It started with a bad date.
Or, at least, partially. Noah Dines played around with the idea of breaking the record for a while. Since moving to Stowe, Vermont, in late fall of 2019, he fell in love with long ski days. To himself and onlookers, it became obvious that Dines could ski a lot and then ski a lot again the next day.
But it wasn’t until he was driving back from a date in Burlington that he resolved to attempt the world record. “The date was … unenthused,” Dines says, searching for the right word. “I was working a couple of different teaching and coaching gigs, and I was like ‘what am I doing.’ I got this idea, and decided ‘this is what’s happening.’”
The idea in question? Ski 3 million vertical feet in 2024 and break the world record for the most human-powered vertical feet skied in a year.
It was an ambitious goal for someone who had only started skiing consistently six years earlier. Through high school and college, Dines estimates he only skied five to ten times a winter. He grew up in Bedford, Massachusetts, learning to ski at Nashoba Valley and later earning a political science degree from the University of Connecticut.
Rather than running for office, Dines turned to education, at first teaching in coastal Maine. It was there that he taught himself to tour, skinning up Camden Snowbowl in Nobleboro on a discount telemark setup at night. “I wasn’t wearing a watch. I didn’t know what Strava was; at most I was skiing five digits each year,” Dines says, belittlingly.
Dines’ new interest in touring drew him to Stowe, where he became a ski racing coach for Mt. Mansfield Academy Ski Club, despite having zero experience in racing. He also taught science, all as a means of digging in to Vermont’s winter.
His ski journey was setback, however, when he fell from an ice climb in Smuggler’s Notch, breaking his back.
“That made it take a while for me to get my footing in Stowe,” Dines admits.
His back eventually healed and Covid’s arrival in 2020 gave him a lot of free time to ski. Dines couldn’t get enough of touring, banging out multiple laps a day at Stowe Mountain Resort and Nebraska Valley, a local backcountry zone, gaining a reputation as a gregarious, curly-haired machine. “That’s when I first found endurance sports,” Dines says.
The idea of chasing the record, held by Stowe local and friend Aaron Rice, wasn’t immediately appealing. Dines originally saw it as “not vibey” and “just skiing for numbers.”
As his volume of vertical gain increased though, Dines saw no dip in the fun he was having. He talked it over with Rice as they lapped Mount Washington’s Tuckerman Ravine one spring day. Rice gave him beta and his blessing.
“It wasn’t like it was my idea, but anytime he’d bring it up, I’d be like, ‘yeah, yeah, you should do that definitely! You’re a much better athlete than I ever was, and you could crush it,’” Rice says. “We just chatted a lot that winter, as he was kind of deciding, and, yeah man, I just kept telling him that he should and could do it.”
Dines’ first and biggest challenge was funding. A teacher’s salary wasn’t enough to support a year of skiing and a teacher’s resume failed to court sponsors.
“They would say ‘that’s too hard, you’re probably not going to do that,’” Dines says. “I had no clue what I was doing on the business side.”
Nevertheless, luck found Dines. In typical New England fashion, over dinner before a Noah Kahan concert, Dines caught wind of a friend of a friend who worked at Fischer Skis. He convinced the brand to sign on in early 2023.
From there, he started a GoFundMe, dipped into his savings, and started skiing. He wrote about it on a SubStack to start, titling his project “The Big Ski Year,” an intentional rip-off of the largest birding competition in the world.
He skied his first lap at midnight on January 1, 2024. Then came the easy part: chugging along uphill, happily churning out 1,500 to 2,000 feet per hour. Dines travelled with the snow, from Stowe to Chamonix, Innsbruck, Berthoud Pass, Winter Park, Alta, Mount Hood, and Chile. He slept at the world’s largest truck stop on his way out west, skied deep powder in Aspen, and brushed shoulders with some of the world’s best skiers and riders, including Jeremy Jones and Parkin Costain.
“Meeting all of these skiers has been one of the coolest parts to following the ski world calendar,” Dines says from his ski hostel at El Colorado, Chile. “There are American, French, Spanish and Italian skiers here. By 10 a.m. every day, I’ve said hello in a ton of different languages.”
Dines broke the record accompanied by a crew of pro skiers on September 2, 2024, surpassing Rice’s previous record of 2,506,499 vertical feet and lighting the ski world on fire.
And he’s not stopping there. Dines continues to ski to this day, aiming to surpass 3 million vertical feet. On his current pace, he’s slated to smash that number.
“I feel good, I feel fine,” Dines says when asked how his body is doing. “I’m not existentially tired. If someone asked me to go skiing right now, I’d say yes. I’ve tried to be cognizant of sport science.”
Dines’ commitment to sport science is straightforward. From the start, he scheduled a few more hours of rest into his daily schedule than Rice did, in hopes of avoiding the overtraining that Rice suffered from. When he’s not skiing, he’s tried to keep his heartrate as low as possible, taking phone calls, scrolling on social media and eating. A lot. “Mostly carbs and whatever I can get my hands on,” he says. “In France, I just shoved pastries down my throat.”
Dines also optimized his gear and strategy to move quicker, skiing mostly on resorts, lapping individual runs repeatedly on tiny skimo skis. He wears a running vest that he keeps filled with candy or knockoff Oreos, called “Frac,” a delicacy of southern hemisphere ski lodge snack bars.
His approach is different than that of Rice, who spent more of his time in the backcountry, prioritizing powder and Wasatch lines from The Chuting Gallery. In the same way, Rice’s approach was different than the original record setter, professional skier Greg Hill. Hill skied first descents, went on a three-week, bad-weather-ridden expedition in peak uphill season, and skied the fifth highest mountain in Canada, all while setting the benchmark at 2 million feet. For Hill though, these differences are trivial in the face of progression.
“Noah’s doing it the right way to take it to the next level,” Hill says. “An achievement like this breaks down barriers and inspires people to push themselves, to support the next person.”
Since Dines started his big year, Hill lent his support through texts, telling Dines the day after his record-breaking lap to “keep steady and crush the next 120 days.”
In the next few months, Dines will eclipse 3 million feet. In honor of his time spent in Europe and South America, however, he has a new metric goal in mind: 1 million meters. Hill likens this benchmark to the four-minute mile: after that mark, it won’t matter where the record goes next.
Beyond millions of feet, one continuity both Rice and Hill noted between the three record breakers was the motivation. Each skier did it in the style they wanted. “The three of us each did it as a quest for ourselves,” Hill says. “We weren’t doing it for sponsors, it was a personal quest that came from deep within.”
As for the day-to-day skiing, Dines’ “why do this” answer changes frequently. “When it snows 5 feet in 5 days, it’s to ski powder,” Dines says. “Sometimes it’s to try hard, which I don’t think I ever really did before in anything. Sometimes though, it’s just to see how it feels to ski that much.”
At the time this article was written, Dines had skied 2,878,326 ft. That’s just under 100 Mount Everests.
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