Winter has arrived in Colorado and I’m so grateful for the last few weeks filling my creative bucket. To me and my creative practice, there’s nothing like floating on powder and getting stoked on adventure rigs with friends.
Dolores LaChapelle, my skiing teacher shero, lived a life stoked for creativity.
A Denver-native, she was a pioneer in backcountry powder skiing, remarked for her effortless style on the snow which she connected to her research and writings as an educator. What a lady. Her book Deep Powder Snow: 40 Years of Ecstatic Skiing, Avalanches, and Earth Wisdom is one I regularly visit this time of the year, it's a rare one too - I’m always looking at thrift stores for chance copies. She exclaims,
“Powder snow skiing is not fun. It is life, fully lived, life lived in a blaze of reality. What we experience in powder is the original human self, which lies deeply inside each of us, still undamaged in spite of what our present culture tries to do to us. Once experienced, this kind of living is recognized as the only way to live — fully aware of the earth and the sky and the gods and you, the mortal, playing among them.” - Dolores LaChapelle
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to creative connections and celebrations to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.