As a lifty and someone who has spent most of their life on the ski hill, I've spent my fair share of time around skiers who overestimate everything. It might just be because im working at a resort and constantly have to listen to their exaggerated stories of "30 foot cliffs" and "20 feet of air," but recently it seems like its been getting out of hand. Usually it is just kids who do this, which is understandable, but I'm seeing more and more full-grown adults who are completely wrong with their measurements. Today, a man who was about 40 years old came up to me and said there was 30 inches of powder (when in reality we had about 10). It can be hard to tell who is telling the truth and who isn't, so in my head I created a couple rules to sort it out:
1. If they give any sort of measurement without you asking, they're exaggerating. Every good skier I know would just say "I went kinda huge," or "It was pretty fat," instead of "DuDe I juSt WenT oFF a 30.243 FoOt CliFf," like the jerrys do at my home resort.
2. If they do give you a measurement, divide it in half to get a more realistic answer. For whatever reason I find that people tend to think things are double the size that they actually are, especially when it comes to air time. I can't tell you how many times I've had friends or visitors that come up to me while I'm bumping chairs and say they just caught 3 seconds of air off a cliff. I always want to ask them how their legs aren't broken because I know they didn't just drop a 100 footer.
3. Don't argue with them. There is no way of convincing them that the cliff isn't actually as big as they think, and they will go through anything just to convince you that they are right. I actually had a guy bring a range finder up to the mountain once only to prove himself wrong, and he still didn't believe that he was wrong.
Has anyone else noticed how bad it's been lately? ESPECIALLY on social media.
I'm not usually someone to jerry shame or to be an asshole about this kind of thing, but I think its funny asf when people turn sending jumps and cliffs into a numbers game. It just creates a bunch of annoying people that are trying to one up each other by making up fake stories. Just have fun people, its how you actually get good at skiing.
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