By the standard of most mere mortals, Noah Dines‘ accomplishment sounds almost superhuman. In January, he set out to break the world record for the most uphill skiing in a calendar year. Eight months and two days into a pursuit that took him to three continents, the 30-year-old from Stowe reached his goal — 2,506,500 feet — at the summit of El Colorado, a ski resort in the Chilean Andes.
With several months left in the year, Dines kept going. Seven weeks later, on October 24, he reached a new milestone on Chile’s Lonquimay Volcano: 3 million human-powered vertical feet. And he’s not done yet.
Particularly noteworthy about Dines’ achievement is that he broke the previous world record, set in 2016 by his friend and fellow Stowe resident Aaron Rice, as a relative newcomer to the sport, with no prior experience as an endurance athlete. In fact, the Bedford, Mass., native didn’t get serious about uphilling, aka ski touring, until the pandemic, when the sport exploded internationally.
Since then, Dines has become an international celebrity, of sorts. He now gets recognized by fellow skiers in the Alps, the Rockies and the Andes, including by Olympic and professional athletes with many more years of experience.
For the uninitiated, ski touring involves putting skins on the bottom of one’s skis for traction, then trekking up a mountain and skiing back down, either on groomed trails (called on-piste skiing) or on ungroomed (off-piste) snow. The equipment is generally much lighter and more flexible than Alpine gear, enabling the skier to cover more terrain faster and with less effort.
Still, Dines typically spends five to eight hours a day skiing, making trips that vary from multiple “laps” up and down a ski resort’s slopes to one or two long climbs in the backcountry.
For the average ski-touring enthusiast, a big day on the mountain might involve an ascent of 6,000 to 8,000 feet. This year, Dines has been averaging 10,000 feet of elevation gain per day, which is equivalent to climbing to the top of Mount Mansfield more than three times.
“Doing north of 10,000 [feet], day in and day out, is a staggering feat — and a mental feat as much as a physical one,” said Adam “Howie” Howard, editor and publisher of Height of Land Publications in Jeffersonville, which produces Alpinist, Backcountry, Cross Country Skier and Mountain Flyer magazines. “It makes me wonder what else is possible for this guy.”
There is no international body to certify Dines’ achievements. He documents all of his ascents using a GPS-enabled smartwatch that automatically logs his trips on Strava, a popular fitness app.
“There could be some guy in Switzerland who skis 5 million uphill feet a year, but I doubt it,” Dines said in a recent phone interview.
Dines had originally intended to conduct our interview while he was skiing up Mount Hood, Oregon’s tallest peak, but rain that day forced him off the mountain. Instead, he spoke from his pickup truck in a supermarket parking lot in Odell, Ore.
Compared to most elite skiers, Dines fell in love with the sport relatively late, at age 23. He grew up skiing at Nashoba Valley Ski Area in Massachusetts and logged maybe five to 10 days on the slopes each winter; he never even competed in varsity sports in high school. After attending the University of Connecticut, Dines moved to Maine and lived closer to the mountains “in an environment where going skiing was the thing that people did as much as possible,” he said. “That’s where I really caught the bug … and it just spiraled from there.”
In winter 2017-18, Dines bought a used $100 telemark ski setup and a pair of skins. He then taught himself to ski uphill at Maine’s Camden Snow Bowl, a small town-owned ski area with just 845 vertical feet.
“Why ski just one lap when you can ski two or three?” Noah Dines
In fall 2019, Dines, an educator, moved to Stowe and worked for a time at Mt. Mansfield Academy. When the pandemic hit a few months later, he still hadn’t made many friends in the area.
“All of a sudden I had a lot of time on my hands, and the best way to fill it was by skiing,” he said. “And why ski just one lap when you can ski two or three?”
Dines quickly discovered that he was adept at skiing a lot of vertical on a daily basis, without needing time off to recover. Determined to break the world record, he set up a GoFundMe page in September 2023 to finance the endeavor. At the time, virtually no one in the skiing world knew who he was.
In January, Dines began his world record pursuit in Stowe, logging his biggest month to date: 378,000 vertical feet, which is itself a record for a single month. Then, as access to skiable snow dwindled in Vermont, he traveled to Saint-Gervais, France, in February, then Innsbruck, Austria, in March. While the European lifestyle was “incredible,” Dines recalled, skiing in the Alps last winter was terrible, with warm temperatures and lousy snow.
After returning to Stowe in April, Dines and Rice skied New Hampshire’s Mount Washington together in May. From there, Dines drove to Colorado, then Utah and Oregon, before flying to Chile for the summer.
At the time we spoke, Dines had taken just 13 days off from skiing all year, mostly for travel. They included four days in July when a cyberattack largely shut down global air travel, delaying his scheduled flight to Chile.
Because Dines skis alone most days, he mostly avoids avalanche-prone areas, which enables him to travel with less gear and often without a pack. Usually, he’ll park at the bottom of a mountain and ski up from there. If a lap takes him less than an hour, he may carry nothing at all, including food and water, which he’ll leave behind in his truck.
But when the terrain and weather conditions allow, Dines prefers longer ascents, which he said “feel like a walk in the woods,” albeit 4,000-foot ones. His single biggest day this year was in Stowe in April, when he logged 16,500 feet. With only 2,000 vertical feet to work with in Vermont, that’s more than eight trips up the mountain.
“I’ll put on a podcast; I’ll listen to music; I’ll call somebody,” he said. “Then you have a 10-minute descent, which is supercool.”
Though technically a quasi-professional athlete with a handful of sponsors — Fischer skis, Maloja clothing, ATK Bindings and Plink, the last of which makes electrolyte tablets in Richmond — Dines has no trainer or physician monitoring his health, workout regimen or caloric intake.
“I’m a team of one,” he said. “If I’m hungry, I eat. And if I’m not hungry, I also eat.” Dines couldn’t say how much he weighs. He hasn’t stepped on a scale in months.
Fame and sponsorships are relatively new phenomena for him. As recently as spring, Dines had only a couple thousand followers on Instagram, where he’s been chronicling his adventures. (He now has more than 9,400.) People in Stowe often recognize the bearded, six-foot-one skier with the long, curly brown locks and big smile. Once, at New Hampshire’s Tuckerman Ravine, someone asked to take his picture.
“When I left the Northeast, I was sure I’d be skiing in anonymity,” he said.
But after arriving in Colorado and spending the night in his truck at 11,300 feet, Dines said, he was “walking around in an altitude haze” when someone approached him and said, “You’re Noah Dines, right? I just saw a video about you.”
By the time winter sports publications began taking notice of his world record pursuit, Dines was getting recognized constantly. It was his social media presence that really raised his public profile. On his first day in South America, several Chileans knew his name.
“Social media has been a total game changer,” Dines said, not so much for helping fund his skiing but because of all the real-life friends he’s made. At Mount Hood he skied with pro snowboarders Jeremy and Cass Jones and pro skiers Kai Jones and Parkin Costain, all of whom he called “absurd athletes.”
Then, on Lonquimay, Dines skied with members of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Team while they trained on the volcano. And at Utah’s Alta Ski Area, he met Steven Nyman, a former World Cup Alpine racer on the U.S. Ski Team, and ended up living in his Park City, Utah, home for a couple of weeks.
“What I love about ski touring is that I’m doing something all the time. I’m out there, and I’m moving,” he said. “And it’s such a lovely way to spend time with friends.”
And, soon, with family. Though Dines’ parents and relatives were initially skeptical, believing that his “adventure” was merely an excuse to be a ski bum, Dines said they soon realized he was serious and got behind him. While his mother doesn’t ski at all, Dines’ father, who’s never skinned before, has promised to give it a try this winter.
“He’ll suffer certainly, because the first time you go ski touring, it’s challenging,” Dines said. “But I’m just really excited to show him this part of my world.”
What’s most evident from Dines’ social media posts and press coverage is just how much fun he has doing something so challenging. As an endurance athlete, he’s mastered the ideal state that balances peak performance with effortless focus, what sports psychologists often refer to as “flow.” It’s his happy place.
And he relishes sharing his joy with others. When Dines decided to break the world record, the first person he told was Rice, the record holder at the time.
“He said, ‘That’s awesome! I will be your biggest fan and do anything I can to help you,'” Dines recalled. It’s the kind of unselfish sportsmanship that Dines plans to pay forward one day.
“Whenever someone is ready to go for mine,” he said about his own record, “I will show them the exact same support, for sure.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Skis the Limit | How Stowe’s Noah Dines broke the world record for the most uphill skiing in one year”
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This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2024.
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