Written by Warren Miller 
Friday, 01 September 2006 

It's that time of the year again. One Colorado ski resort has already started selling ski lift tickets. Halloween is right around the corner and soon it will be Christmas, which unfortunately is when almost every room in every ski resort in North America is already booked. All of this of course doesn't mean a thing to a lot of people because the ski season is still a calendar page or so away. For others, their evenings are already spent watching the weather cable and re-reading all of the back issues of the different ski publications they subscribe to. Most have called every 800 number for brochures from every resort in every book or magazine they can find. They might even have subscribed to the daily newspaper of the resort they're think they might have enough money to visit on their one-week vacation this year. 

There are eight or nine pages of job opportunities in whatever resort paper they subscribed to. If this sounds like you, why don't you just bite the bullet and quit your job and get a ski resort job for a winter. What have you got to lose? 
You are already in good enough shape to do the sit against the wall exercise for eleven minutes and you have already visited every ski shop within driving distance of where you live or work. All of those new shaped skis or the new step in bindings and boots for your snowboard will strain the float on your credit card, but what the heck? 
"If you don't do it this year, you will be one year older when you do." 

If you are going to do it, do it right now, because at ski resorts, places to live are few, far between, and expensive. Remember when you lived in that dorm in college? You probably had 100 square feet to live in, study, and store your kayak, mountain bike, and skis. If you're as smart as I think you are, you probably built your bed up on legs about six feet high and stored all of our toys under it. No sense in wasting all of that expensive air space. 

You can do the same thing in a rented condo room in the resort of your choice. This will be a condo that someone who knows how to work the system has already rented for the winter. They will have rented the three-bedroom condo (located at least a twenty minute commute away from the lifts) for about $2,500.00 a month. One of the bedrooms will be for him, her, or them, and whoever owns the lease will rent out the other two bedrooms to four different people for as much as $750.00 per person, per month. The original lessee will live rent-free and make $500.00 a month because they already learned how to work the system. 

The person who rented the condo will also have some kind of a job with flexible hours, a $1,000.00 bonus if they stay until the end of the season plus a season's ski pass. There is such a shortage of employees at most of the major ski resorts in America that some of those year-end bonuses can be negotiated higher later in the winter if you are doing a good, responsible job. How much money will you have saved during that same length of time if you keep working in the city where you live for The Amalgamated Accounting Company? 

Many of the major resorts today offer the same kind of job opportunities that you are currently working at there in the city. The only drawback will be that you won't be able to take your dirty clothes to your parent's house and have your mom wash them while she fixes your favorite dinner while you and your dad watch Monday night football. 

But do it now and for over a hundred days in a row you can be standing in the ski lift line first thing in the morning and get first tracks every time there is powder snow. You will be able to meet a lot of different people from all over the world while you ride up with them on a high-speed quad. You might even meet someone who will jump-start your career. 

For example, I met someone when I was teaching skiing in Sun Valley Idaho in 1949. That was when one of my pupils loaned me my first 16mm movie camera. I had tried to go back and finish my college education after World War II but it snowed and I dropped out as a senior. I was living in a dorm room with Fritz Kramer that was eight by sixteen feet with a shower and a toilet down the hall. It was a lot better than the bunk on the Navy ships that I had been sleeping in for a year and a half. That first full time winter job as a ski instructor was the start of almost sixty years of skiing and filming the white winter world. 

So once again I remind you, "If you don't do it this year, you will be one year older when you do." 

Courtesy of
WarrenMiller.net