As Sobriety's Popularity Grows, What Is Skiing's Fondness for Drinking Worth Anymore?

Peering down the snowy lower reaches of the ski area, a tangle of runscrisscrossed with tracks through fresh snow,my friend turned to me and asked a pressing question. At least for our likes.



"The usual place?" he said.



Pants soaked and bodies exhausted, we had pushed ourselves through a deep and heavy powder day. And instinct nudged our already bleary smiles to a place that so often marks the conclusion of our ski days: a certain local microbrewery.



Skiing to the base, we zigzagged through a maze of trails and high-rise condos before clicking out of our skis and scampering across the street toward an aging adobe building. There, the bar's weathered wood door greeted us. Creaking as it opened, we were suddenly exposed to a pulse of lively music, dozens of happy voices, and our favorite bartender. Together it all welcomed us in.



Waiting for our other ski buddies, we settled in, beers in hand. The frothy drinks-for many as integral to skiing as the turn itself-went down easy, easing our bodies and minds into the usual post-ski mind-shift; pony up, grab a beer with a friend, chat about things big and small, and repeat.



It was all good fun until a few hours later, when something all-too-common happened. Glasses were stacked as our favorite bartender cried, brought to tears, in part, by the on-shift beverages she was having. But also by her partner, prone to having a few too many, passed out at the bar.

The drinks we gather around are so often associated with skiing. But alcohol now inhabits a complicated niche in mountain town life. As its often overlooked harms come to light, drinking has evolved from default after-activity fare to something often avoided-its omnipresence in the outdoor culture reexamined and now even criticized.



But as a tangible social lubricant in an increasingly isolated world, does alcohol, especially in moderation, still offer us an important, even irreplaceable avenue for connection?



It's not easy to discern if you listen to those who make their living wondering. Just as drinking has come under increased scrutiny, digitization has left us marooned from each other. "When I first took office as Surgeon General in 2014, I didn't view loneliness as a public health concern. But that was before I embarked on a cross-country listening tour," former United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote in the introduction to an advisory about American loneliness three years ago. "People began to tell me they felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant," he continued, later noting that social media, smartphones, virtual reality, remote work, artificial intelligence, and assistive technologies all played a role in people's isolation.



And as ill as this new world order may be for our minds, knowledge of what our bodies endure-whether from pollutants, plastics, or alcohol-has become a political focal point. The polarizing Make America Healthy Again movement coalesced along such lines, just as a milder temperance movement gained traction, separately instigating a new moral and economic framework for how we look at health. "Neo-temperates are shifting social and, yes, moral norms about alcohol by emphasizing its effects on health," Shayla Love wrote for The Atlantic. "They also, crucially, are creating markets for nonalcoholic drinks and spaces."



All the pieces are in place for the modern sobriety movement, and it is flourishing. According to a Gallup poll from August of last year, just 54% of American adults report that they drink, the lowest level the poll has found in 90 years. That has been fueled largely by alcohol's cratering perception. Research has lately refuted earlier findings that modest drinking has possible health benefits, replacing that conventional wisdom with a higher potential for cancer and other maladies. Murthy again was part of the debate when he suggested booze come with a warning label like cigarettes have long had. Notably, awareness of alcohol's health effects has been most acute among younger people. Two-thirds of those 18 to 34 view alcohol as unhealthy, while 53% of all adults now share that sentiment.



But others have noted a complicated, perhaps more lonesome reality in alcohol's demise. Running in The Economist last January, the articleFalling wine sales reflect a lonelier and more atomised world suggested that lower consumption of vino may not be a simple pivot toward healthier living. Rather, it reflects a more solitary world. "For some people, drinking is an isolating addiction," the article noted. "But for most it is a social indulgence. And that, increasingly, is what people are missing."



The ski world itself has long had a knotty relationship with alcohol. While the subculture leans heavily on après beverages and good times, awareness of the role drinking and partying have on mental health has rightfully come to the fore. And with that has come a counterpoint to the long-standing function alcohol plays in outdoor pursuits and outdoor communities.



Writing for 5280 in 2018, a time that marked the outdoor world's fledgling sobriety movement, former Skiing editor Tracy Ross delved into her own relationship with alcohol, something that had been integral to her experience in the outdoor industry, especially living and skiing in mountain towns.



"I wanted to know if I had a problem and why so many people who live here seem to straddle this invisible line between social drinking and problem drinking," Ross wrote. "I wanted some answers, knowing full well that I might not like what I found."



Ross wrote that her drinking habits eventually changed drastically, having been impacted by outdoor figures like Paddy O'Connell, whose articles on mental health and sobriety have become integral to a wider reexamination of drinking in the outdoor world. But that shift happened fitfully. "Most memorably, O'Connell recounted a conversation he'd had the previous day," Ross wrote of a speech the outdoor writer had given at a sober-positive event at the notoriously wet Outdoor Retailer tradeshow. "At a booth inside the show, a brand representative to whom he mentioned the sober happy hour replied: ‘Sober happy hour? What the f*ck is that? Who the f*ck would want to be sober?'"

Renowned psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Seigel wrote in his seminal work Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances that human-kind's desire for altered states and using substances to attain them was what he referred to as "the fourth drive," a learned behavior as fundamental as our most basic needs and desires.



"We need intoxicants-not in the sense that an addict needs a fix, but because the need is as much a part of the human condition as sex, hunger, and thirst," Seigel wrote. Ross echoed that in outdoor terms in her 5280 article, writing that skiing and outdoor activities seem to pair so naturally with alcohol's time-out-of-mind. "I also viscerally internalized this: that nature is great and cold beer is great, but that cold beer and nature together are exponentially greater than those two things on their own," she wrote.



Humans don't just yearn for mind-altering substances, it seems. There is, perhaps, also something innate to outdoor pursuits-daring, exhilarating, transcendent-that warrants a toast to the good life. Or, for some, many.



But can the innate sociability of drinking be harnessed for some good in a ski world still grappling with its consequences?



According to the U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 assessment, "social participation across several types of relationships has steadily declined. For instance, the amount of time respondents engaged with friends socially in-person decreased from 2003 (60-minutes/day, 30-hours/month) to 2020 (20-minutes/day, 10-hours/month)." While far from a fix-all, could a few more moderate happy hours bring people closer, just like scaling back on drinking can have its own benefits?



Alcohol undoubtedly is not for everyone, and not every outdoor event needs to be bookended with a brew. More importantly, those who need to abstain in mountain towns and resort communities deserve that credence. But while acknowledging the problems that come with booze's ubiquity was a long time coming in the outdoor space, the fall of the drink in the broader culture brings to light a complicated reality. And our world–even the binge-drinking skiing one–will be best served by having space both for sobriety and the social beverage.



The beauty lies in the choice, whether that is one to abstain or to partake.While the decision to be sober is not an anti-social one, falling interest in drinking may be a symptom of a separate movement toward isolation. Within reason, latitude should be given on both sides. Those who drink surely should understand the role of sobriety. And just as much, especially in a world that yearns for connection, the positivity of a few social beers need not be forgotten.

My friend and I recount the spoils of the day, warts and all, at our little bar. We revel in the good life, meditating on fresh snow and great times, taking down cold brews. Soon we reach that heady point a few in. We're on the wings of the two-headed beast. Happy hour heroes.



But as always, the time to go comes quickly. I have my wife and two sleeping kiddos to get back to. Playing the roulette of stay-or-go is in the past for me; I won't see how far this one can go. But my friends and the rest of the motley crew will. I say my goodbyes and vicariously imagine what might come next for this bunch, a group I was one of until I exited, passing through the swinging portal, back to the real world.



Out there, the sun has long ago left the valley. Smiling, I find my darkened skis just past the crossroads, already covered by another round of snow rolling in, silently falling in heavy flakes, aglow under the incandescent cone of a street light.



I trudge in my ski boots across the street to catch the bus just before it rolls up to the stop, where I gaze back one more time at our bar, a hazy look I've made maybe a few too many times as I approach middle age. But it's at once a glimpse back in time and into infinity. Looking back at the usual place.

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This story was originally published May 13, 2026 at 3:30 AM.