ϳԹ

Kimmy Fasani
(Photo: Todd Glaser)
Kimmy Fasani
(Photo: Todd Glaser)

Kimmy Fasani Has Always Been Fearless. Motherhood—and Breast Cancer —Taught Her to Be Vulnerable.

Published: 

In a new documentary, the pioneering professional snowboarder opens up about motherhood and her career in the shadow of a cancer diagnosis

New perk: Easily find new routes and hidden gems, upcoming running events, and more near you. Your weekly Local Running Newsletter has everything you need to lace up! .

Pro snowboarder Kimmy Fasani seems to have only one speed: fast. I learn this at her tiny green clapboard cabin on Lake Mary, just 15 minutes up the road from her primary home in Mammoth Lakes, California. Soon after we arrive aboard a little e-powered dinghy, I turn around to gaze over the lake and its forested shores. Kimmy, meanwhile, has somehow already stripped down and pulled on a bikini, and is now leaping off a 20-foot cliff that fronts the frigid alpine water. For a moment, her body is silhouetted against the deep blue summer sky, and then she disappears beneath the glassy surface with a big splash followed by ripples of concentric waves. She surfaces with a whoop and a grin.

“It’s a tradition,” Kimmy says as she clambers back up the rocks. As long as the lake isn’t iced over, she and her husband, artist and pro skier Chris Benchetler, jump in at least once whenever they’re here. Kimmy towels off, changes into shorts and a long-sleeve shirt, and before long is bounding into the thickets on the south side of the lake, following an overgrown trail. Along with her good friend Cara Williamson, a brand-marketing executive who flew in from Denver for a few days, I run panting behind her, ducking under branches, crawling over logs, and tiptoeing through moats of muck. This is prime bear habitat, she tells me as she wrestles a branch. “They’re usually standing on the dock, sniffing, checking things out,” she says with a laugh.

Soon we come to a better-trod trail, which switchbacks through shady conifer forests and past sparkling views of the lake to the top of Mammoth Crest. This trail is Kimmy’s sanity. Now that she’s a mother of two boys, Koa and Zeppelin, aged six and three, she comes here to move around and drink in the mountain air and remember who she is amid all the motion and mundanity of motherhood.

As she breezes upslope, past ambling couples and vacationing families, I let her do most of the talking. Kimmy has been a professional athlete for 25 years, earning a reputation as a pioneer in women’s snowboarding. Now she’s finishing what may be her most challenging project yet. Six years ago, she and Chris invited their friend Tyler Hamlet, a Bellingham, Washington, cinematographer, to film what was supposed to be a lighthearted family documentary, a project that would soon evolve into something much different.

It started in 2017, when Kimmy was pregnant with Koa. With the bright-eyed optimism of people on the brink of parenthood, Kimmy and Chris planned to simply take him along whenever they traveled. They asked Tyler, who had worked with Chris on film projects in the past, if he would capture their joys and mishaps as Koa entered the world. “I wanted to try to create a road map for other athletes who wanted to start a family,” Kimmy told me as she huffed up the slope toward Mammoth Crest. “I wanted to help them realize that this is possible.”

After Koa arrived, in 2018, Tyler accompanied the couple to New Zealand, where they filmed a short for GoPro (one of Chris’s sponsors) and started capturing the challenges and hilarity of two pro athletes juggling life, work, and fun with an infant in tow. They surfed, skied, climbed, biked, and drove along the winding seaside roads of the South Island. It was a dream gig, and as veteran athletes Kimmy and Chris were accustomed to being in front of a camera.

But the balancing act turned out to be harder than any of them expected. Between New Zealand and the family’s next big trip, to Japan, things shifted. Koa was now ten months old, and Kimmy was officially stepping back into work after maternity leave by appearing in a video for her sponsor Burton.

“Tyler started realizing, ‘Oh, I better start filming more than the happy moments,’ ” Kimmy says. “This life has so much more dimension, and maybe we have a message that can help. But at the time, we didn’t know what it was.”

Over the coming years, the couple encountered more challenging plot twists than they could have foreseen: the unexpected ripple effects of childhood trauma, a career-hampering injury, an acute medical crisis for Koa, and, for Kimmy, an aggressive-breast-cancer diagnosis at 37, just months after her second child was born.

For years, Kimmy and Chris kept the documentary secret, not quite sure where it would lead. Tyler did other work for his clients, like Dakine and ESPN, but when he was with Kimmy and Chris, he kept the cameras rolling more than he otherwise would. He filmed them in the mountains, in formal interview settings, and during casual moments. The project became something much more real than any of them expected.

On the slopes above Lake Mary, Kimmy moves quickly up into the mountains, each footfall fast and confident, while Cara and I trail behind her. She tells me she has only just started to share the details of the film with people outside her immediate circle. “It’s scary talking about our private life, because there’s always room for criticism,” she says. “There’s so much unknown as to how the movie will be received. I wanted it to be an honest, raw, vulnerable piece that tackles big topics.” At once edgy and hopeful, Kimmy is finally ready to launch it into the world. She’s willing to be seen in a new way.

Kimmy and her son Koa at Mammoth Lakes Basin, California
Kimmy and her son Koa at Mammoth Lakes Basin, California (Photo: Todd Glaser)

When I first arrived at Mammoth Lakes, where Kimmy, Chris, Koa, and Zep live in a tidy, renovated home on a quiet cul-de-sac dotted with pines, the family was recovering from a gnarly night. Zep had spent the wee hours vomiting and was so dehydrated that Kimmy decided to take him to the emergency room. Now everyone was recuperating at home. Kimmy only got about two hours of sleep. When I’d called ahead to ask if she might want to rest instead of talk, she didn’t hesitate. “Come on over,” she said cheerfully. Life is always chaos, she seemed to say.

When I walked in, Kimmy was all warmth and energy, giving me a huge hug despite this being our first time meeting in person. In her and Chris’s whirlwind of a home, she was answering questions, calling to her kids, texting someone. She folded laundry in short, clipped movements, then gave Alexa instructions as she showed me the house. She pointed to Chris’s bold paintings on the walls and to an extra-long wooden farmhouse table built by a friend and big enough to host Friendsgivings where no one is turned away. “We have an open-door policy,” Chris says.

Chris and Kimmy’s loved ones describe Chris as the mellow yin to her energetic yang. With her compact, muscular frame, she looks like she could launch into a back handspring at any moment. When she speaks, her eyebrows arch, her eyes grow wide, and her forehead crinkles. Her words are sometimes staccato, as if she doesn’t want to waste time drawing out syllables. But I also notice that in quiet moments, when she’s not animated for the sake of another person, her face can look steely and intense. She has the sort of grit that reminds me of a story I once heard about a wolverine that chewed its way through a metal cage.

“Nobody is tougher than Kimmy,” says Kelly Clark, a three-time Olympic medalist and fellow Burton rider. “But she’s the nicest person you’ll ever meet too. She’s bubbly and sweet and so kind—and then she won’t take no for an answer.”

This determination has helped Kimmy become a bit of a unicorn in the world of professional snowboarding. Most athletes are through their prime by their early thirties, but Kimmy is 40 and has remained a prominent name for decades.

Even as a kid, she set a brisk pace. Her mom raised her, an only child, in a cabin on the outskirts of Truckee, near Lake Tahoe, where at times it snowed so much they couldn’t see the neighbors’ houses above the snowbanks. She was skiing at two and racing by five.

At the same age, she started taking gymnastics classes and got into it right away, loving all the flips, jumps, and handstands. At nine, she got on a snowboard. Her body awareness and comfort in the air helped her excel. She landed her first backflip when she was 14, on a jump that she and her friends built in her backyard. The move would become her signature at a time when few athletes her age could pull one off. In 1999, when she was 15, she won a national slopestyle title, earning a sponsorship from Burton. She won the next two years as well. She was the rare combination of an intense overachiever and a rebel, drawn to snowboarding for its fuck-it-all ethos.

For years, Kimmy and her husband, Chris Benchetler, kept the documentary secret, not quite sure where it would lead. The project became something much more real than either of them expected.

In her early twenties, with the support of DC Snowboards, she stepped away from contests and into the growing realm of backcountry riding. Few women snowboarders were doing this at the time, but Kimmy embraced the challenge, loving the freedom and creative license. Production companies tapped her for film parts, and between trips to Japan, British Columbia, New Zealand, and Chile, she often spent nine months of the year on snow. In 2011, she became the first woman snowboarder to land a double backflip in both a terrain park and the backcountry. That same year, just after she married Chris, she re-signed with Burton, with the promise that the company would put serious resources behind her back-country riding.

Entering her thirties, Kimmy was hitting her peak. In many ways, her life was like a dream. In 2016, she was named ´dz’s Rider of the Year by Snowboarder and Trans-world Snowboarding. On social media, she posted images of shimmering mountain tableaus, people catching air framed only by blue sky, riders floating through billowy mounds of blue-white snow, and crystalline peaks mirrored in lakes. In videos, she careened through trees or across untracked meadows with an amazed grin and her long locks trailing behind. She was gleeful, all heart, and immersed in the wild pursuit of fun. In photo captions, she celebrated others, expressing gratitude for everything and everyone—her parents, her friends, the mountains, the earth, the weather.

When she and Chris decided to start a family, she didn’t want to give any of that up. But the majority of her contracts didn’t include protections for pregnancy. Gathering her courage, she asked Donna Carpenter, then CEO of Burton and a mom herself, if they could rewrite the terms. Carpenter said yes. The new agreement included the provision that pregnancy would no longer be considered a medical condition and that her contract couldn’t be terminated on that basis. It also put in writing that she’d be less available for six months around the due date, offered her more freedom to skip events, and provided travel expenses for a companion for any event or filming appearance while she was breastfeeding. She persuaded her other sponsors, including Dragon Alliance, and Mammoth Mountain to change their contracts in similar ways.

“Kimmy was the first pro snowboarder to really embrace motherhood and shine a light for all of us that we can be an athlete and a mother,” says Jamie Anderson, a two-time Olympic medalist and 21-time X Games medalist who had her first child in early 2023. “Five or ten years ago, if you had a kid, it was kind of career suicide. But since she has been such a big part of this movement, I feel like sponsors are starting to respect it and make room for moms in the industry.” Later other athletes, sometimes in other sports, drew upon the contract language she helped craft when they decided to become parents, too. At least on paper, everything lined up for Kimmy to do it all.

Snowball-fighting with her husband
Snowball-fighting with her husband (Photo: Todd Glaser)
Snowball-fighting with her husband
(Photo: Todd Glaser)

Sitting on the couch in her home in Mammoth, surrounded by kids’ toys and freckled with morning light streaming through oversize windows, Kimmy tells me that things are different now. She has always been goal oriented, hyper-competent, a consummate go-getter. But these days she forgets stuff, a result of the emotional roller coaster of the past few years, the hectic pace of mothering two small children, and the lingering fog of chemo brain. She spent a year in treatment and still feels the side effects of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. She goes days without remembering to look at the mail. Her email inbox was once uncluttered but is now up to 5,000.

The other day, for the first time, she left her credit card somewhere, probably at a gas station. Maybe she accidentally put it in the trash? And shit, she just realized that her friend Cara is coming in today and not tomorrow, and we’re already late to go pick her up from the airport. She and Chris run six businesses, including their athletic careers, Chris’s art and film production, vacation rentals, and a small real estate practice. They also oversee a nonprofit, the Benchetler Fasani Foundation, that connects people to nature after they’ve undergone loss or hardship. Life is joyful, stuffed-to-the-brim, thinly managed havoc, and she is used to it. She seems to hold things together through pure energy and willpower. But in the car on the 45-minute drive to the Bishop airport, Kimmy tells me that it didn’t always feel OK.

When she arrived in Japan in early 2019, she was itching to get back to work. Chris, Koa, Tyler, and a nanny came for the first few weeks so she could get used to being on snow again, but things weren’t flowing, even in the endless powder of Hokkaido. When she was with Koa, ten months old at the time, she felt the pull of the mountains and craved the feelings of weightlessness, speed, and pure presence that she loved so much. But her gut churned as she kissed Koa goodbye and he screamed and shook his fists. On the slopes, part of her was still with her baby, and she couldn’t quite concentrate. She kept falling, over and over, not feeling fully present
in either place.

Kimmy began to realize that it wasn’t just a sense of love and responsibility that made her feel anxious when she was away from Koa. She was suffering from postpartum depression and navigating a long-ago childhood trauma, whose effects resurfaced when she became a mother. Between the ages of five and ten, she had been molested by a cousin who babysat for her. Now, with a kid of her own, the terror and anxiety of the experience reemerged in new ways. She had only shared that history with a handful of close people, and she didn’t trust anyone with Koa except Chris. But at the same time, she felt a magnetic pull to return to her life’s passion and feared she might lose an important part of herself if she didn’t listen to her calling.

Thanks largely to marketing pressures, pro athletes are often expected to package their personal lives for public consumption on social media. Before Kimmy had kids, she curated her feed, sharing genuinely and spontaneously but also with some restraint. As her personal life grew more complex, she felt compelled to share even more openly—with her friends and her audience. Sometimes being in front of the camera was actually therapeutic. In these moments, she would plop down for an interview, Tyler would turn the camera on, and she’d just talk for an hour before he even asked her a question. “The camera was a form of journaling,” she says. “Because we did it so frequently, it captured the essence of the roller coaster we were on. It was a release for me to be able to talk through it.”

Chris and Kimmy met in 2003 in an ice cream shop, when he was 17 and she was 19, and they quickly bonded over their shared experiences of losing their fathers to cancer. They not only both had a passion for the mountains, but also a certain emotional depth and sensitivity. For years, they made their peripatetic lives work, sometimes not seeing each other for many weeks and crossing paths for a few hours in airports. But adding children to the mix convoluted their schedules even more and almost put them over the edge. Occasionally, Tyler happened to be in the room when things got heated—even as their arguments skirted the d-word.

“Kimmy was the first pro snowboarder to really embrace motherhood and shine a light for all of us that we can be an athlete and a mother,” says Jamie Anderson, a two-time Olympic medalist.

While Kimmy struggled to find her ground in the mountains after having children, Chris’s career was flowing. He was working on a collaborative ski film with the Grateful Dead—2019’s Fire on the Mountain, which he considers one of the most rewarding projects of his life—and creating graphics for a line of Atomic skis named after him. She was happy for him but wished she had the same support—from both her partner and the industry—to pursue her own dreams. Now and then during their arguments, Kimmy reached her limit and screamed at Tyler to turn the camera off.

“It was extremely tough at times,” Chris says. “A lot of those moments Tyler filmed are Kimmy and me at our rawest. I imagine couples have disagreements on that level in most relationships, but very few have a fly on the wall that captures the tension.” Sometimes, Tyler left the room, uncertain about professional and personal boundaries.

Typically with action-sports movies, the cinematographers and athletes arrive on site, head into the field with a plan, work hard to get the shots, and wrap in a matter of days or weeks. Whether the action involves athletes arcing through untracked powder or surfers riding big waves, the result is often a glossy dream, a beautiful mirage others can aspire to.

This film, a feature documentary called Butterfly in a Blizzard, was different from anything any of them had worked on before. Kimmy and Chris funded it themselves to retain editorial control. No one could tell them what to do or when, but that also made it hard to decide when it was done. Every time they thought they were finished, the plot thickened. In Japan, when Kimmy was freshly back on the job after maternity leave, she broke her wrist. In Revelstoke, British Columbia, where she was leading a crew of men for a Burton film, Koa experienced a freak case of life-threatening kidney failure, and she had to evacuate him before a giant storm rolled in.

There were also bright moments, like a trip to Svalbard, Norway, on a small boat with a group of athletes and filmmakers. Kimmy and Chris brought Koa, who miraculously slept 12 hours a night, lulled by the peaceful rocking of the boat, while they took turns carving huge arcs in the steep slopes of the fjords, in the lingering daylight of spring.

Through it all, Tyler kept filming. He had never shot something quite like this and even needed to buy a new, smaller, and more portable camera for it. There wasn’t a big crew. It was just him, capturing the big, ordinary, momentous, difficult, and tender moments of family life. “At one point I asked myself, what did I get myself into?” he says. “It was a lot of becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable.”

Chris sketching out ideas for a body-painting session. Once he finished, the whole family approved the results.
Chris sketching out ideas for a body-painting session. Once he finished, the whole family approved the results. (Photo: Todd Glaser)
Chris and Kimmy during a body-painting session.
(Photo: Todd Glaser)
Chris and Kimmy during a body-painting session.
(Photo: Todd Glaser)
Chris and Kimmy during a body-painting session.
(Photo: Todd Glaser)
Chris and Kimmy during a body-painting session.
(Photo: Todd Glaser)
Chris and Kimmy during a body-painting session.
(Photo: Todd Glaser)

Throughout the town of Mammoth Lakes, the mountains have a dark omnipresence. The shadows of their ultra-steep slopes appear between the trees, houses, and businesses, as if reminding you that you’re not far from what’s wild. Kimmy moved here in the early 2000s because it was the center of a rowdy park-and-pipe scene with massive jumps and pros pushing the limits. She stayed because the high mountains are in her blood and she can’t really live without them. They are her refuge, her solace, and her teacher.

When Kimmy was 14, her father was diagnosed with lung cancer. Her parents had never been married, and her dad was different from other dads. When she spent time with him, he’d often be drunk by 11 in the morning. They watched horror movies while he chain-smoked. If she was thirsty, he’d offer her a sip of his screwdriver. But he also helped introduce her to the outdoors, taking her hunting and fishing, persuading her to dive through lakeside thickets to retrieve the ducks he shot. She loved it. When he died five months after his diagnosis, Kimmy was devastated. She retreated to the mountains, riding straight through from first chair to last.

Snowboarding was pure fun, but the wide-open spaces offered more than that: they allowed the intensity of her emotional life to dissolve into something larger than herself. She didn’t have words for this feeling at the time, but it was a way to find presence and peace. She felt attuned, in the flow. “That was my first attachment to nature and how powerful it can be in hard times,” she says. “That became this guiding light for me.”

She has needed it. As a pro athlete, Kimmy is expected to be an emissary of stoke, packaging her adventures and misadventures into tidy positive narratives. But life doesn’t always conform to that script. In 2010, when she was landing some of the biggest tricks of her life, professional skier C. R. Johnson, Kimmy’s childhood friend and first love, died in an accident at the resort now known as Palisades Tahoe. In 2012, her friend Sarah Burke, a pioneering freeskier, died after a crash in the halfpipe. Just after receiving the two Rider of the Year awards in 2016, she lost her mom, who had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s follicular lymphoma, which mutated into large B-cell lymphoma, and exited on her own terms through California’s right-to-die legislation.

Kimmy has broken her pelvis, foot, thumb, wrist, and both arms, dislocated her elbows twice, compressed vertebrae, and torn her ACL, MCL, and PCL all at the same time. At one point, she was on bedrest for three months, binge-reading self-help books, marinating in misery and quiet. While many athletes might have retired, she took three painstaking years to rebuild her knee and her strength.

“I thought about it over the years, what kept me coming back,” she told me as we were driving to pick up Cara from the airport. “I really think it was an addiction to that feeling of presence. And I liked how I was able to progress and push myself and find different limits or boundaries that not many other women were doing at the time.” But a few minutes later, she also idly wondered about the connection between elite athleticism and trauma.

“There’s an element there—so many of us are striving for similar validation, whether it’s internal or external,” she says. “Because it’s really hard to put it into words why I returned after the most catastrophic injuries or the craziest sicknesses when I could have just walked away. I could have put all my cards on the deck and been like, I’m good.”

As viewers will see, adding children to the mix convoluted their schedules even more and almost put Kimmy and Chris over the edge. Chris says that, at times, their arguments skirted the d-word.

One reason she kept at it was the chance to use her voice and the platform afforded by her accomplishments to create a better sport. Even as she got more film parts, for example, she battled misogyny in the field. She was constantly fighting to get on male-dominated film teams because there simply weren’t any comprised of all women. She sensed that a lot of the men didn’t want women along, that it would make them look weaker. There were double standards. Chris noticed, too.

“In an area where guys can make a lot of mistakes, get their sleds stuck, crash in the landings, and create bomb holes, Kimmy had to be strategic, land everything, and always show up early,” he says. “There was a lot of pressure to be on top of her game, and little room for emotion.”

Kimmy battled sexism in other ways. She spoke up to marketing executives when she saw ad campaigns that demeaned women, and she launched a weeklong event with photo shoots and riding sessions for women pros. On jumps the size of small houses, they spun, flipped, gapped, and fell—laughing, hair flying in all directions, skin flushed from cold air and adrenaline. Unbound by the pressures of competition, it felt like pure freedom and creativity.

Video loading…

Kimmy and Chris felt a similar motivation to keep the cameras rolling in their life together. They hoped that sharing their struggles would help others reckon with theirs. That desire to inspire other people and start important conversations spurred them to continue filming during the biggest challenge yet: In 2021, about nine months after Zep was born, Kimmy discovered a lump in her right breast.

Within days, she was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer, which had already moved to her lymph nodes and epidermis. The doctor barely needed to examine her, because a tumor was visible in her right breast. “She looked at me and was like, ‘We need to get you into chemo ԴǷ,’ ” Kimmy says. Six rounds of extra-strength treatment—one every three weeks for over four months—quickly transformed the strong, vibrant 37-year-old into a patient fighting for even a shred of normalcy. The infusions were medieval. It was hard to eat. Everything tasted like tarnished metal, and even drinking water was a struggle. She could hardly walk from the bedroom to the bathroom without leaving diarrhea all over the floor. Infections wracked the inside of her mouth, and crippling fatigue settled in like a dark cloud. She lost 20 pounds in a matter of weeks. The worst part was listening to Zep cry uncontrollably because he had to be weaned prematurely at nine months. Later, she had a double mastectomy and 30 rounds of radiation over six weeks.

Through her year of treatment, Kimmy was transformed. Motherhood had already cracked her open, particularly on social media, where she shared details about her struggle to find balance, including the trials around Koa’s medical crisis. But cancer obliterated what remained of her defenses, and she had no choice but to be even more vulnerable and real.

Kimmy underwent what she describes as an involuntary stripping down. She lost her hair, her breasts, her fitness, the clarity of her mind, her identity as a functioning human being with a life and a future beyond sterile instruments and infusion chairs. At one point, she was walking around the neighborhood pushing a double stroller—with no hair, a newly flattened chest, and sunken cheeks—and she realized that people were quietly staring, not knowing what to make of her. She was in a dark tunnel of discomfort. Through it all, Tyler kept filming.

In some ways, Kimmy felt that her whole life had prepared her for this—as much as anyone could be prepared, anyway. She had been seasoned by the extremes of triumph and loss, beauty and challenge. Those endless days in the mountains had trained her well: hitting jump upon jump, falling and springing up again. She had practiced withstanding that groundless feeling of charging down a line so steep and convex, she couldn’t see where it led.

Tyler had tried to maintain some degree of distance while filming, but this was extreme. With Kimmy doing chemo and Chris wrangling the kids by himself, there were times when Tyler set the camera down and just helped. It was a hard choice to put their family on display during such a challenging time, but Kimmy wanted to keep the cameras rolling, a sincere effort to find meaning in what seemed senseless and random.

From left: Koa, Chris, Zeppelin, and Kimmy
From left: Koa, Chris, Zeppelin, and Kimmy (Photo: Todd Glaser)

In late 2022, Kimmy successfully completed her cancer treatment. She’ll still need scans every six months for five years, but so far the cancer hasn’t returned, and she doesn’t live in fear of it. Just after finishing treatment, her friend Travis Rice, a pioneering pro snowboarder, came to visit and get in some early-season turns at Mammoth together. He was impressed with her riding and spirit, and invited her to return to the Natural Selection Tour—a challenging big-mountain contest with backcountry snowboarding’s best athletes—in 2023. Back on snow, and placing an impressive third, it felt like she had come full circle and she, Chris, and Tyler agreed to stop filming.

Butterfly in a Blizzard will hit the festival circuit soon and will be shown more widely in 2025. The final cut homes in on Kimmy’s social and emotional transition into caring for children, a process known to mental health professionals as matrescence.

“That’s the root of the story,” says Rose Corr, the film’s codirector and editor. “But Kimmy’s story is just one of such resilience and strength. I hope people have an understanding of the shift into parenthood, but I also want them to be inspired by her, what she’s gone through, and where she is now.”

Kimmy is an early riser, and before I leave Mammoth, she and I meet at Black Velvet Coffee Roaster first thing on a bright, sunny morning. We climb to the very top floor of the three-story shop, where the sunlight and a cool mountain breeze pour in through open windows.

Having recently turned 40, she’s been reflecting on her career and what’s next. Retirement or even slowing down aren’t really in her vocabulary. Still, a good career evolves, and she’s been contemplating moving into more of a mentorship role, helping the next generation of riders push the sport further.

“I do think the film is a culmination in my career,” she says. “It’s the first time people will really see inside our life. There have been so many comments about us being ‘the power couple,’ but behind closed doors, we are just people trying to learn how to be better humans, navigate relationships, and balance family and tragedy and loss.”

Kimmy, a self-described “passionate control freak,” is fond of saying that resilience is a muscle you have to condition. But in these past few years, she’s learned that sometimes to be resilient, you have to let go of things—including your stories about yourself. Life can always present some new form of chaos that demands you stretch in a new way. It’s always asking you to become a more authentic version of yourself, she tells me. In the coffee shop, she brings up some footage on her phone. It’s of her snowboarding a line that helped her into that reservoir of resilience, in a moment when she wasn’t in perfect control.

There she is in the Chilkat Range outside Haines, Alaska, in the spring of 2015. The peaks glow with morning sun, and Kimmy jumps out of a helicopter perched on a ridgeline that looks as sharp as an upturned ax. Vertiginous spines plunge thousands of vertical feet around her, at angles upwards of 60 degrees. As the helicopter peels away, she is left alone in a vast expanse of peaks and glaciers. It’s the first time she has stood atop a line like this. Her board balances on the ridge’s razor edge, air beneath both nose and tail.

Snowboarding was pure fun, but the wide-open spaces offered more than that: they allowed the intensity of Kimmy’s emotional life to dissolve into something larger than herself.

She tells me what it was like to stare down that impossible-looking face. She was terrified, but knew she couldn’t “freak out,” she says. “I just had to sit there and be like: OK, you know what you’re doing.” She needed to trust her feet, her body, and the instinct and muscle memory she’d developed over so many years.

In the video, she tips her board downward. “When you start riding, it’s almost a blackout. You’re in the flow state and beyond the flow state,” she says, her eyes bright and intense. “You’re breathing with the mountain. The mountain takes a breath, you take a breath. You move, the mountains move.”

I watch as she rides across huge runnels of snow she hadn’t expected to be so big. This is part of riding in Alaska—it’s giant and remote, which makes it nearly impossible to predict exactly what you’ll encounter. The flutes are as big as her body and alternately stiff and soft, with a sharp edge that could easily hook her board if she tried to turn. After straight-lining a few hundred feet, she finally arcs a big left, airs off some rocks, lands, then loses her balance. She starts cartwheeling, tomahawking 12 times down the mountain, disappearing into a cloud of snow.

Later, Travis Rice tells me that mastering the art of falling distinguishes good athletes from great ones. “You learn a lot from the falls,” he says. “It’s the uncomfortable situations that are our greatest teachers.”

The footage doesn’t capture this, but Kimmy finally comes to a stop. She waits for the dizziness to subside, blinks, and cleans the snow from her goggles. She feels intensely alive, invigorated and connected, even a little proud. She stands up and shakes out the jitters. The worst has happened, and she’s still here.

Want more of ϳԹ’s in-depth longform stories? .

From September/October 2024
Filed to:
Lead Photo: Todd Glaser