18 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
LETTER FROMCOLORADO
BAD INFLUENCER
Trolling the great outdoors.BY NICKPAUMGARTEN
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID WILLIAMS
W
hen people in and around Den-
ver say, “Smells like Greeley,” they
mean that the air reeks of the feedlots
ringing the city of Greeley, the state’s
slaughterhouse, and also that snow may
be on the way. Updrafts blowing off the
Plains condense in the high mountain
air and deliver a precious resource: fresh
powder for the ski areas; water for the
ranchers, farmers, and marijuana grow-
ops. Renewal comes disguised as rot.
For David Lesh, the smell of Gree-
ley has often prompted him to fly his
single-engine airplane from Denver up
to the mountains, to work and play in
the snow. Lesh, who is thirty-five, has
been skiing in the Colorado Rockies for
sixteen winters. During many of them,
he was a professional—he performed
aerial tricks in photo and video shoots
on behalf of sponsors. In 2012, frustrated
with this arrangement, he started de-
signing and manufacturing his own
mountain-sports outerwear, founding a
company he eventually called Virtika.
Effectively, he was sponsoring himself.
Lesh, who markets the brand mostly on
social media, projects a rogue persona
and a lavish life style, full of decadence
and danger. Rally cars, airplanes, para-
chutes, snowmobiles, machine guns,
drugs, bikinis, booze: “Jackass” meets
“Big Pimpin’,” by way of “Hot Dog.”
The act has helped him acquire both a
viable customer base—self-styled rebel
snow-riders and park rats—and the con-
tempt of his fellow-Coloradans.
He broadened both constituencies
in the summer of 2019, after he and a
friend went snowmobiling near Inde-pendence Pass, just before Independence
Day. Three women from Aspen, includ-
ing the executive director of a local con-
servation group, happened to be out in
the high country gathering data for a
research project on the changing bloom
times of alpine wildflowers. Lesh and
his friend roared into view, riding their
sleds below the snow line, across the
fragile tundra. The women took pho-
tos of them, and of shrubs and grass
that looked to have been torn up by
their treads. The two men had appar-
ently been riding their machines in a
federal wilderness area, where motor-
ized vehicles are forbidden. The women
reported them to the U.S. Forest Ser-
vice and to the Aspen Times—“Envi-
ronmentally unconscionable,” one of the
women said—while Lesh posted pic-
tures that his friend had taken of him
snowmobiling earlier in the day, shirt-
less under his red Virtika bib overalls.
Lesh then posted an image of the Aspen
Times article and wrote, “I’d like to thank
everyone that made this possible,” with
prayer-hands and laughing-face emo-
jis. The Forest Service connected the
dots, I.D.’d the perp, and filed charges.
(Lesh had also recently posted photos“I want to be able to post fake things to the Internet,” David Lesh said. “That’s my fucking right as an American.”