For the vast majority of the skiing population, days on snow are limited to weekends and vacations, with the bulk of the week spent in school texting the girl in the front row or at work complaining about your spouse.  Thus, many comb the internet for ski content to satisfy their vicarious cravings until the next time they click in.

In an age where even multinational corporations put so much emphasis on social media that they’ll pay some idiot to Tweet about iced coffee because they can’t figure out how to communicate in brief and misspelled spurts of grammar, your online ski persona can do as much to dictate your standing in the ski community as your actual skiing skills.  So take heed of the following advice, which will help you manage your internet skiing career from your first post on NS as a toddler to your last avi forecast on TGR as a crinkly, bitter, randonee-ing old man.

Newschoolers

So you’ve grown old enough (7) for your parents to give you a MacBook, an iPhone, and that matching XXXL teal-colored suit you wanted for Christmas that sags on your 130 pounds like a wet mop.  You took some ski lessons way back when, but haven’t used your poles in any functional role since. It’s time to get online.

Newschoolers is the kindergarten of the ski industry; it’s your first time interacting with others, you quickly find out who is cool (Tom Wallisch), and just like a game of The Sims, you can track your “karma” in numerical form.  Seniority is based on number of posts, karma figure, and how quickly you can recycle meaningless ski gossip (“Matt Walker had to borrow a pair of Salomon Ghosts from Henrik Harlaut’s brother in that shot because he left them in a Tim Horton’s in Montreal.  That’s why he didn’t have SPKs for that four kink.  But everybody knew that last week… before it happened”).

But don’t worry, there’s plenty of content designed to help the growing park monkey through the dark years of puberty and adolescent uncertainty.  You can get advice on how to stay away from drugs, find out what the cool kids are wearing, and more importantly, what Tom Wallisch is wearing.  At this point you’re too young to know anything about the backcountry, but that won’t stop you from asking people where Chad’s Gap is.

Marital status: Single, exchanging dozens of texts with some girl who gave you a handy once.

Quiver: One pair of center-mounted park skis with no edges.

Preferred song to edit to: Hip-hop or Deadmau5.

Avoid: Tight pants.

Technical terms to master: Sticky, karma, Bobby Brown, pretzel.

Double black diamond terrain: Getting first post.  Getting first post demands utmost attention to wasting ones’ time during the day, as anyone attempting this feat must outdo the thousands of teenagers hitting refresh on the homepage during their free period until a new article or video show up.  Posting first is the switch 1440 of Newschoolers, and while it is a completely mindless achievement, at least this activity helps the average NS reader spell one word correctly.

TGR

Now you’ve grown up, found a gal, and have health insurance, kids, and haven’t been to a Poor Boyz premier in years.  Outerwear has outgrown its original stylistic purpose and is now considered purely for its functional uses, such as keeping the body warm and dry in a wet and cold mountain environment.  You trade your Empire pipe gloves in for a pair of those train conductor gloves everyone at Snowbird wears.  With an old, weary frame and aching knees, you eschew the park in favor of “real skiing.”  Your purposes online now revolve around monitoring people’s eye-balled snow reports and blurry photos to choose where to take the pre-dawn skin the following day. You get stoked off of moisture content numbers, and asking people if they have “change for a nickel” to show you the goods at the place you skipped work to ski.  But don’t worry; real-time insecurities can still be played out in forum form; plenty of “jongs” exist to be called out for misreading avalanche reports, giving away secret “zones,” or admitting to owning powder skis shorter than 185 cm.

Marital status: Married & living in Seattle, or single in a trailer in Idaho heated by a stove fueled with old demo equipment you stole from the rental job you got fired from.

Quiver: one pair from each of Volkl’s lines from the past eight years.

Preferred song to edit to: banjo.

Avoid: posting an inaccurate weather report, talking about avalanches incorrectly.

Technical terms to master: Jong, flaming, sticky.

Double black diamond terrain: the Jackson Hole forum.

This is the North Shore of the skiing internet.  Visiting dentists are warned not to ask for “a tour of the goods” with a full description of your outfit, lest you want to get cut in the liftlines, snaked out of fresh tracks, and your rental car tires slashed.  Posting on this thread puts your entire internet ski career in the hands of blood-thirsty savages who live in unheated cabins in the Tetons with deer carcasses hanging from the ceiling, their families long since unaware of their whereabouts.   This aggressive and cutthroat species spare no beater, as in “I go to mandatory air lines when people follow me inbounds or out… lessons learned the hard way are learned well.”  Best to wait until Seth Morrison is in your contact list before diving into the deep end of the pool.