This story by Tommy Gardner was first published by The Stowe Reporter on Sept. 12.
For Noah Dines, Labor Day was just another day at the office.
Dines, a Stowe skier on a quest to ski 3 million uphill feet in a calendar year, last week surpassed the current world record, logging his 2,506,500th foot of vertical.
He achieved the feat Sept. 2 at El Colorado, a Chilean ski resort about 25 miles from Santiago, where he’s been making laps since late July.
By eclipsing the 2.5-million-foot mark, Dines overtook previous record-holder Aaron Rice, a fellow Stoweite who set the record in 2016. Rice had, in turn, eclipsed the original person to throw down the gauntlet, Canadian skier Greg Hill, who climbed 2 million feet in 2010.
Dines isn’t done, either. While he has a goal of 3 million vertical feet — all human powered, no mechanical conveyance up or down — he also simply has a goal of gaining as much uphill mileage as possible by Dec. 31.
By that point, he’ll be back in Vermont, but this won’t be his last trip to the Andes, and not just because of the terrain.
“There’s an infinite amount of skiing and infinite lines, but there’ll also be people,” he said this week, only slightly huffing and puffing while doing one of his innumerable daily treks up the 10,000-foot hill. “I’ll come back just as much to see new friends as I will to ski, which has really become a huge part of the story this year, since I left Stowe.”
When we last left off with Dines, in late April, he was squeezing every last vertical foot he could out of Mt. Mansfield before the snow completely melted for the season. At that point, he had logged 1.2 million feet in the first four months of the year — the equivalent of 41 trips up Mount Everest.
But to achieve his goal, Dines must follow the snow, which meant, at first, heading out West.
“In essence, I stopped at the first snow I found,” he said.
That was at Winter Park, Colo., where he spent about two weeks. Then he spent a few days at Aspen, but he’d gotten there too late to get much snow.
From there, it was on to Utah, where he met Steven Nyman, a World Cup and former Olympic downhiller who lives nearby. Dines stayed for two weeks with the local legend.
“He kind of became a pivotal figure in my year, just because he knows everybody and is wicked cool, and just loves skiing,” Dines said.
After that, Dines spent about six weeks at Mount Hood, the Oregon destination for anyone seeking to stretch out a United States winter as long as possible.
However, snow in the continental U.S. is a finite resource, which meant it was time to head south — but first, a hiccup. Dines’s flight happened to be scheduled right when the massive CrowdStrike software mishap crashed millions of computers and grounded thousands of flights worldwide.
The incident cost Dines four days of his next journey, but he was so far ahead of his pace that, barring injury, the setback didn’t spell game over.
“I managed to get it all back, but it was just frustration,” he said. “I knew I had so much in the bank that I’d be OK. But my goal isn’t to be OK. My goal is to be great.”
Dines has called the small resort town of Farellones home since late July, but even as he was on the phone this week, he was anticipating heading still further south in a couple of weeks, following the snow in the Andes as long as possible.
As much as he’s traveled since departing Stowe in May, Dines has tried to stay put in each place as long as possible, because every day spent traveling is a day not spent skiing.
Eventually, he’ll be back in the Green Mountains to finish his journey. However, the skiing community is small, and Vermont has never been far from Dines no matter how far Dines is from Vermont.
Just the other day, he and a buddy were hitchhiking. A handful of cars passed by before he got a lift, but just a bit later, he got a message: “Hey, we’re skiing at Valle Nevado. We’re from Bolton and we thought that was you, but our car was jam-packed.”
As stoked as he was to break Rice’s record, Dines said it will be even sweeter if he can hit the 3-million-foot mark on his home mountain.
Any messages for Stowe?
“I can’t wait to see you,” he said. “I have felt the love this whole time. The messages and the notes mean so much, and I just can’t wait to be back with my community.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Stowe skier breaks uphill record, keeps on skinning.