The Top Ten List of Top Ten Lists for Skiers

Published September 29, 2022 11:08AM

Since the dawn of media, listicles have been consumed by the masses. Scrawled on cave walls, the Cro-Magnons read “6 Best Grooming Tips For Your Woolly Mammoth” and “5 Ways For Man Make Fire Good.” The Romans were famous for scroll-written lists like “5 Excuses To Leave Dinner and Use The Vomitorium” and “7 Gift Ideas For The Host Of Your Next Orgy.” The Celts famously perused “13 Tips To Get That Smell Out of Your Kilt.” And so on and so on until we skiers began to digest lists of the top skis, resorts, boots, et al gear every single season since skiing was bestowed upon us. (Don’t miss the 2023 Gear Guide though…) But never in the history of lists has there been a list of lists, one list to rule them all. Until now, friends, until now.

Please enjoy The Top Ten List of Top Ten Lists For Skiers:

1. I hung up drinking nearly a decade ago but I still love a great ski bar and what it represents for a thriving ski town. Sadly, it seems these semi-grimy hubs of community whose walls are regaled with ski nostalgia and echoes of ski bum greats are being replaced by white tablecloth banquet halls and bougie character-less boutique drinkeries. Yuck. Skiers want old, scuffed wood, drink deals, and cheap food. Hell, we like our floors wet and a little sticky too. The Top 10 (plus 4 more) Ski Bars Left In The World (though I’m upset The Buck in Telluride is not included) is a list of must-visit locales that gloriously celebrate the ski bum après scene.

2. No matter what you call the Almighty Being on the other side of the existential rainbow bridge, I think we can all agree there is a significant lack of ski stories in the Bible. Well, if the Great Ski Bum Above were to divinely reveal anything to a goggle-tanned Moses, it would have been The 10 Commandments of Ski Rentals.

3. Do me a favor: drop a pen on the floor, stand just over it, and pick it up. If you groaned like an asthmatic elk on the way down or up then the Top 10 Stretchy Stretches for Skiers Who Are Bendy Adverse is the list you need. If you did not, please enjoy the Dynastar Maxes in these photos from an article published in 2021.

4. This is a website devoted to top ten lists (beware, you can spend too many hours looking into very weird subjects…which maybe is the entire reason the internet exists) and here are their thoughts on The Best Alpine Skiers Of All Time. Note: I think this would be a great thing to bring up at après while pointing out who is excluded from the list and how weird some of the comments are. Enjoy.

5. Maybe you are like me and you love nerding out on the history of skiing. Even if you don’t, I hope you look at the planks from The 10 (plus one more) Most Influential Skis Of All Time and see them as stepping stones to communal ski joy and huge leaps forward in ski tech…even if they now look like unskiable framing studs or super goofy relics.

6. The 10 Best (plus 30 more) Words for Snow is just a really nice way to use the Farmer’s Almanac (other than a means to incorrectly predict next season’s snowfall) and maybe learn a new word or two.

7. I absolutely love the Olympics at an absurd level, like the kind of cheesy love you see in the third act of a Freddie Prinze, Jr. movie (Summer Catch is actually a wonderful film.) But I wish the IOC would reinstate these 10 Super Weird Discontinued Winter Olympics Sports. Everyone would tune in to watch a sport that involves skiing, target shooting, fencing, and horses.

8. My friend, writer Brendan Leonard, has a great saying about camping: “It’s just a series of really uncomfortable naps.” But his reporting on the 10 (minus one) Worst Nights Of Sleep On A Mountain proves to me that winter camping may be the worst idea anyone has ever had. These sleeps were all sleeps of survival necessity during insane adventures, but the fact remains.

9. If you type “top ten” into Ski Magazine’s search bar, 7,104 results come up. I hope you enjoy at least one of them. I recommend starting at the very last of the 711 pages and working your way forward. You’ll find a ton of articles that are not lists and do not have anything to do with the words “top” or “ten.” But you will find some lists in there, as well as snippets about snowstorms from 1998. Oh internet, look how far we’ve come.