Does “The Boss” Even Ski?

One of the best things about Alpine Meadows is that culture of people that have been here forever. If you’re a regular reader of this site, you know that there are things that are on the official map, and then there’s all of those runs that people refer to that don’t exist on the map. Likewise, there’s also several places around the mountain where you can find signs, “meeting” rooms and other places that say that Alpine is truly a local’s mountain. One such shrine appeared this season off of Scott chair, a tribute to Bruce Springsteen.

I’ll confess now. During my college years in the early 80’s, I was a huge fan of “The Boss”. Not only did I own every studio album, I owned many bootleg editions as well. When I wasn’t ditching classes to go skiing, I was likely ditching classes to catch the closest Springsteen concert. Odds are pretty good that if you saw a VW camper van blasting “Thunder Road” in the Alpine Meadows parking lot in 1980, it was likely me.

But this shrine was not my work. I first saw it posted on a few friend’s Facebook pages, and later found it on my own on one of the quieter runs at Alpine Meadows. The shrine consists of laminated copies of photos, album covers, and the complete lyrics to “Thunder Road”. Why is it there? We can’t quite figure it out. If the shrine had the lyrics for “The Promised Land”, it would certainly make more sense to many of us. We’ve had several readers ask if we knew anything…inquiring minds want to know!

And apparently, “The Boss” does ski. We found online references to his presence at Sun Valley, Idaho and Deer Valley in Utah.