Way to go Stev!
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ELDORADO NATIONAL FOREST, Calif.—Dave Boswell was out for a hike with friends on a recent June afternoon when he saw a man dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts—hiking with a set of alpine skis on his back.
No lift lines in July.
“It was really strange to see him come down the mountain,” said Mr. Boswell. “My second thought was, ‘why aren’t we doing that too?’ ”
It’s “patch skiing” season in the Sierra Nevada.
Patch skiing is when ski fanatics hunt for whatever snowy spots, or patches, are left on mountains, hoping to complete just a few turns. Their sometimes slippery goal is to ski every month of the year.
The skier on that day, Stev Fargan, tested his mettle on remnants of a snowfield 25 miles from Lake Tahoe. He skied down two different snow patches and was able to make turns in the double-digits.
On both patches, after he skied to the bottom, he decided the runs were so great that it was worth it to hike back to the top of the patches to do it all again.
A single run on each patch lasted less than a minute.
Stev Fargan hikes up the mountain with his skis, boots and other gear. PHOTO: ABIGAIL SUMMERVILLE/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“The hike-to-turn ratio isn’t always great,” said Mr. Fargan, a 58-year-old teacher from Wellington, Nev. “But there’s never a lift line.”
With one of the highest snowfalls on record in the Sierra, Mr. Fargan and other patch-skiing aficionados say this summer is shaping up to be a banner season. It’s also extending the regular season at resorts such as Squaw Valley, which will stay open until July 7 and Central California’s Mammoth Mountain, which plans to operate into August.
Having not missed skiing at least one turn for 188 consecutive months, by his account, Mr. Fargan “is the premiere patch skier in the Sierra Nevada,” said his friend, Jamie Schectman, a veteran skier in June Lake, Calif.
John Simonelli, Spencer Abbott and Stev Fargan, from left, after they skied their first patch of the day. PHOTO: ABIGAIL SUMMERVILLE/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Mr. Fargan credits his wife, Michele Nelson, for sparking his love of patch skiing.
“She was working for the Forest Service at the Bunker Hill Fire Lookout and she said, ‘There’s a ton of snow here still.’ So I brought my skis and that’s how I started,” he said.
Patch skiing has reached Canada, the East Coast and even Scotland, where Helen Rennie said she is on her 116th consecutive month of skiing in her home country.
“There’s usually nobody else there so it’s peaceful and I often see wildlife,” said the 65-year-old Ms. Rennie, a geography teacher who lives in Inverness.
Although more people are trying out patch skiing, fans say, there are still no strict guidelines to the sport. “You come up with your own honorable rules,” Mr. Fargan said. “Mine are pretty loose; if you’re making turns, then you’re good,” he said.
Helen Rennie skiing a patch of snow in Scotland in 2016. PHOTO: HELEN RENNIE
Other patch skiers, such as Meghan Kelly, have more rigid standards.
“My personal rules are 30 turns total counts as patch skiing and you have to ski at least 10 turns at a time. So on some of the smaller patches, we have to take three runs,” said Ms. Kelly, 40, of South Lake Tahoe, Calif.
She said other skiers base their rules on patch length, with some holding to a 1,000-foot-long run rule.
Katy Hover-Smoot, another local patch skier, has seen friends ski “a dusting of snow on their lawns” in October to get their monthly turns in.
There is a general consensus among the patch skiers that questioning the validity of another skier’s streak is completely inappropriate.
“I would never ask another person for evidence of their patch skiing activity....I would never say ‘that doesn’t count,’ ” said Ms. Hover-Smoot, 35, of Olympic Valley, Calif.
While there is little agreement on the exact rules of patch skiing, there is more consensus on the names of certain patches. Mr. Fargan named one patch “Chinese Fireball Dragon,” after a dragon in “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.”
Meghan Kelly skiing in the Sierra Nevada in September 2017. PHOTO: SARA CARBONARI
If you look at the patch from a distance, it looks like a dragon’s head with a long neck, he said. “On the head you can make turns pretty easily, but the neck gets narrower, and it’s pretty steep as you’re going down. That’s one where you feel very alive when you ski it. You don’t forget it.”
During the height of California’s drought in 2015, Mr. Fargan had to hike four hours, with 40 pounds of skis, boots and other gear on his back, to reach a patch of snow, approximately 12 feet long.
“I had to clear rocks and branches off of it. It was kind of like a chunk of ice almost,” he said.
After clearing the patch, he put on his gear and completed a single turn on a run that lasted a few seconds. He did nine more runs to get five right turns and five left turns.
Then he switched back to his hiking shoes for the four-hour descent.
Spencer Abbott, another patch skier and a friend of Mr. Fargan’s, said he has had trouble recruiting people to the sport.
“I try to tell them we’re going to do a lot of hiking and not a lot of skiing,” said Mr. Abbott, 52. “But I haven’t met a lot of people who want to do it a lot because they’re like, ‘that’s a lot of work for a short amount of skiing.’ ”
Mr. Fargan said the hardest part is stopping before the snow ends and the rocks start. “It’s not like a resort where it gets flat at the bottom and then you get on a lift,” Mr. Fargan said.
The Eldorado National Forest still has snow. PHOTO: ABIGAIL SUMMERVILLE/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
With so much snow left in the Sierra Nevada this summer, he is noticing more people hitting the slopes. On his recent expedition, he ran into John Simonelli in the trail head parking lot and saw that he also had a set of skis.
Mr. Simonelli, of Tahoma, Calif., said he is new to patch skiing. Though he hadn’t met Mr. Fargan before, he followed him to the various patches on the mountain. At the end of the day, he announced: “I’m gonna do this all summer now.”
Appeared in the July 5, 2019, print edition as 'Year-Round Skiers Go to Short Lengths.'
