The wildest true tales by 20 of the greatest ski and snowboard writers alive today. Tales of jail, of humiliation, of skiing through gunfire, snowboarding through pain, getting crushed by avalanche, threatened by authorities, and nearly killing a couple of high-roller ski students from Hong Kong.

Here's how it started... On October 19, an email arrived from a ski writer/ski buddy who had managed to get himself remanded into a seriously uncomfortable night in the drunk tank in lovely Whistler, British Columbia.

His emailed confession was the embodiment of humiliation. It was also the embodiment of my favorite kind of ski writing - personal, quirky, compelling. I thought, I would kill to publish this thing.

That's when the light bulb lit. I can publish this thing, and a lot of other things I love to read. I'll create an eBook. A ski eBook.

That day, I contacted North America's best ski writers. Here's what I told them:

"I'm finding the central, unifying theme hard to describe, but it's a lot like Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart's description of pornography: 'I know it when I see it.' Stories have to be personal. Have to be revealing. Can be embarrassing. And must be brilliantly written. The key word is intense: intensely funny, tragic, exciting - intense".

The writers exceeded my fondest dreams. Get ready for a wild, uproarious, heart-wrenching, consciousness-expanding, utterly brilliant ride.