eheathIf you're insecure as fuck. i get so suprised by how often I see posts about people being all up in each others heads about skiing, when I moved to utah we just skied, filmed and had fun. Maybe there is more pressure on people than there was 15 years ago. I also think the OP is satire, but maybe Im wrong.
So, I think there's some truth to OP's point here, if I could share my perspective/experience.
I graduated high school in 2009 and did the college thing for a year, decided I didn't want to be doing that so I moved to SLC the following fall. Got a job snowmaking at Deer Valley, and asked an old friend (a certain dreadlocked co-founder of Vishnu) if I could crash on his couch for a few months while I found something more permanent. I had absolutely zero aspirations of "making it" in the ski industry, I just loved skiing and wanted to do it every day. I knew that everyone else would be worlds above me, but I didn't care, I just wanted to lap the most perfect jumps I'd ever hit and get a little better at rails. For context, this is the year PC stopped doing Kings Crown and condensed everything into the one park under 3 Kings lift.
I'll preface this next part by saying, I think my experience would have been different and better had I found my own place from the start and tried to find my own friend group. That said, I didn't know a single person in Utah other than Kale, and I didn't have the freshman dorm experience the previous year to give an opportunity to meet people. My options in that regard were to find friends on the DV snowmaking crew (most of them were 40+, the others didn't really ski much) or try to fit in with the guys I was living with.
So I start hanging with that crew, its a mix of solidly better-than-me skiers but not anything crazy, all the way up to guys like Heff and Karl. Hang at the Jwenz apartment and smoke 5g blunts, go to a few parties, do the Guardsman preseason thing. Despite most of the guys being super chill and genuinely nice people, there are a few who do their best tough guy impressions and do little things to make me feel like an outsider, like the kinds of guys who go to bars/parties and "neg" girls to get them to go home with them, typical bro douche stuff. Whatever, I didn't come here to impress anyone, why should I care what they think?
But that shit adds up. You start to question yourself a little. You ride the lift and watch everyone making it look so easy. Even if you tell yourself you don't need to be that good, it starts to wear on you a little. So you work on getting better, maybe get hurt a few times but nothing that keeps you off the mountain, but you can see the progression so it's all worth it right? Unfortunately the lack of a proper friend group, one that you chose yourself and one that wants to see you getting better and having fun, doesn't give you an outlet to process the feelings of being a "shit skier". So you get down on yourself, skiing starts to feel less fun, moving to a new city feels like a mistake. The depression creeps into other aspects of your life, you fracture your shoulder and can't drive a snowmobile anymore so there goes the snowmaking job, your friends are annoyed because you're still living on their couch 4 months later. You understand why they don't want you there anymore, but depression is a hell of a thing so you don't know how to get away. Eventually you leave town altogether.
I know this is very specific to my own experience and there are about a million things I could have done differently to have a different experience. But I also feel like the events that led me to that specific situation aren't too vastly different from what someone else looking to move to Utah might encounter, especially in those college years. The external pressure to be "good" or "cool" or whatever, especially for people in their late teens and early twenties, can be overwhelming even if you don't have a desire to be a full-on ski bro. Everyone wants to fit in, right?
I do want to add, the majority of people I met that year were stoked on skiing and anything related to skiing, and generally couldn't give a fuck about anything else. Most of those people were supportive of each other. But it only takes a few assholes to muddy the waters.
End of rant. Thanks for giving me an outlet to process some of this, it's only been 14 years lol