It’s Always Been About the People
Skiing is better with friends. Unknown skiers delight in the magic of side-by-side pow turns in the late 70s in the Canadian Rockies. Photo: Warren Miller Archive
“People come first.”
That sentence is permanently etched into my brain, a mantra my parents instilled in my brother Henry and me from a young age. It’s not explicitly about skiing—surely it was a ploy to get me to share candy with my little brother or consider a classmate’s feelings while planning a birthday party—but the surprisingly simple principle has served me well in pretty much all aspects of my adult life. When in doubt, consider the people around you.
Like many teenagers, Henry and I fell in love with skiing by watching our heroes throw down in the movies. We watched Sean Pettit hucking himself to the moon in Matchstick Productions’ The Way I See It (2010) and tried to find cliffs around Crystal Mountain, WA, to pitch ourselves off. I watched Michelle Parker’s segment in Superheroes of Stoke (2012) and she became my idol (still is).
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