Just one more run. If you're a skier, you've said it. You may have been wincing from the cold and wind at the top of the lift, but by the time you skied to the bottom of the run, you were ready to do it again.

What if that "once more" attitude didn't have to come to an end? What if you could continue skiing one more run for the rest of your life?

At 66, Linda Rubin enrolled in a five-week Silver Skis class at Alta for just that reason. After years away from the sport and a period of illness, she wanted to get back on the slopes with her husband and friends.

"My goal was to keep skiing," she said. "Instead of being 70 and saying, 'I can't do it anymore,' I hope to be skiing at 80."

Like golf, skiing can be a lifelong sport if you go about it the right way. Sure, a skier at mid-life might give up gelande—the jump-hitting, soaring approach to skiing now called "freestyle"—but with a few technical adaptations, you can almost ski forever.

Some skiers, like Fredi Jakob, 91, seem to be Ski Forever poster children. Jakob proudly aims to ski his age in days each year—far more days of skiing than the typical Utah skier or ski vacationer.

"I love to ski. I thoroughly enjoy it," he said. "I don't see any reason to quit."

Senior skiers make up so much of the local skiing population that Alta has begun offering more programming specifically for them. Silver Skis is new this season, offering instruction for a variety of abilities and interest levels.

"We're skiing with a lot more adults who are locals," noted Scott Mathers, Director of the Alf Engen Ski School. "We've really targeted these types of programs to build the skiing community at Alta, to connect local people."

Jeremy Moore, adult program coordinator for the Alf Engen Ski School, remarked that Alta offers other adult programs for those who are focused on aggressive skiing. But Silver Skis is aimed at a different demographic.

"When it comes to skiing as a senior and the ski school's Ski Forever philosophy," Moore explained, "the focus is more about skiing efficiently, safely, and being effective with the movements you make—extending your lifetime of skiing."

At ski resorts today, skiing past age 70 is not as rare as one would think. In earlier years, Alta offered free passes to those who were aged 70 and up, but so many senior skiers took them up on the offer that they increased the freebie age to 80. They offer a discounted season pass for ages 65 to 79 as well.

"The wider skis opened up a whole new world to people who could ski," said Lori Norman, coordinator of the Ski Forever camp based out of Alta's Peruvian Lodge. "With the skinny skis, you had to be more athletic, and if you were older you couldn't go anymore. The wider ones are life-changing."

And she added another important factor: "The snow at Alta is forgiving."

Young at Heart
Famed senior skier Junior Bounous, 99, once said that people quit when they no longer have friends to ski with.

"Talking to seniors, the biggest reason they wanted to quit skiing was social, not physical," he said. "They had lost ski mates, husbands, wives. Skiing alone wasn't as much fun as skiing with a partner."

There are plenty of potential ski partners at Alta. One Silver Skis participant made buddies in class and is hopeful the class will serve as "the feeder group to the Wild old Bunch," a ski club that meets weekdays at Alf's Restaurant, a mid-mountain, ski-in-ski-out gathering spot.

The club holds court at the round table, purchased specifically for them, just inside the patio doors. Members can also be found on the slopes, wearing the club patch—a blue smiley face in a red knit cap, headwear de rigeur in the days before helmets.

The club borrows its name from Butch Cassidy's outlaw gang, the Wild Bunch—"old" is snuck in and intentionally kept lowercase, so you don't notice.

They trace their history back to 1973, when a group of friends made an end-of-season skiing video with an 8mm movie camera.

They were shredders. In the film's opening shot, someone's flying off a jump; in the second shot, a group is skiing deep powder on a storm day. They're wearing sweaters, beanies, and sunglasses and they drop into the Greeley Bowl against a background of era-appropriate 70s music, heavy on the Hammond organ.

Between scenes are cuts to title cards handwritten on poster board. The filmmaker, Rush Spedden, appears at the end of the film in a Butch Cassidy-style bowler hat and is credited as the club's founder.

Now, 50 years later, the Wild old Bunch club welcomes skiers to join them. There are no meetings, no minutes and no dues. Skiers who might relate to the "wild" or "old" parts of the club name are welcome to show up at the round table and make friends.

Hugh Paik, 83, notes that there are 130 active members, and more who just like to stay on the mailing list. Like many members of the Wild old Bunch, soft-spoken Paik is actually a lifelong adventurer. He has twice walked the 75-mile French route of the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage path through Spain that's popular with active tourists. Now his adventures are focused on Alta, which is only 20 minutes from his home.

"I enjoy the panorama the most," he said.

Tom Beggs, 78, is also a member of the Wild old Bunch and a Silver Skis instructor.

"It's a lot of fun. It has to be fun," Beggs says of teaching the class. "I have a bucket list every lesson: we're going to have fun, be under control and learn something."

Beggs is one of the longest-tenured instructors at the Alf Engen Ski School, in his 32nd season, so he knows the school's philosophy well. The idea that skiing should be fun goes back to Alta's founding father, Alf Engen, who transformed ski instruction from the strict and sequential European method to a new form of American instruction, which focused on getting the student to relax and naturally absorb the lesson.

Beggs might drop by Alf's Restaurant with his students, where they can get to know Wild old Bunch members on a ski break. When the five-week classes are over, the students will be part of the Alta scene.

"Alta is a big family," Beggs observed. "When you're skiing with the same instructor for five consecutive weeks, you're part of the in-crowd."

Living on the Edge
Among the Wild old Bunch regulars who might be found at the round table are Howard and Naomi Karten, both 80, who seem to stay young by living like kids. Each ski season, they come to Utah from Boston and rent an unfurnished apartment, which they appoint with only such belongings as they can keep in a 5x5 storage unit: a mattress, cookware, a handful of hangers and such.

For many years, they simply slept on a mattress on the floor, but when rolling out of the mattress got too hard, Howard built a knock-down bed frame that's easy to store. Their reason is simple, Naomi Karten explained: "When skiing is your goal, you need very little else."

Higher-level participants in Silver Skis experience another perk of being part of the Alta community: knowing how and when to cross Alta's many traverses to find secret slopes and powder stashes that aren't named on the map or that might seem intimidating since the side-country skiing for which Alta is famous is off-limits at many ski areas in the world.

Silver Skis instructor Brent Bowman inducted his three higher-level students into just such secrets. The students were maxing out the groomed routes and wanted guidance getting off-piste, or backcountry.

"We skied all kinds of runs and explored new places," he said, naming Greeley Hill, the Westward Ho trees, and the Catherine's Pass area.

As a retiree and transplant to Utah, Bowman gestured to his students, saying "I'm in the same boat as these guys." He wants to ski ergonomically and make new friends, too.

Steve and June McQuide—age 83 and 79, respectively—are skiing the hard stuff while they can. Just recently, they hiked Catherine's from the top of the Supreme Lift and made their way down the Back Forty to the groomed runs—expert terrain they also enjoy with the grandkids.

"If you're skiing a hard trail, you're not thinking of anything else," Steve McQuide said.

June McQuide agrees: "There's a level of accomplishment that you can do it, a little harder, a little steeper." Then, she posed a question: "How [often] in our lives, after you stop working, do you push yourself to do something harder?"

Dialing it Back
For some, skiing seems to extend life itself. Matt Kindred, 83, says he lives to ski and skis to live. After two bouts of cancer, a stroke and a lifetime of broken bones, skiing is the one athletic activity that keeps Kindred going. He says he skis better than he walks.

According to Moore, that's not uncommon, especially for those who have been skiers for some time. "Skilled skiers can use gravity to their advantage and just slide down the hill," Moore said. "They can make subtle and gradual movements to create smooth, round turns —which is often the goal on our skis even for younger people."

In his youth, Kindred was drawn to all kinds of extreme sports and adventures. He was a big wave surfer in Waimea Bay, Hawaii. He climbed Yosemite's El Capitan and raced bicycles—including in 500-mile and 750-mile races—until he was "run over by a pineapple truck on Maui," which put an end to his bike racing.

Still, he kept going. Kindred has run the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim in a day—during winter, multiple times—finishing the event by cross-country skiing 45 miles out from the North Rim to the highway. He had to do the adventure with a different friend every time because nobody was willing to put themselves through such torture twice.

Kindred said he needs physical activity to keep living, even if his outings are less intense than they used to be.

"I have to dial it back now," he reports. "Some of us are talking about when we get older we'll have to ski one run to get up to Alf's, and then it's one and done."

At the Wild old Bunch club's weekly Olive Garden dinner, nobody looks at the menu for long. It's the old skier efficiency at work; everyone already knows what they want.

They place their regular food and drink orders quickly and then they talk skiing, a conversation which includes everyone at the table. They talk about skiing for fun, about skiing with family members who come to visit, about the most memorable runs they've taken over the years. When the talk turns to the weather, it's not placeholder talk, but real discussion about inches and quality of snow and which years were best.

The conversation very naturally turns to the friendship and community they find at the other restaurant, encircling the round table at Alf's. The whole premise of the Wild old Bunch, it's said, is that people can just drop in.

And then June McQuide interjects: "Forget the skiing, it's just the fact that there's a big round table. It's there. And if you come ..."

"... then you're one of the family," Beggs finished.