Up, up and away: Stowe skier aims to log 3 million vertical feet

For those counting, that’s more than twice the distance between the Earth and the International Space Station.

Although part of the challenge involves also skiing down — no lifts or snowmobiles or other mechanical means of conveyance — only the uphill efforts count in the slow, steady tally. Not that Dines would have it any other way.

“I’m doing this because I love to ski. I love to ski a lot,” he said Friday, basking in the warm sun on a cloudless 60-degree day, sitting on the tailgate of his old Toyota pickup truck in the Midway parking lot near the base of Mt. Mansfield. “I don’t think of it as I have to go up to go down. When I’m going up, that’s skiing to me. Sometimes the going down is heinous and the going up part is much more pleasant.”

The challenge started literally the minute 2024 began. While other revelers were clinking glasses to welcome in the new year, Dines was clicking in to his bindings, all by himself. He got 2,000 feet in that initial midnight foray, went home and slept for a bit and came back and did another 10,000 feet.

As of Friday, he had logged more than 1.2 million feet.

Chasing the record

Dines grew up outside Boston and learned to ski as a child at Nashoba Valley, with 240 vertical feet.

“It ain’t Stowe, but it’s sure as hell skiing,” he said.

He began ski touring in the 2018-19 ski season at the Camden Snow Bowl, about four miles inland from the central Maine coast, where he lived for a few years after college. The following fall, he moved to Stowe.

Uphillers — especially cyclists and runners — use the term “Everesting” to show off their vertical prowess. That refers to cumulatively climbing 29,029 feet, the height of Mount Everest, the tallest peak in the world. With Dines’ pace so far this year, he’s been notching more than two Everests per week.

Put another way, that’s 241 Nashoba Valleys every week.

While vertical uphill skiing feet is not one of the innumerable entries in the Guinness Book of World Records, the mark that Dines is chasing is well documented. And it was set in 2016 by another Stowe skier that Dines knows well.

Aaron Rice documented exactly 2,510,924 feet of vertical that year — he revealed the precise number in an October 2023 Catamount Trail Association podcast in which he and Dines were interviewed together, ahead of Dines’ big adventure.

Rice said instead of trying to set a Guinness Book of World Records milestone, a “corporate” route that he said can cost upwards of $100,000 to essentially buy into, he and Dines operate under FKT (fastest known time) “etiquette guidelines.” That means that, if you’re aiming to beat someone’s record, you do it under the same basic guidelines as the person before you.

“I followed his guidance, but stricter,” Rice said.

Rice himself was chasing another person’s record, whom both he and Dines acknowledge originally laid down the gauntlet. Canadian skier Greg Hill climbed just over 2 million vertical feet in 2010, a quest that took him to 71 peaks in four countries in one year.

Dines admits that Hill and Rice probably had more varied adventures during their record-setting years, while Rice acknowledged on the podcast that Dines is the more athletic among them.

A month in, skiing every day in Stowe, Dines had attained 378,000 total feet of elevation, just making laps, six, seven, eight times a day or more. He said that was a single month record, based on the two men whose tracks he is following.

He said although Hill’s largest single-month tally of 238,000 feet is smaller, Hill did it without skiing the same line twice.

“Mine is maybe more impressive athletically, but his is cooler,” he said.

Training, eating, chatting

To reach his milestone, Dines estimates he will ski 330 days this year, averaging 9,000 feet per day. That’s not a feat someone approaches lightly.

Dines spent some time last fall building his body up for the challenge, with a lot of running up the work road to the top of the gondola. He added some extra muscle because he knew he would lose that mass throughout the challenge.

Like how a marathoner differs from a sprinter, he doesn’t ski uphill as fast as he can because he wants to conserve energy over the course of 2024. However, he’s still a downhill skier at heart, and has little compunctions about simply sending it on the way back down. In the waning days of April, a week after the resort had stopped spinning the lifts, Dines was reporting good snow in the Nose Dive woods and recent routes down Hell Brook.

“Ski touring is super low impact,” he said when asked how his body is holding up after 1.2 million feet. “Also, you’re skiing different places and there’s different steepness, so it’s engaging muscles differently, and that’s kind of a key. You mix it up, you ski different things, you don’t ski that trail the same way every time.”

He is cautious about injuries, knowing even the most minor hotspot on his ankle could turn into a nasty blister and rob him of precious days on the slopes. He noted Rice broke an arm during his year, although both agree that was far better than breaking a leg.

Since his endeavor doesn’t leave much time for a job, Dines will have to find ways to fund his further adventures, especially as North American snow in the Rockies and Cascades — his next stop — dwindles and he heads to South America for a spell. Although he’ll be sleeping quite a bit in a tricked-out pickup truck bed, he still must eat.

After his epic Stowe January, he spent two months in the Alps, which he found unseasonably — and somewhat disappointingly — hot.

He’s been gifted untold snacks and meals this season by fellow skiers who know him and his truck very well after seeing him and it at the mountain every day.

“A lot of people have been giving me truck treats,” he said. “They’ll just put food on the front seat of my truck.”

Dines acknowledges he’ll have to get better at chasing sponsorships or fund-raising opportunities as the year progresses. A GoFundMe he set up to help finance his adventure — gofundme.com/f/the-quest-for-3-million — had raised almost $7,000 as of this week.

His gear is already taken care of by Fischer, but he noted in a blog post that he would like to land a sponsor by some energy gel company so he wouldn’t have to subsist on Haribo gummy candies, like the sour worms he was scarfing down after a run last week.

Skiing upwards of 9,000 vertical feet every day also doesn’t leave much room for a social life, at least off the slopes. On the hill, though, there’s a ton of chit-chat, especially in the spring, when more and more locals turn to people-powered laps on the mountain.

“Friend vert is free vert,” he said, gesturing at the still-ample avenue of snow headed up Mansfield and adding, “And this is my living room.