It took a while, but Jim Morgan eventually figured out how to be a serious skier and a serious student at the same time.

It sure didn't happen his freshman year at the University of Utah, after being lured here from Lancaster, Pa., by his older brother's postcard describing skiing in snow "armpit deep."

Nor the couple of years after that when Morgan set aside school for a job in the race department at Snowbird.

But about the time he was thinking, "I need to go back East to go to school to get away from all of this," he hit upon a solution: school full time in summer and fall, one night class each winter and spring quarter. "It worked out to a full year's worth of credits."

The scholar in him emerged. Morgan later went on to law school at the U., where he met his wife, Anne Whitehead, now a staff attorney to U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball.

Because of skiing and road cycling, "I never really looked outside of Utah for employment," said Morgan, who spent 14 years at the Salt Lake City firm Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough before becoming in-house attorney for Resource Management Inc., which provides human-resources services to hundreds of clients.

Although he spends more time at his kids' swim meets than on the slopes these days, Morgan's passion for skiing has not ebbed.

"I still view it as an important part of who I am."