I've been skiing with my friends since I was about 8.

It hasn't always been with guy friends. In fact, one of my best buds growing up that I loved to ski with was Alice. She was a racer, so she smoked pretty much all of us back then.

But, since I'm a dude, and skiing is a fairly dude-ish activity, I've been on my share of guys' ski trips.

Here's how the trips have looked across my lifetime.

An Early Taste of Freedom - Pre-adolescent trips

These were with our parents, our friends' parents, school trips, or with other organizations that provided proper chaperones. However, they were some of the first times that I felt real freedom. I skied with some little rippers, so the chaperones could never keep up. They'd try for awhile, but eventually they would relent and say something like, "Okay, I think I want to take a little break. Can you meet me right here in 2 hours?"

At this time, there weren't too many instances that we had been left alone in our lives. I saw the jumps and didn't have to worry about a chaperone seeing me breaking the rules by catching some air (the resort I grew up on didn't allow jumping, and back then there were no terrain parks. Lame!). It was up to me if I wanted to break the rules and jump, and how high I wanted to go when I did.

It made consequences a reality for one of the first times because, when there was no one there to say "Take it easy," I could let it fly, and realized that there is a correlation between how high I jumped and how much it hurt when I landed. The same lesson Icarus learned. Be careful trying to fly too close to the sun.

Teenage School Trips

Night skiing. Showing off. Making out on the hour and a half bus ride home. Good things.

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College Trips

Shoelace budget. Barely enough money to get drunk at night. Showing off. Making out. Again, good things.

This is where my inner-child and my inner-adult really started to see eye to eye.

My inner-child said "Don't grow up and get a job. Just keep making turns forever!"

My inner-adult said, "Something tells me the inner-child is right. You'll need money so you have a place to live, but turns may just be what it is all about."

On a guys trip in 1996, at a Leftover Salmon show in Crested Butte, I decided to move to Colorado after I finished at Penn State.  I miss being around my family, but it was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

Mid 20's Trips

I've been on the welcoming side of all of these trips. Since I lived in Colorado, everyone came to see me.

This is where we start trying to figure out ways to be on the mountain without having a pass. "You three ride up, then one of you comes down with two passes and the rest of the group can use them."

Yeah, I'm not necessarily proud of my part in committing conspiracy to trespass, but it made sense to my 25 year old brain. Half of the reason we didn't want to pay was because, at this age, it seemed like it was impossible to wake up in time to make paying for a full pass make any sense.

The mid-20's trips always seemed to involve staying up until 2 or 3 a.m. to see how much beer and tequila we could fit in our bodies. I spent much more on booze than I did food, so when my body was sleeping, it was happy. It somehow knew that I wasn't going to give it the nutrition, hydration or rest that it really needed to stomp all over 20,000 vertical feet in a day.

At about seven a.m., my internal clock would wake me up saying "You're going to miss it." To which my hangover would answer, "No chance, I don't care."

At eight, the same thing would happen.

I'd sleep blissfully until about 9:45 a.m., at which time my love for skiing would give a huge push, and just barely edge out my hangover, and I'd rise, bleary eyed, to my friends who were looking about as bad as me.

We got some good turns on those trips, but at that point, the party was the real focus. We drank beer and ate turns, and sometimes I was so hungover that the skiing wasn't even fun. Well, skiing is always fun, but somehow it was less fun.

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Thirty Something Ski Trips

Change starts to take place. People have more money to spend because they are more established in their careers. It isn't as hard to get some of them up in the morning because they don't want to waste their money or time.

There is no more pass sharing. No one wants to be on the resort without the proper credentials anymore. Hangovers are still there for some, not so much for the others. In the former phase, it was rage all day and all night. In this one, it starts to become about resting at night so that raging all day is even possible.

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The Big Four Oh

Everybody has kids, and those little things are turning out to be expensive.

In our 20's, it's about us. In our 40's, it's about family. This year's trip shrunk to a core group. 4 guys, one in each seat.

We reminisce about all the great trips we've had, and confuse what happened to whom on which trip. It doesn't matter, they are all such fond memories.

On this one, we didn't want it to last forever. My friend Dave said he missed his family so much he could hardly stand it. That was after only four days. It was touching.

At this age, we haven't lost too much of our ability, or our desire to charge. In fact, I think we are all better than we used to be. We hucked some little drops and took it up to almost 60 mph a couple of times.

If our ability has grown a little, our patience has grown a lot. Back in the day, there was no waiting for anyone who was taking forever. Well, there was some waiting, but it was usually accompanied by a lot of screaming and cursing. Now, it doesn't matter so much. We have somehow realized that it is going to take as long as it takes, and the screaming and cursing aren't going to speed anything up.

Further, there was more gratitude in this last trip. I think that the older we get, the more we realize how lucky we are just to be able to ski and ride Steamboat. We see how cool it is to have lifelong friends.

When we meet people on the lift and tell them that we've been friends since first grade, that we played on little league teams together and slept at each other's houses like we lived there, they are often in awe. They mention how lucky we are to have each other. Without getting mushy (well, I get mushy, they don't), we acknowledge. We know it's a very special thing that we are still playing with our friends.

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