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Yahoo
3 days ago
- 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.
Yahoo
04-02-2025
- Yahoo
The Soul of Skiing Thrives at Montana's Fiercely Independent Ski Resort
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. I stood on top of Whitefish Mountain Resort surveying the jagged skyline of Glacier National Park was framed by an azure sky. The vivid white and blue backdrop resembled a movie set. Below me, a forest encrusted in thick rime ice beckoned. Locals call these encased trees 'snow ghosts.' They form because of the near daily fog that hangs low over the mountain, leaving everything below frosted My partner warned me not to ski too close to the snow ghosts—they looked soft and magical but were actually rock-hard blocks of ice. I pushed off into this troll forest. My legs hummed with I was buzzed by a large bird. I whipped around to see something with fully extended wings blow by me. It let out a bird-like CAAAW. 'What the…' I Moore, a local photographer I was skiing with, was unphased. 'Oh that was Turkey Tom,' he in the Montana outback, I guess I should not have been surprised to find a skiing turkey.'Wanna catch him?' said Moore, motioning to where he thought the turkey landed. We arced down the sunny corduroy, rounded a blind corner, and came upon the half man, half bird twirling pirouettes in the middle of the Not CrowdsI came to northwest Montana in search of an endangered habitat. Not of skiing turkeys, but of independent ski areas. As nearly every major ski area in the U.S. participates with at least one of the major multi-resort passes—Epic, Ikon, Mountain Collective, and Indy—Whitefish is the last holdout. With 3,000 skiable acres, 300 inches of snow and a half million skiers visiting annually, Whitefish is the biggest ski area in the country that has stubbornly remained single. What difference does it make? For starters, Whitefish skiers have mostly been spared the colossal lift lines and traffic jams that have become part of the mega pass resort scene. And they've done this while keeping prices down: Whitefish has kept day lift tickets around $100, about one-third the cost of a day ticket at Vail. Season passes bought before October are less than $800. As skiing goes mass market, Whitefish's throwback move just might be the future of Mountain Resort president Nick Polumbus mused about the meaning of independence as we rode up the Snow Ghost Express. He acknowledged that the megapass companies have courted Whitefish, but the Montana resort has swiped left. Staying independent 'allows us to retain a certain sense of character that maybe has been stripped away a little bit from the rest of the industry,' he said as we watched skiers navigating the vast bowl beneath us. It has also allowed the resort to stay financially viable. Polumbus credits 'a supportive majority owner, which means that as we have success we can reinvest and create more success.' That owner is billionaire Bill Foley, who lives in Whitefish part of each year and also owns the Vegas Golden Knights, the 2023 Stanley Cup Champions, as well as restaurants, ranches, and a financial services company. Last year, the gleaming Stanley Cup trophy made a surprise appearance at the summit of Whitefish. This isn't the case of a sugar daddy pumping money into a vanity project. Sure, Whitefish—then known as Big Mountain—was a money pit when Foley, now 79, purchased a controlling stake in 2006. Within a decade, though, he had the resort out of debt and turning a profit, and has reinvested millions into high speed lifts and new lodges. Part of that playbook is preserving Whitefish's culture. 'It's a blue-collar mountain,' Foley told a local magazine in 2016. 'It's not expensive.' For skiers, the real Whitefish success story is the terrain and powder. Brian Schott motioned for me to shoulder my skis and follow him up a short booter. Brian is a longtime Whitefish skier who founded the 'Whitefish Review,' the mountain town's acclaimed literary Whitefish, the goods include a dollop of we reached the top, I craned to see over a horizon line.'What's down there?' I asked.'Powder,' Brian smiled. He quickly vanished over the edge. My wife Sue followed and I chased. We plunged downhill like leaping dolphins, launching through the air and submerging in knee-deep fluff, turn after turn. We caught up with Brian at the bottom and admired our had been five days since the last storm. 'How is this untracked?' I asked in amazement.'There's a ton of terrain,' he said, motioning his pole to the ski tracks above and below us. 'There are fresh lines for everyone.' Turkey ChaseI cruised down Inspiration, a screaming wide groomer with big views of the Flathead Valley, and spotted Turkey Tom. The Whitefish legend is a sight to behold: a slight balding man wearing camo hunting pants and different colored vintage boots, sans poles or hat. His signature turkey wings are draped over his shoulders, flipping up in the breeze. Turkey Tom is a solo actor, twirling and cawing as he goes. He prefers skiing to talking, but after I bought him a slice of pizza, he opened did the turkey become his thing? 'They're all over the road, and I'm just a cheap guy picking up junk and living off of it like a real ski bum,' he told me. No need for Patagonia when you can ski in roadkill. He says he gave the bird's body to the local food does he ski in circles? 'Oh I just do that,' he said with a shy smile. 'The whole skiing thing where everyone has to stand up straight and keep their head straight,' he waved his hand as if to swat away the entirety of ski instruction. He reluctantly revealed that his real name is Tom Czacka. He's 69 and was once a water plant operator. He moved to Whitefish from Hawaii. 'I can't cool off there.'Then I asked him about a rumor I'd heard. Is it true that he was on skis that he got from Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber?Kaczynski was a Harvard-trained mathematician who led a nearly two-decade long bombing spree that killed three people and injured 23. He eluded one of the FBI's longest and most expensive manhunts for 17 years. America's most notorious domestic terrorist was finally captured in 1996 at his remote cabin in Lincoln, Montana, a couple hours from Whitefish. Kaczynski received a life sentence without parole. He died by suicide in prison in 2023 at the age of 81. In his now infamous manifesto, Kaczynski raged against the ills of modern society and technology, but he apparently made an exception for skis. In 1995, Turkey Tom was driving toward Whitefish when he saw several pickup trucks on the side of the road. A bearded man was standing there selling beehives, a typewriter, and a sweet pair of sticks. 'You gotta take these things. I gotta get rid of all this stuff,' Tom recalled the man saying as he shoved the items into Tom's car. The PRE 1200 skis had the initials 'TK' on them, but Turkey Tom thought nothing of it. Six months later, he saw a newspaper photo of the Unabomber being arrested near where Tom stopped for the roadside yard sale.'Oh my God, that's him!' he exclaimed. The Unabomber went to prison, but his skis roamed freely with Turkey Tom, who loved them in powder. A few months later, FBI agents rolled up to Turkey Tom's place and seized his new skis. 'They said it was evidence,' he said Unabomber powder rig was Of The SnowFrom downtown, it feels like I can walk up the main drag right onto a chair lift. The ski area, which is six miles away, sits atop the town like a white was founded in 1904 as a railroad town. As the population grew, the large snowy mountain above town beckoned local residents. In 1947, a rope tow opened on Big Mountain, the comically nondescript name that locals gave the ski area. The community has literally driven this mountain: in the early days, residents bought shares and volunteered in the myriad tasks needed to run the place. In 2007, Big Mountain was renamed Whitefish Mountain Resort, inextricably connecting the identities of the town and mountain. After skiing one day, I stopped at Spotted Bear Spirits, a tasting room featuring locally distilled liquors. I ordered a Montana Mule made with huckleberry vodka, a local delicacy. Hannah May was having a cocktail at the bar. She works at a local clothing store by day and as a freestyle skiing coach on weekends. She explained that she grew up skiing at Snowbird, where her parents difference between skiing in Utah versus Montana? 'Egos and attitude,' she said. 'Everyone in Whitefish just supports everyone. It's all about the community here.'That community made national news in 2016 when it stood up to Richard Spencer, a neo-Nazi and part-time resident of the town, chasing him away, refusing to serve him at restaurants, and booing him when he showed his face at the ski area. Spencer has not been seen around town in several mountains, not white supremacists, are welcome Mountain Resort celebrated its 75th birthday in 2023. The cowboys have mostly been replaced by skiers, outdoorspeople, and, especially since the pandemic, second homeowners and remote workers. That has left many locals experiencing shock and awe over soaring home prices. The median listing home price in Whitefish was $1.3 million in July 2024, more than doubling since 2020, according to Log castles rise up alongside the mountain like mythical beasts.I pulled up a stool at the Great Northern Bar & Grill, a popular watering hole in the heart of downtown. On any given night, you might find a literary reading or a blues band. The latter was playing the night I was there. There is a relaxed mix of tourists and locals, with the dress ranging from L.A. chic to Carhartt. The dance floor was packed and local beers flowed freely. Whitefish locals are diehards. Craig Moore told me about his 17 year unbroken streak of skiing every month, all within 100 miles of my passion,' he said, hoisting a Going to the Sun IPA. The blues band thumped in the background and a rowdy game of shuffleboard was going on behind us. 'I moved to Montana to ski. I didn't want to stop skiing. And just because the lifts stop running doesn't mean that I have to stop skiing.'In DeepThe Flower Point chairlift is the gateway to the goods. From the top of the lift, other skiers curled around to slide down the groomers. Sue, Brian, and I headed straight ahead past the ski area boundary sign into the towering fir trees. This is the launching point into Whitefish's sidecountry in an area known as the Canyon. This is unpatrolled avalanche terrain, so I was glad to follow the lead of soft-spoken Idaho native Joel Anderson, guide and owner of Whitefish Vertical Adventures. Other backcountry skiers slipped into their own private stashes as we skinned upward. I could feel the powder fever, but the vibe out here was decidedly laid back. That happens when there is room for everyone to get fresh the top of a peak, we ripped off skins and surveyed the terrain. The slope fell away steeply into a well-defined canyon. Joel motioned downhill. 'It gets a little tight there,' he said. I squinted but could not see anything that I would call tight. As an eastern skier, this gorgeous glade looked downright roomy. Joel dropped in on his splitboard, riding straight down the fall line. I charged down after him. I accelerated on faith that corridors would keep opening below me. Snow splattered off my parka as I laced turns down my own private glade run. Sue streaked by in another channel, wedeling through the was smiling broadly when we regrouped with him. 'Welcome to the best powder in Montana,' he skinned up for a lap in another zone. More untracked lines beckoned. This time, we descended in a powder quartet, alternating leads. Snow boiled up over my knees as we charged down through the emerged on a snow-covered road at the bottom of the canyon. Bright white walls of snow rose up all around us. I stopped to take in the scenery, but Joel told us not to dawdle. We had 30 minutes to hustle back and catch the last chair or we would have to skin up the ski area. Whitefish has a diehard community of uphill skiers, but we were not planning to join them just yet. We made the last chair with 3 minutes to spare. Back at the top of the mountain, the sun was beaming and the après crowds milled about. We pointed our skis down Toni Matt, the showcase groomer named for the Austrian ski instructor who schussed the headwall of New Hampshire's Tuckerman Ravine in 1939, a feat that made it into the Guinness Book of World Records in 2024. Matt went on to lead the ski school at Whitefish in its first years, firmly putting the resort on the national map. Skiing the Toni Matt trail with its big views felt like I was soaring over the Pacific the middle of my skiing reverie, Turkey Tom flew by. I hardly flinched at the unusual mix of bright snow and skiing birds. Whitefish had cast its iconoclastic bird man paused briefly, lazily twirling and cawing, then soared onwards, his feathers illuminated by the warm Montana POWDER 2025 Photo Annual is available. Click here to have it shipped directly to your front door.
