2026 is the 20th anniversary of The Ski Diva. To celebrate the amazing women who make this community what it is, we’re going to be featuring interviews with Ski Diva members on the blog all season long. Check them all out here.
Rachel, who goes simply by @RachelV on the forum, has been a member of The Ski Diva since 2006, and has run the site since 2023. She lives in Colorado, where you can find her riding the lifts at A-Basin from October through June, and trying to cultivate a positive attitude about summer from July through September.
Tell us just a little bit about yourself outside of skiing and The Ski Diva.
I’m a 40-something professional web person who’s been living in Boulder, Colorado, for 15 years. I grew up in the northeast, spent my post-college years in NYC, and try to skateboard, play guitar, and take my dog on lots of hikes when I’m not skiing, working, or spending time with my partner.
What drew you to skiing, and what’s kept you hooked?
I learned to ski in high school, when a friend’s dad was able to get a cheap lift ticket package at Powder Ridge for a group of friends and me. Lessons were not involved, and I have a very clear memory of careening towards some netting at the bottom of the bunny hill, completely out of control. Skiing wasn’t on my radar and I’m not sure I would have gone at all if not for the social aspect. Somehow, after a few weeks I was able to get down the hill in one piece, which I attribute to being 16 and having no fear and resilient bones.
After that I really didn’t ski again until after college, when I was living in NYC. For some reason, despite ski weekends involving a minimum 4-hour drive, metro area traffic, and hotel rooms, my group of friends and I started going regularly. I’m honestly not sure why! It was such a pain and took so much time! My best guess is just the pure “type 1 fun” aspect of skiing, which is still one of the things I love so much about it. I remember the day I finally figured out how to carve, and how I could not get over how fun it felt.
To this day there are few things I find as satisfying as skiing, or that clear my mind the way skiing does. I also just genuinely love spending time outside in the mountains, especially during the winter when the days can feel so short.
How did you find The Ski Diva? What motivated you to join and stick around?
I found The Ski Diva back in 2006 via another ski forum: EpicSki, which is no longer around. I’d had a few experiences on EpicSki that didn’t feel great in terms of how women were talked to, and the community at The Ski Diva immediately felt a lot more welcoming and respectful. I also skied almost entirely with men at that point in my life, and was looking for ways to meet more women ski partners.
In general, it just felt like a relief to find a place that was full of women that loved skiing as much as I did, and I more or less jumped in with both feet, both online and off.
How has The Ski Diva influenced your life outside of skiing?
There are so many ways The Ski Diva has influenced my life, but the biggest thing I always think about is how this community helped me build the confidence I needed to move out west back in 2011. I’d been living in NYC since college, loved it there, and had never lived anywhere outside the northeast. I was also spending at least half of my winter weekends driving to Vermont to ski, and traveling out west two or three times a season. It felt like I should be thinking about moving somewhere that made skiing a bit easier, but it also felt scary to think about moving long distance.
During the winter of 2009 I found myself in the position of being able to spend two months in Utah. I didn’t have any real connections out there, but there was a solid group of women active on the forum who lived in the Salt Lake City area. I met up with many of them to ski over the course of those two months, got invited along to some group outings, and sometimes met someone for a meal or drink. Having just that little bit of social fabric in place made those two months feel a lot better than they would have otherwise. (Shout-out to @tradygirl, @altagirl, @dloveski, @Sheena, and everyone else who hung out with me back then.)
That experience kind of planted the seed that I could move to a place where I didn’t really know anyone and be okay. I repeated the experiment the following winter on a smaller scale by spending two weeks in Boulder, Colorado, and then made the move a year later. Somehow 15 years have passed since then, and even though there are things I miss about NYC and the northeast, I really can’t imagine living anywhere else.
How did you end up taking over The Ski Diva?
When I look back on how I came to take over the site from Wendy, it really does feel like it all unfolded pretty naturally. I’d been a member of the forum since 2006, and went on my first Diva trip to Solitude, Utah in 2008, where I met Wendy (and a bunch of other Divas, several of whom are still active today). I’m a software engineer and general web person professionally, so after that I’d sometimes help out with technical things, or just chat with Wendy about the site in general and brainstorm ideas.
In the year or two before I took over, I knew Wendy was thinking about how to step back from running The Ski Diva, and exploring options for how to move on while still keeping the community alive. I don’t remember exactly when the idea popped into my head that I’d like to take over the site, and, embarrassingly, I don’t remember if it was Wendy or myself who floated the idea first. Either way, we talked about it a lot when we were both in Taos for Diva West in 2023, and made it final that summer in Vermont while I was on a trip back east.
That’s not a very exciting story, but to me it really does feel like everything evolved very organically over 15 years or so! Here’s the official blog post and forum thread about the transition from back when it happened in July 2023.
What do you hope The Ski Diva looks like 20 years from now?
I don’t have any grand plans to change the bones of the site; I really just want to figure out how to keep attracting new members and keep the site feeling relevant and valuable as technology continues to change. I hope that focusing on the human aspect of the site – the real relationships we form both online and offline, the conversation and connection with actual people, the genuine friendships that have developed – is something that continues to feel more important as so many other things we do are being taken over by AI.
And, of course, I want to continue the goals that Wendy had when she started the site in 2006: to provide a place for women to connect with other women who feel equally passionate about skiing, and to create an environment where they can talk about skiing in a way that’s comfortable and respectful, without being sexualized or marginalized or looked down upon as skiers.
As a software engineer and someone who has a lot of hobbies that are majority male, I think it’s incredibly important to have spaces where you can show up and feel 100% accepted and supported as a woman. Seeing other women doing the things you want to do, getting advice and perspective from women, and being encouraged and supported by women are all so valuable when you’re trying to get into something new. While things have improved a lot over the last 20 years, I feel strongly that spaces like The Ski Diva are still necessary. That’s a huge reason why I wanted to step up and take over from Wendy and keep the community running.
What song would be on your ultimate ski playlist?
I really, really like skiing to Lizzo.
If you had to describe skiing in three words, what would they be?
Joyful, adventurous, freeing.