The Salt Lake City Ski House
The end of a historically awesome winter season!
Last year I spent a month and a half in Salt Lake City skiing with Cindy. We enjoyed it so much that we planned a 6-bedroom winter ski house to also host friends this year.
This season turned out to be amazing for many reasons. For one, we had a night and day experience between last year and this year’s snowfall. You can see the record breaking effects in the graph below:
In an area where ski resorts historically average 400 to 500 inches of snow a year - Alta hit 800 inches the week after we left. Yesterday they completely closed the resorts to deal with the snowfall.
Our ski house of ~30 year olds also took the opportunity to hit more than our fair share of ski jumps.
In some ways - this was a nice metaphor for taking advantage of the volatility in seasons. Last season when it never snowed - I still learned how to carve and ride but didn’t try to hit too many jumps. But of course this season with record snowfall…..
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
A Retro on Community and Friends
One core theme I learned: if you build it - people will come. This year we ended up planning a trip with over 35+ skiers and snowboarders staying sporadically over 11 week from January to March. Planning trips and hosting is a lot of work, but well worth the reward!
And we didn’t just ski all the time. As a house, each member took some time to organize fun activities.
I set up a leaderboard in the kitchen to track the person who did the best tricks, outfits, and other feats that could be attempted for skiing / snowboarding.
We made dumplings for Chinese New Year and Jeff took some time to teach us how to rap.
Ben got a chance to slow cook a huge Costco brisket for 12 hours for the first time.
For Valentines day, Christina had the whole house write each other cards and pass out candies.
Tyler hosted a taco night and everyone took turns pitching their intentionally shitty startup ideas.
We got together every Sunday night to watch The Last of Us (where coincidentally the last episode of the show was set in Salt Lake City).
We woke up at 6:30 in the morning and tailgated in the freezing cold of the Brighton parking lot.
It was great seeing friends from various circles connect and form bonds, even beyond my immediate acquaintances. In January, the house was booked at about 70-75% capacity. But by the end, it was almost always full as friends invited others to join the trip.
Living in a winter ski house with 12+ people at times was also much funner with the shared understanding that it was temporary.
For Cindy and I plus our friend Tyler who also stayed a majority of the weeks there, we saw through a lot of friend groups in various levels of socializing / vacation or hardcore skiing mode.
We had to save some sanity for ourselves mentally and physically with the sheer amount of ski days. A lot of people wanted to prioritize skiing in a very compressed time period. Luckily though we came out unscathed and (mostly) uninjured!
I did feel like it was hard to also get a lot of work done. I biffed on a few new years goals just three months in (like writing my newsletter every week) and I attribute it to prioritizing friends and snowboarding for three months. So a mindset shift is kind of needed going forward!
Communities are Important
I think winter sports are a great reason to get together with friends. Winter sports satisfy two conditions of being common enough to bring people together and infrequent enough to make it a special occasion together for a trip.
I’ve talked before about how making friends can be hard when you get older and how it’s helpful to have secondary reasons to get together. Ski trips are a great excuse! But also I realized recently that the proximity of having a community house just made hanging out with people much more natural.
Instead of intentionally setting up time to catch up over a phone call or dinner - I really enjoy the natural serendipity of conversation between work or meals. A friend called it building up micro-interactions that eventually add up to friendships. And this past season totally made me realize how much I missed working with people in person again.
I wanted to feature some interesting facts that Rob Henderson took on a podcast about friendships and community.
It takes about 200 hours of face-to-face contact to become a good friend with someone.
Dunbar cites research suggesting that individuals (unconsciously) invest more heavily in people they expect to get the most help from.
Women commonly have a very close female best friend along with a romantic partner. For men, they tend to have either a very close best friend or a romantic partner, but seldom both.
For most people, the “close friends” category contains about 5 people. Dunbar clarifies that this inner core includes family members, too. For people with fewer than 5 close social ties, they’re more likely to develop symptoms of depression. Interestingly, people with more than 5 are also at greater likelihood of depressive symptoms. [This is likely because people are spreading themselves too thin, and thus do not feel well-integrated into a social circle.]
With friendships, if you don’t spend roughly half an hour a day with them, the relationship tends to rapidly decay. This doesn’t have to literally be 30 minutes every day. It can be once a week spending a whole evening with them, or every couple of months spending an entire weekend together.
When our time is scarce, often the first thing people cut is their friendships. Friends don’t come with deadlines, and we assume that friends will forgive us for not staying in touch.
After about 3 years of neglecting a friendship, they drop out of your friend network altogether and become an acquaintance
It’s pretty clear that communities are important towards human well-being as a whole. One of the struggles of the slowmadic lifestyle is moving to cities where we don’t have pre-existing friends to hang out with. I’ve also heard a lot of anecdotes of people noticeable socializing less post-Covid.
But ultimately this past winter made me really bullish on short term (1 week to 2 3 months) community houses and trips. They’re great ways to re-connect and feel really close to friends that I may not see for months or years until the next trip.
Thank you to everyone that came on the trip and next year I’d love to facilitate the chance of more people to host their own houses and open it up to a shared community of awesome people.