SASHA AND KRYSTIN continued following their passion for skiing, but not as the singular entity their mothers had once imagined. Krystin coached freeride programs at Crystal Mountain and Alpental in Washington state and, in 2018, with help from K2 Skis and Fremont Brewing, she launched the SheJumps Snowpack Scholarship to give women access to avalanche education. “I grew up skiing. It was given to me as a gift,” Krystin says. “But not ev-eryone gets that. I wanted other women to able to afford avalanche safety courses without that barrier to education.” Sasha, meanwhile, found her place in skiing too. After spend-ing a year teaching in Vietnam on a Fulbright scholarship, Sasha returned to the United States and won the Freeskiing World Tour in 2013, earning a coveted spot on the Freeride World Tour. Sasha carved her own path, but she also recognized that the ski industry didn’t exactly reflect the wide, diverse community she’d learned to thrive in beyond the resort boundaries. “I don’t feel like I belong in the ski industry in the form of rep-resentation or access to sponsorships and opportunities outside of those that I’ve built myself through winning competitions,” Sasha says. “But I’ve always belonged in skiing, and I feel lucky that my sport takes place outside because I’ve always belonged there too.” Sasha competed on the Freeride World Tour for a year but began battling chronic pain, forcing her to lean heavily into meditation and mindfulness as a means to recovery. Now 34 years old, she’s left competing behind and runs a meditation business in Victor, ID, called Mountain Mind Project, where she trains athletes and others in meditation for resilience and better performance. Krystin, 32, works as a senior coffee quality specialist at Starbucks in Seattle. Both have worked and competed as professional skiers, yet they hadn’t had a chance to ski together since they were kids. Those divergent paths reunited finally on a brilliant, clear day at Crystal Mountain, WA, when the cousins climbed into the gondola to-gether. From the top they could see Mount Rainier slathered in early-morning light. They hiked Silver King, a towering inbounds peak at Crystal, scouting their lines. From the top, Sasha ripped big, arcing turns down a smooth face, while Krystin picked her way through a more technical route. “While Sasha and I have a lot in common, we’re also very different people,” Krystin says. “We have different energy levels and unique ways of looking at the hill.” They were there filming a part for Nexus , a new, narrative-driven ski movie, which was released in the fall of 2022. The Arc’teryx project tells the story of women skiers through their con-nections to each other and the world around them. For Krystin and Sasha, that meant sharing their own stories, but also those of their mothers, Cúc and Liên—two women who crossed oceans and learned to live in a new country, who taught their daughters they could be anything they wanted. Cúc blew out her ACL while on a date with Steve—it was only her second time skiing. Pictured here in 1982, a year after knee surgery, she picked up cross-country skiing to keep moving on snow. Photo: Dingle Family Archives Sasha draws upon her Freeride World Tour background as she navigates through Crystal Mountain, WA’s lift-serviced backcoun-try. Crystal Mountain is Krystin’s home resort, and their film project presented a unique opportunity for her to take Sasha to some of her favorite zones. Photo: Katie Lozancich All the members of the Dingle family were comfortable as disrupt-ers. Steve was an early adopter of snowboarding in Vermont. Adrian (age 6, bottom right) spent all his time in the halfpipe and building jumps and rails in the backyard. Sasha (age 9, bottom left) loved how in ski gear it was hard to tell if she was a girl or a boy. Photo: Dingle Family Archives 064 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 16, Issue 4: Page 64
