20 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
litter the public highway,” he said. “After
all, it’s not the beer cans that are ugly;
it’s the highway that is ugly.”
T
he Virtika headquarters are in the
Park Hill section of Denver, east
of downtown, in a warehouse that used
to be an industrial laundry. “Two idiots
bought the place and tried to turn it
into a weed grow,” Lesh
said, after greeting me at
the door. Bravo, a French
bulldog, familiar from his
videos, attacked my shoe-
laces. Lesh had bought the
building from the idiots five
years ago (there are still sev-
eral marijuana operations
nearby, including one called
Dank; the neighborhood
did not smell like Greeley),
and now rented out two-thirds of the
space, to a golf-instruction gym and an
auto-repair garage.
Lesh is lean and strong, with blue eyes
and long blond hair, often pulled back in
a ponytail. He had on black fleece pants,
a heavy gray work shirt, and Birkenstocks
over white gym socks. He apologized for
his complexion, which looked fine; the
day before, at the urging of a girlfriend,
he’d undergone a micro-needling facial
procedure. He showed me a photo of
this, and also some shots he’d just posted
on Instagram of him using beeswax to
remove his nostril hairs. Fastidious in
some ways and in others not: he made
clear that he had no fear of catching or
spreading Covid. He doesn’t take pre-
cautions or wear a mask. Even though
cases were now spiking in Colorado, he
said that some doctors had told him the
virus was less of a threat than the media
would have us believe.
The open warehouse space combined
a sprawling stockroom, stacked with boxes
of Virtika inventory, and a workshop,
where he soups up his snowmobiles and
sports cars. In one corner, he had built
an apartment, sparely decorated, which
he uses as an office and, now and then,
as a bivouac. (His official residence is a
one-bedroom condo in Breckenridge, a
block from the chairlifts.) Upstairs, there
is a kind of man ledge, with a sixteen-foot
movie screen, concert speakers, and a
massager lounge chair.
On the roof, which looks out toward
downtown and the snowy high peaks
beyond, he had a hot tub, deck furni-
ture, and a giant chess set, the kind where
the rooks are the size of toddlers. He
brought out a standard chessboard, and
we played a game. He said he’d learned
chess from Dan Bilzerian, the Insta-
gram influencer, professional poker
player, and former Presidential candi-
date. (He dropped out of the 2016 race
and endorsed Donald
Trump.) “He’s the one per-
son who beats me,” Lesh
said. Usually, around these
parts, Lesh continued, he
had to play without his
queen to keep the games
fair. By the time he beat me,
he had two queens.
Downstairs, at a kitchen
island, Lesh told me that
there was a warrant out for
his arrest. Stephen Laiche, his lawyer
in Grand Junction, had strongly ad-
vised him to delete the Maroon Lake
post. (“Taking a picture of yourself tak-
ing a dump is just gross,” Laiche recalls
saying to himself. “Think that’s going
to help you sell more clothes?”) Lesh
didn’t want to. Laiche quit and filed a
motion to be removed from the case.
At the subsequent hearing—held re-
motely by phone, owing to the pan-
demic—Lesh, out of confusion or in-
transigence, failed to call in at the
appointed time, and the judge issued
the arrest warrant. Lesh hoped to clear
it all up with the judge the following
morning, at his phone-in arraignment.
The charges at hand had to do with
two other Instagram incidents. Last April,
with the Independence Pass charges still
pending, and with the state’s ski hills and
public lands shut down because of Covid,
Lesh decided to poke the bear. He posted
a couple of photos of him snowmobil-
ing off a jump in a closed terrain park at
the Keystone ski area, which, like Breck-
enridge, is operated by the company that
owns Vail ski resort, on land belonging
to the Forest Service. Lesh wrote, “Solid
park sesh, no lift ticket needed. #Fuck-
VailResorts.” This was trespassing, not
just trolling. Keystone alerted the For-
est Service and the sheriff ’s office, which
launched a new investigation. Lesh wrote,
in a new post, “Those money hungry
half-wits decimate wilderness around
the world, build lifts, lodges, and resorts,
and treat their customers and employ-ees like shit... people flock by the mil-
lions and pay $200/day to ski there. I
post a picture, harming no one... ev-
eryone loses their minds.”
Soon afterward, Lesh posted another
provocation: a picture of him standing
atop a mossy fallen tree trunk that bi-
sects Hanging Lake. The lake, an hour’s
hike from the road, in Glenwood Can-
yon, is a popular and much photographed
Colorado landmark, known for its aqua-
marine shallows and surrounding wa-
terfalls and cliffs of mottled travertine.
The Forest Service bans swimming there,
and also fishing, dogs, and drones. A
sign prohibits walking on the downed
trunk, but there was Lesh on Instagram,
out in the middle of the lake, shirtless,
in a bathing suit: “Testing out our new
board shorts (coming soon) on the
world’s most famous log.” The com-
ments came in hard and fast, a few prais-
ing the mischief (“Legend!”) but most
strafing him as an “entitled tool” and a
“fuckwit” who had desecrated one of
Colorado’s most sacred sites for the pur-
pose of pitching his crappy gear.
Lesh eventually settled the Indepen-
dence Pass charges (he wound up with
a five-hundred-dollar fine and fifty hours
of community service), but not long af-
terward the U.S. Attorney in Grand
Junction announced that the Feds were
charging him with six new misdemean-
ors, relating to the incidents at Keystone
and Hanging Lake. Each carried a pos-
sible jail term of up to six months. In
setting the conditions of Lesh’s release,
a judge ordered him to cease trespass-
ing and breaking laws on public lands,
and stipulated that any further violation
would result in the forfeiture of his bond.
Lesh, at the kitchen island, began
parsing his legal troubles. “I love the out-
doors,” he said. “I don’t take extra nap-
kins or use disposable silverware. I’m not
wasteful. I’ve never destroyed anything.”
He referred to his critics as “environ-
mental terrorists or extremists.” With
regard to Independence Pass, he went
on, “They said I was in wilderness, I said
I was not. They had zero evidence.” He
added, “There’s some imaginary line
drawn out there.” (The wilderness-area
line, though not painted on the tundra,
is not imaginary.) He and his friend
hadn’t intended to ride on grass, but they
had found themselves running out of
snow on the way back to the road.