Читать книгу Shaped by Snow. Defending the Future of Winter онлайн

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My grandfather Grant Culley was a businessman who created a life for himself and his family by investing. When he began studying at Stanford University without any money to pay for his tuition, he invested in himself, gambling his way through school. Afterward, he put his time, money, and career into an insurance company that initially failed. When he and his partners tried to launch their business again, it succeeded. My mother was a little girl when Merrill Lynch bought the company, and their stocks tripled overnight. My grandfather then set his sights on purchasing land. Responding to ads in The New York Times, sight unseen, he bought a bay in the Inside Passage of Canada and a coconut plantation in Fiji. Our family still owns the cabin in Canada.

“He always wanted to invest in snow,” my mother continued. “He was addicted to light powder and steep terrain. When I was a kid we’d always have to drive all the way out from the Bay Area to the Wasatch to ski, rather than just going to Lake Tahoe. And he’d pack up his and Suzanne’s ski gear and fly up to the Canadian Rockies to go heli-skiing with a guide named Hans Gmoser. They’d stay in an old logging camp with no central heating or plumbing.”