To the average holiday-maker the ski industry might look like any other, though perhaps a little more glamorous. Those in the know realise it's a world of its own. It has its own little subculture, or, to be more precise several subcultures.

First there are the ski bums. Keen skiers as kids or students, they can't wait to spend a season in the mountains. No job is too menial as long as they can ski, and they think they are the coolest people who ever lived. They see the poor holiday-makers who come and go each week as an audience to their in-crowd japes, when they aren't complaining about the crowds.

After one or two seasons trying to maintain the illusion of a sex-and -partying lifestyle for their friends back home, most go back to the real world and get on with their lives, maintaining their love of the mountains through annual pilgrimages to the scene of their youthful excesses.

Also see: Our Jobs Sought/Jobs Available forum.

Some stay however, either out of inertia or a real love of the lifestyle. In every resort you will find people who arrived as ski-bums and stayed to develop a business, a career, a life. But this is dangerous territory. Every resort also has its collection of old ski-bums, who didn't know when to leave or how to stay, condemned to a life of waiting on tables.

Ski instructors are a different breed. There are essentially two types. They either grew up in the mountains, have always been excellent skiers, and have few annoying personal habits that would disqualify them from teaching. Or they are urban types, who wouldn't be out of place in any of the professionals, but who are drawn to the lifestyle of the mountains and enjoy teaching. Either sort can make excellent instructors.

Also see: Our Instructors' Locker-Room forum.

Finally there is the hard core: professional pisteurs, lifties, ski patrollers, rescue crews and snowmakers. These are men and women who grew up in the mountains; they couldn't live anywhere else because the oxygen levels would be too high. It takes a certain type of person to give up family, friends and personal hygiene to sit in a heated box at the top of a chairlift nodding to total strangers in a blizzard.

They have not chosen a career in the mountains, it's more like the mountains called and they answered in a language most people reading these pages wouldn't understand.

See our links to Industry & Ski Professional sites