by Debbie Vance

David Rothman’s collection of mountain tales and ski essays, Living the Life, hits the shelves November 5^th and will fill a regrettable hole in literature—namely, the absence of a written corpus dedicated to skiing, dedicated to revealing the intimate connection between skier, sport, mountain, and other snow/topography/thrill/ski aficionados.

With magazines like Powder, Backcountry, and Off Piste; and writers like Lou Dawson, Craig Dostie, and Steve Casimiro, ski writing is slowly but surely building its reputation and audience, but in doing so readers and skiers alike are clamoring for honest, adventurous, there’s-ice-in-my-beard ski stories, and Rothman is the man for the job.

“I wrote it because I wanted to help give American skiing a written language as soulful as that of fishing, surfing, mountaineering, sailing and other environment sports, a quality it seemed to lack when I was growing up,” Rothman writes in the book’s introduction.

Everyone who’s ever hit the slopes—if you haven’t, you should—knows the gloriously heart-racing adrenaline that pumps through your body as you perch on the edge of a steep, powdery downhill, ready to wrestle with gravity—and (hopefully) win. But it is the true lovers of the sport for whom skiing transcends sheer athleticism and appreciation of geography and body, and begins to transform your very way of living, your mindset and world view.

“For if skiing is not a sport, but a way of life,” Rothman writes, “it touches far more than mountains and snow—it comes into contact with friendship, love, grief, joy, sorrow, history, politics, ambition, faith, tragedy, comedy, failure, triumph, audacity, remorse, delight, and regret, which is to say: everything that matters. It is those deep emotional realities that are at the heart of life. And you have no choice but to live that life. So live it.”

We at Conundrum Press are excited to bring this soulfully written ski language into the world and watch it grow. #livingthelife 

Check back next week for an exclusive interview with David Rothman himself.

In the meantime, check out this video of Revelstoke-based skier, Izzy Lynch with fellowCanadian big mountain skiers, Riley Leboe and Colston VB as they tackle wildly unpredicatable Alaskan mountains.

Also, this musical timeline of ski-movie history.