Crested Butte – The starting gate was the scariest place for 14-year-old Francesca Pavillard-Cain.
Below her skis, a junkyard of rocks and trees clogged nearly vertical channels of snow unfortunately named Body Bag and Dead End chutes. Crested Butte’s ski patrollers open this terrain only once a year. Pavillard-Cain could hear the faint roar of a crowd somewhere below the terrifying horizon line.
The Crested Butte local drew a sharp breath through a mouthful of braces and plunged into Body Bag.
“I was really scared at the start,” she said. “Really, though, I think everyone is nervous up there. I try to concentrate my nervous energy so I have more skiing energy. What settles me is thinking that even if I take a chance, at least I tried something I would not typically do. I know that when I’m competing, I can do more than I can on any other day.”
Pavillard-Cain skied away the junior women’s champion at last weekend’s 15th annual U.S. Extreme Freeskiing Championships, the venerable extreme skiing competition that launched the careers of some of the world’s most recognized skiers.
Headlining this year’s event were the ladies and the 14- to 17-year-old juniors, such as Pavillard-Cain. The rubber-boned teens bounded like startled goats down the most intimidating terrain the state’s burliest ski area has to offer.
The ladies gracefully charged down the same lines as the guys in pursuit of the largest cash purse in freeskiing – $6,500 for first place for men and women.
The historical chasm of skills separating the men, women and juniors disappeared at this year’s extreme skiing competition. It wasn’t until the helmet and goggles came off at the end of the run that one could identify the gender and age of the skier who just navigated a rocky slope so steep it barely holds snow.
“What the guys were skiing 10 years ago, the girls are skiing 10 times harder now,” said Eric “H-Bomb” Baumm, the longtime director of Colorado’s most demanding ski competition. “There is no more junior’s line, chick’s line and guy’s line.”
While the carcass-hurling men still assaulted the precipitous terrain, the youthful heirs to skiing’s throne shined brightest in the three-day competition. Many of the best juniors were watching ski videos of this event before they ever turned a ski, and some were not even born when Crested Butte forged a new ski competition model in 1992.
They didn’t rise through the organized ranks of ski racing or mogul bashing, as did most every veteran professional in the freeskiing world today. All they know is steep, fast skiing in which high-end moves are seamlessly linked in a do-or-die puzzle. They are the new school and the future of skiing.
“The ante has been upped,” said ski legend-turned-junior coach Eric DesLauriers, whose 12-skier team from California’s Sugar Bowl competed in Crested Butte. “They’ve grown up watching their heroes in ski videos. The steep, technical stuff really makes sense to them because they are thinking like the best skiers in the world.”
Dane Tudor was 10 when he started chasing daredevil rippers around his home hill at Red Mountain, British Columbia. Pursuing men twice his age is how the quiet 16-year-old honed the ski skills that earned him this year’s junior championship.
“You have to keep up with them, or they leave you,” Tudor said. “It makes you a lot better just keeping up. There are a lot of 13-year-olds out there right now who are hanging with older skiers. They’re next.”
Those teens are heirs to the freeskiing throne. They’re getting younger and bolder with every competition.
“The juniors are just insane. The people who win juniors are top five in the whole competition, for sure,” said Ed Dujardin, a 17-year-old from New Jersey who finished eighth among junior men. “I was really happy with my run, but then I watched the rest of the guys come down and I was like, ‘What the?”‘
Equally impressive were the women. In Friday’s qualifying round, the highest score delivered from a panel of judges that measured every skier’s control, fluidity, technique, aggression and line selection went to Whistler’s Jennifer Ashton. In Saturday’s finals – featuring a last run of 10 men and five women pared from more than 150 competitors – Ashton dominated the field to finish first.
“These young girls grew up thinking they could do anything they want. I don’t think the young women who are winning this competition had any limitations growing up,” said Kim Reichhelm, the 45-year-old Colorado ski diva whose win at the World Extremes in 1991 blazed a new trail for lady skiers.
“I constantly struggled as a tomboy who wanted to hang with the guys and ski hard,” said Reichhelm, who lost a ski on her second run in Friday’s qualifying round and didn’t make the finals. “I was an outcast. A weirdo. Now, these girls are throwing down as hard as the men, and they are celebrated. It’s awesome.”
Saturday’s venue was the competition’s toughest, with skiers hurling themselves down narrow chutes and controlling their speed by slapping tiny pillows of snow clinging to sheers faces. The terrain in the Hourglass – like that in Dead End Chutes and Body Bag – is only opened for this competition.
“Pretty much this whole thing is a no-fall zone,” Baumm said as he revealed the course to the finalists Friday night. “I’ve made a mistake in there and tomahawked down the whole run. Make a mistake, and you’ll do the same.”
Skiers were not allowed to pre-ski the Hourglass. They could study their lines from the bottom, but things look much different when you are staring down 45-degree slopes.
“Oh, man, I was scared stiff up there,” said Gunnison’s Ryan Sutton, a 29-year-old lifelong skier who, to the thunderous approval of hundreds of sun-soaked spectators, masterfully connected a series of powdery pillows on a 70-foot face in the Hourglass to claim second in the men’s comp. “But it’s a competition, and you can’t hesitate. Look at it, and then ski it standing up. Ski afraid, but ski standing up.”
Staff writer Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-820-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
