The Three Sides of Risk

May 19, 2020 by Morgan Housel

I grew up ski racing in Lake Tahoe. I was on the Squaw Valley Ski Team, and it was the center of my life for over a decade. At a conference a few months ago I was asked what skiing taught me about investing. This was on stage, where you can’t ponder your answer – you have to blurt out whatever you can think of.

I didn’t think skiing taught me anything about investing. But one incident came to mind.

“Well, let me take this to a dark and tragic place,” I said before telling a group of 500 strangers a story I hadn’t talked about much in almost 20 years. A dozen of us had grown up skiing together. Most had known each other since we were young children.

By 2001 we were in our late teens, having spent the majority of our waking hours over the previous decade never far from each other. We skied six days a week, 10 months a year, spending summers on the glacier of Mt. Hood, Oregon and in New Zealand, where the seasons mirror our own.

Skiing took precedence to everything. Most of us were in an independent study program that let us bypass traditional high school. After skiing all day we read a few books and filled out a few forms in the evening in what – to our amazement – led to a diploma.

The amount of time we spent together created a relationship closer to siblings than friends. Ski racing is an odd hybrid between a team and individual sport. You train and travel and eat as a team, but the sport itself is individual. Our race results did not rely on each other; our daily sanity did.

Any group of a dozen teenagers will find a way to butt heads. Half the time I think we hated each other. Twenty years later, few of us keep in touch.

But of the dozen teenagers who, by 2001, I had spent the majority of my life with, four of us had become inseparable best friends. This is the story of two of them – Brendan Allan and Bryan Richmond.

You take amazing things for granted when they become routine. Squaw Valley is one of the largest ski resorts in North America, was home to the 1960 Olympics, and attracts a million visitors a year. It’s staggeringly beautiful. To us, it was just an extension of home.

Ski racing required four hours a day of training, which felt like work to us. The rest of the time – another four hours a day, six days a week – we just skied around, unstructured, having a good time. We called it “free skiing.” Everyone else just calls it skiing.

On February 15th, 2001, we had just returned from a race in Colorado. Our flight home was delayed because Lake Tahoe was blasted with a blizzard vicious even by its own standards. You can’t race or train when there’s a blanket of new snow – racing requires hard-packed ice. So it was time for a week of free skiing.

Earlier that month Tahoe received several feet of light, fluffy snow that comes from Arctic temperatures. The storm that hit in mid-February was different. It was warm – barely at the freezing point – and powerful, leaving three feet of heavy, wet snow on top of the light powder that came before it.

We didn’t think about it at the time – we didn’t think about much at age 17 – but the combination of heavy snow on top of fluffy snow creates textbook perfect avalanche conditions.

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