Portillo, Chile – Chris Davenport loses his shirt here every year.
The minute the big-mountain maestro sets foot on one of Hotel Portillo’s two dance floors, a snow bunny hops right up to him and unabashedly sheds his top. This year, ski-flick diva Wendy Fisher did the honors, as women swooned.
It is all in good fun, of course, and the occasion underscores the departure from the responsibilities increasingly shouldered by the two professional skiers who pioneered the freeskiing world more than a decade ago.
But now they both have settled into marriage, are in their mid-30s and are pondering what their futures might hold. In many ways, Davenport, who is originally from the East Coast, and Fisher, who is originally from the West Coast, live parallel lives.
Their spouses serendipitously went to high school together, they live in Colorado – Old Snowmass and Crested Butte, respectively – and they left traditional ski racing in their spray to pursue precarious lines down previously undreamed of peaks. Plus, they are raising children.
Now they come to Chile for “Ski with the Superstars Week,” the brainchild of Davenport, who acknowledges the clock is ticking on his ski-movie career.
“Any pro athlete no matter what the sport – football, baseball, hockey, you name it – at some point is going to retire or their career is going to come to an end. At least in our sport when we’re done as professionals we can ski the rest of our lives. We’ll always have it,” Davenport said. “No one’s going to be a linebacker or a center for the rest of their life.
“So while we might not be doing it professionally and making a living, we can ski with our friends and family for the rest of our lives. That’s what’s neat about our sport.”
Davenport, 35, remains a highly sought-after commodity in freeskiing circles. Last year, however, growing bored with moviemaking and yearning to spend more time with his wife and two young children, he set out on a quest to descend the summits of all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks in a single snow season. When the Sangre de Cristos failed to receive the required snow, Davenport reset his goal to one calendar year. He still has nine mountains remaining. He has until Jan. 22. Even then, no one else has accomplished the feat.
Ski with the Superstars Week camp, in its third year, is the other example of what maturing extreme skiers such as Davenport can accomplish.
“I thought: ‘Nobody’s really doing big-mountain ski camps in South America right now. Why don’t I invite some of my friends who happen to be the top professional skiers in the world down here for a week so we can all hang out and bring some clients down with us?”‘ said Davenport, who, in addition to Fisher, recruited Warren Miller movie icon Chris Anthony of Vail, gravity insurgent Shane McConkey of Squaw Valley, Calif., and “The Godfather of New- School Skiing,” Mike Douglas of Whistler/Blackcomb, Canada, to perform as camp coaches.
“Life is easy here in Portillo. It’s unique,” said McConkey, 36, noting the resort is limited to about 450 skiers because of the number of beds and its 1-to-1 ratio between staff and guests. “It doesn’t matter what business you’re in. I was lucky enough to be part of pushing the ski industry in this direction. What’s next is always the question. I’m going to keep skiing and looking for new creative ways to do fun stuff on skis.
“But I can’t assume I’ll be in the movies for too much longer. I’ll keep doing it so long as I have something to offer.”
McConkey foremost is a skier. And, as Davenport explains, Red Bull and other sponsors “like him a lot.” But as a longtime James Bond admirer, you never know when McConkey will launch off a cliff, pull a cord in the middle of the air and release his parachute. He pulled that stunt a day before Ski with the Superstars Week got underway, to the amazement of onlookers, who watched slack-jawed from the Hotel Portillo hot tub and bar.
BASE jumping has become McConkey’s latest passion. The eternal rebel, he used his ski-film time at Ski with the Superstars Camp to show and tell about a video of Norwegians taking flight in what he described as a breakthrough film complete with bird suits.
Unwittingly, McConkey opened up Ski with the Superstars Week a day early when he hucked off a death-defying ledge, pulled his cord and sailed over man-eating cliffs to the lake below – just for kicks. His film crew wasn’t around.
“Skiing is a great sport. You can do it forever with your family or go out and cruise the groomers when you’re 90. That’s pretty fun. But there will never be a ski run, in my mind, that is as fun as BASE jumping. There is absolutely nothing like it,” said the thrill-seeker, who also is married with children.
Meanwhile, Fisher, who went to high school with McConkey, explains how she won the U.S. Extreme Skiing Championships in 2005 while pregnant. She even skied in her hometown of Crested Butte the day before she went into labor.
“I was supposed to have him before the ski area opened, but he came late and I skied the day before I delivered,” said Fisher, who had taken five years off from ski competition before feeling revitalized just before her pregnancy.
Now, like the others, Fisher is diversifying her career. In between teaching and film shoots, she even holds a seat on the Mount Crested Butte Town Council.
“There are no egos here. We work together great. We’re all about having fun and getting people to love skiing as much as we do,” she said.
“We all knew our time was coming, and now it’s come. We love skiing so much, we’re not going to let it go. We’ll still find ways to do our own stuff, and this is one of them. It’s driving us to enjoy the sport and share it with others. It’s been really fun.”
