Part 2.
My parents weren't skiers so it was challenging for me to get my days in. They did support me going for the most part and continued to drive me to the hill whenever they could and I was in our high schools ski club which did around 5 night skiing trips a season. I had a brief stint ski instructing when I was 14 at Craigmeur which gave me the basic understanding of the importance of technical skiing form for being a strong skier. So skiing remained in my life but it wasn't as regular as I would have liked it to be and I was constantly daydreaming about a different lifestyle.
A lot of my free time as a teen chasing tail and going to hardcore shows and playing guitar in a band. It was a fun social outlet. The hard core scene was a great place to get my anger and anxiety out and moshing and stage diving was a pretty darn good adrenaline fix but my heart was always in the mountains.
Then, at the beginning of my senior year I got my drivers license and everything changed. I skipped school regularly, often to go ski at Craigmeur or Vernon Valley. Years of being a kid with A.D.D. that was mostly unrecognized in a helpful manner as well as constant disappointments, nights spent crying over my math homework that I couldn't focus on, being scolded or worse when I couldn't deliver and a low self esteem had finally reached a point for me that I completely turned my back to what I had been told were the important things in life. That and my own personal disinterest in material wealth had me rebelling in a big way. New Jersey seemed like the epic center of blatant consumerism and the values of the majority there seemed so off puting to me that I grew a hatred for the region. My parents and family would tell me that my dreams and desires were worthless pipe dreams which fueled my anger and drive even more. I was skipping school so much that by the end of my senior year I was far from actually graduating. I was two years worth of credits short but I was determined and this wasn't going to stop me from fleeing the east coast to go live my ski bum dreams out west.
The following year I found a full time job working in a sandwich shop to save money and took enough courses at night school to graduate that spring. I spent my weekends going to Vermont to ski at Mad River Glen or up to Plattekill in the Cats where I found the steep terrain and down home feel of these mountains to be really attractive to me. That was the winter of 93/94 and the snow was deep. My hunger for fresh powder snow skiing had become a full on addiction. I would ski unmarked trees, smash fall line bumbs and jump off of rocks all day long. I would ski until my legs burned so bad that I would fall over from exhaustion. I loved skiing at those mountains but I was growing hungry for more. My eyes were now fixated on the west and moving to a place where it snowed a lot and crowds were minimal so fresh tracks could be had days after a storm.
Montana had caught my attention after reading about Whitefish and it's plentiful powder and perfect tree skiing matched with an uncrowded and hard to reach location. The cost of living was next to nothing and my girlfriend and I had saved around eight grand which could go a long way up in that area. We packed our bags and were on the road for my 19th birthday that September 3rd. As we crossed the PA border on I-80 I popped in a cd and cranked Tom Petty's Running Down a Dream and............... "I felt so good, like anything was possible. Hit cruise control and rubbed my eyes." I haven't looked once in my rear view mirror since that day and New Jersey has become a long gone, distant memory.
