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A ski partnership stretched across adulthood

Carolyn Highland’s “Ski You Soon” takes a premise that could have been handled as a sentimental reunion story and gives it more texture than that. The article follows Highland and her longtime ski partner Lindsay as they try to make a short spring tour happen after years of life drift: marriages, children, demanding careers and a move from Colorado to opposite ends of the country. What makes the piece work is that Highland does not pretend the old ease still exists. The logistics are harder, the bodies are different and the windows for adventure are narrower. The story’s emotional weight comes from the fact that the friendship has to be maintained deliberately now, with the same kind of patience and improvisation that a backcountry day often demands.

The mountains as a way of learning each other

Highland anchors the friendship in the pair’s shared history training for the Grand Traverse, the forty-mile ski mountaineering race between Crested Butte and Aspen. That detail gives the article its core insight. A mountain partnership is not just built on compatible pace or overlapping ambition. It is built on accumulated knowledge: what food someone wants when they are fading, how they handle fear, what kind of encouragement helps and when to back off. Highland uses the memory of road trips, hut visits, race training and small moments of care to show how backcountry travel accelerates intimacy. The article ends up being less about a single tour than about the rare form of friendship that grows from repeated exposure to discomfort, uncertainty and mutual reliance.

A mature version of mountain joy

The present-day ski on Alaska’s Friendship Pass gives the piece its final turn. Lindsay is pregnant, the snow year is thin and the outing is modest by big-objective standards, but Highland treats those limits as the point rather than the compromise. The article quietly rejects the idea that mountain meaning depends on higher consequences or cleaner athletic narratives. What matters here is continuity: two people who have changed almost completely still find a way to meet on snow and recognize each other in motion. By the end, “Ski You Soon” reads as a defense of the adult backcountry life many skiers actually live, where commitment is measured less by spectacle than by whether you keep showing up for the people and rituals that made the mountains matter in the first place.