Climbing and Skiing the Seven Summits with Kit DesLauriers

0:01I just kept looking at all these mountains that we were walking underneath and I was like, why don't I have my skis and why don't we just stop at this one and then this one and then this one? And I guess I felt quite, I know I felt really different by the end of that trip, you know. I'm called to climb mountains, absolutely, I love to go to high places, but what I was really felt called to was to ski back down them. And so that was my personal mission at that point.

0:31Kit DesLauriers:Kit Delorier is a ski mountaineer who is perhaps best known for being the first person to climb and ski down the seven summits. She finished that project in 2006, right after winning the Freeride World Championship twice in a row. Kit has been named a National Geographic Adventure of the Year, she's in the Ski Hall of Fame, and she works with the conservation group Protect Our Winters. Her current favorite place to ski is in Alaska, and she just served two years as board president for the Alaska Wilderness League. Kit is one of the most inspiring people I've met. She knows who she is, and she stands by her values, full stop.

1:13Kit DesLauriers:I spoke with Kit twice at Outside Days in Denver. First, we did a live interview together at the local REI, Go REI Denver. The next day, we met up for a more intimate interview because I wanted to share her wisdom with our listeners who couldn't be there in person. Kit is an insightful, determined, and generally badass athlete with some amazing stories to share. Spoiler alert, she's also our first guest who has raised a wolf. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.

1:57Kit DesLauriers:Kit Delorier, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living live in person. Yahoo! Thanks, Shelby. We actually talked last night at the Outside Festival in Denver in front of 250 people, and it was great. We did, and the REI flagship. Let's start with your childhood, because I'm really, really curious. It was pretty darn normal, I think. How did you get into skiing, though? I was a teenager when I got into the kind of skiing that most people would think of as skiing. It wasn't anything that was accessible to me before then. So I was 14 the first time I went skiing at a ski resort. and even then it was Sunrise Ski Resort in northeastern Arizona run by the Apache and I was you know wearing jeans and rented ski gear and I loved it and my dad especially was pretty wild so he was a lot of my adventure buddy and honestly through the years like I'd say the first time I went and skied the Grand Teton I called my dad and be like, guess what I just did?

3:02And I'd tell him and he'd go, you're the only one who's surprised, you know? So yeah, I don't know. My childhood was kind of normal, but I've always known that I was different than what most people would call normal.

3:15Kit DesLauriers:So you were an outdoorsy family? Yeah, to some, I mean, my mom tagged along and I think she enjoyed it a little bit, but if you asked her now, she'd say no. I think it was mostly led by dad, but. That's so interesting. So, okay. So you ended up going to University of Arizona and Tucson because we had moved to Arizona for me for like middle school, high school. And academics have always come fairly easily for me. And I graduated in the top like one or so percent of my class. So I got a free ride to go to the University of Arizona and Tucson. So I did. Did you do sports there? not sanctioned um at the u of a in tucson i learned to rock climb i got deep into mountain biking i you know did crazy things like sold my clarinet from middle school and high school and bought you know tickets to go to see the garcia band in san francisco and what i did like that That was my college.

4:24Kit DesLauriers:So you've always been a little bit of a wild child. And then after college, you became a stonemason? Was that your first gig out of college? Let me think about that. Almost, yeah. Almost, yes. And I was just thinking about this memory of going through Mesa Verde with my family when I was like preteen or something. And the rock work at Mesa Verde and the stories of the indigenous people who built it and the beauty of it really spoke to me. And I never lost it. And I have a creative side. Like I love to build with things. My dad was a builder, right? My grandfather. And I have fine artists in my family.

5:05I am not one. But building with things has always really excited me. And I remember in high school having, you know, those optional courses, like I forget what they call them, right?

5:19Kit DesLauriers:Like home ec or woodworking or auto shop. Exactly. Those are two very different things. You can just stop right there. Home ec or woodworking, right? And it was called shop or home ec. Shop. And we were only allowed to take, as girls, one semester of shop. I loved shop. And then I had to take home ec. And then they made me sew. and I'm not a sewer. I love to cook. So it's not, I'm not against home ec. I'm against being told what I can and can't do. I guess that's, now we're getting somewhere. I see this. You don't like being told what you can and can't do. And you'd like to show people that you can do these things that are really hard.

5:55Kit DesLauriers:No, show myself. Show yourself. I don't care about, yeah. That's a really important distinction. Yes. After college, Kit moved to Telluride and became determined to join the ski patrol. But before she could do the job, she needed to be a stronger skier. She threw herself into training, improving her skills on the mountain, volunteering with the local search and rescue team, and earning her Wilderness EMT certification. Along the way, Kit tried ski mountaineering for the very first time and fell in love with it. Can you tell people what ski mountaineering is for those who don't know? Oh, it's, you know, when you go backcountry skiing, and you have your skis on your feet with climbing skins underneath them, and you're walking along uphill something to ski back down, you don't have to take your skis off that ski touring.

6:47Ski mountaineering is involves some ski touring usually, and then you get to an aspect of the mountain that becomes steep enough that you can no longer skin up it. So you take your skis off, and you put them on your pack and you put crampons on your feet. And sometimes you have ice axes in your hands and sometimes you need a rope and you have to climb up something. So that's what I say is ski mountaineering is when it gets steep enough that you need at least crampons on your feet. You can't get up it with skis on your feet.

7:15Kit DesLauriers:I've never done anything like that. I'm really curious for you when was the first time you tried ski mountaineering? It's a very clear memory. I had to work on my skiing skill set for quite a while until I was ready for ski mountaineering ski mountaineering was not my ultimate goal though it was really just to become a better skier I you know had a lot of friends I ran around the mountains with and there was this awesome woman Barb Scheidegger who was maybe 10 years or so my senior and she was a former pro mogul skier and we were off on a trail run one day and she said so what's next on your list and literally my jaw dropped because I was like that's how you do it you you make lists and then I went huh well you know every day when I drive home to Ofra Colorado I look up at this you know beautiful peak and um and it's got this awesome line on it and I I'd like to climb and ski that line.

8:16And she's like, let's do it. And so we put together a small group of women and we went. And that was the first time that I ever went ski mountaineering. Like we climbed up this thing with ice axes and well, kind of, you know, it was just a snow climb. We didn't need ropes or anything, but crampons and an ice axe. And then when we got to the top, for some reason, I was just felt really clear. And I was still not what I would call an expert skier now that I could look back on it. I'm sure I considered myself one then. But man, I skied it really well, like my focus. And I realized that I really enjoy being in situations where, here's a way that I've learned to put it, where there's no space to be making your grocery list, is how I say it.

9:01Like, you just need to be doing what you're doing 100%.

9:04Kit DesLauriers:And I really like that. So you found flow, you found focus. Yeah. And Barb was like, wow, you skied that really well. I was like, yeah, thanks. It felt good. It kind of didn't even feel like me. It felt way better than what I can usually do. And something inside you just registered that ski mountaineering. How did you then like keep going? It doesn't mean because I found my thing, as you say it, it doesn't mean that that was my thing that I did. Right. I did a lot of things and I was also busy raising a wolf and you can't run off and okay let's be a ski mountaineer all the time when you're you know it's like having a kid my level of commitment to him was like having a kid so I was out with him every morning and every evening the wolf the wolf yeah but ski mountaineering I don't know it was just you just kind of like I was I'm drawn to aesthetics so that line was really beautiful and other lines as they were really beautiful and as opportunities just the right partners teammates came around to go do something then that's what I would do I think we should just tell the wolf story very quickly so at what age did you buy a wolf well he was given to me I didn't technically buy him but I, let's see, how old was I?

10:22I had just turned 21. And I knew somebody who had a boyfriend of mine from earlier had raised a wolf from the same breeder. Now, mind you, it's illegal to have an animal like that. And I don't need to give any other descriptors really about it. But But his wolf was a she. And her name was Issa. As in, what kind of a dog is that? Issa Wolf. That was her name. And I took care of Issa when he went off to Alaska one summer. And I was living in the mountains. And it was amazing. And then Issa was killed, hit by a car, when we were back in Tucson at the University of Arizona in Tucson. And then it was maybe a year later or something when I was about to graduate.

11:17And I was just reading the newspaper and I saw, hey, it's like wolf cubs for sale. And I said to this friend, hey, isn't that the same breeder? And so we went out to look at them and they were, at that time, they were seven days old. Oh, they must have been so cute.

11:33Kit DesLauriers:It was incredible. And I had no intention, right? I mean, I was like, you've already like, this is called wild ideas. and I'm just like, freedom, don't tell me what I can and can't do. Well, so maybe that factored into it. I just had this intense, immediate connection to this one. And she offered to me, she said, I'm done breeding. This is the last litter. So I will offer this one to you next week, right, when he's two weeks old. And nobody else will ever be given that opportunity from me. And a week later, I went and picked him up, and I cried the whole way home, like, what have I done? And I fed him and then I, you know, burped him and I slept on the floor with him in a sleeping bag.

12:15So I could run outside in the middle of the night, like, and literally like trained him. And he and I, yeah, it was probably the biggest loss of my life ever when he died. And he lived a long, full life. And he didn't live, he didn't die for being a wolf in a human's world. and he lived almost his entire life without a collar on. How old was he? He lived at nine. Nine? Just about nine. That's incredible. A couple days short of nine, yeah.

12:46Kit DesLauriers:So you have this book, Higher Love, and we talked a little bit about it last night, but there's a scene where, you know, the wolf is not a baby anymore and you have to like show it who's boss and to show it who's boss, you're trained to give it a bone with meat on it and then take it away before it rips your hand off. yeah, to someone like me, and probably most people listening, it sounds absolutely terrifying. Yeah, and it was, and it hurt, and I didn't think I could do it, and I cried, and I walked away defeated, and then I went back, and I found deeper places in myself that I could go to find the resolve and the power and be removed from the thought and just be full of the intention that I had.

13:40And that's how, that's how wild animals work. And it was an incredible gift to push myself to go that far myself. And it served me and I was not the only time I had to do it with him, I tracked him down from chasing a herd of sheep that were annually pushed through from the high country in Colorado by their sheep herders living in their little trailers. And I found him. He had escaped. I tried to keep him inside, but my roommates must have let him out. And I was like, oh, geez, where is he? And I suspected where he was. And I went down and I found him. And he was on his way into the sheep herd.

14:23And I called him. And he sat down and he looked at the sheep and he looked at me and he looked at the sheep and he looked at me and this went back and forth. And then finally, he just took off for the sheep. So I just ran flat out like as fast as I could through this field, like across like marmot holes and rocks and everything. And I got to him right before he got to the sheep. and I you know at that point I had by then I had learned and practiced a lot of what it takes to communicate with an animal like that which was I pushed him to the ground and then I leaned down and I bit hard I bit his ear hard like like trying to draw blood and then I growled and I at him and I didn't look him in the eye because wolves you only look him in the eye when you love him.

15:15And I didn't look him in the eye. And I did all those things. And I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck. And I dragged him up a hill. And then I'd be overcome again. And it wasn't like I was overcome with rage. I was like, what I was overcome with was like, if I don't do this, if I can't protect you. And my vow to you when you were 14 days old was that I would never let you'd be killed for being a wolf in a human's world. And I can't break my promise to you. And I almost did. And so I was mad at myself, but I needed to teach him a lesson and I got him home. And I, like I said, I've pretty much didn't live with it.

15:53He almost never needed a collar on, right, which I called a necklace, except I trained him with one, right? So he's actually pretty good on a leash. But anyway, I got him home and I tied him up in the side of the yard. and I said to all my friends, my roommates, don't look at him, nothing, until I say so. And I gave him a bowl of water and I left him out there for 24 hours tied up with just water and no love, no eye contact. And the 24 hours later, I took him off the leash and you know what he did? He went up the hillside. We were on the edge of the National Forest. He went up the hillside and he stayed up there for two days.

16:31Like F you. and then he came back down. So those sheep come through every year. The next year when the sheep came through, I mean, I'd marked my calendar. I knew I'd lived there for several years. I knew what weekend it was. Well, they came down like the weekend earlier. I was wrong. So I was up having coffee, and I look out the window, and I was like, oh, God, here come the sheep. He was outside. You want to know what he was doing? Sitting on the front porch on his haunches. Wow. Just watching. So he didn't go. That's how smart wolves are. That's how loyal. And that was our connection.

17:17Kit DesLauriers:Kit's wolf, named Alta, taught her a lot about discipline, respect, and following her internal compass. That compass led Kit to the mountains. In 1998, she was invited on her first international alpine expedition, where she spent weeks trekking among towering peaks in India. Even though she enjoyed the climb, in the back of her mind, she wished she had her skis with her. The following year, Kit moved to Jackson, Wyoming, and spent as much time skiing as she could. She was keeping up with some of the most competitive skiers at the time, and her skills did not go unnoticed.

17:59I was just free skiing and snowboard, and I met the director of the Freeride World Tour. And I happened to make a mistake and be like, holy cow, there's a 30-foot cliff underneath me. And I landed it and skied out of it, and he was kind of like, who are you? And then the next year, I decided I wanted to try and do the world tour, but I was already 34, and I didn't want to screw around with all the qualifiers. And so I just decided I would call that person up and ask him if I could get an entry without spending a whole year doing qualifiers. And I was like, do you remember me? We met at Snowbird.

18:38And he was like, yeah, I remember you. And I said, can you let me in? And he said, well, don't tell anybody. I'll give you a bye and don't make me regret it.

18:48Kit DesLauriers:And that's how it went. And so you did it and you won. I won the overall points title. Yeah. Then you did it again the next year. And then I did it again. I kind of didn't want to do it again. I was actually enrolled in a grad program that I really wanted to do in a master's of landscape architecture. Yeah, I read that. Landscape architecture. Yeah, at the Conway School in Massachusetts. I wanted to take my hardscaping skills to the next level. And I had deferred for a year to do the free ride. And then I was like, well, if I defer again, they've already told me, like, you don't get to defer for two years.

19:22It's a pretty exclusive program. and I couldn't decide what to do. But when you're the reigning world champion, they're going to let you in at the last minute if you decide yes. So I had a little bit of time to decide. And what I realized is the reason that I was mostly scared of doing it the second year was what if I didn't win again? And once that was facing me, once I acknowledged that, I was pretty disgusted with myself. I was like, that is the worst reason ever. and you better get your ass back out there.

20:00Kit DesLauriers:Kit returned to free ride and won even more definitively than the first year. The evening of her big win, her next wild idea started to take shape. She went to dinner that evening and ran into Dick Bass, who at the time was the owner of Snowbird Ski Resort. Dick was also an author, skier, and a climber who had written a book about becoming the first man to climb the seven summits. Dick Bass and I never discussed the idea. We serendipitously ended up sitting nearby each other at dinner and had conversation late into the evening, and then he had left a signed copy of his book when I checked out of his hotel.

20:41And so I read it through the rest of the ski season and competition season, and as I read it, I couldn't help myself. It wasn't really an option. As I'm reading the words he wrote about his climbs, they went back to that visual thing that I said earlier about looking at rocks. I was envisioning the mountains with the words he used, and I thought, those sound eminently skiable. I wonder if anybody has skied them.

21:23Kit DesLauriers:If you're anything like me, you're already dreaming about your upcoming fall adventures. And if you need to freshen up your gear closet for the new season, I've got exciting news for you. From September 18th through September 28th, REI Co-op MasterCard members earn 10 % in card rewards on all REI purchases. That's two times the card rewards and two times the awesomeness. Apply today to get in on it. Whether you've got a fall hiking trip on the calendar or you're just stocking up on essentials, it's a great time to shop your favorites at REI. To learn more about the REI Co-op MasterCard and see if you're pre-approved, go to rei.com slash MasterCard dash podcast.

22:06Kit DesLauriers:That's rei.com slash MasterCard dash podcast. Terms apply.

22:20Kit DesLauriers:Smart World knows that winter doesn't always play nice. One minute, it's a bluebird day on the mountain, the next, the sky is dumping wet snow and you're getting blasted with sideways winds. That's why Smartwool is introducing their first ever insulated outerwear collection, Winterloft. It's a down jacket, upgraded. Smartwool's new Winterloft insulation blends merino wool with recycled down. That means more warmth and versatility than you'd get from down alone, even if your jacket gets wet. From tailgates to snowball fights, a winter loft jacket is down for whatever. This September, you can find winter loft jackets and vests exclusively at REI.

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23:06Kit DesLauriers:the SmartWool Winterloft Collection at your local REI and warm up whatever goes down. SmartWool, go far, feel good.

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24:09Kit DesLauriers:So whether you're heading out for a quick neighborhood loop or training for your next wild idea, the AeroGlide 4 helps every mile feel a little smoother. Check out Salomon's AeroGlide 4 at your local REI store or at REI.com.

24:38Kit DesLauriers:Kit Delorier is one of the most accomplished ski mountaineers in the world. She spent a decade skiing in some of the best mountain towns in the U.S. before winning back-to-back Freeride World Championships in 2004 and 2005. A year later, Kit became the first person to ski down the Seven Summits. For the Seven Summits, I think a lot of people don't understand what that means. First, you have to climb up them. Well, they're the highest mountain on each continent. It's not the seven highest mountains in the world. it's the highest mountain on each continent. You'd already done Denali. So before you actually said.