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CRESTED BUTTE ATHLETES: MOUNTAIN GROWN AND POWERED BY PASSION
Crested Butte, CO- With Team Crested Butte, as with many local competitors, it's difficult to tell when the athletes are training and when they're just having fun. They almost always look like they're training…and having fun.
The four Crested Butte adventure racers, Jari Kirkland, Jon Brown, Brian Wickenhauser and Eric Sullivan, spend much of their days pedaling, skiing, paddling, biking or staging impromptu treasure hunts in the trees. Whatever they do, they do to the max and with big grins. As a result they are climbing toward the top ten teams in the world and becoming the unintentional media darlings of adventure racing.
"We've had the results, but I think it also has to do with our personalities," Jari said. "We are happy, we love life and we have fun."
That's also why they fit in Crested Butte, where athletic pursuits, like most everything else, are powered by passion and supported by a vast mountain environment.
Team Crested Butte this summer qualified for the Raid Adventure Racing World Championships to be held in September near Chamonix, France. "The world's toughest adventure race" will take racers through Italy, Switzerland and France over five grueling days.
This summer, the team placed 12th out of 60 professional teams (third among Americans) competing in Spain's Andorran Pyrenees. They finished second in the Teva Mountain Games in Vail, sixth in an international field at Mexico's Nuevo Leon Outdoor Challenge and 13th at the North American Raid Qualifier in Bend, Oregon. Team Crested Butte has been featured on CBS twice, including major programs on Primal Quest; during five hours of OLN coverage; and in publications such as Adventure Sports Magazine.
The team's longest race, Primal Quest 2003, spanned more than 450 continuous miles near Las Vegas. During the six-day ordeal, team members grabbed only catnaps in between biking, running, rappelling, boating, orienteering and other challenges. At one point Jari fell asleep in mid-stride and toppled over, but after a few minutes was up and running again.
"You can't say, 'I'm too tired.' You have to open your eyes and make your body start moving. Your team is counting on you," she said. Eric added, "You get to see what you're made of."
The team dynamic becomes huge in a multi-day race with little sleep, constant physical exertion and the mental stress of orienteering and strategizing. "A lot of teams just fall apart," Eric said. The Crested Butte racers rely on friendship and humor to pull them through.
Living in Crested Butte, with its nearby streams, lakes, trails and mountains, also gives the team a huge edge. "We used to do adventures here all the time anyway," Jari said. "This just adds that whole element of orienteering, getting lost, being in new terrain. Every competition is different; it's not 90 minutes on a soccer field or running the same loop around a track every time. There's that sense of exploration. Like living here."
Brandon Clabaugh, slopestyle adventurer
The mountains also inspire younger athletes, like Brandon Clabaugh, 13, who has the 2010 Olympics on his mind. Brandon grew up schussing down Crested Butte's slopes on skis and snowboards. Now he does his schoolwork online so he can ski every day. He generally hits the terrain park, halfpipe and extreme ski terrain with friends or his coaches, Ben Somrak and Corey Tibljas. Now in their early twenties, Ben and Corey also grew up skiing in Crested Butte and started their own ski filmmaking company, Two Planks Productions, while still in high school. Their most recent film, "Unwritten History," features footage of Brandon catching air and cutting up the slopes.
Brandon took fifth overall in last winter's Next Snow competition, sponsored by Sports Illustrated for Kids. Top skiers in the 9-13 age range competed over five days at Keystone. Brandon skied and snowboarded, doing big mountain, big air, park and halfpipe events. He also enters local and regional freestyle events, often competing against adult skiers, and last winter took second in the men's open section of the ProFurious Series.
"I like slopestyle, doing the rails and jumps," he said. "Competing is cool…especially the adrenaline and being around friends."
When the snow melts, his escapades continue on skateboard, dirt bike and downhill mountain bike. "Brandon's adventurous, but he knows how far he can go," his father Nick said.
Ben Babbitt, speedster on skis
A few years before Brandon's dad took his toddler son out on the slopes to ski with a harness, Ben Babbitt's dad was doing the same thing. Ben grew up skiing with his parents and the local town programs, then joined the Crested Butte Ski Club because he loved to fly down the slopes. While his identical twin studied acting and headed off to the lights of LA, Ben skied with the Crested Butte Academy as a post-graduate. There he went head to head with his Crested Butte friend and racing nemesis, David Chodounsky, who recently won the NCAA national slalom championship skiing for Dartmouth and hopes to make the U.S. Ski Team after college.
Like Brandon, Ben loves the thrill of competition, but he relishes speed over air time, so he specializes in downhill and super G events. "There's nothing like speeding 80 miles an hour down a mountain in a pike," he said. "It's a total rush."
Ben traveled the world on the NorAm circuit and made the Rocky Mountain Regional Team, one step from the U.S. Ski Team. Now 21, he is focusing more on technical events like slalom and giant slalom, because this year he will ski in those venues for the University of Colorado while earning his business degree.
"I would love to race World Cup some day; I'll have to stay on top of my game while I earn my degree," he said.
Ben credits his success partly to the mountain where he spent much of his childhood. "Crested Butte Mountain is incredible; no other place in North America compares to it. There's unbeatable terrain; that made me a better skier," he said.
Passing it on: extremists Wendy Fisher and Kim Reichhelm
As Brandon and Ben ride their rising stars, some Crested Butte athletes are capping their successful careers by passing their passion on to others. Crested Butte's legendary women freeskiers include three excellent examples: Wendy Fisher and Kim Reichhelm.
Wendy's life changed hugely - and unpredictably - when she won the 2005 U.S. Freeskiing Championship after a four-year layoff. A week after hoisting the trophy, she discovered that her pre-race jitters had perhaps been partly morning sickness; she and husband Woody Lindenmeyr are expecting a baby.
Motherhood will launch yet another chapter of Wendy's adventurous life, which started in Squaw Valley, California. Chasing her brothers around the ski slopes led to racing at Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont, where the freckle-faced ski protégé climbed to the U.S. Ski Team. Injured in the '92 Olympics in Albertville, France, Wendy had time to realize that pressure and routine had taken the joy out of skiing. "Even as my dreams were coming true, I was getting sadder and more depressed." She left the ski team and skied briefly for Sierra Nevada College, but felt "burnt to a crisp."
Luckily, Kim Reichhelm, a fellow U.S. Ski Team refugee, recognized Wendy's symptoms and invited her to visit Crested Butte. The Butte introduced Wendy to freeskiing and to her future husband; her visit turned into a relocation. She won a succession of national and international freeskiing titles (including two world championships and the overall tour title), earned film contracts with Matchstick Productions and Warren Miller and rediscovered the joy of skiing.
"This mountain reminds you to play and makes you a great skier," she said. "I still find myself improving, getting quicker, agile, fluid and smooth."
Wendy also started leading ski clinics, focusing first on women, then on girls - "to catch them before they got too fearful." Playfulness is one of the secret ingredients in her Fish Ski camps for adolescent/teenage girls. Wendy and her campers frolic around Crested Butte Mountain, too busy catching air, tucking steeps and laughing to realize they are honing their balance, quickness, skills and confidence.
"It's about opening them up," Wendy said. "They learn to play with obstacles, more speed, different terrain. There's something cool about seeing kids get psyched about skiing."
Wendy's mentor, Kim Reichhelm, has spent much of her adult life bringing fun back into skiing for other people. Kim grew up ski racing at Stratton Mountain School where she quickly rose through the racing ranks to the U.S. Ski Team. After five years with the U.S. Ski Team, Kim represented the University of Colorado becoming a two-time NCAA All American. Kim went on to compete professionally on the Women's Pro tour and after 18 years of ski racing Kim then discovered the freedom and exhilaration of freeskiing. Kim won the first World Extreme Skiing Championships, followed by a host of national and international titles. A polished presenter as well as poised athlete, she did media commentary for ESPN, ESPN2, RSN, Fox Sports Net and the Outdoor Life Network. She also appeared in ski films and on television programs such as David Letterman, Dateline NBC, Good Morning America and ABC's Wide World of Sports.
In the late 1980s, Kim helped pioneer ski clinics designed specifically for women. Her supportive, fun-spirited, all-inclusive Women's Ski Adventures have drawn acclaim since 1989. She also hosts "Ski with Kim" adventures (from Switzerland to Nevada heli-skiing to Chile) for men and women and Big Mountain Freeski Camps for teens.
"The last 30 years of my life I have skied more than 100 days a year," she said. "The only thing I love more than skiing is sharing it with other people."
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