Ski to Die Fix Shoes to Live

A conversation with a skiing pioneer

Story by Max Galanty
Photos are courtesy of Mark Mechinelli

The Shoe Hospital is just like one would imagine based on its name. It's an old fashioned store- squeaky door with a bell to announce a customer's arrival, and all. There are hundreds of shoes of all sizes and colors; there are brown dress shoes, black hiking boots, red pumps, and even a baseball mitt or two. There is a friendly Chocolate Labrador in the window and an equally gentle, elderly man adjacent from the canine, behind the counter. His name is Al, and his son is Mark Meschinelli—an original member of the Ski to Die Club.

"We didn’t wear helmets because they didn’t do that back then."

Meschinelli is wearing a tight-fitting purple athletic shirt, not the obvious choice for attire at a shoe repair shop. Before our conversation, a middle-aged man, around Meschinelli's age, puts his hunter green hiking boot up on the counter and asks Meschinelli if he could fix the boot. "No," Meschinelli regrettably tells the gentleman. There was a hole on the toe of the boot, just above the sole of the shoe, "that’s a bad place to have a hole," Meschinelli says.

There was no such thing as bad hole when Meschinelli would ski with the Ski to Die Club, or perhaps there was no bad terrain at all—the rougher the better.  The "club" would look for the most challenging paths. "Ski to die is a figure of speech," Meschinelli explained. The club started as group of guys who loved to have fun and loved to ski. No one actually had intentions of dying.  They were all friends who would go to the 46 high peaks, ranging to over 3,000 feet high and ski down them on a challenging path—like the hiking trail, or whatever looked "naturally enticing." There were a few women who joined the guys on some of their trips. They got the respect of the guys if they kept up with them on the treacherous adventures.

This was back in the 70s and 80s when all of the guys would meet up every weekend. Meschinelli actually was not a good skier when he started, but he tagged along with the others, and after skiing every weekend for a winter, he became efficient at skiing.

"I followed guys that were better than me. I bought wooden skis and took them cross-country for three or four really cold miles. There were a lot of rocks. I made it the whole mountain until the end, and I broke my ski," Meschinelli remembers of his first descent down a mountain.

"We opened a lot of ski routes."

"We didn’t wear helmets because they didn't do that back then," Meschinelli says. They brought out enough stuff to spend the night just in case something unforeseen happened on their journeys. Their skis and boots were flimsy in comparison to today's more modern and sturdy equipment.

"Every trip was an adventure. We never knew what we would find," Meschinelli reminisces. For example, they never planned to ski past sundown, but sometimes they would find themselves shredding fresh powder under the pale light of moon.  The club zoomed past trees, zipped off cliffs and zapped the idea that any path was too dangerous. "We just wanted to pound ourselves," Meschinelli says.

Today, back country skiing is common. There are groups of skiers that might even call the Ski to Die Club’s antics amateur because there are much more extreme ski movements out there these days. However, Meschinelli would argue the opposite. "It’s not the same today," Meschinelli said, "They use all of this equipment."

It's safe to say that Mark, along with the Ski to Die Club, is a pioneer to back country skiing in the high peaks of the Adirondacks. "We opened a lot of ski routes," Meschinelli laughs.

Currently, all of the guys are grown up and spread out along New York. Now, Meschinelli works part-time in the Shoe Hospital with his dad, Al. He is also a freelance rock-climbing and ice climbing instructor. The crew still keeps in touch and they enjoy seasonal outdoor activities to this day. "The mountains will always be our connection," Meschinelli says.

Where's your favorite place to shred fresh powder?