Tia Budish was nine years old when she and her dad, Chris, hiked to ski Saint Mary’s Glacier—a year-round snowfield in the front range of Colorado—on 4th of July, bearing an American flag. They missed August and September that year, but in October, they were back riding lifts at Colorado’s Arapahoe Basin. That’s when the idea set in: What if they tried to ski at least one day every month of the year? “We put two and two together that we had already nearly been skiing every month of the year, so we made it a goal to keep going,” Tia recalls.
That was almost 12 years ago. Tia is turning 21 soon. And the father-daughter duo has skied for 139 consecutive months without missing a single month. “There wasn’t some big intent to start. We made it through that first year fairly easily, so then we made it a mission and never looked back,” says Chris, a lifelong skier who works as a real estate appraiser in Denver. “I thought maybe we could make it last 10 years? Then Tia would go to college. But then it just kept going.”