The Death of the Ski Bum, And Imagining Their Return

Shrouded in cliché and nostalgia, at once our heroes and our foil, the ski bum has become so legendary that its true nature is now nearly impossible to grasp.
At once foundational, mysterious, and perhaps more lately dosed with a dash of irrelevance, this countercultural figure inhabits a sort of purgatory in the modern skiing consciousness. Subject to both reassessment and wistful regard, nothing else might strike the ski world with ambivalence as much as the ski bum. But this figur