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Comment by bendixso | Hacker News Reader

Some of the geekiest people I know have become the best skiers/snowboarders on the mountain. I know a guy who used to regularly show up to the terrain park and do double frontflips over 60 foot jumps. He's got a PHD in physics now.

I know another guy who used to compete in big air competitions. Senior iOS developer.

My friend Brian does double cork 10s. Medical doctor.

This sport is for nerds. If you're nerdy, you have an even greater chance of being successful at it because you know how to focus on getting great at something.

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Senior iOS developer, medical doctor,...

The common ground is not just geekiness, it is money. Skiing is expensive, and in order to get good, you need to practice a lot.

I am curious to know how nerdy skateboarders are. Skateboarding and snowboarding share some similarities, but the former is much more affordable.

Skated regularly for 31 years, in many countries, with thousands of others. Skateboarders are not nerdy.

The accessibility of skateboarding puts it leagues ahead of an expensive sport possible only in certain locations at certain times of year.

There are definitely nerdy aspects to skaters, despite most skaters being non-argumentative and easy going about those aspects.

A lot of skaters are very particular about their wheelbase, deck width, wheel size/durometer, tail/nose style.

Skaters are also obsessed with archival of magazines and video parts, leading to some nerdy discussions of 30 year old events that the mainstream would consider trivial.

Yeah when I was skiing 3-5 days a week at Mammoth, I met a lot of physicians and business owners on the lifts. Some astounding conversations too, a middle aged group using a private jet to hop between resorts.

It's impossible to not notice the atmosphere of rich white people at any winter resort.

So expensive! Only the richest of my friends could go skiing / snowboarding as kids. I wasn’t able to afford it until I was 26. But, then again, in the 80s and 90s, computers were also expensive. I wasn’t able to afford my first computer until I was a junior in college. So, it makes sense that my friends who had computers also went snowboarding.

There are a lot of ways to greatly reduce the cost. You can buy some really great second (even third) hand gear very cheap. Lift tickets at smaller mountains or even hills that are not as challenging to advanced boarders are often very reasonable. If you can adjust your work schedule to free up the odd weekeday that too will save a lot on the lift ticket.

iOS Developer, ex-skater, and snowboarder here. Skating is much more technical than snowboarding. There are many variations of the same trick as well as the entire flat-ground realm of skating. However, I have taken my worst bails snowboarding. The terrain park is on a different scale of "bigness" than a skatepark, creating more potential risk.

I dunno. I actually don't think it's all that expensive of a sport if you can invest in your equipment and keep it long term. Sure, you'll spend a few grand one season for a setup that will last you three or four seasons. The season pass will set you back another $600 per year roughly.

I've had my current setup for five seasons. Same board. Same boots. Same jacket, helmet, pants, etc. If I do a back of the envelope calculation, my sport probably costs me $1,000 per year on average.

There really is such a thing as competence, work ethic, and patience. These traits tend to lead to success in other areas of life, including the accumulation of wealth and advancement in one's career. Not everything can, or should, be explained by privilege. Great people really do earn their greatness.

Plus snow tires/chains, a roof rack to carry the gear, and gas and maintenance to drive 1-2 hours (each way) to the pass. Plus non-bulk-homecooked food/snacks to eat while you're out. Plus losing a huge chunk of hours every week, which matters when you're an hourly employee.

I bet a good number of people on HN are software engineers who have never had a job where they made less than $100K with "unlimited" vacation. For an hourly employee, the opportunity cost alone of skiing for a month can easily be $1000 -- I could be racking up overtime instead (and then go shoot hoops in the park, for free).

The average software engineer salary is roughly double the average salary, which in turn is about double the full time minimum wage salary. For a lot of people, "a few grand" is an insurmountable barrier. When you're living paycheck to paycheck, you're not even thinking about "accumulation of wealth and advancement" yet.

You only need snows when driving on day of storm. Unless you are doing a destination trip. that is avoidable. Any SUV or reasonable sized car does not require a roof rack to fit a couple of boards plus boots and bindings.

Pick smaller mountains for day trips or buy your pass when first on sale to a mountain that does not make snow. As just one example, an early pass to Homewood was $509.

I have sold equipment still in good working order for next to nothing. Probably the only thing you'll need to spend any coin on is boots that fit. Helmets can be had 50% (or more) off during the offseason.

...or you just go skate, play soccer, throw a frisbee in a nearby park.

Unless one happens to live in a skitown, snow sports are already more expensive than alternatives that don't require a roadtrip, let alone season passes.

If someone has an extra $250 a month to to spare for a hobby, they're already doing fairly well.

> It’s not that expensive

> you’ll spend a few grand ... 1000 dollars a year

Pick one

It's expensive but I did it in college when I made a spare $250 a month.

Old Volvo 240, used gear, waterproof running pants with sweats underneath that I already owned. Total cost of entry was a few hundred dollars.

It's much better with expensive top-notch gear but so is everything else. And it's still cheaper than skiing.

Twenty years later cheap gear is radically improved and there's a much bigger used market. And if you live near Seattle you can hitch a ride with me to Stevens whenever.

If you don't want to pay for lift tickets you can get used split-board and avalanche gear and take an avalanche safety class for about a one-time $1500 expense and walk up mountains for free instead, even at resorts.

lol, you invest a few grand one year up front but it smoothes out over the coming seasons to roughly one grand on average because you keep your gear and don't have to invest in new stuff every season.

Also that's not the super frugal version of this. If you really wanted to, you could just buy all of your stuff on Craigslist. I've done that with some of my stuff, and you can get a huge discount.

You wouldn't believe the kind of people who buy gear, ride like two days, and then sell it a few years later. The market is glutted with this kind of stuff.

I do a lot of expedition-style backpacking either alone or in a guided group. The groups are always full of tech people, mostly from SV. It's almost like the only people who can afford fun shit are the techies.

could it be they are the only ones that can afford $600 per day guided trips? MDs and tech nerds are well paid.

Nah, It's not even that much. $600 will get you a very good, 3 or 4-day guided trip to the backcountry in Oregon and Washington. You'd be hauling your gear, food and skies/snowshoes. I do think that techies can easily afford this stuff, but I also think what's more important is they can afford to take a lot of time off work (or just leave their jobs all together knowing they'll find another gig fairly quickly) to enjoy things like this.

Park is fun for me. It's relatively cheap too. You just need a ski pass and your gear. I would also qualify as a tech d-bag but I don't spend a ton of money on the sport and generally look like a dirtbag when I'm out and about

Depending on the mountain and the park, you may even be able to get away with just foot power.

Are these all in Northern California?

Not at all. There are high end touring and backpacking, i.e. full service guided hut/cat/heli drops and hut to hut style, all over the world in or near most major ski destinations. Most people I know who can afford to do these trips is within the STEM group or independently wealthy. Or they're younger with no overhead and they dirtbag it for a awhile to save up but this is the minority.

> This sport is for nerds.

Having a lot of disposable income helps, too.

Or if you're a dirtbag, the ability to live as cheaply as possible so you can spend as much time as possible on the mountain.

>Having a lot of disposable income helps, too.

It's not that expensive unless you have to travel far enough warranting an overnight stay. I was able to afford decent equipment and lift passes from working a cashier job in high school. You could buy used equipment for a family of 5 for under $1000. Check out craigslist in some mountain towns, you can find higher end equipment that's a only a few years old for dirt cheap.

Cashiers job and no financial responsibilities.

You're just going to ignore the remaining 2/3 of the post where I said the following?

>You could buy used equipment for a family of 5 for under $1000. Check out craigslist in some mountain towns, you can find higher end equipment that's a only a few years old for dirt cheap.

Is that the case or is it because winter sport is so expensive and we are well paid compared to people in other fields?

I recently went to Berlin and Prague, and met a lot of people who worked in tech that had quit their job to travel for 6 months.

This is the exact same thing for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Half the guys at my gym (in a random town in South Florida) are engineers or doctors.

Unexpected joe rogan?

PHD in physics. Aha. Maybe that helps. He knows why the snowboard does what it does and goes where it goes.

It took me to 'my friend Brian' to pick up your sarcasm.

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