Moving abroad during the best of times can be a challenge. Doing so during a global pandemic is at best, a questionable decision, at worst, a disaster. Thankfully my experience thus far has fallen mostly under the former category. At the age of twenty-two, after eight months of living at home in the Methow Valley with my parents, when the opportunity to move to France presented itself, I seized it. After a frantic month of...
Before Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins, the last time U.S. women won a championship medal in a team event was back at the first women's biathlon World Championships in 1984, by Julie Newnam, Kari Swenson, and Holly Beattie. It was a different time, says Swenson: spectators warned them that "women shouldn’t be skiing and carrying a rifle, that this was just too hard on women."
Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club coach Josh Smullin mixed it up at the end of the race season this March and ventured to Chamonix, France, where he took himself out of his comfort zone and into a ski mountaineer's dream trip along the Verbier Haute Route.
While most skiers are heading out on vacation, Holly Brooks is en route to Siberia for the last race of the FIS Marathon Cup. She leads the series by four points over Tatjana Mannima of Estonia, meaning that whether it's in first or in sixth, whoever crosses the finish line first takes the crown.
In late May, weeks after Nina Silitch finished her last race of the season, loads of her ski-mountaineering equipment still occupied more than half the space in her bedroom. Her husband, Michael, couldn’t understand why, after six months on the World Cup and international circuit, she wasn’t ready put it away. At 39, Silitch was coming off a career-best season in most respects – she became the first American to earn World Cup gold in...