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i ski too much to hold a job
i live off my parents
cant ski sober
has roof rack bike rack and ski rack on rally car.
sleeps in car at least once a month.
____ days with a full 15credit schedule. /claim
But now Toups' brawny 6-foot frame is wedged in a jail cell in Georgetown, imprisoned for the past 57 days on misdemeanor federal charges of camping on public land, possessing marijuana and assaulting a Forest Service officer.
He could walk free with time served if he admitted his guilt. But Toups won't do that.
"I've lived this life for 33 years and now all the sudden I'm supposed to admit I'm guilty? I can't do that," he said from jail last week. "I don't know what changed after the Forest Service tolerated me for all these years. I thought we were just respecting each other. Let me ask you, is it snowing?"
Toups' tale is the embodiment of ski "bumdom." Since the 1970s, he has bummed at Mammoth in California, Snowbird in Utah, Oregon's Mount Hood, Aspen Highlands and all the ski areas in Summit County. His home -- for nearly a decade -- was a Volkswagen Beetle, the passenger seat torn out so he could sleep.
"He had a little tunnel down to it like a snow cave," said Halsted Morris, a longtime Loveland skier.
"He was the real deal"
After a few years at Loveland, where Toups worked in the ski area's kitchen, he moved on to Aspen Highlands, where every morning he stomped steep snow as part of the ski patrol's avalanche mitigation. A few hours bootpacking earned him a day's lift ticket. He haunted the mid-mountain cafeteria, munching food from abandoned trays. He stocked shelves at the local grocery at night.
"He was the epitome of ski bums. He was the real deal," said Mike Tierney, a veteran ski patroller at Highlands. "He was just a totally eccentric individual who was here to ski. We don't see those kinds of ski bums anymore. And that's kind of sad."
Mac Smith, the longtime director of the Highlands patrol, spent a few seasons in the 1970s camping at the base of the ski hill. He remembers Toups with fondness, as a "gentle giant."
"He was a really intelligent person," Smith said. "He just had a different drum beat, and he followed it."
