“ONCE IT BECOMES A JOB, “Sometimes, I’ll be laying in bed in the dark— maybe it’s a level of PTSD—and I’ll tap into this feel-ing, recollecting,” he says. “What I remember most is the speed—I came into that tree so fast —and flying through the air, chunks of bark flying past my face.” Richardson and the CK9 crew helped stabilize Kuch and keep him warm for two-and-a-half gut-wrenching hours until a helicopter arrived. The crash was traumatic, but the break was straightforward. “Kuch says he was also lucky in that his bent and mangled cell phone quite possibly bore the brunt — of the impact. “Maybe it would’ve been a shattered situation instead of a nice, clean break,” he says. Kuch’s initial reaction after the accident and the surgery that resulted was unexpected. “I was grateful for the rest,” he says. It had been an action-packed few years for Kuch, and as potentially devastating as the injury was, it gave him a much-needed moment to breathe. In the months that followed, Kuch purposefully dis-tanced himself from skiing. He started by avoiding social media and committing to physical therapy, but progressed into less-healthy distractions. A spring spent healing spi-raled into a blurry summer of heavy partying. “Once I was off crutches and on a cane, I was missing an outlet for my energy,” he confesses. “It was just this backwards phase of recklessly abusing my body. I was still doing physio, but just completely tuned out.” He credits his partner with pulling him out of the spiral, saying that a mutual decision to pivot away from partying may have saved his career. Back on snow the following winter, Kuch quickly regained his excitement for skiing and refocused on his return. Using his unspent travel budget, he and Richardson took off to New Zealand for a feel-good comeback tour last September. They made a casual edit from the trip—no pressure, all passion–a throwback to Kuch’s formative years spent lapping Whitewa-ter’s low-key slopes. “Coming back felt so good,” Kuch says. The duo had big plans for 2023, hoping to turn their one-year project into a two-year film, but their roles sadly reversed when Richardson slammed into a tree in Japan last January, lacerating multiple organs and sustaining severe THERE IS A LOT OF PRESSURE WE PUT ON OURSELVES. AND THERE’S A DISTINCTIVE LINE BETWEEN WHETHER PRESSURE IS A GOOD THING OR A BAD THING FOR ME.” SAM KUCH nerve damage. While Kuch helped to support Richardson during his recovery, he focused his 2023 season on a solo project with CK9. The result puts the “stellar” in “inter-stellar”—with a space-themed project that spliced Kuch’s out-of-this-world ripping with grainy, archival astronaut footage. Themed projects have their risks, but in truth, it seemed perfectly fitting subject matter for the meteoric man. Fresh out of the crater of his injury and following a move to K2, Kuch combined pillow fields, windlips and big backcountry terrain into one of the most exciting edits of the season. You wouldn’t know it by watching the film, but Kuch faced difficult conditions last season in British Columbia, and the crew was shut down left and right due to instabilities in the snowpack. “Every day, we were scratching for it,” he says. The challenges were much like those he’d encountered in 2022 leading up to his injury, but Kuch met them as a skier who’d been to the brink and back. For the 25-year-old, that meant being transparent with sponsors and managing expectations in order to ski another day. “I told them I was feeling the pressure and it messed with my head a bit in years past,” he says. Those conversations were a salve for Kuch’s stress. When he returned to snow, he was able to leave the negative pres-sure behind and embrace the butterflies that come with exploring the outer limits of big mountain skiing. The joy was back and so was Kuch. 052 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 2: Page 52
