The Ski Journal - Volume 17, Issue 3
STICKING IT OUT WITH ALISON GANNETT
Words: JOSÉ DA SILVA 2023-12-04 10:20:42
Alison Gannett pushed her way onto the Teton Gravity Research heli in the mid-90s and went on to write her name in the history books, earning a TGR Hall of Fame nod and opening the door for women freeskiers to follow. Photos: Tony Harrington
Since 2017, Teton Gravity Research has inducted athletes from their early films into the TGR Hall of Fame. Alison Gannett, female freeskiing pioneer, is the latest to be added to the Hall.
It was 1997 in Valdez, AK, and Alison Gannett was broke. She couldn’t pay the hotel bill, she couldn’t pay for food, and she certainly couldn’t pay for a seat in the helicopters that left from the small fishing village each day headed for the Chugach Range. “There was a guy from Burton [Snowboards] with a $100,000 travel budget. I was eating saltines with ketchup,” Gannett recalls.
Steve, Todd and Jeremy Jones were also in Valdez to film their second Teton Gravity Research film. They had debuted a year prior with The Continuum. Gannett had just quit a day job in environmental science and begun her freeskiing career. She was desperate to be in the next film, but there was never room for her in the TGR chopper.
“It was a boys club at that point,” she says. “But day after day, week after week, people kept getting hurt. And I was like, ‘You know what, I’m just going to stick it out until they have to take me.’ And then one day they said, ‘Okay Alison, you’re up.’”
Harvest, that second film, featured TGR’s first female segment: Alison Gannett skiing “the best straight line” snowboarder Jeremy Jones had ever seen. It was a revolution—not only for her, but for women’s skiing in general. At that time, many women’s segments were frivolous.
Gannett had appeared in ski films before Harvest, and she remembered one part for a Warren Miller film she described as “foofy.” The film crew positioned her at the base of a tree and instructed her to wait for a male skier to fly by and smack the trunk so that snow would shake out of the branches and onto her. One year after Harvest, Gannett won the Freeskiing World Championship and appeared as the only female skier in Uprising, TGR’s third film. For the next 20 years she skied around the world for TGR and Matchstick Productions. Despite the success, she often felt she had to continue to prove she could match the boys. “TGR opened the door,” she said. “But after that it was still a lot of hard work. And I ended up with a two-decade skiing career that was amazing.” Coverage of Gannett often mentions these years only in passing. Instead, it usually focuses on her later, achievements. A few years after she won the world championship, she started Rippin Chix, freeski clinics specifically for women. In 2004, she founded the non-profit Save Our Snow. She worked on Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Project—and ultimately forwent helicopters and snowmobiles to avoid their carbon emissions. She traveled New England on bicycle to deliver presentations on climate change.
In 2010, she and her husband moved to Holy Terror Farm in Paonia, CO, to grow their own food. They went to the grocery store for the final time in April of that year. But farm life wasn’t isolated from the real world. Doctors found a terminal brain tumor in 2013 and gave Gannett six to eight months to live. That was over a decade ago.
Gannett and her husband still live at Holy Terror. She skis less than she used to. When she does, it’s usually at Powderhorn, a local mountain, or to get around the farm. Still, Gannett uses lessons learned during her freeskiing days. Whether it’s the unfamiliar terrain of subsistence farming, the intricacies of climate change, or her improbable recovery from cancer, she confronts a problem the same way she broke down hard lines. “Separate it into easy chunks, until it isn’t so difficult anymore,” she says.
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