Season 6, Episode 92

Sasha Berkovich grew up in the Soviet Union at a time when nothing came easy, and nothing in skiing was handed to you. If you wanted gear, you had to barter for it. If you wanted to ride a rope tow, you had to build it, you had to scrap together old engines, scavenged parts, and whatever rope you could find. Sometimes the only currency that worked was vodka. Skiing wasn't a hobby for Sasha back then; it was something you earned piece by piece in a world where there was never enough of anything.

Sasha chased skiing anyway. He built lifts out of scraps, traded bottles of vodka to get bindings, he found a way. And then, in 1988, he did something even harder – Sasha, his wife, and their two young children escaped the Soviet Union to make a life for themselves in the United States. No guarantees, no safety net, just a belief that freedom and skiing were worth risking everything for.

Today, we get to hear what he did, what skiing meant to him during those years, and how his story unfolded once he reached America. And I'm grateful to Sasha because one of his young children, whom he brought from the Soviet Union, is my very best ski buddy, Greggy, with whom I just spent 10 weeks in Patagonia ski mountaineering.

Follow The SnowBrains Podcast:On FacebookOn InstagramOn ThreadsOn SnowBrains.comThis episode was edited by Liam Abbott.Hosted by Miles Clark.