Russ Scholl is the kind of guy who clearly loves his job. The avuncular ski instructor has been teaching at Breckenridge for ten years and skiing for far longer.
“I've spent hours and hours and days and months and, geez, I started skiing in 1959, so you do the math,” he said. “Haven't missed a season since.”
Riding the lift up Breckenridge’s Peak 7, Scholl regaled the strangers to his left with one of his signature dad jokes.
“How did the hamburger introduce his new girlfriend?”
Scholl’s question is met with tepid interest from a group of bundled-up vacationers. Undeterred, he proceeds with a punchline.
“He simply said, ‘meet Patty.’”
Scholl, whose bushy, white, mustache picked up snowflakes on the ride up, said the jokes land better with the kids he teaches in ski school. That’s also where he built the foundation of his most recent project – the Periodic Table of Snow.
Across the years, Scholl had been jotting down nicknames and slang terms for different snow conditions in the pages of a notebook he keeps in his pocket. But then, when the mountains were shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, he was sitting at home and looking for a new outlet. That’s when the periodic table was born.
“Just out of the blue,” Scholl said, “it hit me.”
Now, he has published a 133-square grid full of funky colloquialisms for different kinds of snow. While Scholl sells the table on his website in poster form, it’s primarily a passion project. He seems just as excited to tell a stranger in the lodge about his periodic table over a bowl of chili as he is to make an online sale.
Throughout a day on the slopes, he dropped a few of the names he’s accrued over the years.
There’s “cold smoke,” which originated in Montana as a description for dry, light snow that hangs in the air after getting kicked up by a skier or snowboarder.
Then there’s “chokable snow,” a term for powder so deep that it flies up into your mouth. The list goes on. One lift ride, he talked about “mashed potatoes” and “white suede.” The next, “diamond dust.”
Scholl has spent enough time on the snow to see a lot of different types up close, and to understand the nuances between them. He guessed that he had personally skied about 50-60% of the snow types on his table.
“Snow is a very flexible, plastic kind of a material that changes based on many different things,” Scholl said. “From wind to temperature, sun to people sliding across it.”
When it comes to sliding across it, Scholl is a pro. His turns are textbook — smooth, tight, and stable. He glided across Breckenridge’s groomed corduroy with ease and didn’t show a hint of wobbliness on more difficult terrain above treeline.
There, after expertly navigating the moguls that were forming a few days after the last snowstorm, Scholl remarked at the subtle, high-pitched whine emerging as he glided downhill.
“Squeaky snow,” he said. “Or, as some New Englanders call it, ‘screaming lobster.’”
Many of the terms on his periodic table are regional, from the Midwest’s “brown snow” — caused by windblown soil particles from nearby farms — to the heavy, wet “Sierra cement” normally found around Lake Tahoe.
Scholl, who made a career working for the Navy, also put together a periodic table of military slang after his snow table took off. The main driver behind his projects, Scholl said, is curiosity.
Despite choosing the periodic table to present his decades-long collection of snow slang, Scholl insists that he’s not a scientist “in any stretch of the word.” In fact, he struggled with science going all the way back to his undergraduate days at Colorado State University.
“Freshman year, I took Chemistry 101,” he said. “I did so poorly, I nearly flunked out of college because of chemistry. So here, all these years later, I'm getting my retribution against chemistry.”
Scholl enthusiastically shares the findings from his sweet, snowy retribution with anyone who cares to listen and works on his understanding of the slopes and their conditions with each trip down the mountain.
“Every day is a challenge,” he said. “And you never know what you're going to find.”
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
