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Leave a Little Magic for the Rest of Us

By

Andrew Ross

Chris Trajkovski chasing stuff on Mount Mansfield. Photo: Karl Lipsky

Chris Trajkovski chasing stuff on Mount Mansfield. Photo: Karl Lipsky

On February 3, 2025, my high school classmate and occasional touring partner, Chris, texted me a link to a video from Ryan Delena, a New-England-based skier and emerging influencer whose posts have been popping up in my social media feeds more frequently lately, and probably yours, too. Instead of featuring Ryan’s trademark aggressive skiing in…

Responses

  1. Scotsman

    I’ve been watching some of Delena’s videos and living in Washington state , am amazed by the scarcity of good lines in the NE. I watch the videos and the thin lines through all those tress and think, thank God I live here.
    Many of the local stashes near my home mountain have become overrun with new BC skiers. Mainly young, they find the runs through a mapping app and use the names on the mapping app, in their social media posts and not the names we old farts call them.
    I don’t mind it too much and accept it as the a result of the growth of our sport ( although I admit I do resent the guiding companies who use these same areas for clients, showing up with 8 person groups).
    The difference from what I can tell is that when i want to escape the crowding , I just go further out into the BC and find all the untracked snow I could every want. This is obviously different in the NE and I have empathy for the old timers that find their scarce resource now overrun.

    I understand the nostalgia for the times past ( although I often think of a phrase I read that said nostalgia is just old people lying about how good it was !) but the cat is out of the bag and modern mapping apps are here to stay and entice people into the best runs.

    I think Delena’s eventual nuanced approach to the mapping in question was a good compromise and I’m impressed by the young man’s openness and thoughtful approach.

    As to Only Show, NotTell….. that is the unwritten rule amongst my cadre of skiing miscreants and we still have a run called Dick Cheney ( it’s in an undisclosed location and you get face shots!) that would result in excommunication if mapped on social media.

  2. Andrew Ross

    Thanks for reading, Scotsman. The more I talk to the “old timers,” the more I’m surprised (in a good way) by everyone’s zen-like acceptance of the inevitable – like you said, the cat is out of the bag. It’s helped shape the way I look at the issue; it was interesting to see my own opinions evolve in real time as I interviewed the people featured in this article.

  3. Matthew Kaso

    If you’ve ever been to Talkeetna, Alaska and walked into the Fairview Inn your greeted by a giant mural perched above the bar of a big Griz cresting a high point and (what i like to imagine anyhow) he’s seeing Denali and the central Alaska Range for the first time. That’s the magic Andrew is talking about in his title. I think the title alone is worth contemplating. I’ll never forget the excitement of thrashing our way up a well known roadside couloir in the Sierra and then laying eyes on the most striking, aesthetic couloir I’d ever seen a little deeper in the range. And just like that another adventure was hatched. It’s a nice memory because it happened organically and that is the magic that sometimes gets lost in translation of the over sharing age we exist in. To be clear I’m not anti guidebook, etc but like a nice bottle of tequila the rule of everything in moderation applies here, and maybe just maybe some of the magic won’t die if you leave a little extra in the bottle for the rest of us.

    1. Peter Vordenberg

      Well said Matt. Amen. And also cheers!

    2. Andrew Ross

      Well said x 2! Thanks for sharing that memory – sounds like there’s more to that story.

  4. Scotsman

    I’m not sure this mythologizing of the ” magic of being show a new line ” isn’t just another justification for patently obvious gatekeeping.
    Not that gatekeeping isn’t a part of BC skiing, but we should just be honest about it as I think the author is being.
    Having, through longevity and frequency assumed the mantle of “local ” , I can with some honestly say that the , and to quote the author,” inner circle of local skiers” can be the most condescending, judgmental and self-important bunch of people I know, myself included.

    I’m a local here and don’t want outsiders skiing my secret stash and want to retain the magic of showing someone my stash for the first time but I’m going to Europe next week and spent the morning looking up GPX tracks for tours so I don’t fall in a crevasse and bust my creaky ass or get lost.

    As I say, I have empathy for the local skiers in this instance as these are ” underground”, pruned lines and scarce but I think we can all be a bit hypocritical when it comes to “outsiders” discovering our coveted lines.

    Never been a sentimentalist and I find all this mythologizing a bit much at times. But thank God we are all different.

    1. Andrew Ross

      Great points, Scotsman. And you’re right – everyone’s a hypocrite. The question is whether or not we choose to recognize that, and whether we allow that recognition to inform how we treat other people… I appreciate your straight shooting take here! The line about GPX tracks in Europe made me laugh.

      For me, though, the magic goes a lot farther than seeing/being shown a new line for the first time. The magic is how skiing can force us to interact with the real world, and the real people in it. You meet a lot of cool people that way…

      A buddy of mine said this article reminded him of a quote from artist Geoff McFetridge, who sums it all up in one line better than I did in this entire article: “Skiing is my user interface with the world.” (That may be a paraphrase). But you get the idea. It’s not just the lines, OR the snow, OR the mountains, OR the people – it’s all of it. And and and.

  5. Peter H

    I think the notion that nostalgia for the days of exploration, failure, success and discovery is gatekeeping, is misguided. It’s not about withholding information but rather acknowledging that something is lost when you can follow a blue dot and a blue line to an objective with essentially no effort aside from the physical. The new digital tools are here to stay and I no doubt use them along side my analog materials and good old intuition. But we should strive to conserve values in the community. If you’re looking at your phone more than your surroundings, your missing the point. As Emerson said, “life is a journey, not a destination” and there’s no doubt he took this from Zen teachings, “it’s better to travel well than arrive”. It’s not about keeping people out, but about keeping and building the spirit of adventure IN the community. To fail a few times only to eventually unlock a zone and find your way to the top of a line you have eyed for a long time makes it story rather than data in the cloud. Thanks High Route for keeping the spirit of adventure alive.

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