On Traverses is Chapter 9 of Snowbird Secrets, 22 meditations about what it means to ski this cosmically connected mountain. I'm posting it today to commemorate this coming Thursday's podcast with Guru Dave Powers, whose work you can find at gurudavepowers.com. Enjoy!

You’ve probably never heard of my guest today, but Mike Bisner might be the most well-connected person in our sport. He has covered every base at an executive level, as general manager of one of the largest specialty chains in the retail sector, as marketing director at Salomon when the French juggernaut was riding high, and he later played a similar role at Head as it was shouldering its way into the first rank of ski suppliers in this country. His list of ski-industry connections might be the most extensive in our sport.

Kim and I are going reminisce about our time together at the Snow Country Magazine ski test in the early ‘90’s, but oddly that wasn’t the high point of her career. She is best known as the creator of the first and still longest-running women’s ski camps, which came after a career in ski racing that landed her on the U.S. Ski Team. She is notorious for a fairly spectacular crash that occurred while filming with Greg Stump and Bruce Benedict on License to Thrill, a spill that went viral before viral was a thing. A big-mountain competition champion as well as a world-class windsurfer, we caught up with Kim yesterday.

A few simple guidelines to guide you through the maze of new ski boots so you'll end up in the best boot for you and your beleaguered feet.

No one embodies the spirit of hot dog skiing as completely as the incomparable Wayne Wong. A living legend, he continues to rock the free(style) world!

Consumers waste a lot of time scouring the Internet for deals on skis, when in fact for a given category, chances are all the top models will be priced within $50 of one another. Of course there is a robust sale market, but its focus are the skis of yesteryear, particularly the recently obsoleted 2023 vintage.

Mike Adams has been a force to reckon with since he assumed the reins at Elan's U.S. distributorship in the early 1990's, raising their U.S. presence and richening their mix. He was the engine behind Salomon's renaissance at the end of that decade before accepting the role of running Atomic in this country. He's had his finger on the pulse of the sport right up the present day. He's as authoritative a source on the U.S. ski market as any man alive.

The Internet was already a cesspool of misinformation, then along came AI-driven content creation to turbo-charge the amount of uniformed rubbish available to a vulnerable public. In this episode, I expose the tendency to fraudulence that seems baked into AI.

In only 4 scant seasons, Stuart Winchester has metamorphosed from avid citizen skier to one of the most well-informed (and therefore well-respected) sources of information about ski areas of every stripe, particularly in America. His Storm Skiing Journal is a must-read for anyone who wants a granular view of American skiing. We love his byline: “Everyone's searching for skiing's soul. I'm trying to find its brains.”

Boots are not only the most important part of a skier's ensemble, the ability to fit boots is a specialty ski shop's most important asset. A shop's best assurance of survival in today's turbulent market is to field a team of bootfitters trained to match boots to their customers, optimizing both comfort and performance.