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Words: Alex Armstrong
I fell in love with skiing at 800 vertical feet—the height of Mont Ste-Marie, the hill I grew up skiing. If you had told younger Alex that I would be a full-time ski patroller at Lake Louise in my 20s and later chasing big mountain lines across the globe as a sponsored athlete, she wouldn’t have believed it.
My career thus far has been a series of fated redirections that I, in turn, chose to follow with fervor and drive. When I quit ski racing, it was chasing powder and ski coaching out west. Then, a friend offered me a ski patrol job for $7.75 an hour. After that, it was crashing a freeride comp so spectacularly that a ski company wanted to sponsor me.
I’ve leapt forward at every turn in this journey but held on to valuable lessons from each step. Some of my most cherished skills I've gained from these, what feels like past lives, are first aid and avalanche knowledge. These skills have served me well in the mountains, but I like to put them in a category I call "have it and hope you don’t use it.” Helmets, transceivers, avalanche gear and insurance also fall into that proverbial bin.
As a ski patroller and professional athlete, I’ve seen and experienced my fair share of injuries on the resort and in the backcountry. We practice various rescue scenarios—whether they be transceiver training for avalanche rescue, splinting up limb injuries or how to set up an emergency overnight bivy—but rarely think about what comes after we get out of the immediate danger and back into civilization.
As someone who’s had five knee injuries, I can tell you that once you’ve self-rescued, there are many steps and costs that follow. Luckily I live in Canada, and most surgeries and MRIs are covered, but physiotherapy outside of eight visits after surgery is not—and that adds up. Additionally, now that I travel more often for skiing, I always think about how financially and emotionally devastating a foreign hospital bill could be.
That’s why I’ve added insurance to my must-haves outside the classic skiers' packing checklist. Specifically, I've added Spot Insurance through Blister+. It not only covers most action sports like biking, skiing and alpine climbing, but it’s a year-long subscription so I can set it and forget it at the beginning of the season. My “have it and hope you don’t use it” bin is constantly growing, but so is my peace of mind and that bigger safety net that allows me to accept more risk in my life.
The latest big opportunity that’s come my way in this wild thing I call a ski career is my first and absolute dream heli trip to Alaska with Teton Gravity Research. I can assure you it's everything they say Alaska is and more—big, beautiful, demanding of respect and an adrenaline roller coaster. When you stand on the ridge across from a big Alaskan spine wall choosing your line, you play on this teeter-totter of excitement and fear with all sorts of thoughts running through your head.
My two big opposing fears are of failing, which means not skiing the line the way I want, and of getting hurt. When you ski high-consequence lines up there, those scenarios are both very much in the realm of possibilities.
I find that the best way to quiet those thoughts to focus on what you need to do in those moments is preparedness—prepared in the sense that you’ve trained hard in the gym and on snow, that you have a routine to manage all the heightened emotions and that you have your “have it and hope you don’t use it” bin/gear dialed.
Right now, as I write this, the ski season is winding down and I’m coming down from the adrenalized roller coaster that is big mountain skiing. The transition into the realm of leisure athlete is a welcome yet strange reprieve after the full-on pace and preparedness I spent cultivating. In this space climbing, biking, freediving and surfing are all on the menu, and none of them have any expectations of me. Though it may seem totally disconnected from my skiing, rest and reset are arguably just as important as my in-season work. A different kind of preparedness for the next season, you could say.
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