Season 3 / Episode 3
If you’re lucky enough to run into the fast-paced trio of Eben Mond, Doug Evans, and Mark Morris at their home ski hill of Loveland, Colorado, good luck keeping up. They can rip laps at this underrated ski area, which overlooks Interstate 70 and tops out at the Continental Divide, faster than anyone.
Mond met Evans while they were both working at Loveland’s ski shop years ago. Not long after, they were both launching the cornice under Loveland’s Chair 9 when some other guy showed up. It was Mark Morris, who played in a local bluegrass band and worked in a ski shop down the hill. “I hit the cornice harder, then they’d go back up and go even bigger,” Morris remembers. “Finally we met up and we were like, ‘Who the hell are you?’ We’ve all been best friends ever since.”
They’re an impressive crew, a rat pack that miraculously knows when ski patrol is about to drop a rope and can find every pocket of remaining powder left at the mountain. “It’s in this cool little pocket at the top of the world at 12,500 feet,” Morris says about Loveland. “The wind blows around. You don’t get the snow that hasn’t been touched, you get this whispy powder that’s been blowing around and settling in the trees. So even on the iciest day, we can find soft snow because the wind is always honking.”
The three of them have figured out unique ways to make their lives work in the mountains. Evans, who still works in the ski shop, skis every month of the year, logging hard-to- reach patches of snow at high elevations midsummer and amassing more than 200 days on snow a year. Mond helped start Loveland’s first freeride team and ran a ski-tuning shop out of his house. Morris started a local bluegrass music festival that draws in hundreds.
“We seldom make plans to meet up to ski,” says Mond. “With our group, it’s always Loveland. When we’re at Loveland, then the place to be is Chair 1.”
Mond says he likes it here because it feels like a small town ski hill. “Sometimes when you ski those big resorts, you never see the same person twice,” says Mond. “But at Loveland, it’s the same lifties, cooks, patrollers, and skiers year after year—there’s something nice about that.”
Westward Series: Season 6
What is it about Vermont? There are places with bigger mountains that get more snow and less subzero temps. But there is no place with a more committed core of skiers. Raining? No problem. Bulletproof? They invented bulletproof. Negative 20 and 30mph wind? Better be ready at 6am so you can get first chair at Stowe.