The Ski Journal • Volume 18, Issue 1 • KAI JONES’ BIG MOUNTAIN CLASSROOM

Born to one of the most recognizable families in snowsports, Kai Jones has been skiing in Teton Gravity Research films since the age of 11. At 18 years old, he may be a young veteran, but he’s also just getting started. Jackson, WY. Photo: Nic Alegre

Kai Jones loves birthdays, but not just for the parties. May 5th, 2023, his 17th, marked the day he walked again after the worst day of his life. It was a sure sign that he would ski again.

Two months earlier, Kai was deep in the Teton backcountry shooting for Teton Gravity Research’s film Legend Has It in a zone he had skied dozens of times before. He dropped into the steep, pillowed face, a technical but familiar line. He felt confident, and his turns, graceful beyond his years, showed it. He aired deep, but clipped a rock on landing and started tumbling. When he came to a stop at the base of the apron, he was in the worst pain he’d experienced in his entire life. It felt like both of his legs had exploded.

After a swift heli evacuation and multiple emergency surgeries, the outlook was grim. He’d shattered both growth plates in his knees—not ideal for a teenager, much less a teenager whose entire life revolved around skiing. Lying in his hospital bed, “I had the realization that I might not ever walk again,” he recalls.

At 16, Kai could have just left it at that. He had already made his mark on the ski world, appearing in five TGR feature films, gathering three consecutive nominations as International Freesports Film Festival (IF3)’s Rider of the Year, even earning a coveted spot on the Red Bull athlete team at just 13 years old. Why go through what would be the hardest recovery of his life to put himself back out there? He thought he’d been aware of the risks he’d been taking, but suddenly the weight of this world felt heavier. He stared up at the Tetons outside his hospital window and wondered: Is this really what I want to do?

Kai was born into one of the most recognizable families in American snowsports. His uncle, Jeremy, made a name as a big-mountain snowboarder, pioneering a style of riding in Alaska and the greater ranges that’s still largely unmatched. Meanwhile, his other uncle, Steve, and his father, Todd, co-founded the iconic production company Teton Gravity Research in 1996, ushering in a new era of ski films. Growing up in this unlikely environment undoubtedly influenced the direction his life would go, but Kai asserts that he was always given the choice and opportunity to do what he wanted—which just happened to be skiing.

Kai’s polite, calm and collected demeanor hides a much deeper personality, one filled with unbridled excitement and above all, curiosity. He is the type of kid who wants to figure things out for himself, learn from personal experience, and understand how the world works from all different sides.

When asked whether he can remember his first day on snow, Kai shrugs and says he doesn’t, likely because it happened not long after his first steps. He learned the basics from his mom, Shelly and dad at their home hill, Grand Targhee, taking further inspiration from the characters he saw on screen in his dad’s films, particularly ones like Way of Life [2004] and Almost Ablaze [2014]. “By the time I was old enough to realize what was going on in those movies, I knew it’s what I wanted to spend my life doing,” says Kai. Sitting in his elementary school classroom, he would count down the minutes until the weekend, which meant two uninterrupted days of skiing with his friends.

Those were the early days of the youth competition free-ride scene in the Tetons, and Kai joined the Teton Valley Ski Education Foundation [TVSEF]’s freeride team when he was eight. Twenty minutes up the road from his home in Victor, ID, Targhee became his favorite playground, complete with everything from big mountain terrain to terrain parks and easy backcountry access. He traveled to Utah, Montana and California for junior competitions, and made friends all over the country. His local crew, made up of the likes of Tucker Carr and Luke and Wyatt Gentry, were just as obsessed with skiing as he was. They were an unstoppable pack of groms.

“I always saw my TVSEF team as the underdogs,” Kai says. “We were pretty competitive with the kids across the Pass in Jackson.”

In 2018, he became the U12 National Freeride Champion at Snowbird, and he started wondering if he could actually become a full-time professional skier.

Kai’s curiosity turned into obsession, and he devoured as much information as he could. When he was 11 years old, he eagerly joined TGR’s annual International Pro Rider Workshop [IPRW] alongside his idols, learning about backcountry safety and basic medical skills, and practicing rescue drills, all while finishing his math homework in the corner of the classroom during down time.

His first big break came later that year when TGR was scrambling to fulfill a contract requirement for a key media partner. A complicated nighttime shoot in Corbet’s Couloir had been planned, but the pieces weren’t coming together. “I remember my dad asking me to join in on a production meeting in his office, and not really knowing what I was there for,” says Kai. He was in the middle of spring break and discovered that he would be given the chance to film alongside Tim Durtschi at Jackson Hole for Far Out [2018]. The five-minute segment, and its subsequent release that went viral on YouTube, put him on the map for good.

“I had been filming with TGR for a few years at the point and didn’t even know Todd had a kid until I watched him drop into Corbet’s the year before,” says Durtschi. “But when we filmed that first segment together, I had never seen a father-son bond that’s so strong. It’s not Todd telling Kai what to do, it’s him sharing that dream and saying, ‘Do with it what you will.’”

The ski industry started taking a direct interest in Kai, and he couldn’t help but notice he was mostly portrayed as Todd Jones’s kid: the young TGR prodigy. He wasn’t the only pro skier to get his start young—just take a look at Sean Pettit, Kye Peterson and Pep Fujas—but growing up in a family rooted in ski media is an entirely different story. From an early age, Kai’s peers and closest friends were some of the biggest names in skiing. His sources of inspiration went far beyond the athletes he idolized; he studied the art of riding in front of the camera from the best of those behind it.

The following year, Kai returned to the International Freeskier & Snowboarder Association circuit, only to feel hate from some fellow competitors and online. He would constantly hear that he was only there because he was Todd’s kid, that his success was all nepotism, and that he was just some kid who had been born with a silver spoon. The jabs wore on Kai. He knew he had to keep working harder to prove that he belonged. “I had this deep motivation to prove myself beyond what I was hearing at comps and reading online,” he says.

Kai developed a close friendship with Durtschi, who quickly took on the role of mentor, both on and off the mountain. He spent summers developing his freestyle skills on Mount Hood, learned to ride a snowmobile in his Idaho backyard, and diligently practiced his mountaineering and avalanche rescue skills. He absorbed whatever he could when riding alongside older and more experienced skiers like Durtschi, Nick McNutt, Parkin Costain and Sammy Carlson, to name a few. He wrote out a list of local test piece lines he wanted to hit, from huge airs like Jackson’s famed Smart Bastard cliff, to climbing and skiing the Grand Teton.

In 8th grade, Kai transferred his education to the online Picabo Street Academy, which caters specifically to young athletes, allowing him to focus on skiing during the winter and academics in the warmer months. For Kai, that transition felt natural and much-needed, giving him the chance to keep his mind focused on one thing at a time. He wouldn’t have to cram long division homework in the back corner of the IPRW classroom anymore.

“I’m not so tapped into what you’d call the traditional teenage social life,” laughs Kai. “I feel lucky that my friends at home are into the same things, like taking advantage of the raw environment we grew up in.” In his world, balancing being a kid with being a pro skier felt pretty normal–he was just lucky enough to learn many of life’s lessons in the mountains alongside peers who were similarly chasing their dreams.

Winter was all about skiing, and summers were about finding joy outside. He practiced flips and spins on a backyard trampoline, built a summer rail setup from an old playground kit, and went on long hikes, scrambles and bike rides with his family and friends. Out skiing with his local friends, many of whom also had sponsorship deals from ski brands, a day on the hill shared elements of traditional teenage weekends–whole days filled with shenanigans, iPhone clips, bags of candy, talking about girls, TV shows, what their favorite pros were up to–all while stomping 40-foot cliffs, practicing double backflips and skiing as much powder as they could before their moms came to pick them up.

For the next few years Kai was faced with a sort of dilemma. His identity as a skier so far had been based on his rapid rise through the ranks as a grom, but he felt like something needed to shift for the industry to see him as more than just a childhood phenom. “Even though I was older, I was still just 11 in everyone’s head,” he says. “I really wanted to break out of that and be seen as not just good for my age, but as a real pro.” He says he felt that shift truly start when Red Bull offered him a full-time athlete contract in 2019, at the time making him one of the youngest-ever members of the company’s ski program.

That season, he finally found his stride, taking a mid-March trip to Girdwood, AK. “That first Alaska trip was so scary,” he remembers. “I didn’t really ski anything bigger than I would have at home.”

The massive peaks, steep spine walls and unique snowpack of the Chugach blew his mind, setting the tone for what was to come. He spent hours just flying around in the helicopter and didn’t ski the way he felt like he could. But he did learn the first in a series of important lessons about matching his curiosity and drive with patience.

That lesson paid off and his progression skyrocketed. “By the following season, I finally felt like I wasn’t skiing like a kid anymore,” he says. It was one big line after another, landing doubles in the backcountry, charging down couloirs in Cooke City, MT, and seeking out the tallest pillow stacks in British Columbia. He finally felt like his skiing could stand alone, no longer just an impressive little kid in his dad’s ski films.

“I see in him the joy of skiing,” says Durtschi, who has continued to film alongside Kai. “Learning, having goals, pushing yourself in a sport. It’s easy to get jaded, especially with a 20-plus year long career. Kai and his buddies keep me young. That younger generation is looking at skiing from a whole different perspective, and it re-inspires me every time I’m out with them. They’re still just thinking about the next pow day, not the next contract.”

Sixteen years old and heading into the 2023 season, Kai set even more ambitious goals, like securing a spot on the Freeride World Tour, tricking natural features he had previously straight-aired, and filming in as many new places as possible. “I felt like I was on top of the world” he says. “I thought that I was pretty much invincible.”

But on March 7th, 2023, on Teton Pass, his whole world came to a screeching halt. Instead of chasing weather windows with the TGR film crew, recovery was now a full-time job for Kai, hopping between his home in Victor, Vail’s Steadman Clinic, and Red Bull’s Athlete Performance Center in Santa Monica, CA. He was wheelchair bound for nearly two months following his crash. Then, he left the mountains and moved to Los Angeles for the summer, grinding through physical therapy while learning how to live alone for the first time. It was all the perspective he needed. “I couldn’t find a sense of community [in LA],” he says. “It really motivated me to put myself back together and move back to the mountains.”

As Kai progressed through his recovery, one week at a time, he developed a whole new mindset. Surrounded by his family and close friends, he began journaling, meditating and visualizing his return to skiing, doubling down on the fact that yes, this was his choice to make and there was only one clear answer. It’s an age-old story that many pro athletes know: season-ending injury, followed by an existential crisis, a recovery and new habits. Kai was thrust into it while his peers were planning to go to prom, get their driver’s licenses and study for the SATs. Not only was it the first real challenge of his career, it was an unmatched life moment of looking inward and growing up fast. No one would have blamed him if he wanted to take a step back from the high-risk path he was hurtling toward.

“When the Jones family puts their mind to something, it’s really cool to see what unfolds,” says Dutschi of Kai’s maturity through crisis. “If you look at it as an ethos for life, the Jones brothers didn’t want to follow the East Coast Boston path of prep school, college and a finance job. Kai’s the manifestation of that mentality.”

That fall, the moment Kai never thought would come had finally arrived. Returning to the Red Bull APC for his final return-to-sport tests, Kai was ecstatic to hit the mobility and strength numbers his physical therapist had wanted to see. In December 2023, he finally clicked into his skis again.

At first, it didn’t feel natural. He was shocked at how hard it felt to ski simple terrain around the resort, but quickly remembered the joy from the sensation of setting an edge, carving a turn and cruising around with his buddies—being a kid again on skis. Despite the slow start, Kai surprised himself with his progress. By mid-winter, he was back to building jumps in the backcountry, and stomped his first triple backflip alongside Durtschi and Parkin Costain.

Almost a year to the date after his accident, Kai flew up to Alaska to chase a weather window and near-perfect conditions with Canadian skier Alex Armstrong and his two biggest childhood heroes, Sage Cattabriga-Alosa and Ian McIntosh. Returning to Girdwood, he felt that internal fire building again, hungry as ever to push himself.

For Kai, this trip was more than just an “I’m back” moment, it was a coming of age. Sage and Ian, now the veterans on the TGR athlete roster, had learned everything they knew about Alaskan freeride skiing from Kai’s uncle Jeremy—where to put your sluff, how to manage your speed, when to stand down. “Mac’s always on about ‘orchestrating the mountain,’” laughs Kai. “But I know he learned that all from Jeremy, so it felt really special to keep that knowledge passed down in the family.”

Buoyed by the support of his idols, Kai stepped out into the biggest terrain of his life. The weather held for longer than expected, and the crew flew almost every single day of the multi-week trip, chasing lines first pioneered by TGR athletes in the ’90s. When asked about what he sees as his mentee’s next steps, Durtschi laughs and says, “The next big challenge? Skiing big lines in Alaska—but I guess he just did that. I’m sure Kai is going to keep surprising himself.”

In fact, later that spring, Kai raced up and down Mount Shasta with his uncle Jeremy before returning to the Tetons and putting his own tracks on a much-coveted ski mountaineering line—the Grand Teton’s Otter Body route, first skied by legends Doug Coombs and Mark Newcomb in 1997. The route towers high above the valley, connecting the east face to a hanging snowfield via a series of rappels. At 18, he became the youngest person to ever ski the line, which is visible through the windows of Jackson’s St. John’s Hospital. “I dreamed of skiing it when I was hurt and to be in a place where I could ski it a year later was unreal,” he says. “I turned the page and started a new chapter.”

The Ski Journal - Volume 18, Issue 1

KAI JONES’ BIG MOUNTAIN CLASSROOM

Issue List