Always check your tread.

Traffic and highway closures are your enemies. Plan road trips accordingly.

If you don’t like getting quagmired on the highway, avoid the Cottonwoods and I-70 and go to resorts away from metro areas. The worst offenders for powder days are Salt Lake City and Denver. Storms almost always come with road closures, so it’s key to leave early. Sometimes I’ll go up the night before and stay on the other side of common road closures. I’ll stay on the west side of I-70 and then��come into Colorado from the west. In the Sierra you also have to learn to circumvent I-80, because that will close from Reno. Be prepared to get up at 3:30 A.M. and drive around Lake Tahoe. My driving tips are: have the right car, with snow tires, and be on the right side of the pass.

Master the delicate balance of work and play.

Chasing powder is��a second job. I have an alias. I’m guessing my boss knows, but no one has said anything. I make it a point to do a really good job at work when it’s not snowing. I’d equate it to a bear stocking up on food before winter. I’m getting five months of work done so I can take extra days off in the winter. If you think about it, most of your time spent at a resort is driving, sitting in lift lines, or in some cases waiting for terrain to open. How many actual minutes are you skiing down the hill? It’s relatively short. The only time I don’t answer my phone is when I’m going downhill, seven minutes at a time. Really I could call this my lunch hour.

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We’ve found the most affordable mountain towns in the nation. (You’re welcome.)

La Grande, Oregon

Population: 13,158
Median home price (*all prices listed according to Zillow): $264,539

When you’re passing through on I-84, La Grande looks like just another eastern Oregon ag town. But the wild and scenic Grand Ronde River drops out of the Blue Mountains to the northeast, and , which claims to have the driest powder in the state, is 45 miles southwest. La Grande is home to Eastern Oregon University, and it has a thriving local art scene, supported in part by the nonprofit . Road biking abounds, and there’s a growing network of mountain-biking trails, including those in the .

Rangeley, Maine

Population: 1,045
Median home price: $396,890

reopened in 2020, after five years of closure due to tumultuous ownership, and the change reinvigorated the outdoor scene in northern Maine. Fishermen have been pulling trophy fish out of the streams and small ponds around Rangeley since the 1860s, moose and loons abound, and the Appalachian Trail is nearby. There’s been a recent state-sponsored push for sustainable forestry, so the town’s economy isn’t tied solely to seasonal recreation.

Thomas and Davis, West Virginia

Population: 1,218
Median home price: $95,243

In the Bible, Canaan is the promised land, and the Canaan Valley of West Virginia, home to the neighboring towns of Davis and Thomas, might be just that. Nearly 70 percent of the valley is encompassed by the , and the parts that aren’t protected offer more than 100 miles of bike trails, three ski areas, rivers, an excellent nordic center with over 15 miles of trails, and possibly the best bluegrass bar in the country, the Purple Fiddle in downtown Thomas. Add these two to your bucket list for most affordable mountain towns in the U.S., and you won’t regret it.

Reno, Nevada

Population: 268,815
Median home price: $541,423

Reno hasn’t exactly been affordable for a while. Property values have been rising—and outdoor opportunities increasing—since 2012, with an influx of Californians. But if you want to live in a mountain city instead of a mountain town, the Biggest Little City in the World is your best bet. The tech- and pandemic-induced boom is slowing, and prices are cooling off. Reno has all the upside of a lot of smaller mountain burgs, like a whitewater park and the nearby ski resorts of Lake Tahoe, with the amenities of a larger city.

Anaconda, Montana

Population: 9,491
Median home price: $229,488

Anaconda was a copper-mining community for more than a century until the early 1980s; its still standing smelter stack, just to the south and taller than the Washington Monument, is a testament to that longtime industry. But the town is capitalizing on recreation in the greater area to distance itself from its extractive past. And there’s a lot to work with, like the 2,200-acre , to the west; the nearby Continental Divide Trail; and fishing in the Big Hole River, to the south. The town itself is home to a new wine store and bike shop, not to mention a growing number of young families.

Boone, North Carolina

Population: 18,036
Median home price: $446,781

Pick your season and Boone, the biggest town in the North Carolina high country, will have something for you. Spring runoff on the New and Watuga Rivers; arguably the best skiing in the Southeast, with three resorts within 45 minutes; and a range of multi-season mountain-biking trails, including those at . Bonus: it doesn’t have the crowds or the price tag of other outdoor meccas in the region, like Asheville.

Saranac Lake, New York

Population: 4,825
Median home price: $275,022

There are a handful of Adirondack communities that could be considered dream towns, but Saranac Lake rises to the top for its charm and trail access, notably a network that feeds into six mountains surrounding the lake. In the summer, the water is full of boats, and in the winter you can ski Mount Pisgah or take a short drive to Whiteface. Saranac Lake is blissfully mellow, and you’re only ten minutes from Lake Placid if you want a splashier but affordable mountain town with more going on.

Heather Hansman is the author of��Powder Day: Ski Bums, Ski Towns, and the Future of Chasing Snow. She also writes about environmental issues and the tricky relationships between places and people for�������ԹϺ���. One time, she won a bag of pasta in an Italian big mountain competition. She lives in Southwest Colorado, where she likes to go uphill slow and downhill fast.

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Thomas knew before I did that this might be the place. “I like it here,” he said two summers ago as we pulled out of Durango, Colorado, after a whirlwind weekend. We’d floated the Animas River at dusk, then pedaled up Telegraph Hill early the next morning, beating the heat of the day as we bombed down Big Canyon singletrack with friends. “I can see us living here,” he added as we drove toward the Utah border.

My fiancé and I were on the road trying out new towns, because I’d convinced him that we had to move. I just didn’t know where to exactly. The question had consumed me for as long as I could remember. After years of rolling through seasonal resort towns as a river guide and ski bum (eventually writing books about each experience: and , respectively), I’d eddied out in Seattle—a city I didn’t love—pinned down by inertia and an inability to hit upon what came next. So many locations seemed out of reach; my cloudy desire for a new place to live was starting to drive Thomas and me crazy.

I knew I wanted to be near the mountains, somewhere that made it easy to spend the bulk of my free time outside. In Seattle we lived in a basement apartment two blocks from the highway, fighting traffic to get to trails. Where a person lives dictates so much: community, culture, commute time. Mountain towns have what I’m looking for in these three regards. But the economics weren’t in our favor. Housing and rental prices have skyrocketed, driven up by market forces and wealthy second-home owners, while in-town wages and job opportunities have remained stagnant. Meanwhile, approval, funding, and support for new affordable housing are hard to come by.

I wasn’t special in terms of the frustration I felt hunting for a dream town. For a person of my age (older millennial) and income bracket (as a freelance writer, modest), living somewhere desirable had become tougher than ever. Thomas and I knew we’d be priced out of most classic ski towns, and cost-of-living considerations were pushing local culture and community out of other locales we’d hoped to consider. We tried to avoid regions we thought were especially vulnerable to fire and drought.

that how you spend your days is how you spend your life. That phrase kept running through my mind and stressing me out. I couldn’t settle on the right place to spend my days, so I stayed stuck, growing anxious as they continued to fly by.

But indecision was a recipe for torment, so to overcome paralysis, we drew up a spreadsheet. We sat on our tiny patio in Seattle, in the heat of a smoky summer that was rife with nearby wildfires, and made a list of every possible place we might want to end up.

It was, after all, about more than just place. It was about identity, along with the future we were lining up for ourselves. No matter where we moved, it felt like I was giving up on some part of a dream. There was Annie Dillard echoing in my head again as we waffled and wasted time.

We made a four-circle Venn diagram with the factors that felt most important: people we loved nearby, easy access to the outdoors, affordable real estate, and a strong likelihood of remaining livable from a climate standpoint. We monitored housing costs and annual precipitation to address some of our more pressing concerns, and winnowed our options down.

In the summer of 2021, I drove toward the Rocky Mountains, and Thomas flew out to meet me as soon as he could break free from work. We crashed at friends’ houses in five states, in places like Carbondale, Colorado, and Bend, Oregon. We took bike rides through neighborhoods, checked out grocery stores and downtown districts, and tried to imagine how we’d spend our days.

I was pining for a place I’d never been to before, one that probably wasn’t even real. But I was convinced I’d know it when I saw it. In German, this is called fernweh, or “far sickness.”

But trying to align an ideal with reality is a dicey business. When you operate out of dreamland, you run up against some serious constraints. During the previous winter, for example, after a clear blue morning of nordic skiing in Crested Butte, Colorado, I’d decided: This is the place. Then I checked the Zillow listings.

The economics may have been out of my control, but I was also tangled up in what it meant to me to grow up and settle down. I wanted to live in a place that I loved, something that seemed to have been readily accomplished by friends of mine, who’d found their home in the world apparently angst-free. I felt jealous and lost, deep in fernweh and getting nowhere.

I obsessed for another six months before we finally made a move. There was no sign from the universe—we just headed in a general direction and eliminated certain options the more realistic we were forced to be. As the field narrowed, our minds kept drifting back to the southwest corner of Colorado, where the desert hits the mountains, and where Thomas had said he could imagine us living. I started to see it, too, even though it meant giving up on other versions of the fantasy.

Here’s the thing about a dream town: either it stays in your head, beautiful but naggingly unsatisfying, or at some point it stops being a fantasy and becomes reality. Then you have to live there—pay rent and sit in traffic and take the tough parts along with the good ones. You have to abandon that sense of far sickness, or you’ll ache for the rest of your life.

We now live in Durango, in a rental house two blocks from the Animas. I’m still worried about the rising cost of real estate and the creeping drought. I still awkwardly invite people to dinner, hoping that at some point community will seem effortless. And I still feel that ache whenever my mom sends me pictures from Vermont. But there’s a ski hill nearby, and I can watch the light hit the La Plata Mountains in the morning. My days are adding up to a life I like, even if I’m not always sure I’m living the dream.

The post I Knew It Was Time to Move to a Mountain Town. I Just Didn’t Know Which One. appeared first on �����ԹϺ��� Online.

Editor’s Note: This story is part of our collection of articles covering Mental Health Awareness. It contains sensitive content related to dealing with death and trauma in the mountains. If you or anyone you know is struggling with mental health issues, help is out there. Start with the and its many resources.

She says she still dreams about shoveling her friend’s body out of avalanche debris. The worst day of her life keeps coming back at night.��

And she’s not alone. If you get deep into skiing, especially if you get deep into the backcountry, you might have to acknowledge that the thing you love can kill the people you love. Skiing and trauma are tied together.��

But mountain culture prizes shaking off tragedy. We pretend to be tough and unfazed. To cope we turn deaths into hero stories or we go silent. But if you’re actively ignoring the brutal parts, in any part of your life, the trauma will catch you.

The National Institute of Health defines a traumatic event as a shocking, scary, or dangerous experience that affects someone emotionally. Trauma can look like a lot of different things in the mountains. It’s not just avalanche panic, it could be watching a ski partner get seriously injured, helping with a body recovery, or getting your confidence shaken by a sketchy fall.

And those events impact everyone differently. Some people won’t be fazed by a rescue or a death, but others will suffer from a scary day in the backcountry. It can be almost impossible to say when that will happen, or to who, but that suffering can root deep.

PTSD can manifest in many ways, from exhaustion to hypervigilance. At its worst it can lead to self-harm, or suicide. When it’s less extreme it can look like lashing out at partners, withdrawing or not enjoying the things you used to love. It can be hard to tell where one behavior begins and another ends, or where something like stoniness goes from being helpful to being toxic. It’s also tricky because some of the mechanisms we, as skiers, use to cope, like social drinking or exercising, can also be destructive when they’re taken to the extreme.

Trauma, and the long-term stress it causes, is hard to deal with in any circumstance, and the tough-guy culture that’s endemic to so many mountain towns makes it harder to take the first step toward treatment and care: talking about it.

“It’s very, very difficult to stand up and say, ‘I’m struggling here when I’m supposed to be tough,’” says Dave Richards, Alta’s avalanche director, who has dealt with PTSD and is an advocate for mental health care in the mountains. “A ‘buck up, Chuck’ attitude is pervasive in mountain communities and mountain cultures.”

That unfazed, unbreakable posture is toxic, but it’s germane to life in the mountains, where a certain amount of mental tenacity is crucial. You do need to be stoic in the face of chaos if you’re a ski patroller, and you might need to make hard split-second decisions in backcountry terrain. It’s tricky to bring in the idea that you don’t have to be tough all the time in a culture that—often for good reason—prizes toughness. Or to address the dichotomy that people who are strong, capable, and can suffer through big days in the mountains can also hurt, have long-standing damage, or be vulnerable.

Plus, according to Bobby L’Heureux from , a Vail-based nonprofit that helps provide mental health counseling to those affected by mountain rescue, skiers tend to be highly individualistic. “There’s a lot of shame around asking for help,” he says.

But asking for help is the first, biggest piece of the puzzle.�� According to the NIH, the best way to address trauma in real time is to talk about it with people you trust. The number one predictor of how someone will recover after a traumatic event is how safe they feel in their relationships. It’s crucial to have a community that you’re close to, which can be really difficult to find in a transient ski town full of hard men (and women).

Reverend Dr. Scott K. Beebe, pastor of the Mount of the Holy Cross Lutheran Church and a member of Colorado’s , says the hardest part of treating trauma is starting a conversation about loss and grief. Don’t feel bad or weird about getting help, it means you’re taking care of yourself. Talking through guilt, shame and grief, especially in a cognitive behavioral therapy setting, can help. Knowing why you feel bad peels back the pressure of feeling bad itself. Talking about it takes away some of the shame.

Vulnerability is a tricky road, especially for mental health issues. One of the things that Richards is thinking about a lot these days is how naming the problem can be a big step in getting help and working through it. We need to be talking about it.

For my friend who survived the avalanche, many hours of therapy dealing with survivor’s guilt, the trauma of the experience, and the crushing grief of losing a friend and ski partner have helped to lift the weight. Without it, she says, she might not have been able to return to the mountains she loves at all.��

Acknowledge that it’s real and that it’s hard, and that it can happen to us in the mountains, and then de-stigmatize getting help. We don’t want to let crushing incidents cripple us more.

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Jeremy Jones, big-line snowboarder, splitboarding sage, and fearless-seeming founder of (�ʰ���)— �����ԹϺ���’s Find Your Good fundraising platform—says he was scared to write a book. “I was kind of nervous, but nervousness and excitement go together in my head,” he says. “Whenever I say, ‘I’ve never done something like that before,’ and the thought of that thing freaks me out,��I feel like I have to go toward it.”

Fear, risk, and knowing when to commit to something scary are all big themes in his new book, (October 2022, Mountaineers Books). It’s part philosophy, part backcountry protocol, part memoir about how he’s carved out his unique path as a climate activist, founder of Jones Snowboards, and pioneering athlete. Drawn from decades of journal entries and years of experience, the book is full of stories and tangible tips about how to live and travel well in the backcountry, which we could all use as we think about our personal futures on snow. We asked Jones a few of our burning questions after reading it.

OUTSIDE: What do you hope people get from this book, especially now as backcountry is the fastest growing segment of snow sports?
There’s something terrifying about writing a book about walking into the mountains, which is this incredibly dangerous thing. In the book we tried to dumb it down to basic fundamentals and principles, and broad arching themes. Which is a hard thing to do because snow is so complex.

I see this is a complement to avalanche courses. I don’t consider myself an expert at all, but I have a lot of time in the mountains, and I’ve learned a lot of lessons. I spill those in the book so hopefully people can learn from my mistakes. I think experience is something you get right after you need it.

Speaking of experience, a lot of the book is about your mindset when you’re in serious situations.��
The mental game is equally as critical as the tactical game. The tactical things are the ones you learn in an avalanche course and they’re totally part of my toolkit. But once you kind of have that toolkit the focus becomes “how do I get in the right mindset and figure out what tools to use?” I think that’s a constant challenge. The best of the world deal with it, and I think that’s why so many of the best of the world have close calls or die. It’s not because they don’t know how to dig a snow pit.

Which tools in your box do you use the most?
I have some basic protocols I can do that immediately eliminate some really serious risk. You never eliminate it all, but I love having those personal protocols that I can lean on. For instance, with Teton Gravity Research (the film company his brothers founded), we always talk about clean terrain. We ride big lines, but they have a runout, and you know what’s below you and around you, which helps keep you safe. You can break protocol, but you have to talk about it with your partners, and once you do, you know the stakes are way up. You know you’re crossing a line.

You mentioned language. Communication sounds like an important tool, too.
I’ve been thinking a lot about framing. Like, at the trailhead if you say, “We’re going to start up toward Widowmaker,” instead of “We’re going to go ride the Widowmaker,” now everyone in the crew is like, “this is a maybe.” It changes expectations.��

How did you learn all this stuff?
I’m such a product of the people I’ve been in the mountains with. I’ve done a lot of formal education, but a lot of it was informal mentorship, seeing someone farther down the road than me and watching and asking questions. At the root of it is this curiosity, which is crucial for all things in the mountains. As for [finding] mentors, the key is to not overreach. Find a person you admire who is a few steps higher on the rung of knowledge and then draft. You can move up the ladder, passing people along the way and finding people higher up to learn from, but if you start reaching for the top too soon, it can be overwhelming and you’re bound to fall.

You’ve been a real mentor to a lot of people in the world of climate change, which feels like it’s the biggest challenge for the future of snow sports. Any advice for how we can be good advocates and stewards?
I think you just have to start. Early on, I lost a lot of sleep over getting POW started. It took me a while to be vocal about the climate stuff because unfortunately climate is politicized, and anything political you start talking about brings��conflict into your life. But we can’t avoid conflict if we’re going to avoid the most pressing issue of our generation. Adapt or Die is my new mantra.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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The annual , held in the picturesque Canadian mountain town,��is a celebration of creativity in the outdoor filmmaking word today. This year’s edition started on October 29 and will go through this weekend—if you weren’t able to attend it��in person, you can buy to digitally screen the films, or wait for to come to a town or city near you. Banff also kicks off the awards and festival seasons, so keep these films on your radar.

A Baffin Vacation (13 minutes)

“Consider taking your sweetheart to Baffin Island, it’s surrounded by literally nothing,” the narrator deadpans in the Wes Anderson-esque intro to . In the film, sweethearts Erik Boomer, a noted expedition kayaker, and Sarah McNair-Landry, the youngest person to visit the North and South Pole, set off on a 70-day expedition in the heart of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, crossing soon-to-melt ice sheets, climbing huge mountains, and paddling first descents. The two shot everything in the film themselves, and captured both stunning scenery and their own real-life emotions. We see McNair-Landry waiting in an eddy as Boomer runs a huge, never-before-paddled waterfall. She’s trying to calm her own nerves and support her partner as she wrestles with the fear of what could happen and the reality of how far they are from rescue. The film is both funny and raw.

Beyond Begbie (15 minutes)

“We put names on places that have to do with the land, you’ll never find an Indigenous place name that’s after a person,” says Shelly Boyd, a leader of the Sinixt First Nations Peoples, in . The film features Indigenous athletes and guides who unpack the colonization of the Canadian Rockies, and the legacy of white settlers who eliminated Native populations and named peaks and other landmarks.��It looks most closely at Mount Begbie, the peak that sits above the town of Revelstoke—it is named after Sir Matthew Begbie, a judge known for sentencing Native men to death. Names matter, Boyd and others argue, and we can’t get out from under colonialism until we excise the ghosts from the place names around us.

Sheri (24 minutes)

Pack rafts have become so ubiquitous in river running that you might not realize the raft’s modern iteration��was developed relatively recently by a middle-aged mom fighting chronic fatigue syndrome. “I took a lot of hits from people—I’m an older woman and I’m building boats,” says Sheri Tingey, the founder of Alpacka Rafts. “I decided I’m going to let the boats talk for themselves.” In , Tingey, who was also a ski bum, clothing company founder, and high-level kayaker, outlines the misogyny and dismissal she’s faced, and the drive that kept her going. The most fun parts of the film are the snippets from her community and her co-workers, including her son, Thor, who now runs the company. They highlight what a fun, weird, hard-nosed iconoclast she is.

The Approach 2 (23 minutes)

Until recently, ski stoke films were often a stale repository of shots of white dudes sending, but thankfully that’s starting to change. Filmmakers are bringing in more diverse skiers, and a needed dose of levity, humor, and reality. The opening scene of The Approach 2 lets you know that the film is part of that movement. It starts with adaptive skier Anna Soens stomping through pillowy powder on a sit ski, and makes you realize that an advantage of the device is the face shots. The film has plenty of serious skiing—for instance, Washington skier Sophia Rouches hucks the notorious , and then heads straight to Alaska for big lines—but it also has needed context about how it can be hard to break into the ski world as someone who doesn’t fit the able-bodied, white dude mold. “That’s the thing about adaptive sports, we’re constantly adapting,” says Vasu Sojitra, one of the skiers featured in the film.

Deep in the Heart (100 minutes)

When I think about Texas, wildlife isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, but showed me that my conception of the state was narrow and wrong. The film is narrated by actor Matthew McConaughey, whose dulcet tones verge on pornographic when he starts to talk about deer rutting season. It is lush, visually stunning, and surprising. The film is broadly about restoration and conservation: how threatened species like bison have come back from the brink of being wiped out; how the nearly mythical ocelot became so rare; and how people can make the future of wildlife diversity less grim. It covers the geographic breadth of the state, from the high plains, to the ocean, and it feels like David Attenborough’s Planet Earth, if Texas was the whole planet.

The Hermit of Treig (78 minutes)

The outdoor world often romanticizes hermits. We love a remote cabin and a fire lookout. But we don’t often talk about what happens when the folks who strike out on their own get older and need some support. Director Lizzie MacKenzie’s emotional film, , is about Ken Smith, a Scottish hermit who has lived in long cabin on the edge of remote Lake Trieg for 40 years. We see Smith, who is in his 70s, work through the beautiful and painful parts of living off the land alone, and think about what the rest of his time on earth might look like.

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In Aspen, Colorado, the housing situation is so grim that the ski area is offering up kickbacks to potential landlords. This season, if you rent a spare bedroom or a mother-in-law unit to an Aspen Skiing Company employee at a fair market rate, the resort will give you one of three perks:��a ski season pass, lift ticket vouchers, or a $1,200 gift certificate. Tenants for Turns, as company officials call��the program, is meant to combat the current housing shortage exacerbated by COVID, because it’s become almost impossible to house all the workers needed to keep the ski area running.

Jim Laing, Aspen Skiing Company’s chief human resources officer, says the resort actually piloted the program two decades ago during another housing shortage. It resurrected the incentive last year, after COVID transplants upended a housing market that was already under pressure. By early in the season Aspen officials��were sweating their staffing because they were short on beds for employees, so they threw out the idea to see if anyone would bite. “We had to try to be creative, so Tenants for Turns was resurrected,” Laing says. “We thought, ‘Let’s reach out to the community try to solve [the housing problem] together.’”

Laing says resort officials think it’s been successful so far. Last year, they placed 32 employees into housing through the program, and this year, they already have 82 beds filled.

It’s a fractional number of their employees, though. During peak season, the ski area employs around 4,000 people, 1,500 of which are first-year employees, who are most likely to need housing. Laing knows Tenants for Turns is��not a solution to Aspen’s housing shortage, but it’s one of many stopgaps the company is putting in place to try to retain employees. “It’s a small percentage, but every bed is huge for us,” Laing says.

Aspen is using Tenants for Turns to chip away at the housing problem that’s crushing desirable recreation towns around the country. It’s a numbers problem, it’s a space problem, it’s an affordability problem, and it’s a planning problem, and it’s particularly heightened��in ski towns—the—which are hotbeds of second homes and necessitate an influx of seasonal workers to bump chairs and serve beers.

Aspen, where the current median home price is $3.2 million, has been on the leading edge of affordability issues for a long time. But it’s also been out ahead of the curve on housing solutions. In the 1970s, it was the first mountain town to build affordable housing, which, at the time, was predominantly found in��urban areas.

This current shortage isn’t a surprise, and the town has been working on creating more housing options for years. For instance, in 2017, Aspen Skiing Company built a collection of 40 tiny homes on a former campground. But 2017 was before COVID, when highly paid professionals gained the option to work remotely, a change that took out a chunk of seasonal rentals, and changed the baseline for pricing. “When COVID hit, it went from really tough to find housing, to almost critical,” Laing says.

It’s not just Aspen. Towns and employers across ski country are trying to come up with creative solutions to workforce housing shortages. Last year, the town of�� Crested Butte, Colorado, bought a bed and breakfast to house locals, and set a short-term rental moratorium in place. In nearby Ouray, Colorado, a group of business owners pooled resources to buy a hotel so they could offer their workers housing. Other Colorado mountain towns such as Breckenridge and Salida have set aside what they call SOS, Safe Outdoor Spaces, where people who are employed locally can stay and sleep in their vehicles.

Those solutions are frequently controversial, and none of them is perfect. For instance, if you page through the Tenants for Turns rental options, like I did, you’ll see that most of available housing is located farther down the Roaring Fork Valley in the towns of Carbondale, Basalt, or Glenwood Springs, nearly an hour away from the ski hill (albeit on the bus line) and none of it is particularly cheap. But it’s something.

“There’s no silver bullet. If there was, we would all be doing it,” Laing says. He says that Tenants for Turns is one of the myriad of ways they’re trying to stanch the bleed of employees who can’t find housing. They’re trying to employ locals who already live in town and might need part-time work. They’ve bought more tiny houses, and are trying to build employee housing down valley, on the bus line, where land is marginally cheaper. “Not everyone loves the idea, but we’re looking wherever there’s space available,” he says.

There’s a paradigm shift necessary to keep mountain towns livable. Otherwise the communities hollow out, and the resorts can’t operate. And maybe it’s his job to be positive, but Laing told me that Tenants for Turns gave him some hope because it’s proof that locals are paying attention to the housing crisis, and it’s seeding the kind of social change necessary to make housing available: density, affordability, limited vacation rentals, and community buy-in. “We’re working on it full time,” he says. “The community is working on it full time. It’s just a process, it’s not an event. We’ll never cross the finish line.”

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