Aaron Fudge
Primary Outdoor Sports: Skiing & Mountain Biking
Favorite Beverage: Strawberry Milk
Sunrise or Sunset: Sunset
Non-Outdoor Hobby: Woodworking
Go-To Trail Snack: Chocolate Covered Peanuts
Favorite Music: Black Keys
Hot Take: Skiing doesn’t have to be gnarly
Book Recommendation: Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain
Three Words to Describe You: Outgoing, Open, & Fun
“It really started at home at a young age. We had this big, old, open area behind my house that my dad used to just bring us back to. We’d go look at the beaver dams and stuff.
I was in Massachusetts. There's a whole lot going on there. There's a lot of population. So it's kind of hard to get away from that. I think early on I realized, ‘Oh, I can be away from the sound of the roads and the hustle and bustle of everything and I can kind of go be in my quiet place.’ I think I was probably eight or nine when I was first really starting to go out there a lot more. So, that's probably the beginning of it.”
“I kinda fledged the nest after I went to college. That was where I met some more people that were into skiing and just hiking in general. That was when I started going out with more people and realizing that, ’Oh, I actually kind of like this more than the average person.’
My typical friends that were into skiing were going three, four, five times a year. I'm like, ‘What are we doing? I want to be doing this a hundred plus. Why aren't we doing this more?’ So I started going out by myself more often, getting tickets on my own, and driving the four hours in a day just to get seven hours of turns. It was worth it to me.”
“I think the initial draw to it for me goes back to finding this quiet place in the woods, to get away from everything.
Those fast turns or those powder turns, even if you're not aggressive about it, that's the only thing that you think about. It's just this quiet moment.
I love the planning. I love the logistics. I love making it happen. I think that's a lot of fun. I'm really goal oriented when it comes to that kind of thing. But, the reason I do it is for those twenty seconds of quiet. Everything else just doesn't matter.”
“We're all just kind of kids out in the playground having fun. That's the goal, is to just be having fun. Just go play. It can be hard to keep that in focus sometimes, but it's skiing. It's fun.”
“Not only does skiing set me up to be in a better mental state when I get back to real life, it just teaches me so much about how to deal with my problems, how to deal with individuals, how to deal with people that are very close to me, people that are not so close to me.
It is just a life lesson. I think that can go for just about any outdoor sport. The correlation between what we're doing and how we're pushing ourselves to our everyday lives, whether that be your regular desk job or driving in traffic, I think we can all learn a lot from slowing down and getting outside.”
“I was diagnosed with Diabetes when I was eleven turning twelve years old. And my parents were very quickly like, ‘This is not going to stop our ski trips. This is not going to stop our hiking. We’re going to do this together and you’re gonna learn and we’re gonna figure it out.’
The weekend after I was in the hospital for four days, we had a ski trip planned. We went skiing as a family. And I remember sitting at the base lodge with fried chicken fingers and french fries like everybody eats at a ski lodge and them calling the doctor and being like, ‘How much insulin does this kid need to take right now?’
So I think that created this baseline that this is not a stop sign. It might be a yield, but we're not slamming on the brakes here. I think that that really set the foundation for who I am today and how I approach things.
Just because we're going to slow down a little bit, doesn't mean we're not going to get there. Do it correctly. Make sure that you’re good and go forward.”
“Diabetes has become this extra logistical factor that I need to think about. It's always there. There's always more food being packed. There's always more insulin being packed. Those kinds of things.
You start getting into the backcountry and longer trips can kind of cause much more of a logistical situation than originally anticipated. There's always the possibility of failure, with technology. Cell phones fail. I need to know what my blood sugar is. Continuous glucose monitors fail. I need to have a backup for that. I have a separate glucometer with another battery to make sure that I can still do that. It's definitely an added layer.
Then, on top of that, it's an added thought process of, ‘How am I feeling? What is my blood sugar? Should I eat? Should I take insulin?’
That again comes back to the 20 seconds of quiet I get when skiing. That's a nice escape from diabetes, for even half a minute. It's worth it.
It's definitely been hard. I think it's more of a mental struggle for me because it is so 24/ 7/365. There is no off button for diabetes.”
“For me, skiing is a long game. I see these 80 year old, gray-haired dudes out there skiing groomers. I want to be doing that. You know? I don't care if it's a blue square. Any day of skiing is better than not.
So for me, there's no-fall-zone skiing stuff, that’s not for me. If I do fall, that's the end of skiing. I don't want that to be the end of skiing. I want to ski.”
“Skiing has taught me to have patience. Learning more about avalanches and having something glaringly obvious that you want to do being right in front of you, but having the patience to say, ‘We can't ski that right now. We should not ski that right now. We need to go back the way we came and come back another day’, that’s hard.
I've seen people not do that. Patience is massive in skiing, especially when you start messing around in avalanche terrain and wanting the long game. If you can teach yourself how to be patient with something like skiing powder right in front of you, that can translate to interpersonal relationships and life.”
