ogc163
Superstar
Igrew up ski racing in Lake Tahoe. I was on the Squaw Valley Ski Team, and it was the center of my life for over a decade.
At a conference a few months ago I was asked what skiing taught me about investing. This was on stage, where you can’t ponder your answer – you have to blurt out whatever you can think of.
I didn’t think skiing taught me anything about investing. But one incident came to mind.
“Well, let me take this to a dark and tragic place,” I said before telling a group of 500 strangers a story I hadn’t talked about much in almost 20 years.
A dozen of us had grown up skiing together. Most had known each other since we were young children.
By 2001 we were in our late teens, having spent the majority of our waking hours over the previous decade never far from each other. We skied six days a week, 10 months a year, spending summers on the glacier of Mt. Hood, Oregon and in New Zealand, where the seasons mirror our own. Skiing took precedence to everything. Most of us were in an independent study program that let us bypass traditional high school. After skiing all day we read a few books and filled out a few forms in the evening in what – to our amazement – led to a diploma.
The amount of time we spent together created a relationship closer to siblings than friends. Ski racing is an odd hybrid between a team and individual sport. You train and travel and eat as a team, but the sport itself is individual. Our race results did not rely on each other; our daily sanity did.
Any group of a dozen teenagers will find a way to butt heads. Half the time I think we hated each other. Twenty years later, few of us keep in touch.
But of the dozen teenagers who, by 2001, I had spent the majority of my life with, four of us had become inseparable best friends.
This is the story of two of them – Brendan Allan and Bryan Richmond.
You take amazing things for granted when they become routine. Squaw Valley is one of the largest ski resorts in North America, was home to the 1960 Olympics, and attracts a million visitors a year. It’s staggeringly beautiful. To us, it was just an extension of home.
Ski racing required four hours a day of training, which felt like work to us. The rest of the time – another four hours a day, six days a week – we just skied around, unstructured, having a good time. We called it “free skiing.” Everyone else just calls it skiing.
On February 15th, 2001, we had just returned from a race in Colorado. Our flight home was delayed because Lake Tahoe was blasted with a blizzard vicious even by its own standards. You can’t race or train when there’s a blanket of new snow – racing requires hard-packed ice. So it was time for a week of free skiing.
Earlier that month Tahoe received several feet of light, fluffy snow that comes from Arctic temperatures. The storm that hit in mid-February was different. It was warm – barely at the freezing point – and powerful, leaving three feet of heavy, wet snow on top of the light powder that came before it.
We didn’t think about it at the time – we didn’t think about much at age 17 – but the combination of heavy snow on top of fluffy snow creates textbook perfect avalanche conditions.
Imagine a thick layer of sand with a layer of heavy cement on top. Now imagine putting those layers on a steep hill. It’s fragile, prone to sliding down. That’s what Squaw Valley was like in late February 2001.
Ski resorts are good at managing these kinds of conditions to keep people safe. Few tourists realize it, but if you visit a ski resort in the early morning hours after a blizzard you will hear what sounds like bombs going off. The sound isn’t deceiving. With a combination of mortars, grenades, and charges dropped from helicopters, ski patrol do controlled blasts of at-risk pitches to intentionally trigger avalanches when the resort is empty, preempting slides before guests arrive (check out some videos).
It’s an effective system, keeping avalanche accidents at major resorts rare.
But if you’re skiing out of bounds – ducking under the DO NOT CROSS ropes to ski the forbidden terrain untouched by masses of Bay Area tourists – the system won’t help you.
Skiing out of bounds is illegal, a form of trespassing. The main reason resorts don’t want you doing it is because it’s dangerous.
Out-of-bounds areas aren’t patrolled, so you’re on your own if you get injured. They usually don’t lead down to a chairlift, so you have to find your own way back up.
And they’re not bombed for avalanche control. So it’s here – out of bounds – that a skier is most likely to discover Mother Nature’s sliding wrath.
On the morning of February 21st, 2001, Brendan, Bryan, and I met in the Squaw Valley Ski Team locker room, like we had hundreds of times before. Bryan’s mom told me years later that his last words when he left his house that morning were, “Don’t worry, Mom, I won’t ski out of bounds.”
But as soon as we clicked into our skis, that’s what the three of us did.
The backside of Squaw Valley, behind the KT-22 chairlift, is a stretch of mountain about a mile long that separates Squaw from Alpine Meadows ski resort.
It’s good skiing – steep, wide open, with rolling terrain. And since it’s out of bounds, it was completely untouched. Our private playground.
Before February 21st I had skied it maybe a dozen times. It wasn’t one of our frequent spots, because it’s laborious. The end of Squaw’s backside spits you out on a back country road, where we would hitchhike back to our locker room.
Brendan, Bryan, and I decided to ski it that morning.
When an event becomes life-changing, all kinds of mundane details sear into your memory. Almost 20 years later I remember Brendan duct-taping his ski pants shut on the chairlift because I had broken the side zipper while wearing them the week before. I remember Bryan cackling with joy as the three of us entered barren wilderness while the rest of the resort was packed with crowds.
And I vividly remember getting hit by one of the only avalanches I’ve ever experienced.
It was tiny, not going over my knees. It wasn’t scary. I remember laughing. But the feeling is unforgettable. I didn’t hear or see the slide. I just suddenly realized my skis weren’t on the ground anymore – I was literally floating in a cloud of snow. You have no control in these situations, because rather than pushing back on the snow to gain traction with your skis, the snow is pushing you. The best you can do is keep your balance to remain upright. I remember putting my hands up and shouting, “Wahooo” like I was on a roller coaster. I essentially was.
The avalanche ended quickly. Brendan was to my left and Bryan was below us. No one stopped. We just charged to the bottom.
“Holy shyt, did you see that avalanche?” I remember saying when we got to the road.
“Haha, that was awesome.” Brendan said. No one thought much more of it.
We hitchhiked back. At first we had trouble getting a car to pick us up, so I decided if we took our shirts off in the 20-degree weather people would have sympathy for us and stop. It actually worked. Seventeen-year-old boys are resourceful.
When we got back to Squaw Brendan and Bryan said they wanted to ski the backside again.
I have no recollection of why, or how this came about, but I didn’t want to go.
It may have been the hitchhiking, which I always hated. That, more than the out-of-bounds skiing, felt reckless to me.
But I had an idea. Brendan and Bryan could ski the backside themselves. Rather than hitchhiking back, I would pick them up in my truck.
Everyone agreed on the plan, which we made in the Wildflour Baking Company cookie shop in the Squaw Valley lodge after lunch. This was before we had cell phones, so syncing on concrete plans ahead of time was important.
Brendan and Bryan walked out and skied off.
At a conference a few months ago I was asked what skiing taught me about investing. This was on stage, where you can’t ponder your answer – you have to blurt out whatever you can think of.
I didn’t think skiing taught me anything about investing. But one incident came to mind.
“Well, let me take this to a dark and tragic place,” I said before telling a group of 500 strangers a story I hadn’t talked about much in almost 20 years.
A dozen of us had grown up skiing together. Most had known each other since we were young children.
By 2001 we were in our late teens, having spent the majority of our waking hours over the previous decade never far from each other. We skied six days a week, 10 months a year, spending summers on the glacier of Mt. Hood, Oregon and in New Zealand, where the seasons mirror our own. Skiing took precedence to everything. Most of us were in an independent study program that let us bypass traditional high school. After skiing all day we read a few books and filled out a few forms in the evening in what – to our amazement – led to a diploma.
The amount of time we spent together created a relationship closer to siblings than friends. Ski racing is an odd hybrid between a team and individual sport. You train and travel and eat as a team, but the sport itself is individual. Our race results did not rely on each other; our daily sanity did.
Any group of a dozen teenagers will find a way to butt heads. Half the time I think we hated each other. Twenty years later, few of us keep in touch.
But of the dozen teenagers who, by 2001, I had spent the majority of my life with, four of us had become inseparable best friends.
This is the story of two of them – Brendan Allan and Bryan Richmond.
You take amazing things for granted when they become routine. Squaw Valley is one of the largest ski resorts in North America, was home to the 1960 Olympics, and attracts a million visitors a year. It’s staggeringly beautiful. To us, it was just an extension of home.
Ski racing required four hours a day of training, which felt like work to us. The rest of the time – another four hours a day, six days a week – we just skied around, unstructured, having a good time. We called it “free skiing.” Everyone else just calls it skiing.
On February 15th, 2001, we had just returned from a race in Colorado. Our flight home was delayed because Lake Tahoe was blasted with a blizzard vicious even by its own standards. You can’t race or train when there’s a blanket of new snow – racing requires hard-packed ice. So it was time for a week of free skiing.
Earlier that month Tahoe received several feet of light, fluffy snow that comes from Arctic temperatures. The storm that hit in mid-February was different. It was warm – barely at the freezing point – and powerful, leaving three feet of heavy, wet snow on top of the light powder that came before it.
We didn’t think about it at the time – we didn’t think about much at age 17 – but the combination of heavy snow on top of fluffy snow creates textbook perfect avalanche conditions.
Imagine a thick layer of sand with a layer of heavy cement on top. Now imagine putting those layers on a steep hill. It’s fragile, prone to sliding down. That’s what Squaw Valley was like in late February 2001.
Ski resorts are good at managing these kinds of conditions to keep people safe. Few tourists realize it, but if you visit a ski resort in the early morning hours after a blizzard you will hear what sounds like bombs going off. The sound isn’t deceiving. With a combination of mortars, grenades, and charges dropped from helicopters, ski patrol do controlled blasts of at-risk pitches to intentionally trigger avalanches when the resort is empty, preempting slides before guests arrive (check out some videos).
It’s an effective system, keeping avalanche accidents at major resorts rare.
But if you’re skiing out of bounds – ducking under the DO NOT CROSS ropes to ski the forbidden terrain untouched by masses of Bay Area tourists – the system won’t help you.
Skiing out of bounds is illegal, a form of trespassing. The main reason resorts don’t want you doing it is because it’s dangerous.
Out-of-bounds areas aren’t patrolled, so you’re on your own if you get injured. They usually don’t lead down to a chairlift, so you have to find your own way back up.
And they’re not bombed for avalanche control. So it’s here – out of bounds – that a skier is most likely to discover Mother Nature’s sliding wrath.
On the morning of February 21st, 2001, Brendan, Bryan, and I met in the Squaw Valley Ski Team locker room, like we had hundreds of times before. Bryan’s mom told me years later that his last words when he left his house that morning were, “Don’t worry, Mom, I won’t ski out of bounds.”
But as soon as we clicked into our skis, that’s what the three of us did.
The backside of Squaw Valley, behind the KT-22 chairlift, is a stretch of mountain about a mile long that separates Squaw from Alpine Meadows ski resort.
It’s good skiing – steep, wide open, with rolling terrain. And since it’s out of bounds, it was completely untouched. Our private playground.
Before February 21st I had skied it maybe a dozen times. It wasn’t one of our frequent spots, because it’s laborious. The end of Squaw’s backside spits you out on a back country road, where we would hitchhike back to our locker room.
Brendan, Bryan, and I decided to ski it that morning.
When an event becomes life-changing, all kinds of mundane details sear into your memory. Almost 20 years later I remember Brendan duct-taping his ski pants shut on the chairlift because I had broken the side zipper while wearing them the week before. I remember Bryan cackling with joy as the three of us entered barren wilderness while the rest of the resort was packed with crowds.
And I vividly remember getting hit by one of the only avalanches I’ve ever experienced.
It was tiny, not going over my knees. It wasn’t scary. I remember laughing. But the feeling is unforgettable. I didn’t hear or see the slide. I just suddenly realized my skis weren’t on the ground anymore – I was literally floating in a cloud of snow. You have no control in these situations, because rather than pushing back on the snow to gain traction with your skis, the snow is pushing you. The best you can do is keep your balance to remain upright. I remember putting my hands up and shouting, “Wahooo” like I was on a roller coaster. I essentially was.
The avalanche ended quickly. Brendan was to my left and Bryan was below us. No one stopped. We just charged to the bottom.
“Holy shyt, did you see that avalanche?” I remember saying when we got to the road.
“Haha, that was awesome.” Brendan said. No one thought much more of it.
We hitchhiked back. At first we had trouble getting a car to pick us up, so I decided if we took our shirts off in the 20-degree weather people would have sympathy for us and stop. It actually worked. Seventeen-year-old boys are resourceful.
When we got back to Squaw Brendan and Bryan said they wanted to ski the backside again.
I have no recollection of why, or how this came about, but I didn’t want to go.
It may have been the hitchhiking, which I always hated. That, more than the out-of-bounds skiing, felt reckless to me.
But I had an idea. Brendan and Bryan could ski the backside themselves. Rather than hitchhiking back, I would pick them up in my truck.
Everyone agreed on the plan, which we made in the Wildflour Baking Company cookie shop in the Squaw Valley lodge after lunch. This was before we had cell phones, so syncing on concrete plans ahead of time was important.
Brendan and Bryan walked out and skied off.
