WILLIAMSVILLE-Bernard (Bernie) Rosow, originally of Williamsville, didn’t choose a path to fame and fortune.
The freeriding, freestyling skier, who died of cardiac arrest on April 23 while hiking up Bloody Mountain in Mammoth Lakes, California, preferred carving his own routes, building his own jumps, and holistically honing his own blend of Nordic and alpine skiing with ski jumping.
The 45-year-old Rosow probably could have gone pro, but he chose his own route: He took on the grind of nighttime slope grooming for one simple reason: So he could just ski every day. And with a knack for technology, he’d put on a camera and film those adventures, becoming a true media personality to approximately 100,000 followers on social media.
In a story in The Sheet, a weekly newspaper in Mammoth Lakes, California, Editor Paige Fisher wrote: “Through helmet-cam videos and social media, Rosow shared his perspective with a large and growing audience. Thousands followed along, watching him charge steep contours, float through powder, and disappear over blind rollovers.”
His death shocked and saddened the ski community coast to coast and was covered in a range of newspapers, websites, magazines, and other media — MSN, San Francisco Chronicle, Freeskier, SFGate, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, Powder, Ski, Sun, and People, among others.
Rosow’s journey through life is a good Vermont story of hardcore tenacity and endurance, along with a love of the outdoors and nature, and with a heavy dose of individualism.
Deep roots in Vermont
Having grown up in a small Vermont village, Bernie was a rambunctious guy at an early age, says neighbor and friend Jon Julian, in whose house Bernie was born.
His father, Bruce Rosow, recalls his son started skiing at age 2 with skis strapped onto his Sorels.
“He followed me and our dog, Potato, and never stopped. Bernard was always active,” he said. “Always jumping. He couldn’t sit still.”
Bernie’s uncle, Bob Lyons, recalls his nephew as an adventurer: “My neighbor was doing landscaping work with a bulldozer. Bernie built jumps and started BMX biking: I’d look out the back window, and there he was, flying in the air over this mound.”
Lyons’s daughter, Lily [Lyons] adds: “All the kids would come around and watch him because none of us could do it: We’d get hurt immediately.”
In those days, Williamsville kids would gather outside the Lessing Family General Store on Dover Road to skateboard and bike on ramps that proprietor Jim Lessing had allowed to encircle the store’s entrance. Bernie was the leader.
By age 7, he was skiing in the New England Bill Koch Youth Ski League, competing in the Nordic races coached by Chris and Mary Osgood of Putney. “Just wonderful people: their attitude was always so caring — just having fun with the kids,” Bruce Rosow recalls of those years when his son learned balance and rhythm on skis.
“Back then, we would drop Bernard off at Maple Valley [Ski Area] in the morning and pick him up when the lights went off. Maple Valley was just heaven for Bernard,” he says.
But so was Van Kirk’s Hill, just up the road from the Rosow home. “He’d wake up, grab the shovel, take his skis,” and head out to “build and ski jumps all day long,” Bruce Rosow says.
That love of jumping led his son to the Brattleboro Outing Club ski jumping program in his early teens in which “local legends Dana Zelenakas, Steve Squires, and Bernie Wells taught all those kids, first of all, to be together as a team. And they taught Bernie to fly.”
“By the time he left Vermont he’d developed a natural grace and versatility on skis that became his trademark,” Rosow adds.
Rosow also credits Vermont’s affordable Junior Instructional Snowsports Program (JISP) for his son’s growth as a downhill skier. All woven together, with a dash of daring and a lot of skill, Bernie’s style earned his renown.
Never too fond of school, the young Rosow was an avid reader and an experiential learner self-educated in big machines, heavy equipment, drones, cameras, filming, editing, meteorology, and the great outdoors.
“Writing a five-paragraph essay was not really exciting,” his father recalls, but ”ski jumping was pretty exciting. He learned technique, how to control himself in the air, how to land; he learned about speed, about takeoff, all very specific skills. Wonderful life lessons.”
Julian adds that “Bernie marched to his own drumbeat — one of the few people who, by age 4, knew what he wanted to do for his entire life, which was ski” — or, at least, be airborne.
Chuckling, he recalls, “I think he must have been 15; I gave him his first job at Top of the Hill Grill.”
Julian, who was running his family’s barbecue restaurant with his two sons and Bernie, recalls that “whenever it was time for cleanup or dish duty, it’d be, ‘Where’s Bernie?’”
“And Bernie’s out on his bicycle doing tricks” — in the parking lot, on picnic tables — “entertaining customers.”
At 18, having graduated from Leland & Gray Union High School — with pink hair, Lyons adds — Bernie headed west.
He first went to Utah and bounced from job to job at three ski areas.
In 2001, he made his way to Mammoth Lakes, California, where he began working with Mammoth Mountain, a 3,500-acre ski resort with 25 lifts and 180 trails. He worked there until his death.
There, he earned a reputation as an ace snowcat operator. He’d work that machine, grooming the slopes from 4 p.m. to midnight so he could be the first on the mountain the next morning. Eventually, he became grooming supervisor.
Bernie began collaborating with photographer Christian Pondella, whose work appears in magazines and for various products, and then with ski-related corporate sponsors: first Oakley, then Black Crow and, most recently, Zag Skis.
Over more than two decades, Rosow and Pondella honed a beautiful friendship skiing, adventuring, and taking photos together.
“Bernie had a really good demeanor,” Pondella says. “He was extremely confident in the mountains. Most of the time we’d go out for pure fun, pleasure, and passion: We’d shoot photos for the love of it. And there were times when it was actual work, when we were shooting for his sponsors or for clients.”
Bernie was known for his directness and candor. Caring and kind and having inspired so many, he was rarely without an opinion.
“He was a wealth of information,” Pondella says. “I’d call him to ask questions about things, to get his advice. And whether he knew the answer or not, he made you think he knew the answer.” Such was Bernie’s infectious confidence.
“He was really into boundary pushing — both, you know, at ski resorts and in his own personal life,” Lyons says, describing her cousin’s credo as “Do the thing. Live life to the fullest. Don’t waste a moment.”
Doing it his way
Though he garnered it, it seems Bernie was not interested in celebrity. He skied and lived on his own terms: learning mountains well and navigating them with grace, finesse, and caution.
Lyons recalls her cousin as “extremely calculated in his risk versus reward assessments.”
“Although he took a lot of risks, I’d never have called him reckless,” says Lyons, a painter and glass artist as well as a professional stunt driver — a line of work in which Bernie’s “mentality had kept me safe in many high-stakes moments.”
Bruce Rosow adds that he didn’t worry about his son’s skiing “because he was thoughtful, calculating, careful.” He might spend hours climbing a mountain, but if conditions weren’t right, he wouldn’t ski it; he’d climb back down.
In recent years, Bernie’s visibility steadily increased.
“He really was peaking,” his mother, Barbara Lindsey Rosow, says. “There was a sense that he was maturing. He had a child. He was on the top of his game.”
Historically, she adds, Bernie “was in the forefront of the sport. He was part of the beginnings of freeskiing.”
That took a little troublemaking at the outset: As Lily Lyons recalls, “back in early JISP days at Stratton, Bernie used to get in a lot of trouble for skiing in the half-pipe where skiers weren’t allowed.”
Half-pipe skiing became an established event in freestyle skiing and was introduced to the Winter Olympics in 2014, but “I think he had his pass pulled more than once for doing that,” Lyons says.
Bernie honed skills in photography, filming, and editing over the years, developing a natural understanding of computers and digital production.
Producing videos of mountain biking, skateboarding, off-track motorcycle rides, and adventures with his son for publication on social media, he took great care to ensure that music chosen suited the footage, creating clips that some have described as more art than promotion.
“When I watch his videos,” his father says, “it’s like [he’s] a painter.“
When the ski season would end in California, Bernie would travel to New Zealand, Australia, South America, and Japan, and “whenever he did that, he was grooming, because grooming kept the food on the table,” his father explains.
And his following inevitably grew. “[We] have been astonished by how many people knew Bernard and, for many of those people, how powerful this loss is because they knew him through experiences in the mountains,” the elder Rosow says.
People’s connections with Bernie took place “through adventures” not just through “hanging out at a party,” Bruce Rosow observes.
Miles Clark, CEO and founder of SnowBrains, a ski website, posted that Bernie “made things look too easy.
“It was almost frustrating to watch him effortlessly rip down the mountain, absorb bumps, bash bad snow, soar off jumps, find impossible transitions, and wait for you at the bottom with a snicker and smile,” Clark said.
Recalling Bernie “racing ahead on climbs and disappearing out of follow-cam frames to hit unseen jumps,” Clark added that Bernie “never let his ability turn into ego [...] He didn’t wear his accomplishments as a badge of honor.”
Inspiring a new generation
In a written tribute, Bernie’s younger brother, Daniel, notes proudly that Bernie was “a favorite skier of the pros.”
“Ryan Cary, coach of the US Olympic Freeski Half-pipe Team, mentioned at least three gold medalists who’d come to Mammoth to seek Bernie out,” he said. “They were all amazed by this New Englander who supervised graveyard shifts maintaining snow conditions and still made first chair every single powder day,” — except on the day his son, Alexander, was born.
“His ski videos are insane, and yet he was so utterly in control that the worst injury he ever had was a broken hand,” Daniel Rosow continued.
“He was the busiest person I’ve ever known and yet always made time to check in on family. It’s like his so-called ADHD worked like a sheepdog[,] breaking trail then doubling back to check on the stragglers.”
Daniel Rosow said that Bernie “has always been there for us and continues to be there to coax us out of our comfort zones and make light of our self-absorbed seriousness. [He] will always exemplify for me freedom of spirit, stubbornness of mission, single mindedness of habit, joy of life, blunt honesty as a friend.”
Bruce Rosow reflects on the death of his father at age 32, of the same heart disease that took his son’s life, a defining event that helped him deeply cherish his experience as a father to Bernie and Daniel.
So it’s not surprising to Rosow that his son’s “greatest accomplishment was being a dad,” a role that he says “completed” him.
“It was something outside of himself that made him a much more kind, compassionate human being,” Rosow says. Bernie, his partner, Amber Feld, and their son, Alexander, “created a really tight family, his father says. “And they figured it out.”
Lily Lyons says that “the way he passed, he was on top of the world, dreams achieved, his kid was doing great. And, yeah, it’s painful, beautiful: He died doing what he loved to do. On the way up.”
She added: “I don’t like it, but there’s something really poetic about it. Shakespearean.” (Rosow passed on the day of Shakespeare’s birth and death.)
In a video posted several months before his death, Bernie said, “You only get so many winters in your life. And so it’s super motivating to me to like never miss a day, always use all my time well.”
Down the mountain
Daniel Rosow and Lily Lyons recently returned from a “Ski Down for Bernie Day” at Mammoth Mountain, where hundreds of Bernie Rosow’s friends and fans converged to give him a fitting sendoff.
As Lyons tells it “pro-skiers and Olympians and mountain friends/roommates/coworkers from all over the world attended. Lots of tearful hugs, lots of stories, lots of celebrating the life of Bernie the way he lived it.
“Alex, Amber, and [my brother] Sam led us all down the mountain,” she continued, and she and Daniel brought up the rear of the group, as “book ends of Bernie’s large and loving community.”
“Everyone waved at the snowcats that lined up on the hill as we descended,” Lyons said.
Mammoth Mountain will host a celebration of Bernie’s life on Saturday, June 13.
‘He chose his path’
Barbara Lindsey Rosow says that in recent years, her son’s smile “just kept getting bigger and bigger. That’s what really stands out for me, is that by the end of his life, he was just one big smile; he was really happy in his life.”
Musing on the loss of a son who faced congenital cardiac disease his whole life and who thrived on adrenaline, she senses “that he’s free, that he chose his path, that he lived his life the way he wanted to live it.”
On his last day, he was surrounded by “those mountains, those mountains were where he worshipped: they were sacred to him,” she says.
“And he died in a way that was quite remarkable, really — on his favorite mountain with his favorite people doing what he loved to do.”
Many of Bernie Rosow’s videos can be seen on YouTube. The family suggests that donations in his memory be made to Familial Hypercholesterolemia Foundation (FHF) at theFHfoundation.org and/or to the Brattleboro Outing Club, P.O. Box 335, Brattleboro, VT 05302.
This News item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.