My personal history with mountains

It’s not common to see Colombian families at ski resorts. But as a kid I didn’t know that. Most of the people I skied with were Colombian.

My parents (both immigrants from Colombia) saw snow for the first time when they were in their thirties. They asked their friend René, a Swiss alpinist, to take them skiing at Snoqualmie for the first time. They figured this dude had been to the Himalayas, so they’d be in good hands.

It took them all day to go down Little Thunder three times. René must have been bored out of his mind, but he was an absolute gentleman about it. By all objective measures, my parents got their asses handed to them — they were bruised, tired, and sore — but they loved it. The next weekend they were back up there.

Pretty quickly, my sister and I were in ski lessons, and soon we were going up to Snoqualmie every weekend. (We would eventually switch to Stevens, where they signed us up for the racing team.)

My parents couldn’t shut up about this new thing they’d discovered, and soon they had a bunch of curious friends asking to go up with them. And so began their journey into being unofficial ski instructors.

Over the years, our garage filled with bins of ski gear — extra gloves, jackets, pants, goggles. "We can’t get rid of these — they’d be perfect for Ana Maria".

Family back home in Colombia began hearing about this strange obsession that had beset Gonzalo and Rosario, and they began asking about it. Before long we were outfitting my aunts, uncles, and cousins in gear from the bins. Seattle summers are beautiful, my parents would say, but we won’t be able to take you skiing if you visit us in July.

As a kid, I had no reference point. I didn’t know that it wasn’t normal to speak Spanish on the lift. It was a given that we’d be going skiing with Colombians — most of the Colombians I knew in Seattle could at least hold their own on blue runs. One family even put their kids into ski racing alongside my sister and I. Teaching the younger kids of family friends became a regular occurrence for my friends and I.

In retrospect, this whole thing was an immense act of community building that I feel a deep sense of gratitude for.

I want to keep that alive. I want to keep taking people outdoors — whether that’s skiing or hiking or backpacking or something else.