During a road trip through Utah last year, Krystin brews up some cold smoke on a particularly snowy day at Alta, UT. Photo: Eric Sales IN MAY 2021 , Krystin was digging dirt at Red Bull Formation, a women’s freeride mountain bike event in southern Utah, when she met Katie Lozancich, a photographer working on the Nexus project. When Krystin saw the Nexus trailer online, she reached out to Lozancich and the other filmmakers. “I love what you’re doing,” she wrote. “But I think something is missing—and what’s missing is our story.” Krystin wanted to show that you don’t have to come from a long lineage of skiers to become a skier yourself, that a family connection to skiing can start in a single generation. “Someone against all odds—like our mothers—can discover skiing and fall in love with it,” Krystin says. She proposed to the filmmakers that they film a segment about her and her cousin Sasha, a unique story about a family’s connec-tion to skiing. “I was like, ‘Are we allowed to say that?’” Sasha says. “It’s direct and bold. Krystin is so good at that.” The filmmakers didn’t need convincing. “At the time, we weren’t sure if we were even going to be able to raise enough money to make the film, but we also knew we had to incorporate Sasha and Krystin’s story,” says Shannon Corsi, director of Nexus. “You don’t see a lot of stories like theirs told. The way their moms passed on their care for their communities, the home they found in skiing and the way they passed that legacy on—it has this ripple effect.” Shannon appreciated that Sasha and Krystin followed separate routes to reach similar peaks. “They both have this shared goal of wanting to show up for their communities,” she says. When you ask Liên and Cúc what they are most proud of when it comes to their daughters, they both pause, overcome with emotion. “My daughter has always known what she has wanted and has stuck to it. Determination is her strength,” Liên says of Krystin. “She gives the gift of her time with direct help and care to her communities.” In ancient Greek, the name Sasha means “helper of mankind,” and Cúc says that’s exactly what her daughter is. “I always wanted women to have a voice,” Cúc says. “When you love the outdoors, you take care of yourself, you take care of everybody else and you take care of the environment. That’s why we introduced our kids to skiing.” As Cúc says this, Sasha is sitting in on our Zoom call, the two of them tiny, grainy boxes on a screen hundreds of miles apart, but very much on the same page. Sasha laughs, as if in awe, at her mom’s response. She knows the mission statement of her own life’s work is nearly identical—to reclaim health through a deep relationship with oneself, with others, and with the natural world. “That’s something you passed on to me, mama,” Sasha re-sponds. “You really did shape me, completely. Being different is a strength and you always modeled that for me. My family allowed me to be who I wanted to be.” Krystin poses with her mother Liên on Krystin’s wedding day, April 17, 2022. Krystin and her husband Peter Brigham were married on snow in Southback at Crystal Mountain with their closest ski friends and parents present. Of course it was a bluebird powder day. Photo: Ryan French Hùynh Family 067
The Ski Journal Volume 16, Issue 4: Page 67
