My Favourite Ski of All Time

I spent most of my teenage years doing two things: skiing and dreaming of skiing. I remember going on a ski trip when I was twelve to Whistler with my dad (yep, I was a lucky kid) and marvelling at what a real ski mountain looked like. Coming from the land of bulletproof groomers and moguls, skiing pow in steep terrain was like being given superpowers. I couldn’t get enough. I wanted to move west there and then, and spent months trying to convince my dad to quit his job and become a ski bum with me. To his credit, I think he even considered it.

The next year, Greg Stump’s classic Blizzard of Aaahh’s came out and it marked the beginning of a new era of skiing. I was thirteen at the time and after seeing it I decided to quit school, move to Whistler and become an ‘extreme’ skier.  I had dreams of being on the cover of Powder, shredding with Scot Schmidt and having a K2 sponsorship. At 13, my folks weren’t super keen on my living out of a Subaru and getting my education on chairlifts without supervision. The Sponsorship stuff didn’t happen right then either. But all the same, the drive was there. And in 1990, that drive got much, much worse.

In the lead up to the winter of 1990, K2 skis released the K2 Extreme. Touted as the world’s first ‘extreme’ or big mountain ski, it was a dream come true for a budding 15 year old dirtbag skier. The funny thing was the K2 Extreme 8.3 wasn’t really an extreme ski at all. It was a VO slalom ski with different graphics. But that didn’t matter. Not to me, not to anyone. It was the first ski out there that wasn’t marketed as a race ski and that made all the difference. When I saw them I fell in love. I tore out the ads in Powder and plastered them all over my room. I went to every ski shop around where I lived to hang out and discuss the merits of what this ski could do. I watched Glen Plake in Dr. Strange Glove do things on those skis that seemed impossible. All nonsense really, but convincing nonsense that made sense to every single powder hound out there that dreamt of living in Chamonix or spending a winter in Snowbird skiing neck deep Utah blower.

One of my heroes showing us what an extreme ski could really do…

This is was OUR ski. Not a race ski or some weird ski designed for old guys (think Spalding Platinum). This was a ski for the ski bum. A ski for all the rippers out there who wanted nothing more than to spend their time shredding pow. I wanted a pair. I needed a pair. It was all I thought about. Day and night, I would dream of those rainbow coloured bases and the traditional K2 graphic on the front that had a little extra edge to it. I wanted 204s with Marker MRR bindings. And on Christmas morning of my fifteenth year, my skier father obliged. Sitting under the tree were a pair of K2 Extremes. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to immediately leave the house and drive to our local hill to try them out. Forget Christmas dinner, let’s go SHRED, dad!

I skied them hard that winter. So hard that over the next two seasons, I went through 9 pairs of them and almost got kicked out of school. Every pair delaminated in the tips. And they were the best skis I’ve ever skied. Not because of their stiffness or their innovative shape, but because they were the only ski out there marketed as an extreme ski. That was enough. The K2 Extreme made me think I could ski anything. Many lines fell to those skis; they were the first skis I took off cliffs and they were the first skis that saw me land a 720. Lamination issues aside, those skis never failed me. They gave me courage and inspired me to make skiing a way of life.

In a way, I’m still a ski bum. I am lucky enough to make a living on my skis, and I attribute a lot of that to those magical years between 15 and 17 when all I could think about was deep snow and jumping cliffs. The K2 Extreme gave me a life long obsession for snow, and for that, I am truly grateful.

Be safe and ski hard.