Dawson skiing the Crestone Needle in 1991 - an image that would later grace the cover of Couloir. Courtesy Glenn Randall.
“Any man who called himself an alpinist skied better than okay, and likely skied the steeps as well” writes Lou Dawson, the legendary ski mountaineer and backcountry scribe, in his recent chronicle Avalanche Dreams: A Memoir of Skiing, Climbing, and Life.
From Texas beginnings to his parent’s Aquarian inspired escape to the mountains of Colorado, Avalanche Dreams is a unique adventure. Dawson’s story charts his rise as climber and ski mountaineer par excellence, at once driven and ahead of his time, who grows from an achievement and moment-driven adventurer to perhaps the most important and thoughtful chronicler of the backcountry skiing movement.
But “how to become a better skier?” asks Dawson in Avalanche Dreams, this hypothetical question posed at once before and after a storied writing career, prior to and subsequent to having a family and finally mellowing into one of the most genuine voices in skiing.
“I knew just one path: the abandon I applied to rock and ice,” Dawson concludes. “‘Ski to die!’ it was called by bar-stool pontificators with plaster-casted legs and bandage-bedecked foreheads.”
“But I came to hate it,” Dawson admits of the superlative, this surface-level, tavern-oriented proclamation of badassery that only glanced into the deeper meaning of skiing.
Alluding to the 1982 Highlands Bowl avalanche that would nearly kill him, but eventually point him toward introspection, Dawson concludes in the kind of reflection that would make him integral to ski culture for decades; a sentence that illuminates the push-pull of skiing for the moment versus the measured, higher-minded cognition on the sport: “[I hated it] not because of its absurdity - no skier seeks death - but because I became a genuine ski-to-die poster boy.”
Skiing has long existed between opposing poles: serious, thoughtful notions, and those more bent on extolling entertainment, excitement, and fun. From within and without.
And the writing on skiing - and ski media itself - has experienced this struggle.
In his review of the seminal extreme skiing film Steep, Variety’s Jon Anderson - himself not a core member of the skiing intelligentsia - assessed the film, a historical celebration of steep backcountry skiing, as being too serious, too self referential. “The featured skiers protest too much about the value of what they do, sounding as if they’re defending and ultimately trying to ennoble it,” Anderson wrote in 2007. “But they’re not curing cancer; they’re sliding down hills on two sticks. It should be fun. So should ‘Steep.’”
Somewhere in between, the notion of ‘ski to die!’ lives, maybe as hyperbole, maybe as profundity.
Thus instead of being allowed a wide latitude for interpretation, even the Homeric like climbing and alpinism can enjoy, serious skiing media has often been subject to a certain level of disregard. Where’s the party? the proverbial good-timer asks, while more thoughtful notions seem to take place far away, in other sports. Moreover, much of the modern ski media apparatus has been pressed toward corporate-cozy models, a paradigm ill-suited to depth. At times the landscape for thoughtful ski media seems destined to irrelevance.
But the medium has long existed, especially in written form. Charles M. Dudley’s 1934 opus 60 Centuries of Skiing marks ski history at its most thoughtful and thorough. And the works of the late Allan Bard - a free-heel ski guide whose philosophical musings often found their way into Powder, and Backcountry - espoused a deeper exploration of life on skis.
And modern skiing itself would hardly stand where it does now without one Lou Dawson - former pioneering rocker climber, current ski alpinist emeritus, and the first to descend all of Colorado’s fourteen-thousand foot peaks on skis.
But Dawson’s legacy may be most cemented in his writings. His eminent ski touring blog WildSnow long charted the zeitgeist of backcountry skiing. And his guidebooks have been both innovative and approachable. Now an elder statesman to a ski world whose media has changed markedly in recent years, Dawson - ever the thoughtful writer - has turned to reflecting on a storied life, releasing his memoir Avalanche Dreams earlier this year. Within, Dawson charts a liberated if at times rudderless adolescence in a hippy-infused Aspen home presaging an adulthood filled with cutting-edge exploits in the mountains. Buttressed by a single-minded loyalty to personal endeavor, Dawson’s story gives way to injury, reawakening, and redemption. It’s a tale not only endemic to a skiing hero’s journey; it’s inseparable from the path skiing and ski media has taken over decades.
Just as Dawson was on the forefront of the climbing and later backcountry skiing revolutions of the 70s and 80s, he was later instrumental in the ascendance of modern outdoor media. Before founding the core skiing blog WildSnow in 1998, Dawson wrote for Couloir Magazine, the first backcountry skiing publication. From print to the nascent internet, Dawson’s works helped mark the peak of the backcountry ski culture, embodying a fledgling philosophy outside the boundaries of resorts that would blossom into not only wide popularity, but a deep cachet enjoyed by the likes of surfing and rock climbing - in no small part due to Dawson’s adventures and writings.
“What really got me going on that introspective retrospective stuff… was when Craig Dostie started Couloir Magazine,” Dawson recalls. “He started that magazine in 1988 as a little newsletter. And he contacted me soon after that, I think that same year, that same season, because I’d been writing these ski touring guidebooks. And he wanted me to do some writing for him.”
Dawson at Denali in 1973. Lou Dawson Collection.
The column in the no-frills magazine - then black and white and borne from a Sierra Club-affiliated backcountry pamphlet Dostie started in Southern California - would become ‘Dawson's Backcountry,’ and would appear in Couloir for nearly a decade. Dawson credits that project as the beginning of his muse, saying “then I started digging into the more retrospective style of writing and opinion writing and sharing some stuff about my life...And that led directly to the WildSnow website.”
WildSnow came to epitomize backcountry skiing. Though always niche, Dawson’s approachable voice and eminent knowledge made the site inseparable from the wider backcountry skiing consciousness. Founded in 1998 before converting to a blog in 2004, Dawson would publish nearly two million words on the site over two decades. From dissections on the latest gear, to trip reports, even ruminations on life in the mountains, WildSnow uniquely covered the backcountry skiing experience.
WildSnow long ran pieces by many authors, making the site a unique mosaic. Still, much of the work would be Dawson’s, an output over years that was staggering - amounting to at least one million published words of his own. “I’d write those blog posts, and I never had writer's block, and I would just whip those things out like crazy. I couldn't believe how much production I was doing,” Dawson remembers with a laugh.
But WildSnow was known more for its content than its quantity. Dawson’s musings on life and skiing were as much aspirational as they were genuine, a voice that many readers connected with far beyond a simple ski guide. “I was looking at how people really lived in these mountain towns, everything from family issues to land use and then the actual way we ski and the way we wanted to ski,” Dawson recalls. “Part of the legacy was kind of an honest take on the core aspects of ski touring and ski mountaineering.”
In characteristic introspection, Dawson would eventually see the need to separate himself from WildSnow. “Later on there was some burnout, it got a little tougher because, at first I wasn’t concerned with how much money I was making because it was an experiment, but after a while I needed to make a living, because it was a full time job,” Dawson says.
But Dawson’s notions of genuineness were operative in the decision. “I was getting older, and I had the usual health issues that come with that kind of age, and basically just didn’t see myself keeping up the pace,” Dawson ruminates. “You’re not going out and making extreme descents and things like that. And I didn’t feel like the way my connection to the sport was working would allow me to be honest with how I enjoyed writing for WildSnow. It seemed like it would be getting more and more forced as the years went by and I didn’t like that, I wanted to be authentic.”
Dawson thus chose to sell the blog to friend and WildSnow contributor Doug Stenclik, founder of backcountry ski shop Cripple Creek Backcountry. Stenclick managed the site with his wife Manasseh Franklin and editor Jason Albert, continuing the site for several years. In recalling that period, Dawson describes Stenclick as a savior, and Albert as deserving recognition for his work at WildSnow and his successor site The High Route.
But WildSnow - long an example of a core if niche publication - would not stay in Stenclik’s hands. “Unfortunately for the website and for Doug that was a time when internet advertising was really changing, and it was really hard to monetize blogs. Banner ads were harder to sell and there wasn’t much money,” says Dawson. “Most of the companies were throwing everything into social media, and still paying good money for ads in printed magazines, which always surprised me.”
Stenclik sold the blog to AllGear Digital - a conglomerate of affiliate-link gear review websites including Gear Junkie and Switchback Travel - in December of 2022.
“Now the site is what it is,” says Dawson.
Dawson’s view on WildSnow’s fate - both honest and measured - speaks to maturity and character.
“Anybody can imagine that as the founder of the site I’d love to see it a little more viable, but, you know, on the other hand they kept all the old content which is nice to have it archived for the public.”
Regardless of any desires that the site could have retained its original tone and model, Dawson neither faults Stenclik nor feels his version of the site was ever fated to digital immortality. Instead Dawson is openly grateful for the run WildSnow had. “You just can’t get too bummed out with it or too concerned because, how could a site like that keep going forever, you know? It just can't. Especially with the spirit we had for the twenty-something year run we had.”
With son Louie and wife Lisa. Lou Dawson Collection.
Just as in Avalanche Dreams, much a story of moving on - from youthful explorations on rock and ice, eventually to skiing and family - Dawson has moved along all the more. And after a life of excess and success in the wilds, then achievement on snow and page, Dawson’s reflections feel as if they are the last forty years of skiing and ski media looking back on itself.
In that meditation Dawson sees the vibrance of his family as his crowning achievement. And WildSnow as his pièce de résistance. “I definitely feel like WildSnow, the website, is my magnum opus, if you will,” he says.
But more than any lofty assessment of his own works, Dawson’s pride comes from what his work meant to the skiing world. “It’s not all the greatest writing in the world, in fact very little of it is what I would consider that great,” Dawson says with characteristic modesty. “But it's there, and it had some meaning for people, and for most writers the ideal is not necessarily to be writing for yourself but it’s to have some meaning for the other people that are reading your writing. So that was a joy and incredibly gratifying and I’m very proud of that work and I’m glad that it’s still there.”
From here Dawson’s sights remain set on his craft. He is gradually updating his 1998 history of North American ski mountaineering, a book with a familiar name; Wild Snow: A Historical Guide to North American Ski Mountaineering. Dawson is also striving to make the work available again after a time out of print.
Beyond that, Dawson plays public relations for his memoir, a task not natural to the introverted chronicler. One who has been instrumental in shepherding the canon of serious ski media through more than one era.
“There’s this one side to ski touring that’s kind of just a happy go lucky, cool, fun ‘this is a fun day we’ve had,’” Dawson ruminates. “But then there’s a whole other side that’s more introspective, and even spiritual. Where people are out in nature and they’re experiencing this power of nature and they're experiencing deep aspects of relationships, whether it's with friends, or lovers, or children; family. And to really express that the written word is essential.”
Avalanche Dreams marks a moment in ski history. Not only as a culmination of one of skiing’s great writers, but also as an inflection point in the culture’s written media. As many independent outlets have succumbed to the fate of affiliate-link corporate models, and online advertising platforms have gutted the ability to monetize blogs, a fraught landscape of the written word in skiing has emerged.
But just as Dawson has for a generation, Avalanche Dreams showcases the depth of self exploration possible through skiing, a thread in outdoor media that may in fact be alive and well. Dawson himself sees long form as healthy. “I don’t think it’s going anywhere,” he says with a smile. “I think it’s all going pretty well.”
As Dawson himself professes, the power of the written word in the outdoor culture continues. And his memoir serves as a testament not only to the depth and emotion of the ski experience, but of the possibility that its written craft will continue - and that it will be an ever expanding canon into the future, no matter the platform: thoughtful writing on skiing may always have a home. An abode that has been indelibly marked by the words of one Louis Dawson.
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