Just your standard morning walk to the lifts in Whistler...
I travel a lot and I meet a lot of people every year, and the most common questions I get asked are asking what it’s like living as a ski bum. Many seem to think my life is non stop parties and snowboarding.
Well… my life isn’t a whole lot different than your life, except I get to snowboard a lot.
The life of a ski bum
The stereotype for a ski bum is that we’re lazy, we party a lot and we just snowboard all day. Stereotypes tend to come from a grain of truth. Sure many ski bums know how to have a good time and sure many of us like to party, but it’s not all party 24/7. Most days, it’s not any different than you.
Here’s my typical day in Whistler:
9 am-ish: Wake up
10 am – 3 pm: Snowboarding
3 – 4 pm: Rest and recover (by rest I mean play video games and watch tv haha)
4 pm onwards: Write blogs, do some development work for our upcoming training products, answer questions, sleep.
So even though I’m snowboarding most of the morning/afternoon, I do have to come home and do work too. Just like you have to go to work, ski bums work too, we just try to schedule our work during the evening/night.
What about the parties?
I’m not going to lie, there are days when there’ll be an after party for a competition or something of that nature, but those are the rare days. Ski bums aren’t partying 24 hours a day. Sure I might meet up with friends on a friday, but that’s no different than any other person elsewhere in the world.
I think the mistake here lies in assuming that every ski bum is a foreigner visiting for a season with tons of cash saved up. There are obviously a lot of those types at ski resorts, but you can’t keep that up for more than one season. At some point you have to work too.
The truth about ski bums
We just want to snowboard (or ski). We’re not living some crazy life of nonstop parties and shenanigans. If some craziness happens along the way, that’s fine, but we just love snowboarding and we want to do it as much as possible.
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