Aspen – It was nearly 20 years ago that Glen Plake bashed his way into the ski world, a mohawked derelict from South Lake Tahoe who fit the mold of the 1980s ski model about as well as his ill-suited 212cm straight skis fit in a mogul field.
But unlike those long-abandoned boards, the 40-year-old godfather of the American extreme scene isn’t going anywhere. In fact, he’s more popular than ever.
So what gives? How does a guy who never came close to winning an Olympic gold medal, never even got a World Cup moguls start, and didn’t learn how slide a rail in the terrain park until his late 30s, become the most recognizable skier in America?
Arguably by becoming the most important. Just ask 21-year-old professional freeskier Steele Spence, or Aspen/Snowmass freeride teammate Michael Olenick, the 20-year-old who recently taught Plake to ride rails.
“Plake is the man,” Spence says.
Plake, introduced to the skiing world in Greg Stump’s 1986 film “The Mal- tese Flamingo,” has been stealing scenes ever since. He became one of the first sponsored skiers in history who wasn’t a racer, sharing billing on the K2 ski team with former Olympic medalists Phil and Steve Mahre.
The unconventional attitude toward the sport he has been practicing since age 2 finally has come into vogue, landing Plake in 10 major ski films, a syndicated television show called “Reel Thrills” and hundreds of guest speaking opportunities, most recently as host of the NEPSA Awards in Aspen.
Along the way, he helped establish the model for modern freeskiers now able to make a living simply by doing what they love.
“I grew up snow skiing, but I was hardly a conventional snow skier,” Plake said between powder turns on Ajax Mountain over the weekend. “Actually, I thought I was a conventional snow skier fighting against what skiing was becoming. For me it was all about going out and having some fun tearing it up, not this perfect little world that people were making it.
“I wanted to carry on the road that the freestylers had laid down for us, but the sport didn’t want to embrace that at all hardly. They were trying to kill all that. But not anymore.”
The best word to describe Plake may be “stubborn.” He still rides those long, straight skis in the moguls every chance he gets, still wears his hair in the punk-rock, rooster-tail Mohawk that he trademarked in his teens and still remains dedicated to the sport he fell in love with as a boy, even while watching his best buddy, Shawn Palmer, enjoy the success of the snowboarding explosion as skiing languished in the 1990s.
That stubbornness created some setbacks along the way too, however, including a string of alcohol-related arrests and accompanying jail time early in his career. But it has served him well since he turned his back on the bottle more than a decade ago.
“I just got sick of it. It got really boring after a while,” he said of his decision to quit drinking for good. “I’m here to ski. If I want to party, I’ll go to Vegas.”
Plake’s decision to break away from skiing’s established social scene – even World Cup overall champion Bode Miller confesses to tossing back a few brews between races – comes as little surprise from a guy who has been establishing his own rules since he started sliding on snow. An admitted practitioner of the lost art of “ski ballet” and self-proclaimed inventor of skier/boardercross – “Me and Palm used to build tracks in my backyard on snowy days when the mountain wasn’t open” – Plake never was interested in what the ski industry had to sell him. Ironically, now he’s the one doing the selling.
“I just kind of did whatever I felt like doing,” he said. “Skiing has been living under all these shackles it didn’t need to be living under. Now it’s back. It’s like a 25-year step backward for the better.
“This sport is back to where it ought to be – this wild, carefree, kind of daredevil thing we do in the mountains. We need to knock down the stigma of skiing being this big ritzy sport, because it’s not. It’s a country sport that happens at the end of dirt roads.”
Scott Willoughby can be reached at 303-820-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.
