Fowler’s a near and dear friend of the Crew so we’re beyond happy to see him getting the respect he deserves.  Ironically, this is the second major publication to the feature Don.  The first?  None other than Playboy.  We shit you not.

From the Boston Globe

Passion for runs hasn’t run dry

Ski bums never lose their get-up-and-go

By Tony Chamberlain, Globe Correspondent

If you want to catch up with Don Fowler, a 68-year-old attorney in Kingfield, Maine, you either have to get up around 5 a.m. or wait for a while.

Fowler works in his office through dawn, then most days hangs a figurative sign: “Gone Skiing.’’

It takes Fowler less than a half-hour to get from his office to Sugarloaf, and most midweek days he has the place to himself. The crowds usually don’t start to back up on the Superquad until the weekends and holidays.

So Fowler enjoys doing what he loves most on one of the country’s great ski mountains before heading back to his office with a spring in his step. And then he does it the next day. And the next, and the next. As long as there’s snow on the slopes and the weather is tolerable, Fowler will be up there.

He knows that the term “ski bum’’ is probably “not the best marketing image for your law practice,’’ he said, “but yes, I ski all the time. Every day when I can.’’

The one day this season his ski outing was threatened was when there was a scheduled meeting of the Bar Association. But Fowler was relieved to find that a 4-inch snowfall forced a cancellation. So, of course, he went skiing.

Having a passion for skiing his whole life, and having shaped his professional life to maximize his love of the sport and Sugarloaf, the term “ski bum’’ resonates with Fowler in its most positive and iconic sense.

For Fowler, a native of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, who began skiing around 5, that commitment meant making some compromises. Easy ones, though. “I probably skied more at Sugarloaf than any other Harvard Law School student before or since, though that’s probably not an academic distinction,’’ he said.

One of Fowler’s good friends, John Christi, had a passion for skiing at a young age and ended up running Sugarloaf in its early days, along with nearby Saddleback in Rangeley, Maine.

Now 72, Christi still shapes his life goals in terms of the sport he loves.

“I have two goals,’’ Christi said. “One is to ski my age [years equal to number of days on the slopes per season], and the other is to climb Mount Bigelow at least once every year. It’s my favorite place to climb, and I said to myself 27 years ago that if I could do it every year, I’d know I was still alive.

“The term ski bum is not pejorative in any way. I just found early, back in 1942 or so, I just loved to ski, loved the feeling of it. Everything about it. I was just bitten in those days.’’

As a student at Bowdoin, Christi spent his summers on Mount Hood, where the season extended well into June. “Then, I’d stay there into September, where I could ski, and then by the time I was back east in October you could always find someplace to walk up and put on a pair of skis,’’ he said.

But Christi found that such an extreme devotion had its price. In 1977, he went to Sun Valley for the winter, but when he returned to Maine, Christi put his skis away and didn’t go near them for 15 years.

At Saddleback, business had gone bad. “I didn’t have much money to lose, but I lost other people’s money,’’ he said. “I had a wife and two small boys for whom it was very difficult to live with a guy who was facing failure for the first time in his life.’’

When he divorced from his first wife, “I blamed the ski business for that whole chain of events, and in my mind the sport got intertwined with the business to the extent that it all just soured,’’ Christi said.

But after achieving success in non-ski-related businesses and with a new family at age 50, Christi found that he couldn’t stay away from the sport.

“I always cross-country skied, but for me the sheer exhilaration of [downhill] skiing, especially if you get to do it well enough so it’s second nature, the sheer physical joy, and the camaraderie of it, I couldn’t stay away any longer,’’ he said.

In the Colorado Rockies, one of the most famous ski bums near the Arapahoe Basin area was also reunited with skiing after a 61-day separation caused by jail time for, according to him, sticking to his principles.

Since the ’70s, Charlie Toups, 63, has lived in his truck in a parking lot near Loveland Pass, from which Toups could easily access the high country.

Untouched by developers and beloved by locals for its rugged purity, Arapahoe draws lots of ski bums like Toups, but he remains unique. He worked odd jobs like shoveling snow to make enough money for skiing. But after making a run last fall, Toups was greeted at the base by a Forest Service agent and was arrested for failure to pay off a number of parking tickets and possessing marijuana, and was jailed.

“I’ve lived this life for 33 years,’’ Toups told a reporter, “and now I’m supposed to admit I’m guilty? I can’t do that. I don’t know what changed after the Forest Service tolerated me for all these years. I thought we were just respecting each other.’’

Two weeks ago, Toups was freed on two conditions – that he obey laws regarding camping on federal lands, and that he admit his guilt.

“He never was a danger to anyone,’’ said Kathryn Stimson, the public defender assigned to Toups’s case. “He’s just a skier, and he’s a really great guy. It’s a shame this resolution wasn’t reached the day he was arrested so he didn’t have to spend half the ski season in jail.’’

As his story circulated, Charlie Toups became the center of an enormous outcry, with thousands offering support to a colorful relic of a fading era.

When people would come to interview him in his jail cell, Toups would often end the conversation with a plaintive change of subject befitting his lifelong devotion.

“Just let me ask you one thing,’’ Toups would say. “Is it snowing?’’ 

Tags: Fowler!

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