Every Wednesday lately, I`ve spent the morning and early afternoon at Eldora participating in its women`s skiing program.

As a result, I roll into the newsroom on Wednesdays around 3:30 with helmet hair and raccoon eyes, reeking of guilt. My co-workers are too busy to glance up to give me the evil eye for spending most of my day skiing.

"Reeking of guilt" might be too strong. It`s a mere whiff, because before I had this job, I was part of Boulder`s self-employed, vagabonding, white-collar but dirtbag-inspired working class -- I was a dirt-collar worker.

The dirt-collar worker prioritizes powder over paycheck, freedom over finances. The dirt-collar worker cannot sit still under fluorescent lights for more than 15 minutes and accepts crappy health insurance (if any) in exchange for flexible hours and travel time.

If you work from coffee shops, have been to a foreign country in the past six months and either mountain bike or snowboard from 2 p.m. to sunset every Tuesday, you might be a dirt-collar worker.

I`m clinging to my roots.

At Eldora, I looked at a room full of women enjoying mid-week skiing (and a tasty catered lunch) and suspected there were a lot of dirt-collar workers there. I`d chatted with two academics at breakfast -- a Ph.D. student and a professor on sabbatical (quasi-dirt-collar workers) -- so at lunch I conducted an informal survey.

"Do you have a full-time job?" I asked.

Results: One "no;" two part-time; one works full-time but makes her own hours. Add in the two academics and me, the writer, and this was a solid cross-section of Boulder`s dirt-collar demographics.

I was sweating spending so much of my day up there, because I`m no longer a dirt-collar worker. I was there on assignment but still biting my nails thinking of deadlines.

Can I get in one more hour with my instructor? One last run? Gah, why did I ditch my dirt-collar lifestyle!

I squeezed in one last run, charged down Boulder Canyon and tried to mentally wrangle everything I needed to do when I hit my desk.

The next morning I left the office with my laptop and ran into Scott Gwozdz.

Gwozdz is a partner with Kickstand Communications and adjunct faculty at CU`s Leeds Business School. We were both working from Trident due to our mutual distaste for cubicles.

"I`m terrified of working in the cube," he said. "It`s the last thing I want to do. I want to work when I want to work, and where I want to work. There are a lot of independent-minded people like that here, and technology enables us to be productive and have our freedom."

Gwozdz didn`t have long to talk -- he was heading out to ski, just like he has every Thursday during the ski season for the past seven years.

After Gwozdz left, I realized I wouldn`t have met him if I`d truly abandoned the dirt-collar lifestyle.

You meet people like him out and about, wherever people who are terrified of cubes congregate, up at Eldora mid-week, working from coffee shops when they`re not training for ultramarathons, or whatever.

It`s a tribe I still belong to. But instead of being self-employed, I got lucky and landed a sweet, rarefied dirt-collar job.