Modern ski bum adapts to a housing crisis
By Sage Sauerbrey, Moonshine Ink Staff
Ninety-nine percent of the species to live on Earth are extinct. Meteors. Over-hunting. Low sex drive. Extinction has taken many forms over the years, but the uncontested winner is habitat loss. Enter the modern Lake Tahoe ski bum.
Shackled with an incompatible ratio between median income and median home price, the modern ski bum’s diminishing habitat is fueling an extinction that could mean the end of the ski town as we know it. (At least low sex drive isn’t the issue.)
The caveat to calling out extinction in this case, however, is defining the culture that is threatened. A bum is commonly viewed as existing on society’s periphery; their time spent goes by relatively unnoticed. But in ski towns this has never been the case.
Here, the ski bum has always been the protagonist, a cultural icon exemplify the reason we all shovel our way through Sierra winters and make the sacrifices necessary to live in a mountain town. But are we losing this unspoken hero? As ski towns become increasingly gentrified, the ski bum has two choices common in the natural world: disappear, or adapt and evolve. To find out which, we spoke with a handful of local icons to define this endangered culture, and how it’s holding on.
I lived the Ski Bum life in Aspen during 1966-67. I got my Season Pass by working the lunch hour making milkshakes atop Ajax Mountain, and got to eat for free there. I lived at the “Independence” Rooming House located in the center of town, an easy walk to Little Nel. At the Independence, we had a small community kitchenette (no stove/oven), a large community living room, community bath-shower houses separate for men & women. Note: the ladies’ bath-tub sa under a window that could be opened, so you could chat to your friends walking by outside.
There was a resident manager living at the Independence, so the place stayed safe, sane and clean. The men’s rooms were upstairs and the women’s rooms were downstairs. There were 2 to a room, and lucky for me – my roommate had a boyfriend, so she was rarely there! It was a great gig!
Men usually made more money than the gals, so often-times I would be invited to cook dinner for different guys (at their residences); they purchased the food & I cooked. Fun! I left town on a bus (Greyhound I believe), as I had purchased a 99-day bus pass so I could travel the states & go visit lots of the folks I met in Aspen! I usually slept on the bus at night, (you could rent a pillow for a quarter), and during the days I put my suitcase in a bus-station locker while I went visiting and touring. You certainly couldn’t do that today!
I don’t know why the big employers in Mountain towns – such as Heavenly/Vail, Casinos, Squaw/Alpine don’t rework some of the old motels into quasi-rooming houses… With a Resident Manager to keep things safe, sane and clean. With the resorts developing year-round access/amenities – you may get more year-round employees who want to live the mountain life on the shoe-string wages paid by these employers!