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Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Yahoo
I Stole the First Issue of POWDER Magazine I Ever Owned
I don't break the law. I follow the support of this statement, I was given the nickname 'Dad' by my college friends for always being the level-headed guy who attempted to save them from getting arrested for public intoxication or some other debauchery.I internalized the nickname as an unpleasant jest at first—I ultimately wanted to be like everybody else, having fun—but I wore it like a badge of honor after a while. Perhaps it was something to do with my relationship with own dad put me on skis when I was four years old, but as my mom recalls, he would have done so earlier if she had allowed him to. I became a skier, and still am a skier, because of the influence of my dad. Plain and a child I didn't fear my dad, but I respected his peace, if you will. As the oldest of two brothers, I tried to do things that made him and my mom happy. I did not make him happy, however, when I stole a copy of POWDER Magazine that he ordered, and then subsequently lost piece is part of POWDER's Summer of Ski Nostalgia content series. Stay tuned in daily for more nostalgic articles, and keep an eye out for the upcoming Summer of Ski Nostalgia badge to identify future can also view all of POWDER's summer nostalgia content to keep up with the best stories and photos in skiing? Subscribe to the new Powder To The People newsletter for weekly updates. I can't recall how old I was when this ordeal went down, but according to my mom and her wagging finger, I was "old enough to know better. "As a kid from Delaware, skiing wasn't something I shared with many of my friends. We played soccer, linked our gaming consoles for LAN sessions, and did other normal, suburban kid stuff. Skiing was something I liked to do, but it wasn't a passion quite yet. I didn't have a community to share the experience with outside of my immediate family and 10–20 days we skied each what I remember: My mom would regularly ask me to walk down to the end of the driveway to retrieve the mail. On one sunny Saturday in the fall, the mailbox was stuffed to the brim with various ads and magazines. I normally would just stack the mail and carry it inside, but the capitalized word POWDER caught my eye on one of the magazines. Powder? Like powder skiing? I was intrigued.I wish I could remember the specific cover, but I've sustained too many concussions playing soccer between now and then. That, or I'm just dumb. Regardless, I was immediately enamored. Up until that moment, I had only read about skiing in a brief section of Sports Illustrated, or in a coffee table book that my dad purchased. I had no idea that skiers were creating entire magazines completely about skiing. My mind was blown. I mentioned my memory issues before (super ideal for somebody who tells stories for a living). I can't recall what happened between my first glance at that issue and my dad scolding me for losing it, but we were all kids at one point. Kids do dumb that first copy of POWDER felt validating. It was my first glimpse into the broader skiing world that I was so very naive about. What I do remember is that POWDER felt like it was written for me. I was young, probably only eight or nine years old, but it felt like the writers were speaking directly to me as a skier, not as a kid from Delaware who was on the outside looking introduction to POWDER is one of a handful of memories that evolved my love for sliding downhill into a passion and a way of dad remained displeased with me for stealing and losing his issue of POWDER, but we worked out a deal for future issues. He would read the new issue for as long as he pleased, and then pass it over to me once he was still hard to believe that I work here all of these years piece is part of POWDER's Summer of Ski Nostalgia content series. Stay tuned in daily for more nostalgic articles, and keep an eye out for the upcoming Summer of Ski Nostalgia badge to identify future can also view all of POWDER's summer nostalgia content to keep up with the best stories and photos in skiing? Subscribe to the new Powder To The People newsletter for weekly updates. I Stole the First Issue of POWDER Magazine I Ever Owned first appeared on Powder on Jun 25, 2025
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Best '70s Ski Outfits From the POWDER Archives
As you might remember (or as your parents might remind you), things were a bit different in the 1970s. Global politics were in upheaval, society was opening its mind to new norms, and ski bumming was entering its first golden age. Those were also the years when this publication, first helmed by founders Jake and Dave Moe, began chronicling the deeper side of ski culture. At the time, ski culture had started to evolve into the free-spirited and expression-driven form it still has today, in part driven by the pages of the first volumes of POWDER Magazine. Powder skiing represented the ultimate freedom, and in true 1970s fashion, the skiers of the time took their expression of it to extreme lengths. Speaking of fashion, this was the era of true drip: from tight-fitting one-piece ski suits to oversized knit sweaters, most everything featured loud colors, patterns, and revealing necklines. Check out the Best 70s Ski Outfits from the POWDER archives below. This piece is part of POWDER's Summer of Ski Nostalgia content series. Stay tuned in daily for more nostalgic articles, and keep an eye out for the upcoming Summer of Ski Nostalgia badge to identify future content. You can also view all of POWDER's summer nostalgia content here. These were the days before Gore-Tex and other waterproof/breathable fabrics, with skiers instead opting for wool sweaters and the odd stretchy ski suit. These things were warm, bordering on sweaty, but they undoubtedly oozed style. A 1977 gear editorial section highlighting the year's finest insulated wares for skiers. Many iconic ski brands really found their stride in the 1970s. Look at how far things have come in these ads from Bogner, Rossignol, and Gerry Clothing. Apparel ads from the 70s were just built different. The wool sweater, still an icon of ski fashion today, provided the vibes during the 70s. Personally, these are WAY too hot for me to wear anywhere but inside a cozy mountain hut, but to each their own, I suppose. Eyewear was also on point, with many skiers still opting for large-framed sunglasses instead of full-on goggles. Fashion over function, especially on sunny days. For anyone who has worn goggles of this era, you'll remember that fogging was a pretty real issue. Marketing copy has always been a hot topic of discussion for brands. How can you make things eye-catching without being too weird? That clearly didn't matter to apparel manufacturers back then. Marlboro jackets? Budweiser sweaters? Nothing was sacred back then. While backcountry skiing really entered its golden age during the COVID pandemic, skiers have been walking up mountains and enjoying soft turns on the way down for many years. Take a look at the style and equipment (or lack thereof) employed during the 1970s from places like Vail to Courchevel. Long before technical outerwear, skiers were enjoying hard-earned turns deep in the backcountry. This piece is part of POWDER's Summer of Ski Nostalgia content series. Stay tuned in daily for more nostalgic articles, and keep an eye out for the upcoming Summer of Ski Nostalgia badge to identify future content. You can also view all of POWDER's summer nostalgia content Best '70s Ski Outfits From the POWDER Archives first appeared on Powder on Jun 4, 2025
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
March Madness Continues: 23+ Inches Forecasted for California Ski Resorts
Another strong and cold winter storm is on the doorstep of the Sierra for Monday morning, March 17, 2025. Cold air and abundant snow will overspread the Sierra range by late Sunday night and will peak during the early morning hours on Monday. Winds will be very strong Sunday night decreasing somewhat on Monday with cold air. The Central Rockies score California Ski Resort Snow totals through late Monday (March 17, 2025):Sugar Bowl: 23 inchesPalisades Tahoe: 22 inchesMt. Shasta Ski Park: 19 inchesDonner Summit: 18-20 inchesKirkwood: 15-18 inchesNorthstar: 9-15 inchesHeavenly: 10-12 inchesDiamond Peak: 6-14 inchesMammoth Mountain: 8-13 inchesTiming and Red Flags: Wind speeds will be very strong initially with the first surge of moisture late Sunday night. These winds will decrease somewhat by Monday morning just in time for lift openings. Snow will continue into most of Monday peaking in the AM. Snow quality will be very good as it falls on Monday. Below: You can see snowfall filling into the Sierra from midnight Sunday to late morning on Monday. The highest totals will land closest to Lake Tahoe with lower totals in the southern Sierra. Some areas in the northern areas of the Sierra Crest might exceed 20 inches by noon on to keep up with the best stories and photos in skiing? Subscribe to the new Powder To The People newsletter for weekly updates. The path of moisture favors the Rockies from Monday night to Wednesday primarily impacting Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. Nearly an inch of water is possible for northern Utah where good odds of 12-20 inches are possible in the northern regions favored by NW flow.@powderchasers is the official weather source for POWDER Magazine. Stay tuned for more forecasts throughout the week as March Madness continues to deliver.
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
The POWDER Cover That Changed Skiing Forever
This article appears in the 2025 Photo Annual print issue of POWDER Magazine. The magazine is still available on newsstands near you, and can be shipped directly to your front door. Not only was the photo on the November 1996 cover of POWDER stunning—and, for the time, shocking—but also a Masterclass in recording something that had never been seen before, let alone done, while also capturing details that layered the stories within the story. To understand any of it you need to start in the middle of mountainous nowhere on the Sweden-Norway frontier, 300 km (about 186 miles) north of the Arctic Circle an hour equidistant between the iron-mining town of Kiruna to the east, and the port of Narvik, Norway, to the west. When an iron-ore railroad opened between these points in 1903, a customs house erected on the national border—riksgränsen in Swedish—adopted that utilitarian name. With little else to do in their spare time but ski the wild peaks backing the rail line, customs officials were soon renting rooms to other skiers, who ultimately erected lifts and opened the eponymous rail-accessed ski area. What seemed an improbable geographic proposition somehow prevailed. Too far north to open before the sun breaks the horizon in February, and too remote for the continent's alpine race circuit, Riksgränsen nevertheless became northern Europe's most important ski stop: a vibrant hot-dog destination in the 1970s; a snowboarding and telemarking ground-zero in the 1980s; host to some of the first ski and snowboard freeride comps in the 1990s (the Scandinavian Big Mountain Championships is now in its 34th year); and a ski-film staple—propelled by Jesper Rönnbäck's infamous leap over an iron train. With its terrain a treeless alpine playground, riders famously made pilgrimage to 'Riks' each spring to build hits and ski under the midnight sun. Most in the snowsports milieu first heard of it when one of those features—a quarterpipe—became a worldwide magazine sensation in the late 1990s. Which is why, on my own pilgrimage to Riks, I was delighted to meet a skier named Janne Aikio, who had a story to grew up freestyle skiing on Luossabacken, a small local hill outside Kiruna. Once a road to Riksgränsen opened in 1985, however, he'd spent every minute he could there. Eventually he cut the commute and moved to the mountain. 'It seemed natural because the season was long and there was so much snow,' Aikio told me when we sat down to chat in April 2015. 'It was just like a big terrain park with rolls, gullies and steep landings everywhere.' That afternoon, Aikio led me on a long, looping journey from Riks' uppermost lift across rocky, wind-battered summits into Norway. Picking our way down an avalanche slope into the area known as Bjornfjell, we landed at the base of a giant wind-lip where it had once taken two weeks to dig out the notorious quarterpipe by hand. Aikio, who hadn't been here in years, stared at the adjacent hillside where hundreds of spectators once sat. 'I can still hear the roar of the crowd,' he said with a far-away smile. I just gazed around, in the way you do when you finally understand May 1996, doubtless amused at the novelty of it, a friend had asked Aikio, a mogul skier, if he'd forerun the quarterpipe for a snowboard event called King of the Hill. He agreed. Arriving late due to his work as a cleaner in the area's only hotel, Aikio reached the quarterpipe after snowboard legend Ingemar Backman and other pros had already warmed up. Without knowing how high they were jumping or where best to drop-in, Aikio hedged by hiking 50 meters above the snowboard start.'People told me that I put pressure on the snowboarders, but I didn't know it at the time because I was just there to do someone a favor and have fun,' recalled Aikio. 'Before I dropped in, I thought: Am I calculating right? I was nervous because the in-run was sketchy and I had to jump a little cliff to gain speed into the track. The compression hit me like a wall, but I stayed calm and focused in the air. I didn't grab because I just wanted to land—but I could hear cheering so I knew I'd done something good.' Not just good, but unprecedented. Boosting 7 meters (23 feet) off the lip on his only hit, Aikio set the bar high (a pun all but unavoidable in the telling). It would take Backman six tries, the rest of the evening and a longer snowboard to max out at 8.5 meters (28 feet), a new world quarterpipe record (only in the snowboard world, of course, because, well, skiers didn't quarterpipe yet). Numerous photographers had assembled, but German shooter Richard Walch's frame of Aikio at his high point would become a clarion call to freeskiers everywhere, its minutiae declaring this was something entirely new, from Aikio's suddenly tiny-looking Hart mogul skis to the mechanics of the moment: while it appears he's styling in or out of a cross-up, this isn't the case—at the weightless apogee, his left hip is just starting its nod to gravity, rotating downward before his right leg has even thought about it; and he's so unexpectedly high that several photographers on the lip are too stunned to even put cameras to their faces, staring slack-jawed into the air. A world away in POWDER's California office, Walch's shot landed on photo editor Dave Reddick's light table. It was the staff's habit to vote on covers shots (I was Managing Editor at the time) and we unanimously picked it for the November 1996 issue. Still, it was a challenge for art director Regina Frank: in order to include the lip for scale, she had to position Aikio partially over the magazine's logo. With the intervening gap leaving plenty of room for cover blurbs, she went large with the title for a series launching in that issue—'The Next Big Thing'—unintentionally guaranteeing skiers would forever associate Aikio's feat with that headline. Though the article it referred to actually concerned big-mountain freeski contests, the cover echoed—and handily eclipsed—the visual whispers then emulating from Whistler's Blackcomb Glacier of a rag-tag group of mogul skiers known as the New Canadian Air Force who, challenging snowboard park-and-pipe hegemony, would forever change the face of skiing. After his moment of infamy, Aikio would go on to be a quiet mover and shaker in the Scandinavian ski industry, coaching freeskiing in Norway, and then freestyle again in Luossabacken (including three-time Olympian and X Games medalist Jesper Tjäder as well as the ski/film collective The Bunch), where he now also runs a café and restaurant. Indeed, the cold, dark winter days of Luossabacken have produced many notable top-flight skiers and snowboarders who went on to various types of notoriety or World Cup careers, but Aikio remains the only one who can claim a cover of POWDER on his résumé.'I was heading south to Åre that fall,' recalled Aikio, of a move from the Arctic boondocks to the country's largest ski area. 'I had a cellphone, and as I drove a friend called and said 'Hey—you're on the cover of POWDER!' Of course, I didn't believe him. When he insisted, I almost drove off the road. I mean, that was the dream when you were a kid, even in northern Sweden, and out of nowhere it came true.' The POWDER 2025 Photo Annual is available. Click here to have it shipped directly to your front door.
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Finland: The Street Skiing Capital of the World
This article appears in the 2025 Photo Annual print issue of POWDER Magazine. The magazine is still available on newsstands near you, and can be shipped directly to your front door. From Ruka Ski Resort to the streets of Helsinki, the Finnish collective Forre has produced countless mind-melting cuts over the last few seasons. Part of their meteoric rise in the niche that is street skiing can be attributed to Arttu Heikkinen, one of the visionaries in this crew. Heikkinen produced their last three movies, and has exhibited a tremendous eye and talent for producing still images as Tukka Pori, who produced 'The Forre Movie' in 2018, put skiing on the backburner for school, Heikkinen took the reins. His first project, 'Forrmula' (2021), stamped a mark of intent reminiscent of Stept's 'Network' and The Bunch's 'Far Out'—two films that elevated crews already known in the core street skiing scene to the mainstream skiing pysche. 'Forrmula' laid it all on the line and the community took notice. The Finns have been at the innovative forefront of street skiing for a while. The dials of fearlessness and creativity get the Spinal Tap treatment, and there's a je ne sais quoi about the stylistic choices in the editing booth. The spot selection is creative, the skiing is heavy, the Finnish police are chill, the architecture and cityscapes are unique. It's no wonder ski and snowboard crews from across the world travel to the streets of Helsinki to continues to carry this torch with success, maturing as a videographer and photographer since his debut with Forre. The ability to build on what works while maintaining quality and a fresh feel across three projects is a testament to his talents. A fourth full-length film is in the pipeline for 2025, titled 'Forrever,' and will undoubtedly leave audiences open-mouthed, much like those before. Here of course, we are shining a light on Arttu's work as a photographer. This gallery showcases Heikkinen's ability to capture innovative perspectives among Finland's bold architecture while his companions push the limits of what's possible in street skiing. From Joona Sipola hurtling through the sky in a stark black and white—and somewhat dytsopian—image, to Ailo Riponiemi executing a death defying drop off the 'Rock n' Roll Carrot' in Helsinki, this portrait of Finnish street skiing gives us a glimpse of one of the most vibrant ski communities in the world. The POWDER 2025 Photo Annual is available. Click here to have it shipped directly to your front door.
