Ski Town Life | Kim Kircher

No one really likes the word “failure”. Especially not Americans.

I’ve heard it called a “tolerance for adversity” and “character building”. When a person’s

Can ski town life teach you to find your grit?

world turns on it’s ear, she often hears “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” When John got sick, my mom told me, “God never gives us more than we can handle.”

So apparently, there’s a consensus, or at least an underlying recognition, that hardship is good for you. It’s a part of life, so we might as well embrace it.

For a while there, I thought if I moved to a ski area, filling my days with adventure and excitement and a little bit of forced hardship, then I’d fill my quota. I thought if I kept adventuring real adversity wouldn’t find me. But it doesn’t work that way. At least not for very long. Read the rest of this entry →

Dirtbags Love Shotskis

In my ongoing series So You Want To Move to a Ski Town, I’d like to offer today’s post on one of the more nuanced elements of ski town life: how to drink from a shotski.

A shotski is a drinking tool. Made from an old, unmounted ski (or snowboard, but that would be called a shotsnowboard, which doesn’t quite have the same ring to it), a shotski requires a certain measure of panache.

Every ski town bar has one of these babies hanging on the wall somewhere. Some enterprising bartender has taken an old ski and epoxied several shot glasses to the top sheet. Here’s how you do it with style: Read the rest of this entry →