Common Ground: Community and Renewal on the Skintrack
By Julie Brown Davis
The author’s friends make their way up a ridgeline on the West Shore of Lake Tahoe in the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit. Unceded Cayuse Umatilla, Walla Walla, and Wašišiw Ɂítdeʔ (Washoe) lands. Photo by Julie Brown Davis @juliemariebrowndavis
This write-up was originally featured in our Spring 2025 Trail Break issue.
I. Newcomer
When snow covers a landscape, it erases all signs of a trail. There are no arrows nailed to trees telling backcountry skiers where to go. A skintrack may zig and zag or be hellbent on a mission straight to the top, but you don’t have to follow it. Actually, you probably shouldn’t. Choose your own way, instead. Find the route that best suits the conditions and terrain. These are the freedoms that make mountain travel in the winter so alluring—and also so intimidating to newcomers.
Historically, backcountry skiing has been difficult for people to access. The community is strong on the inside, but it can seem walled off to outsiders. If you don’t know the right people, or ask the right questions; if you didn’t grow up in the mountains, or have the resources and knowledge, you probably aren’t backcountry skiing. Even if you did know the right people and have the right gear, it’s physically demanding and the learning curve is steep.
An ex-boyfriend introduced me to backcountry skiing. He showed me how to attach clunky, bulky adapters to my resort bindings and gave me a pair of skins that didn’t fit my skis. Not long after we started hiking, my legs screamed at me to stop, unaccustomed to the weight at my feet. I slipped and fell. My legs got completely jumbled when I tried and failed to do a kick turn. I cried. I felt like an imposter, doing something far beyond my ability. I kept pushing to the top. But after that, I didn’t go backcountry skiing again for several years.
“You took her where?” a mutual friend said, in disbelief, when we told him where we went skiing that day. It wasn’t an expert climb, but as a beginner I had no business on that route. What did I know? In a sport as esoteric as ski touring without boundaries, the only way to learn is to follow someone and just go.
Needless to say, the relationship didn’t last much longer.
II. Community
It was meeting like-minded and encouraging, inspiring women that rekindled my desire to go backcountry skiing and lowered the barrier to entry, making the sport feel not just accessible but truly enjoyable. One of those women hiked behind me up a couloir in Chamonix, France, encouraging me all the way to the top. Her mantra? One step at a time.
For most people, winter is a time of retreat and quiet. But for me, as a skier, winter has always been a reunion. Friends scattered across different jobs and travels in the summer once again come back together, sharing ski days and stories. We come back to the same mountain, the same trailhead. Off the slopes, skiing can be the common ground that makes building relationships easy, where community can flourish.
That spirit is what led to the creation of the Backcountry Film Festival in 2004. The board and staff at WWA wanted to bring people together in their hometown of Boise, Idaho, and raise money for grassroots activism.
The fall film premiere is a long tradition in ski culture, designed to bring people together in celebration of a shared love for winter, snow and gravity. Now in its 20th year, the Backcountry Film Festival travels around the country and internationally, with more than 100 screenings over the ski season. For small nonprofit backcountry alliances and SnowSchool sites, the film festival is a membership drive, a fundraiser, a stoke builder, all in one fun night.
I went to the Backcountry Film Festival premiere in Boise, Idaho, in 2019, the fall before the pandemic. Sitting in a packed theater full of beanie-clad skiers, watching stories unfold on the big screen—about people protecting the environment, building community, creating access, and fostering belonging — well, that’s the magic that gets me jazzed to go skiing with the person sitting next to me, as soon as the first snow falls.
Mount Rose. Photos by Julie Brown Davis.
III. Overwhelm
Lake Tahoe’s West Shore is my favorite place to go backcountry skiing. A forested ridge connects three peaks—Rubicon, Hidden, and Jakes. The terrain is playful. Crags frame steep chutes that open up to tree-stamped aprons, benches and gullies. All day long, there’s that wide-reaching view of Lake Tahoe below.
The West Shore also happens to be lots of other people’s favorite place to go backcountry skiing. Its popularity has reached a point where a mellow day of skiing requires a dawn departure from your house, not because the route is so long or technical, but because you won’t find a parking spot otherwise.
More people should add to that richness of spirit—shouldn’t they?
On the one hand, skiing and outdoor recreation have provided the common ground out of which I’ve experienced a tight-knit community and camaraderie. New faces showing up on the skintrack is a positive and welcomed shift. Especially since the pandemic, the demographic in Tahoe is shifting toward more diversity, with more people of color moving to the area, thanks to remote work. Backcountry skiing may be lagging in diversity behind other avenues of outdoor recreation, like hiking, that are more accessible to people. But it’s trending in the same direction.
And yet I also feel washed away by the competition and intensity that arises when so many people are trying to do the same thing, in a small area, with limited resources— because as vast as the mountains feel when you’re out there with one or two other people, they sure get small quickly when crowds arrive. That pressure sends me home, discourages me from seeking out my favorite places in the mountains. Surrounded by people, I actually feel a deep loneliness.
In Lake Tahoe—a place that’s overcrowded with 15 million visitors a year—I’ve thought long about this double-sided coin that is outdoor recreation and community in the mountains. It’s not just the West Shore or Lake Tahoe. The backcountry is the fastest growing arena in skiing across the country. Traffic congestion, parking headaches, crowded slopes are all now part of the experience.
The last time I went skiing on the West Shore, a knot of anxiety lodged in my stomach and my chest as I steered the wheel around the curves on Highway 89 toward the trailhead and passed one pullout after the next, all jammed up with cars and people. The angst continued after we started skinning up the apron under Jakes Peak. I saw 10 people above me, intensely focused and pushing to get to the top, fast. Another 20 skiers and snowboarders marched up behind me, eyes set in the same direction. The snow was firm and unforgiving, and I’d forgotten my ski crampons, so I kept slipping and falling on the icy hardpack. Energy drained and overwhelmed by so many people, I cut the day short and, halfway up, turned around to ski back to the car.
West Shore of Lake Tahoe. Photos by Julie Brown Davis.
IV. Regeneration
So how can we take skiing’s popularity, build community and use those networks to solve the problems caused by overcrowding? It starts with responsibility. It starts with solutions.
Parking issues on the West Shore spurred Tahoe’s backcountry skiing community to organize. Geoff Quine, a board member of Tahoe Backcountry Alliance, says he still leaves his house in Truckee at 4:30 or 5 a.m. to drive the 45 minutes to the West Shore and arrive early enough to find parking. He’s been skiing here for three decades, and in that time, his relationships with ski partners have grown deep out of the trust and experiences forged in tough winter conditions.
Nowadays, he knows an early start is just part of the experience. And he’s using his knowledge of the area and relationships he’s built to invest his energy in a group that’s continuing to create more sustainable access for backcountry skiers in the Tahoe-Truckee region. Tahoe Backcountry Alliance formed to negotiate with the Forest Service and Caltrans to keep plowing the roadside curbs on the West Shore that provide parking for skiers. It’s power in numbers.
“More people getting outdoors and recognizing the benefits, and fostering a sense of belonging and stewardship and protecting our public land—that’s what we want.”
-Geoff Quine
In the Northeast Kingdom, Granite Backcountry Alliance hosts volunteer days where hundreds of people show up to maintain and create backcountry glades, creating more places for people to recreate in the winter. Historically, skiers in New England were extremely protective of their backcountry zones, says Samantha Trombley, a backcountry skier in North Conway who has done marketing work for Granite Backcountry Alliance. But once she started going to events—volunteer glading days, spring skiing at Mount Washington or Wild Corn Shindig, watching ski movies in the fall at the Backcountry Film Festival— meeting people and finding ski partners became easier and easier.
“It doesn’t have to be your best friend, but just someone you know you can trust and are comfortable going out with and also having a good conversation with.”
-Samantha Trombley
Events get people together off the hill. Not only do they raise support for grassroots advocacy, but they provide a platform to disperse knowledge, bring more people into the fold, share values and stories and learning. “Community is a good thing. Telling people about what you’re doing is a good thing,” Trombley said.
V. Solace
Winter is the coldest season of the year. There is also a kind of wintering that happens to the soul.
Katherine May, in her book Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times, writes that everyone winters at some point in their lives. “It is a fallow period in life when you are cut off from the world,” she writes, “feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.” In my life, I have endured more of the wintry seasons that May describes than I’d like to admit. The most recent was a life-altering loss of community, including many people I’d met while skiing. The incident boils down to a misunderstanding, I think. But the pain of the rejection cut so deep, I had no choice but to isolate, to let winter ice my bruises, while my heart and bones were repaired.
For a while, skiing made the pain worse. When I did go out, I found my tolerance diminished for crowds and parking issues. So I left my skis in the garage, and when I took them out again I had to renegotiate how skiing fits in my life and how it affects my identity.
But that’s the silver lining of hardship. By withdrawing, I created space to reflect and figure out how to make a change.
Trombley says it’s counterproductive to use overcrowding as an excuse to not focus on inclusion and creating equitable access in the outdoors. “We’ve had this problem of overcrowding before,” she notes, adding that she is among the newer folks who started backcountry skiing during the pandemic. Instead of closing the gate to newcomers, the community should take responsibility for the sport’s growing popularity. Have a backup plan when your favorite spot is too crowded, she suggests. Join up with local advocacy groups who are talking to land managers about parking or protecting backcountry ski terrain.
I used to say that skiing makes me happy. What I’ve realized, though, is that joy doesn’t come from skiing as much as it is fostered by the connections I make with people when I’m outside, moving my body—skiing, hiking, pedaling, swimming. Those moments are found one-on-one, or in small groups on a skintrack, or when people come together to be better stewards of our sport.
Coming out of my cocoon, I’m again in a community-building season of life. It takes effort and intention. It requires initiative to make plans to go skiing with people, old friends and new. I still haven’t been skiing on the West Shore in a while—a pregnancy, then a newborn delayed my return. Maybe this winter will be the winter I get back out there.
I have gone hiking in the dry months. One late afternoon, I showed up and found a parking spot fairly easily. Multigenerational families were lacing up shoes, strapping on backpacks, running after small children, holding hands with older family members. They were in no rush. It was enough to just be outside, in nature. Those moments inspire me to break out of my silo and reach out to the world.
Tahoe is a day’s drive from San Francisco, Sacramento and Reno—three huge and growing urban areas. This is one of the easiest places for people to come and experience the outdoors. That’s special. That needs to be protected. So the question is: How are we going to do that?
JULIE BROWN DAVIS @julie.brown.davis is a journalist, writer and editor based in Reno, Nevada. Drawn to stories that help her understand what it means to live in the West today, she has contributed to SFGate, Moonshine Ink, REI and Powder Magazine.
