The Ski Journal - Volume 16, Issue 2
CHRISTINA LUSTENBERGER'S STRENGTH IN THE MOUNTAINS
Words: Heather Hansman 2022-10-31 11:24:08
“On an early morning en route to a big unskied line in the Purcell Mountains of British Columbia, Christina Lustenberger takes a minute to observe her approach.” Photo: Drew Smith
In March of 2021, deep in the guts of the COVID pandemic and stuck at home in Canada, Christina Lustenberger made her way to the top of a mountain that’s always been core to her sense of place. Mount Nelson, the 10,869-foot massif that rises above her hometown of Invermere, BC, had been on her mind since she was a kid—she could see it from the house she grew up in and from the chairlift as a young ski racer at nearby Panorama Mountain Resort.
“I remember being 12 and looking over my shoulder on the chair and thinking, ‘I wonder if you could ski that,’” she says.
At that point, no one had. It was in the back of her mind when she was away from Invermere, racing giant slalom on the World Cup circuit starting in 2003, and she was still dreaming about it when she transitioned into big mountain lines, ticking off other first descents from Baffin Island to the Bugaboos.
Finally, that March she recruited another Invermere kid, TGR athlete and big mountain charger Ian McIntosh, to make good on that childhood dream.
They each left their parents’ houses in the early hours of the morning, climbing over 6,000 vertical feet of cliff bands and chossy rock up the south face. When they stood on top, looking down at the valley they came from, they were elated, and aware of how much exposure lay below. They carved their way nearly 2,500 feet down a first descent of the fluted East Face. The slope ticks upward of 55 degrees in spots, but the snow was edgeable and firm as they picked their way past sharky rocks. They called their moms when they hit the apron, free of worry, full of pride.
“Not every day you get to score a first descent with your childhood friend on a peak that you’ve both admired since the very first time we strapped on a pair of skis,” McIntosh says about that day.
For Lustenberger, it was something else. “The whole day felt like such a magical thing,” she says. “From leaving our parents’ houses to getting it in such good condition, with a good friend. It felt like coming full circle.”
It’s a singular loop from dreamy chairlift grom to Olympic GS skier to guide putting down big first descents in front of the camera, and it’s one Lustenberger has been arcing over years of hard work, talent and grit. Her parents, Peter and Jane, met in 1977 while working at the CMH Monashees Heli-Skiing Lodge and went on to open a ski shop called Lusti’s (hence the family nickname Lustenberger carries with her) at the base of Panorama in Invermere. Lustenberger and her older sister, Andrea, grew up on the slopes, chasing their mother as she scoured the mountain for fresh snow. The younger Lustenberger joined the Windermere Valley ski team and then spent six years on the Canadian National Team as a GS specialist.
She was good. Really good. A top 10 finisher on the World Cup, she made the team for the 2006 Torino Olympics. The same precision and fire that earned her racing accolades is still visible when she slices big mountain turns—graceful and full of power, accelerating through every curve.
But she never really loved the gym training that went along with competing, or the rigidity of racing. Lustenberger would sneak touring gear into her ski bag when she traveled to race, so she could go out for a skin before training. She was already thinking about the mountains beyond the race course.
“I’d always felt like the black sheep on the ski team, more interested in fitness training outside rather than a three-hour workout under weights going up and down,” Lustenberger says. “It was a bit of a fight with the ski team to bring those [touring] skis along, but the more I did it, the more inspired I was to pursue the dream of exploring the mountains in a different way.”
She was already feeling the pull of bigger, wilder lines while she was racing on the World Cup circuit. Then she got hurt, and got hurt again. After five knee surgeries before the age of 25, she started thinking about her exit plan, a weird off-ramp to consider when your identity, livelihood and community are all tied to the pursuit of a podium.
“Ski racing is a dream that’s born at such a young age, but I realized that if I continued ski racing, I might not be able to ski for fun,” Lustenberger says. “I started thinking this isn’t forever, so what’s going to fill that void when I leave ski racing?”
Lustenberger thought about her “relationship with joy” a lot when she stepped down from the ski team in 2008 and started walking up a new mountain, trying to turn that page. She enrolled in a two-year ski guide program at Thompson Rivers University, which takes students through the process of becoming an ACMG guide. She started guiding at CMH and began filming with local production companies such as Sherpas Cinema. She also got sponsored as a big mountain athlete instead of a racer, applying her high-level focus and smooth, fast turns to big backcountry lines.
After the regimentation and routine of racing, Lustenberger has had to relearn her own limits, and to slowly build a diverse array of skills. “There are so many different complexities that weigh on you in the backcountry, and the weight of that is so much more self-driven, you’re making it up as you go along,” she says. “As those skills developed it’s allowed me to move into more complex, beautiful terrain. It’s opened up so many doors.”
Lustenberger’s acquired navigation skills, patience and the mental and physical strength to be in the mountains. It’s taken a long time and a precise strategy—it’s not something that can be muscled through. “You don’t want to be bold and jump out onto the biggest line in the beginning of your career. There’s a slow-rising way to move through the mountains,” Lustenberger says, acknowledging that boldness means you might not come back, a fact that’s always on her mind.
She’s been intentional about that slow rise, and her ascent has taken her up through the guiding ranks alongside her ascent as a backcountry athlete. Lustenberger says she keeps a photo album on her phone of big mountains she wants to ski, and she’s been ticking them off methodically with her combination of on-slope skills and a guide’s attention to detail.
“She pays attention to weather and tracks conditions on multiple lines all year to see when they will come into form, then she is ready to pounce,” says Tristan Droppert, the North American marketing manager for Black Crows, one of her sponsors. “Her appetite for unique lines seems insatiable.”
The same spring she notched the first descent of Mount Nelson with McIntosh, the pair also skied a first descent on the south face of British Columbia’s Mount Dunkirk with fellow Kootenaian Nick McNutt, and she was the first person to ski the Gold Card Couloir between British Columbia’s Mount Burnham and Mount Grady with Andrew McNab and Brette Harrington, the latter of whom has since become one of her favorite mountain partners.
Lustenberger originally put her name on the proverbial big mountain board after a 2018 first descent of Black Friar, a stunning couloir in the Adamants. And in 2020, she skied the South Face of Mount McDonald on Rogers Pass with Andrew McNab, a line with three stout ice pitches in the middle that locals had been looking at for years, and she’d been thinking about for nearly a decade.
At a time when not much terrain remains unskied, Lustenberger is finessing her way through lines that no one has successfully attempted. She says a lot of it comes from her patience, her planning skills and her capacity to suffer—which is probably all true—but it’s also a testament to her skills as a skier, and the way she calculates risk. “There are so many different complexities that weigh on you,” she says.
Despite the weight of that risk, there’s a huge amount of joy in how she approaches a pitch and how she makes it look easy in the process—seemingly cool on sketchy ascents and then skiing butter-smooth through steep couloirs, making the same angled turns she once made on the race hill. It’s a thrill to watch and lends itself particularly well to the silver screen.
But what may look graceful from a theater seat is anything but. Navigating the male-dominated, achievement-obsessed world of outdoor sports—and more specifically high-level backcountry skiin—is Lustenberger’s precarious constant, is a skill that requires as much forethought and planning as it does strength. She’s still figuring out the balance of risk and reward, how hard to push, and how to stake her own place as an athlete—particularly as a female athlete.
She says it’s hard to come off as strong and powerful without being perceived as aggressive, and she’s learning to advocate for herself in the mountains and in sponsorship negotiations. “The more strong and powerful you are, you can come off as an aggro bitch—it’s such a fine line to walk,” she says. “In some ways it’s probably silenced my word more; I try to be strong rather than talk strong.”
She says she wants to let her actions speak for her and credits her ski partners with helping her feel it out. She’s well-supported by both the good crew of skiers in Revelstoke, where she’s based, and her teammates from The North Face, such as Harrington and the late Hilaree Nelson, who she says will always be one of her biggest role models.
The same spring she notched the first descent of Mount Nelson with McIntosh, the pair also skied a first descent on the south face of British Columbia’s Mount Dunkirk with fellow Kootenaian Nick McNutt, and she was the first person to ski the Gold Card Couloir between British Columbia’s Mount Burnham and Mount Grady with Andrew McNab and Brette Harrington, the latter of whom has since become one of her favorite mountain partners.
Lustenberger originally put her name on the proverbial big mountain board after a 2018 first descent of Black Friar, a stunning couloir in the Adamants. And in 2020, she skied the South Face of Mount McDonald on Rogers Pass with Andrew McNab, a line with three stout ice pitches in the middle that locals had been looking at for years, and she’d been thinking about for nearly a decade.
At a time when not much terrain remains unskied, Lustenberger is finessing her way through lines that no one has successfully attempted. She says a lot of it comes from her patience, her planning skills and her capacity to suffer—which is probably all true—but it’s also a testament to her skills as a skier, and the way she calculates risk. “There are so many different complexities that weigh on you,” she says.
Despite the weight of that risk, there’s a huge amount of joy in how she approaches a pitch and how she makes it look easy in the process—seemingly cool on sketchy ascents and then skiing butter-smooth through steep couloirs, making the same angled turns she once made on the race hill. It’s a thrill to watch and lends itself particularly well to the silver screen.
But what may look graceful from a theater seat is anything but. Navigating the male-dominated, achievement-obsessed world of outdoor sports—and more specifically high-level backcountry skiin—is Lustenberger’s precarious constant, is a skill that requires as much forethought and planning as it does strength. She’s still figuring out the balance of risk and reward, how hard to push, and how to stake her own place as an athlete—particularly as a female athlete.
She says it’s hard to come off as strong and powerful without being perceived as aggressive, and she’s learning to advocate for herself in the mountains and in sponsorship negotiations. “The more strong and powerful you are, you can come off as an aggro bitch—it’s such a fine line to walk,” she says. “In some ways it’s probably silenced my word more; I try to be strong rather than talk strong.”
She says she wants to let her actions speak for her and credits her ski partners with helping her feel it out. She’s well-supported by both the good crew of skiers in Revelstoke, where she’s based, and her teammates from The North Face, such as Harrington and the late Hilaree Nelson, who she says will always be one of her biggest role models.
“I admire Hilaree for how she navigated and forged her own path as a female in the mountains. She was so inspiring, elegant and strong,” Lustenberger says. “She was just a strong human in the mountains. Strength in the mountains—that’s how I want to be perceived.”
It’s not always that simple, of course, but sometimes it all comes together and those actions speak volumes. This spring, Lustenberger, Nelson and Harrington went to Baffin Island to notch another first descent on a remote, highly technical 12,000-foot line that had a 480-foot serac icefall in the middle. It was a complicated descent with a steep couloir climb-in from the backside, the kind of route that requires a full suite of mountaineering skills.
“I spotted it from the air on the way in and immediately I was like, ‘We need to try this, nothing else matters, I’m so inspired,’” Lustenberger says. Harrington had the same thought—more proof of their connection in the mountains —and when the weather lined up, they skinned across the ice fields, climbed the serac and cleanly skied their way out. Lustenberger says it felt like everything was in equilibrium—good partners, good weather, the feeling that they were in the right place at the right time.
She said this from Spillimacheen, BC, where she and her husband Mike Verway own property. She was just back from Baffin Island and trying to take a break to reset her body and mind. At the same time her focus was already turning toward plans for next winter, which she’s queuing up in her phone gallery.
She admits she’s still working to figure out how to balance it all. She wants a sense of place, a way to establish herself, and to show how strong she is in the mountains. She wants to find a constant state of exploration that requires the pinnacle of her skills, but which doesn’t lead to burnout or keep her mom up at night. She wants a way to ski forever, and to find joy while she does.
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” she says. “I’m in this place in my career that’s getting really exciting. I’ve met some really inspiring partners and sponsors are giving me support for international trips, but I have local BC ski descents that are still on my phone, and that album of lines that haven’t been skied. I have lifetimes of skiing I want to do.”
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