Audio By Carbonatix
Summit Daily News columnist Miles F. Porter IV opened with a shout-out to Jay Brossman for his 80th birthday on Sunday, and I wanted to second the notion.
I briefly met Jay after getting onto his chair on the Lift 2 reload at Loveland last spring and our conversation sticks out as the single most interesting one I’ve had with a stranger on a chairlift.
He had already skied over 200 days at that point last season — he finished with 236 — and he’ll be halfway to that mark for this season a day after his birthday on Monday. Then he told me he skied every day the lifts ran because he’d had a quintuple bypass some years back and his doc told him skiing was the best thing for his heart.
I found a 2008 profile of Brossman by Devin O’Neil that put his high-water mark at 255 ski days in 2002-03. Here’s a little excerpt:
“Them people,” he says of his peers, “they only do three, four days a week.
And none of ’em do seven days a week. … They say, ‘You mean you go weekends?’
And I say, ‘Yeah we go weekends. We go to Loveland. There’s no big crowds there.'”In a county with four world-class ski resorts and endless Nordic and backcountry
skiing options, Brossman represents just one of the many ways Summit residents
approach the concept of everyday skiing.He counts his days in a journal, hates the powder – “We’re from the East,”
his wife says. “We can ski 4-6 inches, but I’m too old of a rabbit to hop” –
and paid a total of $331.50 for three different season passes this year.
Good stuff. Happy birthday, Jay!
