It is October in Aspen and everything is dying.
Thankfully, everything dies beautifully here. Yellow, rusty streaks ripping through the pine-heavy green mountains. Frail yellow aspen leaves falling to the ground. Purple hues inexplicably tearing up distant canyons buttressed by subtle oranges swirling with blacks and blues under the ever-darkening sky that comes earlier and earlier these days over mountaintops freshly capped with snow.
The death of our brief-budded summer beauty, for most Aspenites, however, means only one thing: Ski season is coming. The snow. The pow. The gnar.
And this weekend, that meant the annual tête-a-tête of filmmakers and pro skiers officially known as "The Meeting." Their three-day descent on Aspen with films and parties celebrating snow sport and its attendant culture.
Yeah. In this otherwise dead time of year, Aspen was inundated with shaggy-haired kids smirking below straight-brimmed D&E caps. Squinting dope-eyed behind neon Oakley frog-skin sunglasses. Squealing at the Wheeler Opera House's movie screen, where the world's best freeskiers and boarders did their extreme thing.
I threw myself headlong into The Meeting's festivities this year, despite my decidedly dorkier tendencies. Instead of reading or watching Charlie Rose, I spent a few days viewing the so-called "ski porn" flicks and meeting the snow fetishists who make them.
My expectations were low and dumb. But what I found was a legitimate American subculture celebrating wilderness, wildness and Red Bull and vodka.
These little pockets of off-Main-Street lifestyles are pretty much the only thing that keep me going as a writer and native of our great experiment of a nation, where people are free to flaunt their kinks and get weird. In the last few weeks I've dipped my pen into the inkwell of the free-love-flowers-in-your-hair millenial hippies of Crested Butte and the blood-and-black-eyeliner goths of Denver.
I did not expect the snow bros at The Meeting to pique my interest the way those disparate cultural niches did, but I found myself surprisingly captivated.
They probably wouldn't like being compared to hippies and goths, but, like any subculture, the ski porn folk have an idiosyncratic dress, a self-styled idiom, and they are professedly self-aware of their otherness.
They have redefined words like "epic" and "sick" the same way hippies long ago took ownership of "beat" and "killer."
When pro snowboarder Nicolas Müller looked into the camera and yelled "If you've got gnarly boots put 'em on, because we're about to get extreeeeeme," it was with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, I think.
Or maybe he was serious.
The stereotype of the brainless energy-drink-chugging extreme winter athlete does have some basis in reality. Not unlike the sanguine hippie or the fatalistic goth.
During intermission between films at the Wheeler this weekend, The Meeting's bros swarmed the bar for free pre-mixed Red Bull and vodkas doled out of vats by overwhelmed bartenders who are accustomed to serving less aggressive theater-goers.
"I drank like 15 of these last night," one double-fisting snow bro told me with a laugh. "My heartbeat is, like, super amped."
Other than a film starring local snowbaorder Gretchen Bleiler and friends, The Meeting's movies exclusively showcased white guys hucking cliffs and such in locales like Colorado and Alaska.
But along with these professional shroupers do come their female groupies: the semi-affectionately-coined "pro hoes."
(There is, lamentably, no equivalent for professional journalists. No "pro jo hoes" mingling outside the Daily News building. No "prose hoes" as my goldilocked colleague Curtis Wackerle pointed out this week. However, if any friendly women from the valley want to start the movement, I remind you that I am single and disease-free and my e-mail address is below.)
A girl with ski goggles tucked tactfully under her blonde tendrils scoffed at me when I asked her about the "pro ho" phenomenon Friday night at the Belly Up after-party.
"I got like a hundred days on the hill last year," she sneared. "These guys are my friends. They get after it hard out there. They are sick freaking skiers."
Well said, friend. I'll be counting down the days until Ajax opens with you.
Andrew Travers is like totally stoked to shred the gnar this winter. Until then, you can hit him up at andrew@aspendailynews.com
