Why yes let’s deforest the side of a mountain so we can run down it and possibly hit trees at fatal speeds. Im fucking glad climate change is making this bougie bullshit harder to do. I went skiing once, horrible experience. Everyone in the skiing lodge was a rich white asshole and it felt like I walked into a country club, no a hitler youth recreation club. If you own a timeshare let alone an entire house at a ski resort you deserve the fucking wall!!!
Most winter sports are pretty
since white people are the only freaks who actually kinda like the cold.I say this as a Mayo myself who enjoys the snow.
Most winter sports are pretty
since white people are the only freaks who actually kinda like the cold.i feel like this is ahistoric
Inuit and Siberian natives are white people, actually.
Yes. My comment wasn’t meant as a serious historical analysis.
Counterpoint (there’s no way that it hasn’t been mentioned yet but I’m lazy and not going to look for it elsewhere)…
More white people die skiing than golfing.
Why does every fucking cartoon have an episode about it fuck you
Easier to draw/animate, perhaps?
That one Bond movie has a really iconic action sequence with it and it was used to good effect for gags in Loony Toons, so I think it’s mainly imitating those though idk
deleted by creator
“I used to be able to afford skiing when my parents paid for it but now I can’t” lmao sorry you lost the financial backing of your middle to upper class parents, can’t relate to any of that. No I’m not salty what are you talking about?
Touch snow
Fun fact, the OG big covid wave in my country was almost single handedly brought in by bougie skiiers partying in Austria, in the middle of a pandemic.
They just had to go skii, in a pandemic.
The genetic variant testing has revealed that not a single actual wave or mass spread ever happened here from outside the circles of bougie whiteness, no matter how hard they tried to make headlines of the “Chinese tourist” with covid.
And the fact that energy is spent in putting fake snow on the ground for these people so they can do their sport in climate change destroyed mountains is also a thing. They fly to these places to ski on artificial snow…
Not to mention how this “sport” and the tourism done in Lapland around it exploits and robs Sami peoples lands.
Wait they use fake snow? I know places thst have machines that make real snow, but it has to be cold enough
I mean the snow making machines, afaik they use a lot of energy. Where I live those are used to put snow into the cross-country ski routes that are everywhere as well.
The petty bourge loves this sport too, it makes them feel like they are properly doing their protestant seld-discipline. It has a lot of male coded and toughness coded undertones, there are a lot of sayings about skiing and “toughness”. Ski route rage is a real thing that happens here as a result.
Fake as in not from the sky, but made on the ground with one of those machines. They consume around 20 GWh of power per year in every large alpine ski area[1].
My parents are skiing right now 😆 🔫
Disown your parents
We haven’t really spoken in over a year. They are Biden libs. We also never went skiing when I was a kid because we were too poor. But my parents inherited some money so = skiing.
isn’t the problem with golf the amount of urban space and absurd amount of water it requires? (and, like, country-clubs have a history of de jure racial exclusivity.) like, class resentment is very understandable, but this sounds like someone who hasn’t carved fresh powder, ya know?
You clearly don’t have an adequate appreciation for how bad golf is if you think this is an appropriate comparison
Not to mention in most cases the town or county or state for all intents and purposes sells the land of the mountain to a private corpo to sell ski passes to you as if a fucking mountain is not a public good.
And bonus info on Protect the Peaks as Klee Benally just died, sometimes white people steal mountains that are sacred to local tribes and destroy them with skiing, massive tree clearing, etc.
It’s pretty fun. I don’t think anyone who has to drive a long way and pay big for outdoor clothes and equipment rental is having fun though.
Some of the nicest memories I have are stunting on rich tourists in fifteen year old thrift store gear that got refurbished at a shop in the off season.
It’s nice to go fast.
unlike golf its a manner of conveyance so its weird to say its ‘bourgeois’ if theres people that just do it to get around snowy areas. the big resorts are great cancers on the landscape and society of the mountain though. rich assholes buy up all the property and all the required peons are immiserated having to make long dangerous commutes from adjacent towns or semi-indentured on-location
I hope you’re not implying that there’s anything redeemable about skiing.
It’s a good means for traversing snowy terrain?
This would only be a defense of cross country skiing though.
i dont think theres a problem if someone got out some skis to go somewhere around their snow-bound community instead of snow shoes. you decide if that’s applicable to the redemption of the “sport” ig
Should isolated mountain town communities even exist though that necessitate such means of travel? Like why the fuck should anyone be living in Tahoe, Aspen, ect?
Hexbear when someone lives outside of an urban center:
A lot of those isolated mountain communities serve railways, at least they do in Canada. Jasper has a busy railyard and there’s main line that goes right by Banff. Same with a bunch in BCs interior.
A lot of mountain towns used to be mining communities. Colorado and Montana used to be hotbeds for the IWW.
The youth yearn for the mines moment. Mining is a shitty job and not a suitable industry to build a city off of.
The youth yearn for the mines moment.
What does this have to do with what I said?
Mining is a shitty job
Yes.
and not a suitable industry to build a city off of.
Uh, some of the biggest non-coastal cities in the world were built around mining.
And how sustainable is this industry? Under a planned economy mines would be phased out, all those mining towns, the people relocated into the city, retrained to clean toilets or something. Mining towns should be abandoned not turned into tourist traps.
uhh there’s normal towns in mountains. stuff like pastoralists, high-altitude agriculture, mines, forestry, without getting into any modern tourist/recreation bs
fuck it I will go to the mat for skiing. not those monstrous resorts but cross-country skiing and also backcountry skiing are both fun, except for the avalanches that kill at least one of your friends every year.
you literally cannot walk around where i live because of snow from november to late april but the city bike paths all get groomed for nordic skiing so its an actually a very viable way to get around
Does anyone around you use kicksleds? Remember them being all over when I was a child but haven’t seen one in years.
Do Americans think skiing in general is the same as alpine? Skiing isn’t any more bougie than going for a hike.
I’d argue alpine skiing isn’t bougie if you live within two to three hours of a mountain. Secondhand equipment is cheap, and lift tickets were affordable until relatively recently.
Yeah, I disliked it because it felt crowded and I felt pressured into it by my family, but I grew up in an area much closer than two hours and there was never a significant class element to it as far as I could tell. Kids who didn’t have their own equipment, like me, would just borrow. Maybe as an adult there’s more complicated stuff that you need specific gear for but I couldn’t tell back then.
Adult sporting equipment in general is hard to find because if you’re an adult who plays a sport you probably really like it and use the equipment until it’s busted. Kids grow out of stuff, or lose interest.
I can’t find adult ice skates in thrift stores ever. I’ve been on the hunt for a while, might have to just bite the bullet and spend $150 CAD on a new pair.
Only exception is golf gear because rich guys like buying new equipment.
Now that I don’t live with my parents, nor can they pay for my ski passes, I can’t imagine spending $100-200 for a ski pass, plus the cost of driving to and from a ski-hill that’s 90 minutes away from me :(
I don’t know where you are, but where I live this has never been the sort of second hand stuff that is even remotely accessible to poor people.
I have been able to alpine ski about twice in my life. With rented equipment. Plenty of places around me for doing it, the lift tickets alone make it way too expensive.
And when it comes to cross country, which is a kind of national sport where I live, we all did do that as kids. But, it isn’t cheap. Plenty of kids can’t afford the equipment and those who have the good stuff obviously enjoy it more and don’t get laughed at.
During covid year one me and my partner thought about doing it again as it’s outdoors, but soon found out there is no way poor folks buy even cross country adult skiis that are actually usable. Used isn’t all that cheap either.
There are endless tax payer money maintained ski routes in this country during winter that take over walking routes, hiking routes etc. You are not allowed to do anything there but ski during the ski season. The people who do it are all upper middle class or otherwise in a position where they can afford the equipment. The poors don’t even get to use the area for walking during this time.
I don’t know where you are, but where I live this has never been the sort of second hand stuff that is even remotely accessible to poor people.
Good point, the availability of secondhand equipment isn’t something that ever crossed my mind.
I grew up in the California Bay Area. The PMC types buy equipment, use them for a season or less, then get rid of them on Craigslist and/or yard sales—the surplus drives the prices way down, especially during off-season. It’s still too expensive if you’re struggling to put food on the table and pay rent, but it’s viable if there’s breathing room in the budget.
In the 90s and 00s a decent set up of used jackets, pants, helmets, skis, and boots could be had for under $100, and last you for well over a decade. Hell, my dad is still using gear he bought in the 90s.
Gear is more expensive now. We recently had to kit up my cousin’s bf, and we managed to scrounge everything for $155. He’s a min wage worker, but in our cultures multigenerational living is the norm, and that reduces the cost of living enough that spending that much won’t put him in the red. He also didn’t have spend everything at once, because our family could loan him whatever he was missing while we searched for good deals.
Lift tickets also aren’t what they used to be. Growing up, lift tickets at smaller resorts could be had for $10-15, so overall the sport was affordable for working class refugees with only a highschool education and a middling income. Now the cheapest lift tickets at the smallest resorts are $25, and that price is only available once a month.
Had my parents fled to the US now or within the last decade instead of when they did in the 80s, we wouldn’t have been a skiing family. With the increase of lift ticket prices, we remain a skiing family only because we have all the gear already, and living with my parents lets me save up enough to buy us season passes. If I were living on my own I wouldn’t be able to afford it, nor would my parents since they’re on a fixed income.
Skiing with family and friends are some of my fondest memories, and introducing new people to the sport and watching them fall in love with it is phenomenal. Watching year after year as that joy becomes increasingly out of reach for the working class is enraging. Don’t even get me started on the insulting, increasingly low pay of resort workers, destroying another solid avenue that working class kids used to use to afford slope time.
You could never really be poor and ski around here, but to the average middle class family it was doable. Now only those in, just below, or above the upper middle class can afford it. It’s only going to get more bougie from here on out, which is a travesty.
There are endless tax payer money maintained ski routes in this country during winter that take over walking routes, hiking routes etc. You are not allowed to do anything there but ski during the ski season. The people who do it are all upper middle class or otherwise in a position where they can afford the equipment. The poors don’t even get to use the area for walking during this time.
That blows big time, I’m sorry. While the resort slopes are exclusive to skiers, the miles and miles and miles of hiking trails in the Sierra Nevada are open to regular and snowshoe hikers, as well as cross country skiers. Y’all are getting hosed. We’re all getting hosed. Death to capitalism.
deleted by creator
I couldn’t afford downhill skiing as a child (and we lived right next to a ski hill) and I am still vaguely resentful. Used to bring a sled up the hill by foot and go down it though. The only way I got to learn how fun it is was my mum winning a union raffle for a skiing weekend.
My brother twisted his ankle the first day, so it wasn’t very fun for him, but that is what we call a skill issue.
Yeah, every criticism I’ve seen in this thread applied exclusively to alpine skiing, and almost exclusively to alpine resorts.
Cross-country is basically just Other Snowshoeing. Brand new gear costs maybe a couple hundred bucks, used gear is perfectly functional and ubiquitous (at least here in Canada) and the only infrastructure or anything that needs to exist is just snow having fallen.
