" Such a question suggests that the "unbearable whiteness" of the ski slopes involves complicated social and economic factors and cannot easily be explained away by the early pioneers of the trend. The reader continues the article as he or she wonders why one ethnic culture would be so valued in establishing ski culture, but other cultures are so excluded.

             The author's structural suggestion of complexity opens the door for her use of metaphor in order to explain the "ethnic whiteout" of the ski culture. Europeans may have been an early influence, but that fact does not explain why non-whites living next door to Vail are not skiing there. The answer, suggests the author, lies in metaphor and simile. Skiing is not just a downhill rush, it is "like" something else and, in fact, "is" something else as the rhetorical techniques of simile and metaphor would suggest. As early as 1869, propaganda and advertising began comparing the Rocky Mountains with the famous European Alps when author Samuel Bowles write an account of his Colorado vacation entitled The Switzerland of America. For many years thereafter, the comparison became an important part of the rise of the ski culture in the United States. "Transforming the Rockies into the Alps proved quite popular among ski industry promoters." and even the state of Colorado funded an advertising campaign calling the Rockies "the 'other' Alps." Not only were the Rocky Mountains comparable to the Swiss Alps for recreation, they were the Alps. Such a metaphor proved very effective in promoting the area to vacationers in the upper economic classes. It also proved effective in establishing and promoting a culture at the burgeoning ski resorts that was European in nature and therefore white.

             The use of metaphors as a rhetorical device is both a technique used by the author and part of her evidence for her argument. She uses the device to persuade the reader about the "unbearable whiteness" of skiing just as the metaphor was used to sell the culture of European skiing to America.