Keith Liggett: A Life Spent Chasing Snow
A skier, ski writer, ski instructor and unapologetic ski bum followed winter through the American West to Fernie—and continued dreaming of skiing’s future at Zincton.
Thomas “Keith” Liggett, a lifelong skier, instructor, mountain writer and familiar voice in Canadian ski culture, died peacefully in Fernie on July 19, 2026. He was 76.
At Powder Canada we knew Keith by the description he willingly gave himself: ski bum.
It was not an insult, a temporary phase or an attempt to escape responsibility. For Keith, being a ski bum was a vocation—a decision to arrange life around snow, mountains, ideas and the people who gather wherever the lifts begin turning.
Skiing provided the map.
Keith’s journey took him through Aspen, Vail and Breckenridge before a real job briefly pulled him east. The mountains eventually called him back to Breckenridge, then Hood River and finally Fernie, where he settled in 2006. Along the way, he lived in mountain and outdoor communities across the United States and Canada, following skiing, fishing, writing and the promise of another good season.
These were not simply places where Keith happened to reside. They formed the geography of his life.
He understood that mountain towns are connected by more than highways and airline routes. They share a culture built by instructors, patrollers, lift mechanics, guides, writers and seasonal workers—people who might never become wealthy but who make a community richer by showing up winter after winter.
Keith was one of those people.
He earned his Professional Ski Instructors of America Rocky Mountain Level 3 certification in 1987, giving him what he called a technical excuse to continue skiing. He later taught for years at Fernie Alpine Resort and occasionally turned to telemark skiing when conventional turns were no longer sufficiently entertaining.
Teaching skiing suited him. It allowed Keith to combine movement, observation and language. A ski instructor has to see what another person is doing, understand why it is happening and find the few words that might change everything on the next turn.
Keith was good with words.
His ski journalism appeared in more than 100 newspapers and major ski publications. For 15 years, he wrote a syndicated weekly ski column carried by as many as 75 newspapers annually. He also covered North American World Cup events for Reuters and occasionally the Associated Press.
His writing was informed by experience rather than distance. Keith did not watch ski culture from a comfortable office and then attempt to explain it. He rode the lifts, stood in the lineups, taught the lessons, questioned the industry and followed the snow.
That made him a natural Powder Canada contributor.
His stories explored not only where to ski, but what skiing was becoming. He was particularly committed to Zincton, the proposed lift-assisted backcountry destination between New Denver and Kaslo in British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains.
Keith believed Zincton could represent a different direction for ski-area development—smaller in physical footprint, connected to its neighbouring communities and built around environmental responsibility. In one Powder Canada editorial, he called it the “Tesla of ski areas”: green, clean and local, with deep Selkirk powder providing the final argument.
His involvement with Zincton was not casual. He worked tirelessly for the project because it brought together the strands that had defined his life: mountains, skiing, community, conservation and the possibility that the next generation could do things differently.
On the Zincton team page, Keith summarized his life simply: he had been a climbing guide, ski instructor and search-and-rescue leader whose days were defined by the surrounding peaks. Those peaks, he wrote, created the words and sentences that followed.
Fernie became the final major chapter.
Keith had first discovered the community during the winter of 2002 and moved there permanently several years later. He taught skiing, wrote his Off Camber in Fernie column, founded the Fernie Writers Conference and helped connect Fernie’s mountain culture with its literary community. His books included the award-winning Island Lake Lodge: The Cookbook, the poetry collection like socks in the dryer and The Fernie Originals.
Keith could be opinionated, difficult, funny and generous—sometimes within the same conversation. He did not travel through life in the groomed centre of the run. He preferred the uneven edge, where the terrain demanded attention and the view was usually more interesting.
His passing leaves an absence in Fernie, at Zincton and within the larger community of skiers who still believe skiing can be more than recreation or business.
Keith represented the lifelong version of the ski bum: not someone refusing to grow up, but someone who had decided what mattered and refused to grow away from it.
He followed skiing from the United States into Canada, from established resorts to an unfinished dream in the Selkirks. The journey brought him to Fernie, but it never really ended. There was always another storm, another mountain town, another argument and another story waiting to be written.
The lifts will turn again next winter. Snow will fill the tracks. Instructors will gather their students, writers will search for the right words and dreamers will continue imagining better ways to live in the mountains.
Keith Liggett will be missed wherever ski culture still runs a little off camber.
Editor
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