The Odd Goods
Is there hope of love for the mountain bum? Only if mountain towns can become true communities.
By Doug SchnitzspahnWhen it comes to the overwhelmingly high ratio of men to women in mountain towns, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd,” could be alpine living’s most overworked cliché. But Hollé Vliet understands that maxim all too well. That’s why these days she spends a lot more time with the four-legged goats back at the house she takes care of than she does talking to the two-legged wolves at the local resort bars.
The 32-year-old, who grew up in Silverthorne, Colorado, tends bar at Copper Mountain slinging microbrews for a roomful of tourists, transients and hard-locals elbowing each other for a shot at a ski-town hookup — which is precisely why she doesn’t often venture to the other side of the stool as a customer. Instead, she spends her days off at the house she caretakes up in the sleepy woods north of Silverthorne. She ski tours out her back door and immerses herself in a Summit County experience that has nothing to do with outlet stores, time shares, Jagermeister shots, traffic — or the dating scene.
She says she’s happy this way.
“It’s so hard to meet people. It gets old hanging out at bars, talking to the same five people. You get overwhelmed. Or I go backcountry skiing with guys and they just want to hook up with me. The guys are desperate and the women have become guarded.”
Welcome to the real world of romance in mountain towns, where a small range of dating options means that Vliet’s not alone. For men and women alike, it’s the same frustrating scenario in small, beautiful towns everywhere across the West. Once the destination of a hardy few homebuilders interested in creating a kind of self-sufficient community, most mountain towns are now filled with a glut of second-home real estate that locals and dirtbags can’t afford. That obvious lack of bed space alone puts a crimp in canoodling, and it also creates an environment where people are just too transitory and focused on their own inner outdoor-sports voyage to commit to a relationship in a place where many of them don’t expect to remain for long.
The Ski Bum—stoner flake
or transcendentalist?
But when’s the last time anyone ever said he or she came to a mountain town to fall in love anyway? They come for the snow, the singletrack, the rock. They come to get away from the ex, the job, the family and the Rust Belt shithole that they can’t stand to call home. People come to the mountains because the real working world sucks. Because there’s nothing better than the narcissistic pleasure of doing nothing but getting good at mountain sports (except for hoping that someone else might tell you how good you are). And sure that might include fantasies about hooking up with an aloof, beautiful like-minded athletic soul. But it sure as hell doesn’t include the tethers of a mortgage, long hours at the laptop or screaming kids and changing diapers.
That very sense of independence, of wanton wanderlust, is what makes all mountain town lovers essentially the same. There is some empty yearning in the gut as inexplicable as love itself that draws someone to a mountain town in the first place. As Rilke, that poet of the great, singular mystery of the yearning soul says, “Sometimes a man stands up during supper/and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking…”
So if the odds were really better, would the dynamics actually change?
“People use the 2-to-1 ratio, male-to-female ratio, as an excuse. It’s not just about the odds,” says Agnieszka Hajdas, 35, a Polish poet and professor of literature in New England who comes to Aspen each year during her winter break to work for the ski school and get a powder fix. “These towns attract a mentality where people want to postpone commitment. Lots of men here have the desire to be in a relationship, but they are paralyzed. They are interested but they will not follow up.”
Hajdas admits she’s also somewhat guilty of that unwillingness to commit as well. Her father was a ski bum in the mountains south of Krakow throughout the Communist years. He used wooden skis and even built a homemade ski lift. But her mother didn’t understand. Her parents, devout Catholics, are still officially married but long since separated and she worries that the dissonance of that relationship might still affect her own. The last time she visited Aspen she skied five days, each time she says with a different man who was interested in her. But she admits she too may be infected by the same malaise she sees in others who can’t admit the same passion for each other as they do for the snow.
“I want to be in love all the time, but I don’t want to be committed. So maybe I have the ski mentality too. It’s self-cultivation. It’s self-indulgence. But it’s my relaxation,” she says. “It’s a grace.”
The heart of the mountain-town bum is certainly deeper, more complex than outdoor sports alone. From her position as an outsider, both from another country and culture but also another world within the U.S. — that of stuffy academia — Hajdas has some more perspective on the mountain-town scene that she’s willing to offer.
“I think it can be a place for lonely people,” she says. “It can attract lonely or noncommittal people. Hurt people. But it can be a place of recompensation. At some point, they got hurt and this white apocalypse is somehow a remedy.”
So does that mean that most mountain town males are just misunderstood, like they say, and that there’s a higher purpose to all those good times after all?
“The ski bum all too often gets equated with the stoner image, wasted all the time,” says Kurt Gutjahr, event coordinator at the Center of the American West, a creative academic organization that identifies and addresses cultural issues in the New West. “But it’s not really like that at all. They are seeking a dynamic experience, finding a vision of beauty. Trying to find a way to ski and have a life takes incredible creative energy.”
While that may just sound like a good pick-up line, it points to an even deeper dysfunctionality, both in mountain-town life and the chances of finding meaningful relationships once you’re there. The truth is, the fact that it’s tough to make a living in mountain towns is probably why it’s tough to find love as well.
Gutjahr points to the Center’s publication Boom and Bust in the American West, which takes a look at the tenuous Western relationship resort towns have developed between tourists and their own their economic survival.
According to the report, “…the New West boom has been so closely tied to the purchasing powers of the well-off that a slippage in their spending power would carry big consequences. In the event of a serious and prolonged recession in the national economy, will we see ghost ski resorts and abandoned recreational equipment stores?”
The prospect of dead-end jobs means that mountain towns without some type of recession-proof employer, like a university, have a harder time keeping people interested in a career instead of a spiritual journey. That sure introduces another dynamic between just finding out whether the object of your affection is a skier or a snowboarder.
“I have friends on ski patrol and they don’t want to ever move down to Denver to be with someone who has moved on to a job in the city,” says Vliet. “They want to stay here doing what they love to do. But there are also a lot of people who just give up on it. They are sick of not having anyone. So they go back to the Front Range or their home state. They just get sick of being lonely.”
My Town, My Love Life
But what if by some miraculous right of birth you are actually from a mountain town? What if you have watched the peaceful, beautiful place you call home slowly choke to death on condos and Baby Boomers investing in second homes?
The fact is, you may have the best chance of all. That’s because if you want to find a real relationship in a mountain town, then first you have to create a real relationship with that mountain town.
Real roots and a real identity are the basis for most strong relationships, which can pose a problem in say, Summit County, where more than two-thirds of the homes in the county are second homes.
“Most people have a ‘condominium relationship’ with mountain towns,” explains Lin Alder, the executive director of Citizen’s for Dixie’s Future, an environmental nonprofit with a mission to stop sprawl and encourage smart development in Southern Utah. “If you own a condominium, you don’t really belong to the town. It’s convenient. You may hire people to take care of your property. But what kind of relationship is that? It’s not the kind of loving, caring relationship you have when you are permanently rooted. If you have a place to run away to, then you’re not going to stick to a relationship. Once it gets uncomfortable, you leave. When you decide you are going to stay, you accept everything that comes with that decision.”
Alder was born and raised by a prominent Utah family and has lived in tiny, funky Springdale (population 457), right at the mouth of Zion Canyon and National Park, working as a photographer for ten years.
Springdale frustrates him at times; the pool of people to date is miniscule, and new faces only come through in the form of transients — climbers or guides, or “parkies,” who know they will only be assigned to Zion for six months or a year.
For those who do live there, Springdale is close-knit town — maybe too close. Alder jokes about two friends in their 30s who ended up marrying and having kids — one, with a local woman in her 40s, the other, with her daughter in her 20s. “The niece is actually older than the aunt,” he says. Alder himself was married to a climber, but the relationship fizzled. Now, he is in love again (with another climber) and slowly building a new relationship. But he’s still unsure whether there’s a true future for him in Springdale, even though he owns a house in town.
“Sometimes, people hang on to relationships in these towns the same way they hold onto the towns themselves,” says Alder. “They know they are done. They really should move on, but they just can’t.”
It Takes a Village to Get a Date
When Silverthorne started to sprawl (the population of Summit County doubled between the 1990 and 2000 Census), Vliet had to leave, first to the West Coast and then to Procter, British Columbia. But she started to miss the mountains of her own home and she noticed something ironic about her adopted Canadian mountain town — the odds were reversed.
“There were more women than men. There were all these single, gorgeous goddess women,” she says. “It was just the opposite of here.”
After Vliet moved back to Silverthorne, she and her friend and fellow Copper bartender Melody Schell came up with an idea, a web site called Wild Mountain Honies (www.wildmountainhonies.com) that could connect all the single women in BC with their like-minded Colorado counterparts to even the odds for all. But as they developed the concept, the idea grew into more than a dating site. The two resort-town denizens decided the site could address the even bigger disconnect of people in general who lived in the transitory condo-choked communities they call home.
“People barely know their neighbors here,” she says. “You see all this urban renewal happening in Denver and other cities trying to create a better sense of community, but mountain towns just grow more seasonal, more homes pop up where no one really lives. Mountain towns need ways to create more community.”
If things can change, it will be because of the types of creative ski bums Gutjhar sees making a living now, who start to transform the community into something beyond an addiction to tourist dollars. People like Christine Sperber. After graduating high school in suburban New Jersey in 1989, Sperber moved to Breckenridge, Colorado. She spent some time as a pro snowboarder, eventually running Van’s High Cascade Snowboard Camp in Oregon, managing events at Copper Mountain and now sells Summit County real estate to first-time home buyers — “dirtbags,” she jokes.
Sperber herself bought a house soon after moving to the mountains and realized she could rent it out to fellow boarders (often at lower than the going rate in Breckenridge), creating her own little community.
“You see everything differently when you’re not paying someone rent,” she says. “Your perception changes. You’re responsible and it feels good.”
Now she’s pushing for more sustainable real estate solutions, including “green mortgages” for buyers who make environmentally friendly improvements, and she’s advocating the concept of affordable housing as a sustainable solution for mountain towns that are losing their authenticity to time-share sprawl.
“It’s still a ski town,” she says. “Buying a house doesn’t necessarily change that dynamic when it comes to dating people. But it does make for a lot more people who are trying to make Breckenridge a better place.”
Sperber was married briefly, and now lives with a man she calls the love of her life. They share her house with two friends. She jokes, “We’re trying to have our own little ski town family.”
Vliet’s started dating someone too, though, ironically, she did not meet him on Wild Mountain Honies. In a way, her new relationship is actually a commitment to the community. “He’s a local ski bum I have known forever,” she says. “I decided to give him a chance.”
And Vliet and Schell are seeing Wild Mountain Honies start to build community in ways they hadn’t imagined. “There’s an older man who organizes a group that goes out to new restaurants. I look for other girls to go backcountry skiing. It’s going to become whatever people make it — it could become a hunting/fishing site or a bunch of grandmas who go antiquing. People have been really responsive. There are just a lot of outdoor nature lovers out there who would just like someone to share a love of life.”
Ultimately, that is the key to “mountain love.” Not finding that perfect person, not healing a scar of the heart, but being in love with the place, and the mountains. As Vliet has learned, she is still in love with the town where she grew up, despite all the change. And building the Wild Mountain Honies community is a commitment to that mountain love that brought her home.
“For a while I was very angry, very jaded about all the change here,” she says, “but the mountains will never change. It’s beautiful here every day. That will never change. Every town gets built out eventually. I guess I decided to come back and stay because I’d rather be someplace where it has already happened than have my heart broken again.”
Love, Actuarially
When it comes to men, women and
mountain towns, the numbers don’t lie.
2 to 1
State with the Highest Male to Female Ratio in the U.S.—Alaska. How can that surprise you? In general, there are more men in the macho West, especially up in the last Frontier, where the ratio is 107 men to every 100 women, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. Nevada, at 103.9, Colorado (101.4), Wyoming (101.2), Hawaii (101.0), and Idaho (101.0) round out the top five states where the men are more plentiful. Crowley County, Colorado, is America’s most masculine county, with a ratio of two men to every one woman.
84.6
Place with the Lowest Male to Female Ratio in the U.S.—Gary, Indiana.
Chicks dig the hometown of the Jackson 5 or maybe they just get more nostalgic about The Music Man—“Gary, Indiana, Gary Indiana…”—whatever the reason, Gary, Indiana, is where the girls are, at least according to the 2000 U.S. Census. That industrial lakefront property sounds even better when you consider the male to female ratio is 84.6. As far as states with more women? Head East, young man. The District of Columbia (89.0), Rhode Island (92.5), and Massachusetts (93.0) top the list.
67
The percentage of homes that are second homes in Summit County, Colorado, according to a 2004 study by the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments. When nobody’s home, nobody’s snuggling.
2 for 1
The deal on lift tickets Loveland will give couples who take part in the mass on-slope wedding ceremony on February 14, 2008. Get married and your spouse skis free! Continue to ski every day while your spouse works and the divorce papers are on the way.
Real Mountain Love Story #1
Will You Ski with Me?
By Krista Crabtree
Before I met my husband, I foolishly dated only non-skiers. As a ski racer, I spent every weekend of my young life on snow. There was life on the slopes and life off them, and I didn’t mix the two. Needless to say, none of my early romantic relationships lasted. And I wondered, was I destined to marry a non-skier, forced to go on ski trips alone? When one person skis and the other doesn’t, the odds aren’t good from what I’ve seen. Either it ends up in the Big D or the skier stops skiing, which I imagine is a kind of divorce of its own. One or the other seemed to be my fate…until I met a guy at a little ski resort west of Boulder, Colorado.
It took a whole season of skiing together and edging closer and closer with each chairlift ride before I melted with the spring corn snow. I knew he was “the one” when he consistently let me go first on powder days and I’d go floating through the white room in bliss and in love.
Near the end of our second ski season together, I got a job in Verbier. We arranged for him to meet me there. I picked him up by gondola. It had snowed for three days. The next day on the tram we met a guy from Telluride who caught our eye because he had the fattest skis. He kept peering out the window expectantly until we popped out of the clouds into sun and an endless shimmering blanket of bright peaks and white snow. He invited us to ski with him on runs called Rock and Roll, Superhighway and Seven Dead Swedes Chutes.
He led us to Mt. Fort, the top of Verbier, for 9,000 vertical feet of skiing. My boyfriend was acting strangely nervous as we carried our skis over a knife-ridge traverse fit for mountain goats. Then we came to a cornice and our new friend told us to watch out for the deadly cliff band we couldn’t see. My boyfriend took off over the cornice; very out of character. I followed and held on, for hundreds of turns down the steep face through bottom-less powder while nervously making sure we weren’t about to “cliff out.”
We all met up at the bottom of the face, high-fiving and hollering. But as our new friend pushed off, my boyfriend asked in a shaky voice if I would stay. When we were alone, he stepped out of his skis and got down on one knee. He’d been carrying a diamond ring tied to his money belt for days, waiting for the right moment to ask, “Will you marry me?”
In tears, I said “yes.” We kissed surrounded by blue skies, the elegant Alps and sparkling powder. We then skied side by side, turn after turn, face shot after face shot to Chez Danny’s—a hut hidden in the trees, owned by an old-time Swiss mountain guide. When he heard we were engaged, it was free apple schnapps for all.
Real Mountain Love Story #2
Love Smothers in the Snow
By Lora Bodmer
With the days getting longer and the snow pack getting deeper, the darkest days for love in the mountains are here.
Even long-term romances seem to go wandering when the forecast calls for stormy skies. Boyfriends, husbands, even ‘friends with benefits’ seem to put up blinders seeing only the deep snow hitting their goggles. And the guy who had you feeling like a snow queen at Christmas has now left you out in the cold.
Every February and March, those snow-bound boys become powder and beer zombies controlled only by the eerie green effects of Doppler radar. Considering that life’s necessities — such as food, sleep and perhaps long underwear and a shower — are tossed out the gondola, is it a surprise that romance becomes unkempt as well?
If you’re unprepared for the dry-love desert that deep snow creates, you could find yourself feeling left in the spray of this hedonism without knowing what hit you. Just remember, most guys didn’t move to a mountain town to meet hot chicks and settle down. They’re here for the snow, and so are you.
At a dinner with girlfriends last weekend, you could begin to hear the tales trickle in. The ‘sNOw love’ season was starting again. One girl told of her man blowing off multiple dates in favor of four-hour après sessions with the bros; another of phone calls unreturned. And one hard-to-get friend said the guy who was chasing her down for months was now asking for “more space” without any explanation.
Point being, ladies, you aren’t alone. This time of year, most faltering romances are likely buried under several feet of fresh snow. Just remember that powder skiing and après parties are both gender blind, and you should get yours, too, while there’s time. That way you’ll have your own epic tales to tell when the snow melts, and you go out to find a fresh romance for the spring.
Mountain Love
Do’s and Don’ts
By Doug Schnitzspahn
Do: Test his/her outdoor sport limits. The way your lover reacts in those moments of pure fear, embarrassment, exhilaration, codependency, pain and accomplishment will give you a pretty good preview of your relationship.
Don’t: Ever say how much better your ex skied, boarded, biked, cooked, partied, kissed, took care of animals, placed protection or smelled.
Do: Let the dog(s) cuddle with the two of you.
Don’t: Admit they belong to your ex.
Do: Make a moonlight snowshoe or ski out to those backcountry hot springs.
Don’t: Ogle and or play footsie with the other naked people there. Mention the word threesome. Ask for advice about your rash.
Do: Wilco.
Don’t: Widespread Panic.
Do: The organic gardener. The reader. The former wanderer who just bought a first house. The one who laughs at you. The one your dog likes best.
Don’t: The Southern gentry out to find themselves. The trust-funder with all the toys. The foreign ski-school instructor. The rebounder. The beautiful-but-closeted jock.
