KAI’S POLITE , calm and collected demeanor hides a much deeper personality, one filled with unbridled excite-ment 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 hap-pened 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 Cham-pion 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 transi-tion 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. Kai Jones 079
The Ski Journal Volume 18, Issue 1: Page 79
