Has Mountain Culture forgotten how to have fun? The Bum Jump. Photo: WInnie MacKay-Smith
RANT
Hot Dog!
Remembering how to have fun
By Feet Banks
I learned to ski at age seven, around the same time the movie Hot Dog came out. I remember watching it on VHS and being pretty stoked on Shannon Tweed’s naked hot-tub scene but also on the free-for-all chaos of the Chinese Downhill race. Hot Dog showed danger, excitement, nudity, and had a “stick-it-to-the-man” sensibility that probably got me more hooked on skiing than any pole-less snowplowing lesson I was taking at the time. Hotdogging just looked fun.
And it was. But that movie also signified the start of a shift in the ski industry. The golden age began to wane like a March sunset slowly covering the après patio in shade. Freestyle, the Hot Dog–era’s rebellion against the strict rules and general uptightness of ski racing, suddenly joined up with the FIS and became another rule-driven, in-it-to-win-it Olympic sport. WTF?!
Then snowboarding came along, and the imitative ‘new school’ skiing shortly after. Both those subcultures knew how to party but for some reason the communal mountain fun levels have never quite reached where they were in the late Seventies. These days, kids are taking things pretty seriously – ski-race dads and snowboard-club moms are getting into agro-screaming matches outside the fast food drive-thrus at quarter past seven on a Saturday morning (“We were here first!”) while the kids cower in the back.
Even the annual World Ski & Snowboard Festival held each spring is undeniably a really fun time but it’s so overrun with sponsors and sample handouts and making sure you thank all the right marketing directors at all the right times that it just doesn’t feel the same as a day of slush-jumps, costumes and intoxicated ski ballet.
Whistler local Ace Mackay-Smith remembers the old Hot Dog parties her father used to throw at Tod Mountain, where she grew up, and she keeps the spirit alive each spring with a Hotdoggin’ shindig of her own.
“My dad’s party was called WonderWeekend,” Ace says, “and there’d be obstacle courses where you had to roll over a hay bale and ski through a tunnel and do all these wacky things. There was ski jousting, lots of costumes and a bum jump where everyone had to land on their bums. It was all families in the day and then big parties for the adults at night with people hanging off wagon wheel light fixtures drinking beer upside down.”
With local events like ski ballet, limbo and a hot-dog eating contest that, last year, was won by an actual dog, Ace’s Hotdoggin’ bash is one of very few ‘fun-centric’ ski events left in Whistler – no sponsors, lots of music, and the number one rule is enjoy yourself.
So while the Olympics are an incredible experience that can certainly teach us the value of winning at all costs and the importance of getting your logo placement just right, this spring, reflect on exactly why any of us started doing these crazy winter sports in the first place – for fun.
And yes, naked is still the only way to properly hot tub, well, except naked and drunk – that’s ‘extreme.’
