It’s been, to say the least, a lean snow year at the ski resorts. Less than 200 inches by the start of February. That’s at or near historic lows in Utah.
But maybe you shouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it.
Because Guru Dave isn’t.
Dave Powers, known to his friends as Guru Dave or just plain Goo, has been around long enough to know that things come and go, dry seasons follow wet ones, and with snowmaking and grooming getting better every year, there’s no need to think ski hills are about to become an endangered species.
It’s midmorning, and we’ve caught up with Dave at the Forklift restaurant on the Snowbird plaza. He’s already taken three runs from the top of the tram, skiing on as much fresh corduroy as he could find.
Here’s his report on the conditions:
“Fantastic, absolutely fantastic. Every day I can’t believe how good it is.”
Then, in reference to the dry winter thus far, he adds:
“I can tell you it’s been way worse. The first season I was here was the year of the drought. They didn’t even open until like Jan. 6. And then it didn’t snow again until the end of February.”
That was the winter of 1976-77.
As he said, that was his first season skiing the ’Bird.
This one is his 49th.
Skiing has been Dave’s elixir of life ever since a ski trip in college with the UMass Ski Club to Mont Sutton in Quebec. He skied every day for a week straight, and that was that. He didn’t want to stop.
Back in Massachusetts, while finishing his degree in comparative belief systems, two friends told him about spending three years working and skiing at the Gold Miner’s Daughter lodge at the Alta Ski Area in Utah.
“There’s no better place than Alta,” they told him.
“OK, where’s that?” said Dave.
He booked a one-way flight to Salt Lake City and went straight to Alta, but they didn’t have any job openings.
So he drove a mile down Little Cottonwood Canyon to Snowbird, where they did.
He started out doing night laundry at the Cliff Lodge, then worked as a disc jockey in the Tram Bar. During the day, he skied. He lived in employee housing on the premises.
After three years, he moved to the valley and started working in the asphalt business, tailoring a routine that fit his lifestyle: pour asphalt for seven months, ski for five.
For decades, Dave skied every day of the week, averaging over 130 days a winter. Now, at 75, as a concession to his older years — and the growing crowds that keep following him up Little Cottonwood Canyon — he’s cut out Saturdays. In 49 seasons, Dave isn’t sure exactly how many days on the mountains that adds up to, but it’s got to be north of 6,000. At least 50,000 tram rides, give or take.
But defining Guru Dave by the numbers misses the point entirely. He doesn’t ski for vertical feet. “Skiing is like a tai chi thing for me,” he says, “it’s like a path to enter knowing. The mountain has energy. I’ve integrated skiing into my cosmic pursuit.”
Along the way, he’s become, like the tram or the Forklift where he takes his daily breaks, a Snowbird fixture.
Friends started calling him Guru after he’d been skiing about five years. He credits his friend, and fellow Snowbird lifer, Curtis Kreutzberg with giving him the nickname. “It was because I was talking about crop circles or something like that,” he says, “then it got shortened to The Goo or just Goo.”
In 2005, as his story spread, Ski Magazine sent a writer to Snowbird to spend the day skiing with him. That resulted in the article, “Guru Dave and the Tao of Snowbird.”
“Every ski town is home to folks like Dave,” wrote Jackson Hogen, “people who make life in the mountains seem just a little more colorful, a little more vital, who show the rest of us that, yes, it can be done — it is possible to devote one’s life to skiing and be better off for it.”
Someone at the Forklift framed the article, which caught the attention of another ski buddy, a producer friend, who talked Dave into writing a daily blog reporting on the conditions at Snowbird. “I like to write,” says Dave, so it didn’t take a lot of talking. The blog (Dave does it for free) has been going ever since. Once Dave starts something, he isn’t prone to stop. You can see “Guru Dave’s Snow Report” at gurudavepowers.com
In 2012, Jackson Hogen and Dave published their book “Snowbird Secrets: A Guide to Big Mountain Skiing.” That was followed a few years later by The Locals Project coming to Snowbird to film a six-minute video on Dave that can be found on Facebook and Instagram and the Outside Magazine website (with the title: “The Guru is Our Favorite Man on the Mountain.”)
At the Forklift, the Goo is far from alone. He is surrounded by more and more friends who join him as they filter in to take their morning breaks. Many have been around as long as he has, or close to it. They talk about nothing and everything. Regular guys in a nonexclusive club with a shared passion.
They’ll go back out later for some more runs, they say, ready for more of the mountain energy they feed on — glass-half-full skiers who focus on the snow that’s there rather than the snow that isn’t.
“This place,” says the Goo, “never disappoints.”