Field Notes

Hunter’s Non-love For Skiing

“Thanks for the kind offer (to write an article for Powder), but skiing has always struck me as a foot fetishist’s answer to golf – and I can’t quite get into it. O.K.?”

In 1977, the newly-founded Powder Magazine politely asked the prolific gonzo writer and Aspen resident Hunter S. Thompson to submit a story to them. His answer to them was a resounding NO, and the editors ran it on the Letters page, along with their own snarky response. To this day, it’s unclear if Thompson ever skied despite living in a ski town for almost 40 years until his passing in 2005.

He did however spend many a boozy night at the Woody Creek Tavern, which became his unofficial headquarters. There, he held court with friends, journalists and political allies.

Like in 1970, when Thompson ran for the office of sheriff of Pitkin County, which includes Aspen. His bold, deeply satirical campaign, mixed radical ideas with genuine political reform, was his way of challenging the political establishment and shake up local politics, and he labelled the ticket Freak Power. Some of his proposals included renaming Aspen “Fat City” in order to deter future developers, decriminalising personal drug use, and replacing the asphalt in the streets with grass.

Needless to say, Thompson didn’t win the election.

Country Roads to the Rockies

One famous Aspen resident who in fact did ski, and a lot to that, was the late John Denver – the singer-songwriter who became one of the biggest recording artists of the 1970s.

During a camping trip Denver fell in love with the Colorado mountains, and in 1971, he built a home overlooking the valley in Aspen. He wrote of this in his hit song Rocky Mountain High, which was released the following year:

He was born in the summer of his 27th year Comin’ home to a place he’d never been before

However, Denver’s artistic and creative output and quality abruptly declined soon after his move to Aspen, and he would never again reach the heights he had in the late 60s and early 70s.

He was an avid skier though, as evidenced by the (rather horrific) music video for his 1980 song Dancing With the Mountains. It features a singing Denver skiing powder in a green, onepiece ski suit and fashionable sunglasses, with his hair flowing in the wind. This video is just another piece of proof that uniting skiing with popular culture rarely creates magic.

Vive le Mono

On a bright morning at the Grands Montets ski area in Chamonix, France – long before snowboards crowded the lift lines, a different kind of silhouette caught the eye. Wide, single planks, bindings set side by side, and riders with outstretched arms carving impossible arcs down the glacier. They called it the monoski – and for a moment in time, it felt like the future of skiing.

In Chamonix, it wasn’t just a sport, it was theatre. Monoskiers dressed as clowns, throwing themselves into jumps, spraying snow at café terraces, and embodying the carefree spirit of La Glisse – the French movement that turned sliding on snow into art, play, and rebellion. They skied with a looseness, a joy, a refusal to take the mountains too seriously.

For a generation, the monoski represented freedom. It was faster than early snowboards, smoother than skis in powder, and it carried a style all its own. Though fashions shifted and the snowboard stole the limelight, those who remember Grands Montets in its monoski heyday recall more than a piece of equipment. They remember laughter echoing down the valley, colour against the white slopes, and the sense that sliding on snow could be as much about joy as about control. Trends may come and go, but the spirit of the mono remains.

The Man Who Skied Down Everest

In May 1970, Japanese skier Yūichirō Miura set out to do something no one had tried before – ski down Mount Everest. From the South Col at 8,000 metres he clipped in, a parachute strapped to his back as a brake, and pointed his skis onto the icy Lhotse Face.

The descent was short, just over 600 metres, but extraordinary. Miura-san accelerated to more than 160 km/h before losing control. He fell, sliding and tumbling for 400 metres before the parachute slowed him to a stop just above a crevasse. He walked away shaken, cut and bruised, but with no broken bones.

The attempt was captured in the film The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1975), which later won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The triumph was shadowed by loss: six Sherpas from the expedition never returned, killed in avalanches and accidents.

“Skiing has always struck me as a foot fetishist's answer to golf.”

Miura’s run was not a full descent, but it pushed the boundaries of what was imaginable at high altitude. He went on to build a long life in the mountains, returning to Everest decades later as a climber. In 2013, at the age of 80, he reached the summit once again – the oldest person ever to stand there.

Skiing on the Big Screen

Skiing has always looked beautiful in real life, but on the big screen it has rarely translated. Hollywood has tried, usually reducing it to a gimmick or a backdrop for slapstick. The James Bond franchise is guilty of this: Roger Moore skiing away from bad guys with Union Jack parachutes and machine guns might be memorable, but it turns skiing into a cartoon rather than a sport. Other attempts, like Hot Dog… The Movie (1984) or Aspen Extreme (1993), drowned in clichés, wooden dialogue and clumsy action sequences that confused skiing with soft-core drama. The camera struggles to capture what skiing really feels like – the speed, the solitude, the subtle shifts of balance. Too often it becomes a set piece, edited into fragments that lose the rhythm and flow that make skiing compelling.

The lone exception is Michael Ritchie’s Downhill Racer (1969). Starring Robert Redford and Gene Hackman, it stripped skiing of glamour and captured its cold, competitive edge. Long, quiet shots of racers waiting their turn, the terrifying speed of the downhill, and the tension between individual ambition and team sacrifice made it as much about character as about sport. It remains the only true ski film Hollywood ever got right.

Climbing on the Big Screen

If skiing and cinema have never truly worked out, climbing has proved the opposite. Somehow the camera understands verticality better than velocity. And no, we’re not talking about Sylvester Stallone dangling from a helicopter in Cliffhanger (1993), but a wave of extraordinary documentaries that have brought the raw drama of climbing to the big screen.

Meru (2015) set the tone – Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker capturing the desperate, frostbitten push up the Shark’s Fin in the Himalaya, blending intimate storytelling with impossible footage. The Dawn Wall (2017) followed Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson’s improbable ascent of El Capitan’s blankest face, pairing an almost absurd physical feat with a deeply human backstory of trauma, obsession and perseverance. Valley Uprising (2014) told the countercultural saga of Yosemite climbing, mixing archive footage, anarchic characters and a spirit of rebellion that redefined outdoor adventure.

Then came Free Solo (2018), Alex Honnold’s ropeless climb of El Capitan, where every frame seemed to balance on the edge of mortality – cinema that made palms sweat and hearts stop. The movie won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and rightfully so.

These films work because climbing is inherently cinematic: it is man against gravity, life measured in fingertip holds and fragile ropes, stories written in vertical lines of stone.

The Forgotten Hero

In 1996, Swedish adventurer Göran Kropp completed one of the most audacious missions in mountaineering history – an expedition so pure and stubborn that it has become legend. Refusing all shortcuts, he loaded a bicycle with more than 100 kilos of gear and pedalled from Stockholm to Nepal. Thirteen thousand kilometres later, after winter roads, deserts and mountain passes, he finally arrived at Everest. But the ride was only the prelude.

On the mountain Kropp turned down Sherpa support and bottled oxygen, carrying every load himself. His first attempt ended in retreat, just short of the top. Most would have quit. Kropp recovered, launched again, and on 23 May 1996 he stood alone on Everest’s summit, lungs searing in the thin air. It was the same storm-ravaged season chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, when many climbers perished. Kropp survived, descended under his own power, and when the ordeal was over, he climbed back on his bike and rode all the way home to Sweden. The entire expedition had taken a full year.

For Kropp, this Everest odyssey was not about fame but about stripping adventure to its rawest form: self-reliance, endurance, and imagination. Tragically, his story ended far too soon. In 2002, while climbing near his new home in Seattle in the US, a fall claimed his life at just 35 years old.

Kropp’s Everest mission remains one of the purest expressions of human will ever seen in the mountains – a feat so complete it is unlikely to ever be matched.

Le Tour Alternatif

In the summer of 2021, Australian professional cyclist Lachlan Morton set out to do the Tour de France differently. While the professional peloton was cocooned in team buses, hotels, and soigneurs, Morton embarked on what became known as The Alt Tour – a solo, self-supported odyssey that traced not only the race route but also the long transfers in between. His rules were simple: ride every kilometre, carry his own gear, fix his own problems, and set up his tent to sleep wherever he stopped.

The contrast with the grand tours could not have been starker. The Tour de France is a machine – marginal gains calculated to the gram, calories weighed out, riders shielded from fatigue by layers of staff and logistics. Morton’s project was stripped bare. A small frame bag held his essentials, a bivvy bag replaced a hotel bed, bakeries and petrol stations became his feed zones. At one point, after his cycling shoes destroyed his feet, he rode a large portion of the route wearing nothing more than rubber sandals, forcing him to improvise with cheap footwear so he could keep riding.

Day after day he pedalled through the night, across mountains and valleys, clocking more than 5,500 kilometres and climbing over 65,000 vertical metres. While the peloton raced three weeks of staged competition, Morton was on his own relentless clock, propelled by stubbornness, solitude, and the occasional roadside coffee. By the time the official Tour reached Paris, he had already arrived, days ahead, having raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for World Bicycle Relief.

The Alt Tour wasn’t about podiums or coloured jerseys. It was about rediscovering the essence of cycling – freedom, improvisation, suffering, and joy. In sandals and sweat, Morton reminded the world that the bike’s greatest gift has nothing to do with trophies, and everything to do with adventure.