Ancient Web: Brian Wilson’s Ski Epic Logged 86 Days of 1999 Freedom

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Brian Wilson packed a car, a pair of skis, and enough computer gear to turn a winter sabbatical into a website. The resulting Ski Epic is still sitting beneath decades of additional family and travel photos.

Visit Brian's Ski Epic.

The original trip crosses the 1998–99 ski season. Its statistics, preserved on the homepage, report 86 days away, 53 days on ski slopes, 27 ski areas, and 9,192 miles driven in a Nissan Sentra. Wilson also counted the website itself: 934 files, 822 pictures, and 76.7 megabytes.

Those are the numbers of a major travel-production project in the dial-up era. Today somebody might upload photographs as they go without thinking about the total bytes. Wilson made the size of the site one of the expedition's achievements.

An itinerary that keeps the weather and the mistakes

The on-location log has the texture of an actual trip rather than a retrospective highlight reel. Wilson records snow at Whistler and Blackcomb, a sunny stretch at Taos, stops in Telluride and Vail, and a bout of sickness at Mammoth. An April 1999 entry explains that his Area 51 page had been uploaded incorrectly, then directs readers back to the fixed version.

That last detail is particularly good web archaeology. He was maintaining a travel diary as a set of remote files, revising the site between skiing, driving, and visiting friends.

The original front page links resort galleries, an itinerary, a ski log, a map, thoughts and rants, and notes about the electronic equipment he carried to stay connected. The image galleries share space with detours into friends' houses, roadside incidents, and jokes about allegedly spooky government sites.

The site has kept growing. The newest material now includes much later trips, family occasions, technical writings, and pages related to Wilson's work at Backblaze. Crucially, the original journey remains labeled separately rather than rewritten as a modern corporate travel story.

Ski Epic preserves a particular moment when a personal website could function as a near-live expedition report, even when maintaining it meant considerable work in hotel rooms and borrowed connections.

Read the 1999 location diary and return to the original expedition index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.