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What's in the Ice? Skiing in the Midwest

How the Midwest makes mountains out of molehills

by Alex Sepulveda
Spend some time ski bumming at a western mountain, and you’re bound to meet a ton of excellent skiers and snowboarders from the Midwest. Places like Snowbird, Mammoth and Tahoe teem with transplants from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. More often than not, they rip.





Gordy Peifer points 'em on a steep face.
Photo: Lee Cohen

At first, the disproportionate talent from this region seems baffling. Plenty of Westerners live their whole lives at the base of big peaks, skiing recreationally every winter, and still can’t compete with a cornhusker who spent their childhood schussing down trash heaps buried in blue ice and a skiff of snow. So what is it about the Midwest that generates so many good skiers?

“It’s colder back there, way colder than Utah,” emphasizes pro freeskier and Michigan native, Gordy Peifer. “It makes you pretty hardcore, actually. Once you come to places like Utah, you don’t take it for granted.”

Jibber extraordinaire Jamie Pierre of Minnetonka, Minnesota recalls skiing with his family in Lutsen where “it was 40 below.” Even on a bluebird day, negative temperatures keep many a Westerner off the slopes, but in the Midwest, where humidity is constant and much greater, the options are either to endure the biting cold or go home.





Matt Sterbenz diligently uses the handrail.

“Although there’s not much [snow], there’s plenty of cold weather for the snow machines to produce it at the resort,” says new school phenom Matt Sterbenz about his native Wisconsin. Sparse snow, humidity, wind, and the brutal cold combine to produce boilerplate ice that is the trademark of Midwestern slopes.

Kickers and terrain parks have become the playground for skiers blessed with less than powdery snow. Relegated to icy conditions, young kids often have to find more amusing ways to pass the day than etching skittish turns on bulletproof hardpack. “There’s not a lot of vert, there’s a lot of ice. So if you’re a skier out there, you learn to appreciate [what you have],” explains freeskier Brant Moles.

Pierre offers a particularly illuminating example: “At Highland Hills [MN], they used to…blow ‘snow whales’ (manmade snow) on top of blue ice covering the hay bails [to make moguls]. They were six- to eight-foot mounds of snow that hurt your teeth skiing them. We’d ride into one going full speed, of course, hit the first one, clear half the mogul field, land, and barely recover. They were so horrendous and intimidating,” he recalls with peculiar affection.

Kids with Jamie’s same passion will do anything to adapt to their circumstances, be it the lack of vert, snow conditions, or the fact that they have to attend school during the day. Imagine night skiing in frigid Midwest temperatures.

“You do a lot of night skiing…kids do. So it makes you have a lot of heart if you enjoy skiing,” says Brant Moles. “[But] you get a lot of runs because it’s such a short vertical. I was a really good slalom skier, because it’s so small. You make a lot of turns…or you hit kickers.”

With frigid temperatures, bulletproof ice, and molehills turned mountains, a simple evolutionary principle is at play in the Midwest: survival of the fittest. The harshest conditions produce the strongest skiers, and once in a big mountain venue, as Sterbenz notes, “[Midwesterners] are just like kids in a candy store.”

Athlete Profiles

Gordy Peifer