Everyone wants to be the all-sacrificing powder hound, vagabonding from storm to storm, with no possessions, a bank devoid of money, but full of powder turns. In some places, we know true ski bums. People who don’t have cars, jobs, friends on powder days, or houses (or at least houses that don’t live in trees). We know Ben Price. A true specimen, and maybe one of the last of his kind, Ben lives deep, deep in the Cascade Mountains, living out of his tree house, a map of the peaks engrained in his mind, and more of a dedication to making turns and finding adventure than anyone you’ll meet in the mountains these days. And he does it because of one reason…wait for it…because he wants to. Before the days of the glory and fame of the vibrant, mowhaked professional skier of the 90’s to the energy drinking XGames youth of today, there were local heroes, people who skied because of the freedom and counter-culture found in the mountains. There was some risk involved in this—giving up everything to find solace in the powder. Comforts were gone, but enlightenment was found by the skiers living in the parking lot on the periphery of what was normal. As a snow loving community we’ve come full circle and today we’re all looking for that kind of hero. We need to draw inspiration from something unfamiliar, someone not constructed in the minds of a marketing team, but from a genuine icon—a legendary ski bum. We’re looking for Ben Price. We found him in Washington this December and parked our tiny house in his kingdom, following this splitboarding cowboy to the last frontier. Unexplored mountains and unknown pillow lines were found. And we also discovered that in the world of ski bums there’s everyone else and then there’s Ben Price (a true snow loving freak who would hate us if he knew we put him on the Internet).
