Stev loves to ski. Stev has skied at least once a month for the past 217 months (as of November 2021.) After the ski resorts close, in order to get his spring and summer turns in, he hangs out right in his “backyard”, skiing patches of snow of varying (small) sizes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains (and sometimes in other locations.) Stev says, “I call it ‘patchskiing’, and one of the coolest aspects of it is that the snow, quality and placement differ from year to year, so you never ski the exact same patch twice.”
In 1998, Stev’s wife Michele was working at the Bunker Hill fire lookout for the Forest Service. Noticing a healthy amount of snow on the north-facing slopes, Michele encouraged her husband to bring his skis up during his visits in the summer, and Stev’s addiction to keeping the ski party going all summer long was born.
In the future, he aspires to ski patches in (relatively) faraway places like Glacier National Park in Montana, Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and (really far away) New Zealand. But Stev has dialed in his year-round ski game in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and has developed a nearly clairvoyant sense for where snow might just exist in the heart of summer, even on a weak snow year, and even if it’s only fifty vertical feet of it.