100 Days In A Row of Skiing, part 1: WHY?

In the winter of 2023, I skied 100 days in a row. It actually ended up being 106 days in a row, but 100 is a more attention-grabbing number. Why on earth would I want to do something like this?

It seemed like a good idea at the time?

Well, besides the obvious—that skiing is fun and also as a professional skier, it’s part of my job—the reasons go much deeper.

In the spring of 2022, I found myself standing on top of a line in Alaska. I was feeling good; prepped and psyched. We were rushing a bit, as we were coming up on quitting time, and suddenly the plan changed to film me first. I hadn’t really articulated my plan to anyone but I was so excited and feeling good that I didn’t go over my typical mental checklist. I dropped in, felt the snow under my feet and was ecstatic—I’m doing it!!! Then I noticed some stuff moving quickly, and my first choice exit for the line—cutting out to my right—seemed like a no-go. My second option was to pull up and stop in what I thought was a safe zone, but I got greedy since the snow was so good and I made one turn too many. I stopped and then an instant later got swept off of my feet by my sluff, tumbled down a hundred feet. I pulled my airbag and came to a stop, fine but missing a ski. The guides said we had to get out of there—no ski retrieval since the stuff was moving so big and fast—so I skied down on one ski with my tail between my legs. I couldn’t believe it—here I was, finally feeling good, psyched to drop in on a line, and I had made the most rookie mistake of all. Worse, I had to call my husband and tell him that I had made a rookie mistake.

Where I want to be, at least in my mind.

I was not a rookie, but I was out of practice. I had skied in Alaska the previous winter, but that time, 2 years after having our second kid and my second knee surgery, I took it easy, uncertain where me and the big mountains stood with each other. Before that, it had been eight years since I’d been on a stout AK line, in the spring of 2014 for a Warren Miller film, after over ten years of skiing big lines for ski films. I spent the winter of 2015 traveling the globe on several more exploratory backcountry and ski mountaineering-style trips: Rishiri Island, Switzerland, a month crossing Russia by train and skiing along the way, among others. I got pregnant with our first daughter after that next winter (nothing like a month in Siberia to make you realize it’s time to get home and start a family!), and then didn’t have a chance to go to Alaska again until 2021.

Even though I was lucky and unscathed from my crash, this mistake haunted my through the rest of the spring and summer. My intuition, the thing that I had always been able to count on, had let me down—for the second time in two years. After my most recent injury, coming back to skiing after having kids and the mental aspect of that, and now messing up on a line when I had been feeling so good—it left me wondering how I could get back on track and believe in myself again. I not only wanted to feel great on my skis, but also I wanted to feel good about my line-choosing and my decision-making skills as well.

Happy place? Or is it?

That August, in Portillo, Chile, coaching a ski camp, I watched a group of friends (professional skiers) rip down underneath me from the chairlift above. “That,” I said out loud, “is what it looks like to ski with total confidence.” It hit me. I used to ski like that. And I hadn’t in a while.

I thought back to when skiing had last come totally naturally to me, when I never second-guessed myself, my split-second intuition was hyper-keen, and I felt at one with my equipment, like my skis and boots were extensions of my legs, and I realized that it was when I had been living in Tahoe, two minutes from the base of Palisades. I skied, I worked, I cooked, I ate, and I slept. With the occasional night out to dance, of course.

Now, as a mom with a mortgage, marriage, kids, and lots more responsibilities, this just seemed like a far away time. Even my job as a professional skier has changed—now it’s a lot more time on the computer, and time in the field teaching and coaching, less skiing for myself. Life changes, and that’s a good thing—I feel incredibly fortunate and content with where I’m at. And also, I still know deep inside that I want to ski, and that it’s a large part of who I am as a person. I know I’m a better person when I ski and do the other things that bring me joy and flow and focus.

Hence, my hare-brained idea to ski 100 days in a row. I had the motivation—I had the WHY. Now, I just needed to figure out HOW the heck I (we!) were going to pull this off.

Just keep skiing that way, you’ll figure something out.