No one should drive around with a personalized license plate that will easily allow the rest of us to profile and make fun of them, but they do and I do. I pulled up behind this one yesterday – ME♥SKE – which I took to mean that this Nissan Leaf driver really hearts to ski. My deductive reasoning was aided by a window sticker that said My Other Car Is On The Bunny Slope and another on the bumper reading Ski Naked.

Within five seconds I knew so much about this person. One, he thinks of a car, not as a stylish, important transportation vessel but as a moving surface for his stickers, two, he is easily influenced and allows the politically-correct majority to make life decisions for him, hence the Nissan Leaf and, three, he’s a long-time pot smoker because only stoners think the concept and practice of skiing naked is funny or practical.

Snow People are an odd bunch. They tend to be environmentalists and drug users. They like to drive dangerous, curvy mountain roads late at night after smoking hash from a pipe and then arriving right before sunrise at which point they take speed and go lookin’ for a gnarly rush.

Like surfer dude or guys that like to fish, skiing in any form is mostly about the lies you can tell about it after the fact, We were like the only guys on the mountain, like, they closed the roads, like, minutes after we got there and the snow was like baby powder and I, like, carved it up and, like, total strangers said I was a shredder and bought me beers in the chalet all night … Yeah, right dude.

Snow People are typically rich. It’s like golf, you can’t do it without $10,000 worth of gear for every person in the family. Did you ever see a dude in a van with three surfboards lashed to the roof cruising around the Inland Empire? Ya, well, he’s not a surfer at all just a poser who thinks that you’ll think he’s cooler if he surfs. The same fuckin’ thing happens with skier guy. The guy with the $7,000 ski rack on his Honda Pilot and the Mammoth Mountain t-shirt and the eight snowboards poking out the backseat window isn’t fuckin’ skiing Vail or Telluride, but he did go to Snow Summit twice when he was twelve.

The crowd that hearts to ski, more accurately, just really likes to buy expensive ski gear and sweaters and jackets insulated with the feathers of birds that live in Antarctica. They are the mountain version of the Country Club set – it’s not how you hit the golfball or whether you even tee it up all, rather, it’s about having the latest golf shirt, the kryptonite driver, the golf ball that will roll for miles and looking the part.

In short, the people that spend a lot of time on the slopes, the dudes that really ♥skiing, that dig driving nine hours and spending most of the money in their 401k to freeze their ass off, well, they have a screw loose.

So whether you’re out on the road or at work or just walking around the neighborhood, keep your eye out for these types, Snow People that is, because if you don’t detect them in advance you could end up in a forty-seven-minute conversation about ski bindings with a guy that smells like a bong – and that, my friend, will be forty-seven minutes you’ll never get back.

Photo on Visualhunt.com