Khruangbin and Lord Huron to headline Outside Festival. Swipe right to shred. As an ice storm raged outside, I huddled in a corner and began swiping through dating apps. I was on a mission: to find ski partners, not romance. I was determined to find a ski buddy once the storm passed. Tinder was the most entertaining but the most off-the-wall. Despite my efforts to be clear, my intentions often got lost. I encountered flirting and spam. I was ghosted, and I was the ghost.
I even found myself in unexpected late-night text conversations, and one woman invited me to be the third member of her relationship. I felt like I was playing a human game of roulette, seeking ski buddies, nothing more, and it was the beginning of a messy experience.
The experiment started when I moved to Oregon from Colorado this past August. I initially had some luck joining ski-specific Facebook groups and meeting strangers in gas station parking lots to carpool into the Willamette National Forest. Mainly, the Facebook groups connected me with older women just learning to backcountry ski tour, which was empowering and lovely.
But come January, when our local hill opened for the season, I dove into the dating apps headfirst. By then, admittedly, my crisis for ski friends had already passed with my middle-aged posse on lock. However, I was still looking for a wider circle of ski friends my own age, folks who would ideally create an outdoorsy posse of mid-twenty-somethings.
This group could lovingly get cranky about the woes of young adulthood over lift-bound PBRs. Wanna shred??!? Was my opening line. Hinge proved more successful, with profiles feeling more genuine, even if matches were fewer.
