WOLF CREEK — To describe Wayne Sheldrake as a “ski bum” is an injustice.
A ski bum is a noun, a finite mass of flesh and fleece found in the formerly remote Rocky Mountain nooks now filled by resorts and the mostly temporary fixtures shipped in every season to fill them. Sheldrake, from Alamosa, transcends that notion. He has evolved ski bumming to the verb form, turned the concept of ski bummedness into an adjective used to describe a life philosophy that many aspire to, yet only a few have the necessary gumption to achieve.
Now in his mid-40s, the former ski instructor and writing teacher at Adams State College still rides the snow at his home hill of Wolf Creek some 50 days a year. But Sheldrake has been making a bigger name for himself this winter with his first book: “Instant Karma: The Heart and Soul of a Ski Bum” (October 2007, ). Some have described it as a memoir. The author calls it something else.
“It’s a tribute to the experiences I’ve had, definitely, and to the sport itself. It’s a tribute to those days and those experiences and the people that I met and became friends with through the years,” Sheldrake said. “My skiing experience (now) isn’t that intense, everyday challenge that it was in those days. But I think that’s sort of residual; it sort of stays with you. The thing that really stays with you is that you just always know how to ski.”
After spending seven years as a ski instructor and several more as a Masters ski racer, Sheldrake has a wealth of on-snow experiences to draw from — wild, reckless escapades that left bones shattered and at one point even rendered him temporarily paralyzed.
But there is no shortage of “real life” experiences shaping his personality, including a congenital heart defect he has had since birth and a home life bordering on dysfunctional, all of which he writes about openly in his book.
Still, Sheldrake writes, nothing has made a greater impact on who he is than the mountains and snow of southern Colorado, he says, Wolf Creek and Monarch Mountain in particular.
Two mountains and the friends who skied them have shaped me. Where I ski, in the remote ranges of the Colorado Rockies, has everything to do with what I’ve become. I met the people I love here. Some of the most important went their separate ways after a season or two. Some died before I had a chance to see them again. Those who stayed became who they are here, with me. It’s easy to say we’re just ski bums, and we just ski, but it’s an authentic life. By that I mean it’s as valid when it’s hard as when it’s easy, and it’s never as easy as it looks. It’s real life.
— from “Instant Karma: The Heart and Soul of a Ski Bum”
Although his words flow through 174 pages with the inventive fluidity of a freeskier slicing sinuous turns from a snowy mountain summit, Sheldrake does not consider himself a ski writer per se. Rather, he considers himself a skier who learned to write.
“I’m going to be a writing bum now,” he says.
Clearly, the pairing is inseparable, however. The creative energy that Sheldrake draws from the mountains in winter is superseded only by the discipline he ultimately learned as a skier.
Growing up, for the most part, without a father, discipline wasn’t something that came easily to the young Sheldrake. As a teenager, he shoplifted ski gear, counterfeited lift tickets, vandalized his school. A bum ticker that would demand open-heart surgery in his early 30s robbed him of more traditional outlets like high school sports during his transition into manhood, causing him to seek other vents for his adolescent psyche.
His family had always skied, however, and after graduation from high school, he took to it with a vengeance.
“Growing up, I was allowed to go skiing, just not allowed to do some of the things that my older brothers did,” Sheldrake said. “But we’d spent a lot of time around ski instructors and ski patrolmen, and I saw what that was all about and I wanted to be a part of that. At some risk, I went for it. I just decided that I would and see what happens.”
I considered danger a kind of addiction, positive addiction. It’s brain chemistry. It could be worse. It could be heroin. What’s so bad about wanting to hold your own destiny in your own hands, even if just for a few seconds?
— From “Instant Karma”
What happened was that Sheldrake eventually fell in with the wild bunch at Wolf Creek, a 1980s-era group of ski instructors who skied hard and partied harder. After landing a part-time job during his freshman year at Adams State, he took the winter semester off in his sophomore year to teach skiing full time.
His health issues kept him from getting too caught up in the party scene, but he made up for it by jumping cornices, straight-lining down the mountain at 70 mph without a helmet, even skiing off the snow shed designed to protect cars heading over Wolf Creek Pass from avalanches.
“It was this weird balance of pushing the envelope, seeing what you could get away with physically, but on the other hand, I had the element of my personality that realized if I wasn’t in good health, I wouldn’t be able to do any of that,” he said.
On more than one occasion, Sheldrake found himself pushing a little too far, shattering his pelvis in a collision with a tree, snapping his leg “like a wishbone” in another, tearing muscles and tendons in fierce crashes all before surviving open-heart surgery and shifting his career as a ski teacher to a writing teacher.
And although it’s difficult to describe anyone with a successful career, wife and family as a “bum,” Sheldrake admits it is something that will never completely leave his system.
“I ski just enough to keep me in that persistent frame of mind. It hasn’t left me,” Sheldrake said. “I ran into a guy the other day who was visiting here from Louisiana, and he said, ‘My retirement plan is to come here and work on the mountain.’ And I said, ‘That’s my retirement plan, too.’ ”
Scott Willoughby: 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com
