Bum
Noun
1. A person who avoids work and sponges on others; loafer; idler.
2. A tramp, hobo, or derelict.
3.Informal. An enthusiast of a specific sport or recreational activity, especially one who gives it priority over work, family life, etc.: a ski bum; a tennis bum.

“When you are enthusiastic about what you do, you feel this positive energy. It’s very simple.”
Paulo Coelho

Informal is an apt description of most people I would consider ski bums. Their lives, at least while on skis and in many but not all cases off, are filled with enthusiasm, simplicity and positive energy. Except for a few fortunate trust-fund recipients, all the ski bums I know or know of work at least as much as their more formal, mainstream non-or even anti-ski bum brethren who do not ski as often as they might like. No ski bum is accurately portrayed with the more derogatory (formal?) definition of ‘bum’.
Au contraire.
The life of a ski bum both on the mountain and off is filled with effort and there is neither time nor space for loafing, idling or hopping trains, though in truth there are a few derelicts in the ranks. While the term ‘ski bum’ is of recent origin, it is inconceivable that the enthusiast who gave skiing priority over many other aspects of life has not existed since the invention of the ski sometime around 5000 BC. In modern ski culture there seems to be a perception that the ski bum is a recent phenomenon, but this is not true. In North America the first high profile ski bum was Snowshoe Thompson (1827-1876), though there were surely others. From 1856 to 1876 Thompson carried mail across the snowbound Sierra Nevada in winter on his homemade 10 foot long 25 pound oak skis. He made the 90 miles from Placerville, California to Genoa (then called Mormon Station), Nevada in 3 days and the return in 2 days. He made the journey 2 to 4 times a month for 20 years and was never paid for his efforts. Every ski bum reading this can relate to Snowshoe’s enthusiasm, positive energy and the simplicity of his solitary life in the mountains between Placerville and Genoa.
So, by the time I was old enough to determine my own priorities the lifestyle of the ski bum was a well established if unacknowledged tradition in North American skiing, and so it remains. In 1957 Ron Funk, Tony Perry and I lived together in one small room of a residential home in Aspen while we trained for alpine ski racing. I don’t remember the rent, but somehow $25 a month each sounds right. One of our (and others) money saving strategies involved daily lift tickets which cost around $10. At that time in Aspen lift tickets were attached to the ski pant zipper by a small, metal, detachable keychain. One of our group would buy a ticket each morning, attach it to the pant zipper, get on the lift, detach the ticket, insert it in a spare glove tucked inside the parka and drop the glove to a waiting fellow ski racer at the first lift tower who would then repeat the process. And repeat. It required a lot of effort, attention to detail, inconvenience and imagination to be a ski racing ski bum in the 1950s. We traveled together in full cars to share gas expenses and sometimes drove all night between races to save the cost of a bed. As I wrote in “Night Driving” about a 1959 (when gasoline sold for 25 cents a gallon) nonstop trip from upstate New York to Reno with Don Brooks, Redmond Wilcox, Gardner Smith and Renee Cox (later Gorsuch): “At around two in the morning we pulled up to the back entrance of my parents’ tiny Reno apartment. We had been on the road for sixty-five hours. We unloaded about twenty pairs of skis from the rack and stored them in a corner of the living room. My fellow passengers immediately crashed on the floor in sleeping bags, but my fatigue wouldn’t let me sleep. I showered, put on clean clothes and took a refreshing walk along the Truckee River. When I got back, I joined my mates on the floor, and I slept the sleep of colored dreams. In the morning I loaned Brooks enough money for a bus ride to Portland and saw him off. A week later he returned my money, paying me from his first check. Gardner hung around a couple of days, and when Reno made him nervous, he moved on down the line. Red stayed a bit longer and then just disappeared one day, driving off into the Northwest (I think) in his trusty black Oldsmobile. I got a job on a newspaper in Fallon, commuting 120 miles a day six days a week. Richard Nixon was going to try for the presidency in a year. It was a long summer.”
By the early 1960s Sun Valley had become my ski bum home. At that time Sun Valley was still owned by Union Pacific Railroad and many jobs within the company included room, board, a lift pass, some money for partying and other necessities and time to ski several hours a day. As a ski racer with friends in management I had the good fortune of some advantages, and I was able to work as a bus boy, pizza cook and bartender, prioritized according to training and ski racing schedules. One of my roommates in the Sun Valley dorms was the irrepressible Bobbie Burns who was in the process of revolutionizing freestyle skiing with his flamboyance, enthusiasm, energy and unbelievable skiing skills. Another year I lived for free with Funk in the small Ketchum home he owned in those days. One year Mike Brunetto and I rented a two bedroom basement apartment in Ketchum, though we both worked for Sun Valley, so we could have more personal space, privacy and comfort than the dorms allowed in those times between skiing and working. Mike later became one of the most respected ski designers and manufacturers (as did Burns) in the business. He worked for Head, Dura-Fiber, Lynx, The Ski and K2 before starting his own ski companies, RD and then Wolf Ski which were made in Sun Valley. Wolf Ski business hours were 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and from 2:30 p.m. until whenever the day’s work was done in order that the staff, including Brunetto, could ski.
In 1963 I took a job in La Parva, Chile as a ski instructor (and which taught me to teach skiing), included round trip transportation from the U.S., a few dollars and time off to train and join Funk and C.B.Vaughan for the speed runs in Portillo.
In 1964 I had the opportunity, which included a free plane ticket, to go to Europe and race for a month. I took it and at the end of the month decided I wanted to stay in Europe. I cashed in the return portion of the plane ticket and spent more than a year skiing and racing in Europe, working in the Kneissl ski factory in Austria, working for a spedition (moving company) in Germany and teaching skiing on my own in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.
When ski racing ended for me in 1965 I returned to America and took my first real job as a ski coach in Heavenly. For most of the next 30 years I earned much of my living coaching and teaching skiing (and writing about it, of course). My enthusiasm for skiing has never waned and I still manage between 100 and 140 days a year on skis, some of them in the backcountry. The purpose of my priorities was always to stay on skis. That’s what ski bums do, stay on their skis.
It’s very simple.