The search begins in the gray, smoky light of early morning. Josh Daiek is hunched over Google Earth like an old school cartographer charting a risky path across the sea. He zooms, scrolls, tilts the computer screen, hunting for “any little bump and whatever on Google Earth that we could go ski.” What he is looking for isn’t obvious—it’s rarely a named peak or a marked line. Instead, he is after textures, imperfections, scraps of terrain that most skiers would never see, much less chase.
This kind of work is monastic in its attention and childlike in its wonder. It has become a defining habit for Daiek, now four decades deep into life and more than 10 years into his still-escalating professional skiing career. In the ski industry he’s often jokingly referred to as “Your favorite pro skier’s favorite pro skier,” charging consequential no-fall terrain in ways most pros wouldn’t dare. But Daiek’s instinctual ski style began long before he moved west to the shores of Lake Tahoe, before he started filming in lonely basins and forgotten mountain ranges, and long before he became known for charging down technical terrain with a speed that borders on downright rude. It began in Michigan, of all places.
Humble Hills and Hard Snow
Rochester Hills, a suburb outside Detroit, is not the birthplace most people associate with one of the world’s hardest-charging big mountain skiers. Daiek remembers skiing only a handful of days each year growing up—mostly holiday trips to Northern Michigan, where the vertical maxed out around 500 feet and lift lines could stretch thirty minutes deep. “We’d just stand in the lines for like a half hour to go up a two-minute chair,” he says, “and everyone out there was just happy. That’s what it is. It’s great.”
The purity of that attitude never left him. And, apparently as shown in many of his videos, neither did those conditions: boilerplate, granular, blue ice, breakable crust—whatever the Midwest served, Daiek still skis it. “I think we’re more diehard,” he says of the region’s skiers. “You come out here and it’s like, is it ever really that bad? It’s not.”
In high school, he and his friends figured out a loophole: join the ski team, gain access to transportation, then skip practice. Their destination was a 200-foot local hill with a tow rope and a newly built snowboard terrain park that was off-limits to skiers. Or so the signs claimed. They ducked ropes, took abuse from local riders, and learned 360s and backflips off icy, poorly shaped jumps. “But we loved it,” Daiek says. “That feeling of freedom and flying—that was what really made me fall in love with skiing.”
This was the free-skiing revolution arriving through a tiny, iced-over portal in suburban Michigan. The clothes were baggy, the snow was firm, the runs were short, and the consequences minimal—but the sensation was intoxicating. It also formed the early DNA of the skier Daiek would become: full throttle, fluid, and stubbornly fun.
A Western Education
By the time Daiek moved to Tahoe at nineteen, his plan was clear: “I moved out here specifically to be a ski bum,” he recalls. Daiek eventually found a boss who would let him take winters off—every winter—to ski every single day. Decades later, they have kept that arrangement, and he returns each summer to work for the same employer, with whom he has built a “symbiotic relationship.”
What looks like abandon is actually discipline: he skis daily, often bell to bell, treating the sport as both craft and calling. When he entered big-mountain competitions like the old Freeski Tour, a precursor to the the Freeride World Tour, his mindset was all or nothing. He would either podium or crash—sometimes spectacularly. “I was literally learning to big-mountain ski, coming from Michigan,” he says.
The mountains taught him patience. Or, more accurately, they extracted it from him through hard lessons: miscalculated airs, icy landings, or even a crash in a couloir that nearly became fatal in his first Mountain State film.
“I think a lot of people see my skiing as risky or loose,” he says, “but it’s years of training and time in the saddle.” Fear still comes and doubt still whispers. “If your mind’s not checking you or being scared, then something’s wrong.” But at forty-two, he feels stronger than ever. “I don’t know how long it’s gonna last, but I’m gonna charge hard as long as I can. It’s just the way I’m wired.”
The Rural Revelation
Last year, that wiring led him deep into the Warner Range in Northern California on a self-supported trip with his crew. They spent days hiking, skiing, and camping—classic Daiek terrain: remote, wide-open, nowhere near a resort. Or so he thought.
Driving out, he spotted an anomaly: a single T-bar rising out of ranch country. “I was like, whoa. We’re so rural…I honestly didn’t think anyone skied out here,” he recalls. It wasn’t the novelty of a first descent that struck him—he doesn’t care much about those lines in the sand—but the presence of a ski community where he assumed none existed.
He started following the local hill’s Facebook page. Volunteers were needed. A day’s work earned kids a season of skiing. “Dude, this is what it’s all about,” he says. “This is the foundation of the entire ski industry. It wasn’t about your Instagram account. It was just about, ‘we want to get the kids out, we want to have fun and slide on snow.’ That’s the purity of our sport.”
It resonated with something old in him—those holiday trips, the rope-tow jumps, the hours spent waiting for a two-minute run. He wanted more of it.
That impulse became the seed of his new project.
The New Film
The premise is deceptively simple: visit small, mom-and-pop ski areas; meet the people who keep them alive; then go ski the serious terrain around them. But simplicity doesn’t capture the power of it—for Daiek, it’s a tapping in to the sport’s foundational heartbeat.
“So now I want to go immerse myself in these communities and meet these people,” he says. Once in Nevada, he walked into a diner at dawn and joined a table of ranchers mid-story, absorbing decades of valley history. He calls these encounters “Mountain State style,” the cultural texture that drives him as much as the skiing.
The project is shaping into a three-part series that goes beyond America’s borders. He didn’t want to give away too much on the film but Daiek says that the film explores a scattering of tiny, community-run hills in some of the most stunning ski regions on the planet. He told me that weather pushed its timeline; last season didn’t deliver enough to finish the film. But that’s part of the ethos now: patience, respect for the mountains, and openness to the spontaneous.
What he will say about his film project is limited, but intriguing:
“I want to showcase not only these little resorts, but the skiing I like to do…so that’s gonna dictate where we go.”
It’s a narrow window into something larger—a tease rather than a reveal. Enough to suggest that the project will blend rugged terrain with the humble social worlds surrounding it, the way Mountain State documented basins and bars, solitude and culture along with Daiek’s death-defying ski style. His words on his mysterious film project promise that Daiek’s restless curiosity—the very thing that once drew him into a fenced-off Michigan terrain park in the first place—remains piqued.
Full Throttle, With Maturity
Daiek’s skiing is often described as “fast,” which he accepts as the closest single word to a definition. His acceleration is part technical habit and part personal truth. “To me, that’s the funnest way: skiing something technical, fast, rowdy. Those are the lines that speak to me.”
The risks are real. His awareness must be sharp. He knows he has crossed lines before and ignored conditions, underestimated terrain, or had “very bad decision making.” But he also knows the mountains aren’t going anywhere. “You don’t have to be so eager. If it’s not this year, next year. You gotta be patient and do it when it’s right.”
This kind of perspective is earned slowly, the hard way, from someone who did not grow up steeped in avalanche culture or backcountry practice. “Learning to live in the mountains and respect the mountains in your twenties is different than if you’re brought up in them,” he says.
Now, he skis daily but thinks long-term. He charges fast but waits for the right conditions in a hungry but unhurried way.
When the snow melts, Daiek turns obsessive elsewhere: mountain biking after long days of summer work, home projects, or a rekindled passion for skydiving and BASE jumping that requires three-hour weekend drives. “Chilling doesn’t work for me,” he laughs. “I’m not a chiller. It’s a blessing and a curse.”
After a big day on snow, he wants exactly what you might expect from someone who grew up in the Midwest: greasy pizza and a hazy IPA. Nothing artisanal. Nothing curated. Just fuel and warmth.
The Long Line Ahead
At forty-two, Daiek skis like he’s twenty-four—something he hears often, and something that still makes him grin. He doesn’t know how long he can do this. He doesn’t care to guess. “I’m gonna charge hard as long as I can,” he says. “I bought a season pass, and I’m in it for the long haul.”
Which brings him back to Google Earth in the dim hours of morning, scanning ridgelines for clean breaks in the mountain, squinting at valleys that might hide a forgotten lift, a diner full of ranchers, or a couloir no one thought to ski.
Out there, somewhere, is the next small hill with a tow rope and a handful of volunteers keeping the sport alive.
Out there is where he feels most at home.
And out there is the next line in the next chapter of his story—sure to make all of our palms sweat.
