Outside correspondent based in Breckenridge, Colorado. His story “Irmageddon” was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2019. By the mid-nineties, Cummings was one of the best big-mountain skiers in the world. (Photos: John Fullbright) Late 1980s, Telluride, Colorado Cummings had been one of skiing’s most unlikely heroes. He made his name when straight skis were hip and the hottest discipline in the sport was freestyle moguls—racing down a zipper line of giant bumps as fast and as smoothly as possible, with aerial flair. To come from the high desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and beat people who were training in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or Aspen, Colorado, was a fantasy, even for a gifted athlete like Cummings, who’d been skiing since kindergarten. But two years after high school, he loaded up his van, the Love Machine, and started following the moguls circuit. Like many competitors, he had no coach. Instead he studied the top finishers and tried to emulate them. He bounced around Colorado to train, sometimes pitching his tent between the ice machine and phone booth at Arapahoe Basin or sleeping in a friend’s yard in Telluride. He called his buddies “Shred” and would often say, “Skiing is life.”