The ski patrol headquarters on top of Sunlight Mountain are old-school, and homey.
Vintage trail signs hang from the rafters. Cubbies are filled with snacks, and safety guides. Coffee’s been on the burner for a while, as a weekday crew recaps their morning rounds and assesses the state of their ski equipment.
Phoebe Shaw laments that her boots are picking up some divots and scratches — “little chunkies” — after just a few months of use. Her fellow patrollers have some frays on their pants from sharp ski edges, and we joke that they could turn into capris by the end of the season.
But Shaw knows that’s not really why we’re here to chat.
“Classically, (it’s) much easier for ski patrol to talk about our gear than it is to talk about our feelings,” she says, and the room fills with laughter.
Shaw is an energetic, tele-skiing and snowboarding patroller in her late 20s, with a cropped, spiky haircut and a quick, easy sense of humor. Her job offers a rugged mountain lifestyle, plenty of time on the slopes, and a sense of camaraderie that feels like family.
But the position also requires technical skiing skills, level-headed composure, and the ability to pivot from snow science to emergency medical care at a moment’s notice — all amid long hours and extreme weather conditions. And when Shaw started patrolling eight years ago, she says her colleagues didn’t really talk about how to cope with the challenges.
“There was a lot of like, ‘Toughen up, buttercup. We don’t say these things… You know, you can talk about that when you get home or go to the bar or whatever,’” Shaw tells me as we settle into an interview at patrol HQ.
So a lot of folks — Shaw included — used alcohol to deal with the hard days.
But a year ago, she decided to quit drinking. It was “life-changing,” she says.
“I realized how much I used it to block out any of the things going on in my brain, — I just used it to cover it up,” she says.
“And now it's like I have to face that stuff, … and it makes it so much easier to process and then let go.”
Shaw says she’s not the only patroller who’s taking a different approach to their mental health — though the bar can still be a place for community and camaraderie at the end of a workday.
In this notoriously stoic profession, she’s seen a shift.
“The culture, I feel like, has improved every single year, which is why I keep coming back to this job,” she says. “Because every year, the harder conversations that people don't want to have are being had anyways.”
I’ve noticed it too, as I’ve spoken with nearly a dozen current and former ski patrollers about their mental health in the past year. At Sunlight, Aspen Highlands and Snowmass Ski Area, I was impressed by how open, and honest, everyone was as they shared their most difficult experiences and how they coped.
Eli Pettet is a second-year patroller at Sunlight, who also works in the ER of a local hospital.
“You need to have the strength to move on and deal with it later, and you also need to have the strength to deal with it then,” Pettet says during a roundtable conversation with several other patrollers at the headquarters.
Pettet grew up in the Roaring Fork Valley, and like a lot of patrollers, he loves his job because he gets to ski and help people at the same time.
He says there’s a rush that comes with getting a call about an emergency.
“You kind of get in that mode, you get that adrenaline,” he says. “And that's something that I think all emergency medical people live for: They live for the dispatch.”
It’s the comedown, after the event, when responders need the most support, Pettet says.
He hasn’t experienced any fatalities in his ski patrol career yet.
But from his work in the emergency room, Pettet says he’s felt the “devastating silence” that follows a death.
"You know, we all tried our best, and this person isn't going to make it regardless … (but there's a sense that) we failed,” Pettet says.
“And then you’ve just got to pick up and move on," he adds. "There's 13 other patients we have to deal with. … We can sit here and mourn this loss, and we do, but it's only for a minute.”
Pettet worries those experiences can stack up over time, and hopes the impacts of that accumulation can be addressed among all emergency medical workers.
“You need to realize that you have this emotion, you need to deal with that kind of thing at some point,” he says. “Maybe not then, maybe not for the next week, but it does need to come up. You can't deal with this all in 20 years.”
Debriefing, right after an incident, can help first responders work through some of those emotions in a structured way, and understand why things happened the way they did.
But it’s supposed to be a starting point, not the end of the story, according to mental health clinician Laura McGladrey.
She works at the Stress, Trauma, and Adversity Research and Treatment center at the University of Colorado; she’s also the founder of the Responder Alliance, which gives outdoor first responders the tools to help themselves after a traumatic event and identify when people need clinical intervention.
“Patroller colleagues will be very familiar with having something big happen, rush in, do a debriefing, and then sort of never talk about it again,” McGladrey explains over Zoom.
“If you follow those folks sort of downstream, it's another 18 or 20 months before they show up saying, Hey, I'm not doing okay,” McGladrey says.
McGladrey says that can be the sign of a festering “stress injury.” It’s a term that’s also used by the military, and it reflects the idea that just like a physical injury, the mental impacts of trauma can get worse when they’re not addressed.
So McGladrey developed the “3-3-3 Traumatic Exposure Protocol,” which is used among patrollers and rescuers at some of our local mountains. It creates a system for teams to continue checking in — three days, three weeks, and three months after an incident — and understand which responses to stress might warrant additional intervention, based on a color-coded chart called the “stress continuum.”
McGladrey says that right after a traumatic event, almost everyone will show some signs of distress.
“We are thinking about the event, we feel a bit disoriented, we can't sleep, our risk perception has really changed,” she says. “And we don't feel like ourselves.”
McGladrey says many will bounce back fast — ready for action again. But some people might be stuck in a heightened, reactive state, and a few might be struggling with insomnia, anxiety, and depression.
The second check-in identifies those folks, and connects them to resources for professional help, like counseling services.
And the third follow-up, a few months later, ensures that people in jobs like ski patrol or wildland firefighting still have a support system after they head to their other seasonal gigs.
The Responder Alliance wants to help people return to solid ground. They recommend that responders prioritize self-care, healthy relationships, and activities that lighten the mental load. That could involve fly fishing, home cooking, yoga or time with friends. And if you ask a lot of ski patrollers how they like to relax?
“‘I like skiing,’ said every ski patroller ever,” Eli Pettet says during our interview.
That’s a sentiment I’ve heard again and again throughout the reporting process: Patrollers say that their exposure to serious accidents may change their tolerance for risk, and how they move about the mountains, but for the most part, it hasn’t stopped them from doing the things that they love most.
Phoebe Shaw says it’s kind of like therapy: The climb up a mountain gives her time to process her emotions, and the ski back down gives her the chance to focus and release some adrenaline.
“You don't get into the ski industry, or especially being a ski patroller, if you're perfectly good upstairs, you know?” Shaw says. “It's like, we're all kind of searching for the flow state that skiing gives you which calms down everything upstairs.”
So, after our conversation up in patrol HQ, I join Shaw for a run on the slopes.
We cruise on smooth corduroy groomers under spotless blue skies, and she stops to point out one of her favorite things about this job: As a ski patroller, Shaw gets to see the mountain before almost anyone else, and today, the snow is covered in an untouched layer of hoarfrost — like the wintertime equivalent of dew.
“It's just like nature's glitter covering the whole mountain,” Shaw says. “When you take your first chair up, it's all through the trees, and there's nobody out here, and it's just silent, and you can hear it falling off of the trees. And it sounds like little tinkles, like glass falling on something. Magic.”
We ski down to the lift, and part ways: I’m off to the base. She’s up to the summit. Shaw’s been here since the sun was peaking over the mountains, and there’s still plenty of work in the day ahead.
If you are struggling with your mental health, the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is 9-8-8.
You can also find support and additional services through the Aspen Hope Center, a local non-profit that often works with first responders — including ski patrollers.
The Aspen Hope Line is 970-925-5858. In Garfield County, it’s 970-945-3728.
If you’d like to share your story about mental health in our mountain community, send an email to news@aspenpublicradio.org. This story is part of ongoing coverage on the topic.
