Midwest Ski Journal likes to highlight a few pieces of skiing internet worth your time in LINKing Turns. Find the best, most important, least important and otherwise links here each week. 

This week we look at how New Englanders join ski clubs before watching a video on how to successfully camp at the base of the hill. Then, we read an inspiring essay from Powder that, in part, traces a girl’s thought process before a huck.

TURN 1: The Secret Society of Private New England Ski Clubs Is Actually Pretty Inviting (Jake Stern/Powder Magazine)

This sounds awesome.

It’s like a vacation club for ski families, but more resembles a higher-end, less aggressively drunk fraternity.

Powder Magazine profiled the Polecats, who are all members of the club that love to ski at Wildcat Mountain out east. The coolest part is their “clubhouse,” which serves as a massive home for the ‘Cats and is just minutes from the hill.

This piece gives you a little flavor of what the Polecats are and how their system works. Check it out.

The house sports 48 beds in its 13 bedrooms, a large communal kitchen, bar, and living space. It’s cozy, with dark wood and leather couches. The club is one of many tucked away in the hills and vales of New England, part of a league of 23 ski clubs, each with idiosyncratic names like the Massa-Schussers and the Ski- Bees. It’s like Greek Row for grown-up east coast skiers.

Jake Stern/Powder Magazine

TURN 2: Hacks for Ski-Area Parking Lot Camping (Bryan Rogala/Outside Magazine)

This video series from Outside Magazine, called “The 101,” gives outdoor adventurers some basic tips. This one helps skiers calling parking lots home.

The video centers around a couple that camps every weekend at Taos, New Mexico and gives you the tricks of the trade that make situations like these as comfortable as possible.

Camping in a ski-area parking lot is allowed at various resorts across the West—but you’ve got to be prepared for low temperatures. In this episode of the 101, Bryan Rogala talks with Axie Navas, director of outdoor recreation for New Mexico, and her husband, John Clary Davies, a copywriter for Avocado Green Brands, who spend weekends living in their Cricket trailer at Taos Ski Valley. The two share some tips and tricks for staying comfortable during overnight adventures in cold weather.

Bryan Rogala/Outside Magazine

TURN 3: Skiing Reminds Us What We’re Capable Of (Sierra Shafer/Powder Magazine)

This is a well-written and powerful essay from Sierra Shafer for Powder.

The underlying story is of a girl looking at sending a cliff, but it dives into the world around her through the prism of her skiing challenge.

Besides the wonderful message Shafer’s piece promotes, the detail and color she writes into the story is incredible. Shafer paints a stunning picture of a snowy day at Mount Hood. I highly reccomend this one.

There’s no one way to do it, but all skiers share a common foundation: however you ski, wherever you do it, and whether it’s five days or 50, we continually face new challenges and meet them. We battle inside voices and outside pressures that lead us to doubt who we are. But in the mountains, we escape to a place where skiing reminds us what we’re capable of.

Sierra Shafer/Powder Magazine