Interesting -- was he living with parents? My impression was, and the comments here seem to confirm, that most (all?) U.S. unemployment payouts aren't really enough to live on carefree while casually paying slope fees.
I believe that if you make $47k or more in the year leading up to your unemployment (technically, if you made more than $11.6k in the highest quarter of that year), your benefits are $450/week or $1900/month or $23,464/year. Raising a family of 4 on that would be challenging, but it's easily enough to live carefree in Santa Barbara, CA (where I lived, with one of the highest housing prices in the US) as a 26 year-old bachelor while paying $500 for a skiing season pass and several hundred dollars per year in mountain biking repair costs. (Both he and I were avid mountain bikers; trails are usually free, but the repairs weren't.)
I took home $1600/month as a grad student while saving money and frequenting cheap bars, so I know this is very easily lived on. Of Course, I didn't have quite as much free time for boarding and biking as he did.
