1 Dress for Success
Leave your jeans in your hotel room. Real ski suits cost $1000+ and come with seemingly impossible waterproof/breathable fabrics, underarm ventilation systems, powder skirts, reflective Velcro, built in sunglass cases, and designated pockets for lift pass, cell phone, iPod and car keys (with ring holder clasp, of course). In the Canadian Rockies, you can also be a real skier layered as a techno-mountain-man. This isn’t Aspen, you know.

2 Get the Gear
Nobody uses straight skis. Get all-mountain skis with generous side cut that are shorter than you. Throw your rear entry boots in the trash. Real skiers use boots that buckle tight and cramp toes—no pain, no gain. (Tip: you can have comfortable boots and pretend you’re a real skier. Nobody will know the difference.) Goggles must be NASA designed and very expensive (really, your kids can pay their own way through college). Top it off with a helmet (aka brain bucket), as grey matter strewn across the ski hill is not cool.

3 Learn the Lingo
Real skiers effortlessly navigate the verbal terrain. Carve is more than what you do to your steak—it also refers to making smooth turns on the edge of your skies. Tune is short for tune-up (getting skis waxed and sharpened), but can also mean iPod music. Real skiers seek out powder (fresh, untracked snow) and corduroy (newly groomed slopes). They tolerate chopped powder (others got first tracks), and avoid crud (lousy snow, often with hard chunks). Doing the glades requires dodging trees. There’s no difference between bumps and moguls. Stash is either a nice pocket of untracked powder, or a baggie of marijuana. Skiers disparagingly call snowboarders shredders, whereas boarders reverently refer to themselves using the same term.

4 Die Hard Knees
A cast on a broken limb can be the mark of a real skier, but there’s no glory if the injury happened in a slippery parking lot. A better way to impress is to wear a knee brace, boast about your damaged ACL (anterior cruciate ligament), and mention that you have surgery scheduled with Banff orthopedic specialist Mark Heard.

5 Party Hardy
Drinking beer is the re-hydration process of choice in the Canadian Rockies. Even real skiers of advanced age regularly sneak beer poured into coffee mugs to the hot tub. All night dancing is a favoured technique to avoid being stiff from skiing the next morning.