Since I was little my parents have always brought my siblings and I to the mountains to share their passion for skiing with us. Unfortunately, we didn’t always live in the right place. For five years my family lived in Texas and skiing was only achievable during school holidays and required at minimum a 14 hour drive to New Mexico or Colorado.

When we moved to Washington it was like a dream come true, we could ski every weekend and even weekdays after school. My parents never pressured us to ski and for that I am forever grateful. Through the years I had to give up my other sports starting with swimming and motor cross, then fencing, soccer, gymnastics and finally cross country running as skiing slowly took over more and more of my time and passion.

Now I happily spend as much time on snow as possible following winter all year round. Rain, shine, snow, wind or fog it is always a good time!

In July I trained on the Blackcomb Mountain glacier as my first camp with the national development team, aka NexGen. After a couple of days in Whistler and my first real mountain bike ride on a trail called Tunnel Vision, where I successfully went over the bars not once but twice, I packed up and headed to YVR. I would arrive in Chapelco, Argentina with my younger brother to spend a month coaching skiing and generally eating my weight in steak.

I cannot thank Club Lacar enough for giving me the opportunity to spend a 6th summer doing the thing I love most and sharing it with some little shredders. I coached Alpine on different days with various groups between the ages of 5 to 13 and had a blast skiing nearly everyday I was there. While there was little snow upon arrival, the storms that blew in towards the end sent me home with some nice powder runs and an unfortunate contraction of Bacterial Tonsillitis.

After almost two weeks in bed I managed to recover in time for our Mount Hood camp and keep my tonsils with me a little longer. For the last two weeks of July I trained GS and SL with the team on some of the best snow Timberline has seen in years. We had spectacular weather, although a little smoky, and got the chance of a lifetime to ski during a nearly total eclipse. I learned how to mostly keep up on a mountain bike and that I am much better at keeping pace on a climb than a descent. I also discovered that the mice in the walls are cute but not really suitable for sharing a living space and that while tater tots are delicious, one should not eat them at breakfast and lunch for 2 weeks straight.

With the camp coming to a close, I geared up and got ready to take on the 48 hour “packing a Jetta with way too much stuff” marathon and the 13 hour “drive through wildfires with no air-conditioning” sweatfest to reach my final destination of Calgary. The start of fall semester and the beginning of our centralized training program were around the corner, albeit a 1084km corner.