About Utah: Ski Utah director Nathan Rafferty living the dream

A couple of years ago, Snowbird held a "tram-off "with Jackson Hole in Wyoming to see which resort's team could ski the most vertical feet off their respective trams in a day. Snowbird assembled an all-woman team, but Rafferty and an editor of a skiing magazine shadowed the women every run the entire day.

"He just wanted to be a part of it even if he wasn't a part of it," says Fields.

The crazier the stunt, the better. Rafferty twice has skied all the resorts in northern Utah in a single day. He's skied more than 100,000 vertical feet in a day on multiple occasions. He's competed in the extreme ski competition at Squaw Valley in California. And in summers, he's liable to take off on his road bike or motorcycle and wind up in another state, or continent. This past May, he celebrated turning 40 with a six-day off-road motorcycle trip in Morocco that traversed the Atlas Mountains and ended in the Sahara Desert.

"As cool as it gets," he says.

Until the next thing.

"I don't think of it as crazy, I think of it as fun," Rafferty says. "I consider myself the luckiest guy in the world, doing what I love."

His only worry?

"I just hope I never get complacent," he says.

You've just got to keep your priorities right, right?

Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Monday and Friday. Email: benson@desnews.com