Meet Tia Budish and her dad, Chris. They’ve been skiing year-round for 139 months in a row.
Tia Budish was nine years old when she and her dad, Chris, hiked to ski Saint Mary’s Glacier—a year-round snowfield in the front range of Colorado—on 4th of July, bearing an American flag. They missed August and September that year, but in October, they were back riding lifts at Colorado’s Arapahoe Basin. That’s when the idea set in: What if they tried to ski at least one day every month of the year? “We put two and two together that we had already nearly been skiing every month of the year, so we made it a goal to keep going,” Tia recalls.
That was almost 12 years ago. Tia is turning 21 soon. And the father-daughter duo has skied for 139 consecutive months without missing a single month. “There wasn’t some big intent to start. We made it through that first year fairly easily, so then we made it a mission and never looked back,” says Chris, a lifelong skier who works as a real estate appraiser in Denver. “I thought maybe we could make it last 10 years? Then Tia would go to college. But then it just kept going.”
Sometimes, the approach is long and the turns are short. Tia on her way to a ski day.
Tia will be a senior at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, next fall, and Chris lives in Denver, where Tia grew up, so they don’t always get their ski days in together, but as long as they still get them, it counts. And they try to meet up as often as they can for four-season ski adventures.
In Colorado, skiing year-round is relatively easy to do, with resorts like Loveland and A-Basin opening as early as October and staying open late, often into June, but still, skiing in the summertime requires extra effort. August and September are usually the trickiest months. “Now that we’ve done it for so long, I don’t see anything in our future that’ll keep us from keeping the streak going,” Tia says. “The snow coverage is what’s scariest. That’s our biggest threat.”
Over the years, they’ve traveled to the southern hemisphere (for Tia’s 18th birthday—they went to Chile), they’ve skied lifts at Montana’s Beartooth Basin Summer Ski Area, and they’ve backcountry skied all over Colorado, from Breckenridge to Silverton to Telluride. They’ve hiked for their turns on patches of snow in the high country of Colorado and this past winter, while Tia was studying abroad in Italy, they met in the Alps to get their March turns in. In May, Tia returned home to Denver and they skied at A-Basin together. “It’s always fun when your kids are so adventurous,” Chris says. “Tia has now skied on four continents and isn’t 21 yet.”
Tia started this ski-year-round mission when she was just nine years old. She'll be 21 soon.
“We’ve skied in thunderstorms, we’ve bushwacked through a lot of fields, we’ve flown across the world to get our days in,” Tia says. “I had a broken foot one year and was in a boot, so I had to hike up Saint Mary’s Glacier in my boot and ski down on one ski.”
Most of all, the two appreciate having time together and a reliable ski partner to plan missions to the high country with. “When we have a plan for the day, it’s like we have to get this day,” Tia says.”It always ends up being an adventure. We always come back with stories.”
Happy Father's Day to all the rad dads out there. Including Chris, shown here with his daughter, Tia.