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'Love Island, but colder': Searching for snow-mance on a Valentine's ski retreat

Published: 18 Feb. 2025, 17:59 Updated: 19 Feb. 2025, 13:58

MONICA CHIN
[email protected]

Monica dabs while a blizzard rages, as one does. [RAMONA PARK]

PYEONGCHANG, Gangwon — “What’s the opposite of Bachelor in Paradise?” I ask my friend as we load more sporting equipment than either of us has any business carrying onto a public bus at an hour much earlier than either of us has any business being awake.

“Monogamy in the slammer?” she suggests.

This is the first of many occasions upon which we audibly will question why, exactly, we have chosen to spend our Valentine’s Day on a love-themed ski trip.

We certainly aren’t the only ones. As Korea grapples with one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, mass matchmaking events are being marketed heavily to the country’s 20- and 30-somethings. Cooking classes, book clubs and wine parties for singles abound in the greater Seoul area. The city has organized multiple blind dating events in the past few months wherein participants searched for love while viewing art exhibits, relaxing on yachts and competing in “recreational games.” Buddhist monks are hosting matchmaking templestays with impressive success rates. Korail put a bunch of people on a “love train.” So it’s hardly a surprise that UBlong, a Gangwon-based company specialized in outdoorsy “getaways,” would choose to host a Feb. 14 “Valentine’s on the Slopes” event aiming to, as the colorful Instagram post put it, “spark connections.”

Nobody in my group of friends that is schlepping to Pyeongchang on this dreary Friday morning is aggressively on the dating market, nor are any of us particularly optimistic about the odds of meeting the love of our life while barreling uncontrollably down a mountain. Still, something about the trip’s marketing — perhaps its catchy “Ski into love” slogan, or the fact that all of the Instagram ads feature people who appear much happier than any human has ever been in sub-20 degree weather — spoke to me. I certainly enjoy skiing more than I do art museums and train rides. And besides, as our group chat has reasoned at length, it’s not like we have other plans on Valentine’s Day.

And so I find myself spending my Feb. 14 not at a romantic dinner or a walk on the beach, but rather trying and failing to figure out the mechanism that reclines my seat on a bus that is rumbling eastward, away from the bustle of the city towards the mountains, the snow and the sea.

Monica and two companions take a rest at the top of Mona Yongpyong. [MONICA CHIN]

My friends spend the two-hour journey speculating about the sorts of men we will meet this weekend, how we will meet them and just how handsome they might be; I spend much of it attempting to unwrap a protein bar without disturbing the couple who is cuddling across the aisle. Look, it’s strong plastic, and I haven’t had coffee yet.

It’s 10 a.m. when we arrive at Mona Yongpyong, Korea’s largest ski resort, known to me mainly as the venue where the slalom and giant slalom of the 2018 Olympics took place.

“Maybe it’ll be like Love Island, colder,” a friend suggests as we disembark. The wind is pummeling our faces too loudly to allow for a response.

The arrival

We’re greeted in the hotel lobby by UBlong CEO Angela Kim, a veteran ski instructor who appears to be close friends with all of the resort staff, all of the hotel guests and possibly everyone in Korea. Between lively conversations with various athletic-looking people, she informs me that she came prepared: She’s undertaken an unenviable journey through my skiing videos on Instagram, and she has thoughts.

We sit down and analyze my skiing form, as one does at 10 a.m. on Valentine’s Day. I’m using my edges well, Angela explains, switching between English and Korean, but my upper body’s too fluid and I’m leaning in too hard when I carve. I’m angling my pelvis like so; it should look straight, like so.

I nod and attempt to look pensive as I sip a double-shot flat white that I know will give me an urgent need for the bathroom the instant I get on the chairlift.

Once everyone’s arrived, tickets are distributed, and then we’re released onto the slopes.

Monica disembarks from the chairlift. [RAMONA PARK]

The group of 20-ish participants has been assigned to gender-balanced groups who are ostensibly meant to ski together. But it becomes quickly apparent that this crowd, despite being mostly Korean, will be following the time-honored American tradition of doing whatever the hell they want. Two snowboarders in matching jackets disappear immediately after lunch. A group of skiers who hit it off during the meal declare that they won’t be separating.

Others go off to lessons, but I’m not assigned to one — the skill evaluation section of my intake form was nothing if not a testament to the hubris of man — and I have no idea where anything is, because like a true Gen Z, I cannot read maps. So I latch onto a group who looks like they know where they’re going and cling on for dear life.

We go first to a rental shop, where everyone else rents fancy jackets and pants — I wait outside, because I’m embracing another American tradition of wearing ski clothing I bought secondhand from a much taller man for $20 and passing it off as an “oversized fit.” Then we get rental equipment, which I do need, and are handed a small backpack for stashing our shoes, which I immediately lose, in what is probably an excellent omen for how the rest of this experience is about to go.

Hitting the slopes

My group waits for the gondola in a line so long I can only assume the people at the front have been waiting since before gondolas were invented in the early 1900s. But we’re eventually rising above the dreary afternoon, drifting into the forest, and then the clouds.

“Why are you here?” the skiers I have declared to be my group members ask. “Student?” No, actually — hard as it is to believe, given my persistent aura of disorganization, I am in fact a grown-up with a job. “English teacher?” If there’s one thing that scares me more than dying alone, it’s children. “When are you going back to the States?” Next question, please!

The view from Mona Yongpyong's gondola. [MONICA CHIN]

The interrogation ends when we hit the mountain. We do one run, then another. I focus on Angela’s feedback, on my weight and angles as I cut into the snow, to drown out the existential questions of the chairlift ride. When she joins us for a run, I try to follow closely behind her, to imitate the way she turns. When she’s not with us, I chase the tracks that better skiers have carved into the trail.

As the sun begins to set and neck warmers and bandanas are pulled from pockets to shield faces from the biting cold, I’ve pretty much mapped the mountain. There’s Mega Green, a flat and wide slope where a bunch of snowboarders are trying tricks. There’s Rainbow Paradise, a narrow trail that winds around the mountain like a toy train set. And there’s Red, the resort’s most difficult undertaking. It has a double black diamond rating — for the uninitiated, green means “Beginner,” blue means “Intermediate,” black means “Advanced” and double black means “Why on earth would you ski this, you absolute monster?”

The people skiing Red understand the gravity of the task. They gather at the top, staring down the slope that appears to drop off into nothing, and go down one by one. When someone makes it down, they cheer. When someone falls — at least 75 percent of those who attempt it — they also cheer.

My group makes clear they will be going nowhere near Red — “I’m not trying to die,” one member clarifies — but I'm intrigued as I watch people hurtle down, one by one.

The chairlift conversation doesn’t get significantly deeper, nor does anyone I meet reveal themselves to be my soulmate while dangling 20 feet in the air.

My friends, per our group chat, appear similarly delayed in locating true love. But it’s okay, we remind each other, because the centerpiece of the weekend — the party — is still to come.

Finding the match

On Saturday night, we shed our helmets and snowy clothes and gather at the hotel bar. Others have donned evening attire and makeup, but if you can’t handle me when I look like I’ve just crawled out of a glacier, I reason as I change from my Under Armour into an Under Armour that is slightly cleaner, then you don’t deserve me at my best.

After a brief period of chitchat over wine and finger foods, the first activity begins. Cups filled with slips of paper are passed around, one for men and one for women. Everyone draws a slip, which contains a name, and we’re tasked with finding the name that matches ours: The woman who drew Juliet seeks the man who drew Romeo, etc. I draw a character from a Korean folk tale I don’t know, so I’m left to wait around, apologetically, until my match tracks me down.

A sign at the top of Red warns beginner skiers not to enter. [MONICA CHIN]

We’re given a long list of questions we’re meant to discuss with each other and told we’ll need the answers for challenges later on. What was the first sport you played? Favorite food? Favorite song? Cats or dogs?

It’s abundantly clear from the moment we sit down that neither of us have much to say. “Do you have any hobbies?” he asks, reading question five.

“Skiing,” I venture redundantly.

“Same,” he says, and we both struggle to think of anything else, a commonality that could perhaps unite us were my Korean advanced enough to self-deprecate with the appropriate level of nuance.

He glances down the list and says, “Do we really have to do all of these?”

And so we end up sitting silently for a bit, conveying wordlessly that we’re not, personality-wise, equipped for this situation while fully aware that we volunteered and paid for it, a duality that would give my college philosophy professors hives.

The view from Rainbow Paradise at Mona Yongpyong. [MONICA CHIN]

I end up wandering back to find my friends, both of whom immediately hit it off with their matches and are now engaged in deep conversation. My match returns to his buddies, and I see him point at me across the room, see them all peering over. Snickers circulate the table. One lifts his phone to snap a photo, then another.

The laughs and the eyes fill the room. The click of the camera seems to shatter the scene. It’s too loud in here, and my quads are sore and I don’t like this wine. And each breath of chicken-and-alcohol-and-sweat-filled air brings it further to the front of my mind, a voice I don’t want to hear, a voice I’ve been drowning out. What are you doing here?

I promise, I am not pizza-ing all the time. [MONICA CHIN]

Couples are starting to leave the bar together, one after another, and my friends are still locked in conversation. I Google how late the slopes are open; I have another hour. So I leave. I put my secondhand clothes back on — snowpants with a broken zipper, jacket with two buttons missing, soaking wet bandana, helmet, goggles, gloves.

One more run

Outside, the crew is already beginning to close shop, shutting off the giant lights, folding up the chairlift seats, throwing tarps over the entry gates. I might get two runs in, maybe three. Part of me wants to text friends, but I don’t have anything to say. Part of me wants to look at the prices of flights to JFK — not buy them, just look.

Monica contemplates life, the universe and everything atop a mountain. [RAMONA PARK]

And then, as I’m getting in a randomly selected line, I spot him: one of the snowboarders who disappeared early on the first day who, come to think of it, I didn’t see at the party for long either. He acknowledges me too, and then we get on the lift together, on opposite ends of the four-person chair.

“Didn’t go well for you either?” he asks in nervous but understandable English.

“Not really,” I reply in much worse Korean.

It’s the most comfortable silence I’ve had since this trip began.

The view from the top of Red, Yongpyong's double black diamond. [MONICA CHIN]

When we get to the top, we don’t say anything. We both know where we’re headed.

And then we’re standing at the top of Red, the double black diamond. It’s late enough that the families have gone home for the night and the friends who were tired have retired to the bar. Most of the people standing here are around our age; most of them rode the chairlift up alone. We are not here for anything but the slope.

I stare at the lights of the hotel, where the party is ongoing, a tiny cluster of pearls in an infinite sea of black. Red somehow looks even scarier in the dark, a straight cliff dropping off into nothing.

One by one, people go down. An intermediate-level snowboarder falls about halfway down and somersaults the rest of the way; the crowd at the top and everyone on the chairlift “oohs” and “aahs” throughout. One of the best skiers I’ve ever seen shreds the trail like it’s the bunny hill, and everyone ecstatically whoops the whole way down. A woman does the first third easily before catching an edge and tumbling down, losing her skis, poles and a glove along the way; a brigade of laughing snowboarders gathers them up in her wake. A child in a dinosaur onesie who can’t be older than seven bombs the whole thing without turning once.

“Hold my jacket?” I ask the snowboarder.

“Take mine on the next one,” he says.

Monica waves to the camera before taking off down the slope. [RAMONA PARK]

In my T-shirt, the wind feels like a curtain coiling itself around me. “Spring Day” (2017) by BTS is blasting through the loudspeakers, a song I remember listening to as I packed my life into suitcases the night before I left the United States.

The morning will come again, V sings, and as I holler for the others, one by one, I want to shout it across the years as well. Many things are different here. But these things do not change: The brush of the snow beneath the base of your skis. The wind that rattles your hair. The mountains that look like quilt squares from up here. The adrenaline no one can take from you.

When it’s your turn, lift off. Put your life in your own hands and dive into the steep, sloping dark. Let the cheers from the chairlift carry you down. Throw out form and technique, lean into the carve with all the weight of the world, and let yourself be in love. Love the powder underneath you and the trees rushing by. Love this sport, what it’s given you, the body that somehow remembers how to do it every year. Follow those carving tracks around the mountain, over and over, until they find their way home.

Korea JoongAng Daily reporters are on a mission to try any and every sport that will let us in the door. We can't promise skill or finesse, but we'll give it a good go.

BY MONICA CHIN [[email protected]]

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'Love Island, but colder': Searching for snow-mance on a Valentine's ski retreat

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'Love Island, but colder': Searching for snow-mance on a Valentine's ski retreat

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