Kit DesLauriers is a ski mountaineer, two time Freeride World Champion, and the first person to climb and ski down the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent. She completed the historic project in 2006, cementing her place as one of the most accomplished ski mountaineers in the world. A National Geographic Adventurer of the Year and member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, Kit has spent her career pushing the limits of human powered adventure.
Kit DesLauriers is a ski mountaineer, two time Freeride World Champion, and the first person to climb and ski down the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent. She completed the historic project in 2006, cementing her place as one of the most accomplished ski mountaineers in the world. A National Geographic Adventurer of the Year and member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, Kit has spent her career pushing the limits of human powered adventure.
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Kit DesLauriers:
I just kept looking at all these mountains that we were walking underneath, and I was like, "Why don't I have my skis, and why don't we just stop at this one, and then this one, and then this one?" I know I felt really different by the end of that trip.
I'm called to climb mountains, absolutely. I love to go to high places, but what I was really felt called to was to ski back down them. And so that was my personal mission at that point.
Shelby Stanger:
Kit DesLauriers is a ski mountaineer who is perhaps best known for being the first person to climb and ski down the seven summits. She finished that project in 2006, right after winning the Freeride World Championship twice in a row. Kit has been named a National Geographic Adventure of the Year, she's in the Ski Hall of Fame, and she works with the conservation group, Protect Our Winters.
Her current favorite place to ski is in Alaska, and she just served two years as board president for the Alaska Wilderness League. Kit is one of the most inspiring people I've met. She knows who she is and she stands by her values full stop. I spoke with Kit twice at Outside Days in Denver.
First, we did a live interview together at the local REI, Go REI Denver. The next day, we met up for a more intimate interview because I wanted to share her wisdom with our listeners who couldn't be there in person.
Kit is an insightful, determined, and generally badass athlete with some amazing stories to share. Spoiler alert, she's also our first guest who has raised a wolf.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.
Kit DesLauriers, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living live in person. Yay-hoo!
Kit DesLauriers:
Thanks, Shelby.
Shelby Stanger:
We actually talked last night at the outside festival in Denver in front of 250 people and it was great.
Kit DesLauriers:
We did at the REI flagship.
Shelby Stanger:
Let's start with your childhood because I'm really, really curious how-
Kit DesLauriers:
It was pretty darn normal, I think.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you get into skiing, though?
Kit DesLauriers:
Oh, I was a teenager when I got into the kind of skiing that most people would think of as skiing. It wasn't anything that was accessible to me before then. I was 14 the first time I went skiing at a ski resort. And even then it was Sunrise Ski Resort in Northeastern Arizona run by the Apache. And I was wearing jeans and rented ski gear, and I loved it. My dad especially was pretty wild, so he was a lot of my adventure buddy.
And honestly through the years, I'd say the first time I went and skied the Grand Teton, I called my dad. I'd be like, "Guess what I just did?" And I'd tell him, and he'd go, "You're the only one who's surprised." So yeah, I don't know. My childhood was kind of normal, but I've always known that I was different than what most people would call normal.
Shelby Stanger:
So, you're an outdoorsy family?
Kit DesLauriers:
Yeah. I mean, my mom tagged along, and I think she enjoyed it a little bit, but if you asked her now, she'd say no. I think it was mostly led by dad, but-
Shelby Stanger:
That's so interesting. Okay, so you ended up going to University-
Kit DesLauriers:
Of Arizona in Tucson because we had moved to Arizona for me for middle school, high school. Academics have always come fairly easily for me, and I graduated in the top one or so percent of my class, so I got a free ride to go to the University of Arizona in Tucson, so I did.
Shelby Stanger:
Did you do sports there?
Kit DesLauriers:
Not sanctioned. At the U of A in Tucson, I learned to rock climb. I got deep into mountain biking. I did crazy things like sold my clarinet from middle school and high school, and bought tickets to go to see the Garcia Band in San Francisco. I did like that. That was my college.
Shelby Stanger:
So, you've always been a little bit of a wild child. And then after college, you became a stonemason. Was that your first gig out of college?
Kit DesLauriers:
Let me think about that. Almost. Yeah. Almost, yes. And I was just thinking about this memory of going through Mesa Verde with my family when I was preteen or something. And the rock work at Mesa Verde and the stories of the indigenous people who built it and the beauty of it really spoke to me, and I never lost it.
I have a creative side. I love to build with things. My dad was a builder, my grandfather, and I have fine artists in my family. I am not one, but building with things always really excited me. And I remember in high school having those optional courses, I forget what they call them, right?
Shelby Stanger:
Like home ec, or woodworking, or auto shop?
Kit DesLauriers:
Exactly. Those are two very different things. You can just stop right there, home ec or woodworking. And it was called shop or home ec.
Shelby Stanger:
Shop.
Kit DesLauriers:
And we were only allowed to take as girls one semester of shop. I loved shop, and then I had to take home ec, and then they made me sew, and I'm not a sewer. I love to cook, so I'm not against home ec. I'm against being told what I can and can't do.
Now, we're getting somewhere.
Shelby Stanger:
I see this. You don't like being told what you can and can't do, and you like to show people that you can do these things that are really hard.
Kit DesLauriers:
No, show myself.
Shelby Stanger:
Show yourself.
Kit DesLauriers:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
That's a really important distinction.
Kit DesLauriers:
Yes.
Shelby Stanger:
After college, Kit moved to Telluride and became determined to join the ski patrol. But before she could do the job, she needed to be a stronger skier. She threw herself into training, improving her skills on the mountain, volunteering with a local search and rescue team, and earning her wilderness EMT certification.
Along the way, Kit tried ski mountaineering for the very first time and fell in love with it.
Can you tell people what ski mountaineering is for those who don't know?
Kit DesLauriers:
When you go back country skiing and you have your skis on your feet with climbing skins underneath them, and you're walking along uphill something to ski back down, and you don't have to take your skis off, that's ski touring. Ski mountaineering involves some ski touring usually, and then you get to an aspect of the mountain that becomes steep enough that you can no longer skin up it, so you take your skis off, and you put them on your pack, and you put crampons on your feet.
And sometimes you have ice axes in your hands, and sometimes you need a rope, and you have to climb up something. So, that's what I say is ski mountaineering is when it gets steep enough that you need at least crampons on your feet. You can't get up it with skis on your feet.
Shelby Stanger:
I've never done anything like that. I'm really curious for you: when was the first time you tried ski mountaineering?
Kit DesLauriers:
It's a very clear memory. I had to work on my skiing skill set for quite a while until I was ready for ski mountaineering. Ski mountaineering was not my ultimate goal, though. It was really just to become a better skier. I had a lot of friends I ran around in the mountains with, and there was this awesome woman, Barb Scheidegger, who was maybe 10 years or so my senior, and she was a former pro-mogul skier. We were off on a trail run one day, and she said, "So what's next on your list?" And literally my jaw dropped because I was like, "That's how you do it? You make lists?"
And then I went, "Huh, well, every day when I drive home to Ophir, Colorado, I look up at this beautiful peak, and it has got this awesome line on it, and I'd like to climb, and ski that line." And she's like, "Let's do it." And so we put together a small group of women, and we went, and that was the first time that I ever went ski mountaineering.
We climbed up this thing with ice axes, and well, it was just a snow climb. We didn't need ropes or anything, but crampons and an ice ax. And then when we got to the top, for some reason, I just felt really clear. I was still not what I would call an expert skier now that I could look back on it. I'm sure I considered myself one then, but man, I skied it really well, like my focus. And I realized that I really enjoy being in situations - where there's a way that I've learned to put it, where there's no space to be making your grocery list, is how I say it. You just need to be doing what you're doing 100%. And I really liked that.
Shelby Stanger:
So, you found flow, you found focus.
Kit DesLauriers:
Found flow, yeah. And Barb was like, "Wow, you skied that really well!" I was like, "Yeah, thanks. It felt good." It kind of didn't even feel like me. It felt way better than what I can usually do.
Shelby Stanger:
And something inside you just registered that ski mountaineering. How did you then keep going?
Kit DesLauriers:
It doesn't mean because I found my thing, as you say it, doesn't mean that that was my thing that I did. I did a lot of things, and I was also busy raising a wolf, and you can't run off and go be a ski mountaineer all the time when you're... It's like having a kid. My level of commitment to him was like having a kid. So, I was out with him every morning and every evening.
Shelby Stanger:
The wolf?
Kit DesLauriers:
The wolf, yeah. But ski mountaineering, I don't know. I'm drawn to aesthetics, so that line was really beautiful, and other lines as they were really beautiful and as opportunities, just the right partners, teammates came around to go do something, then that's what I would do.
Shelby Stanger:
I think we should just tell the wolf story very quickly. So, at what age did you buy a wolf?
Kit DesLauriers:
Well, it was given to me. I didn't technically buy him, but let's see. How old was I? I had just turned 21, and I knew somebody who had... A boyfriend of mine from earlier had raised a wolf from the same breeder. Now, mind you, it's illegal to have an animal like that, and I don't need to give any other descriptors really about it, but his wolf was a she, and her name was Isa, as in what kind of a dog is that? Isa Wolf. That was her name.
And I took care of Isa when he went off to Alaska one summer, and I was living in the mountains, and it was amazing. And then Isa was killed, hit by a car when we were back in Tucson at the University of Arizona in Tucson. And then it was maybe a year later or something when I was about to graduate, and I was just reading the newspaper, and I saw, "Hey, it's wolf cubs for sale." And I said to this friend, "Hey, isn't that the same breeder?" And so we went out to look at them, and at that time, they were seven days old.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh, they must have been so cute!
Kit DesLauriers:
It was incredible. And I had no intention, right? I mean, I was like... This is called Wild Ideas. And I'm like, "Freedom. Don't tell me what I can and can't do." Well, so maybe that factored into it, but I had this intense, immediate connection to this one. And she offered to me, she said, "I'm done breeding. This is the last litter, so I will offer this one to you next week when he's two weeks old.
And nobody else will ever be given that opportunity from me." And a week later I went and picked him up and I cried the whole way home like, "What have I done?" And I fed him, and then I burped him, and I slept on the floor with him in a sleeping bag so I could run outside in the middle of the night, and literally trained him.
Yeah, it was probably the biggest loss of my life ever when he died, and he lived a long, full life, and he didn't die for being a wolf in a human's world, and he lived almost his entire life without a collar on.
Shelby Stanger:
How old was he?
Kit DesLauriers:
He lived at nine.
Shelby Stanger:
Nine.
Kit DesLauriers:
Just about nine.
Shelby Stanger:
That's incredible.
Kit DesLauriers:
A couple of days short of nine. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
So, you have this book, Higher Love, and we talked a little bit about it last night, but there's a scene where the wolf is not a baby anymore and you have to show it whose boss. And to show it whose boss, you're trained to give it a bone with meat on it, and then take it away before it rips your hand off. Yeah, to someone like me and probably most people listening it sounds absolutely terrifying!
Kit DesLauriers:
Yeah. And it was, and it hurt, and I didn't think I could do it. And I cried, and I walked away defeated. And then I went back, and I found deeper places in myself that I could go to find the resolve and the power, and be removed from the thought, and be full of the intention that I had. And that's how wild animals work. It was an incredible gift to push myself to go that far myself and it has served me. It was not the only time I had to do it with him, right?
I tracked him down from chasing a herd of sheep that were annually pushed through from the high country in Colorado by their sheep herders living in their little trailers. And I found him. He had escaped. I tried to keep him inside, but my roommates must have let him out, and I was like, "Oh geez, where is he?" I suspected where he was, and I went down and I found him, and he was on his way into the sheep herd. I called him, he sat down, and he looked at the sheep, and he looked at me, and he looked at the sheep and he looked at me, and this went back and forth.
And then finally, he took off for the sheep. So, I just ran flat out as fast as I could through this field across marmot holes and rocks, and everything. And I got to him right before he got to the sheep. And at that point, by then I had learned and practiced a lot of what it takes to communicate with an animal like that, which was, I pushed him to the ground, and then I leaned down and I bit hard. I bit his ear hard, like trying to draw blood. And then I growled at him, and I didn't look him in the eye because wolves, you only look him in the eye when you love them. I didn't look him in the eye and I did all those things, and I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and I dragged him up a hill, and then I'd be overcome again.
It wasn't like I was overcome with rage. What I was overcome with was, if I don't do this, I can't protect you. And my vow to you when you were 14 days old was that I would never let you be killed for being a wolf in a human's world, and I can't break my promise to you. I almost did. And so I was mad at myself, but I needed to teach him a lesson, and I got him home. And like I said, he pretty much didn't live with it. He almost never needed a collar on, which I called a necklace, except I trained him with one. So, he was actually pretty good on a leash. But anyway, I got him home, and I tied him up in the side of the yard, and I said to all my friends, my roommates, "Don't look at him, nothing until I say so." And I gave him a bowl of water, and I left him out there for 24 hours tied up with just water and no love, no eye contact.
And 24 hours later, I took him off the leash and you want to know what he did? He went up the hillside. We were on the edge of the national forest. He went up the hillside and he stayed up there for two days, like F-U. And then he came back down. So, those sheep come through every year. The next year when the sheep came through... I mean, I had marked my calendar. I knew I'd lived there for several years. I knew what weekend it was. Well, they came down the weekend earlier. I was wrong. So, I was up having coffee and I look out the window, and I was like, "Oh God, here come the sheep." He was outside.
You want to know what he was doing? Sitting on the front porch on his haunches, just watching.
Shelby Stanger:
So, he didn't go.
Kit DesLauriers:
That's how smart wolves are, that's how loyal, and that was our connection.
Shelby Stanger:
Kit's wolf, named Alta, taught her a lot about discipline, respect, and following her inte rnal compass. That compass led Kit to the mountains. In 1998, she was invited on her first international Alpine expedition, where she spent weeks trekking among towering peaks in India. Even though she enjoyed the climb, in the back of her mind, she wished she had her skis with her.
The following year, Kit moved to Jackson, Wyoming, and spent as much time skiing as she could. She was keeping up with some of the most competitive skiers at the time, and her skills did not go unnoticed.
Kit DesLauriers:
I was just free skiing in Snowbird and I met the director of the Freeride World Tour, and I happened to make a mistake, and be like, "Holy cow, there's a 30-foot cliff underneath me." And I landed it and skied out of it. And he was like, "Who are you?"
And then the next year I decided I wanted to try and do the world tour, but I was already 34, and I didn't want to screw around with all the qualifiers. And so I decided I would call that person up and ask him if I could get an entry without spending a whole year doing qualifiers. And I was like, "Do you remember me? We met in Snowbird." And he was like, "Yeah, I remember you." And I said, "Can you let me in?" And he said, "Well, don't tell anybody. I'll give you a buy and don't make me regret it."
And that's how it went.
Shelby Stanger:
And so you did it and you won?
Kit DesLauriers:
I won the overall points title. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
Then you did it again the next year.
Kit DesLauriers:
And then I did it again. I kind of didn't want to do it again. I was actually enrolled in a grad program that I really wanted to do in a master's of landscape architecture.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, I read that. Landscape architecture, that's so interesting.
Kit DesLauriers:
Yeah. At the Conway School in Massachusetts. I wanted to take my hardscaping skills to the next level, and I had deferred for a year to do the Freeride. And then I was like, "Well, if I defer again, they've already told me you don't get to defer for two years. It's a pretty exclusive program." And I couldn't decide what to do, but when you're the reigning world champion, they're going to let you in at the last minute if you decide yes. So, I had a little bit of time to decide.
And what I realized is the reason that I was mostly scared of doing it the second year was what if I didn't win again? And once that was facing me, once I acknowledged that, I was pretty disgusted with myself. I was like, "That is the worst reason ever, and you better get your ass back out there."
Shelby Stanger:
Kit returned to Freeride and won even more definitively than the first year. The evening of her big win, her next wild idea started to take shape. She went to dinner that evening and ran into Dick Bass, who at the time was the owner of Snowbird Ski Resort. Dick was also an author, skier, and a climber who had written a book about becoming the first man to climb the seven summits.
Kit DesLauriers:
Dick Bass and I never discussed the idea. We serendipitously ended up sitting nearby each other at dinner and had conversation late into the evening, and then he had left a signed copy of his book when I checked out of his hotel. And so I read it through the rest of the ski season and competition season.
And as I read it, I couldn't help myself. It wasn't really an option that as I'm reading the words he wrote about his climbs, they went back to that visual thing that I said earlier about looking at rocks. I was envisioning the mountains with the words he used, and I thought those sound eminently skiable. I wonder if anybody has skied them.
Shelby Stanger:
Kit DesLauriers is one of the most accomplished ski mountaineers in the world. She spent a decade skiing in some of the best mountain towns in the US before winning back-to-back Freeride World Championships in 2004 and 2005. A year later, Kit became the first person to ski down the seven summits.
For the seven summits, I think a lot of people don't understand what that means. First, you have to climb up them.
Kit DesLauriers:
Well, they're the highest mountain on each continent. It's not the seven highest mountains in the world. It's the highest mountain on each continent.
Shelby Stanger:
You had already done Denali. So, before you actually set-
Kit DesLauriers:
I did Denali first, yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, you did Denali first.
Kit DesLauriers:
Before I had the idea to do the seven summits.
Shelby Stanger:
Who did you tell?
Kit DesLauriers:
Well, I told Rob.
Shelby Stanger:
Your husband at the time.
Kit DesLauriers:
Uh-huh. And I asked him if he wanted to join me, and he said, "No, thank you, but make sure you invite me for Everest." And so he came along on some of them. Who else did I tell? I told a really close girlfriend, one of my best girlfriends from Telluride, and she had come up to visit, and we were off on a really long trail run through the mountains one day, and I told her, and I saw this worry, and I hate that.
It's well-intentioned and everything, but it's like I don't have space for that. And that became really clear for me that I didn't need to tell anybody else. It wouldn't really serve me. I don't think I told anybody else, really. I didn't tell my mom or my dad. I didn't want anybody to worry. The biggest thing is I didn't want to have to explain myself if I decided to abandon my project, and I would abandon my project if it no longer felt right and true, and it's nobody else's business.
And then my mom called me when all I had left was Everest, and she said, "You're going to Everest, aren't you?" And my mom is a worrywart, but she would also say, "What do you want for your birthday?" And I'd be like, "I need a new Avalanche Transceiver." And she'd go, "Oh my gosh." And she'd get it for me, and she'd say, "I don't want to hear about you using this." So then she's like, "You're going to Everest, aren't you?" And I will never forget, I was standing in my living room. I had to sit down on the couch and take a deep breath, and be like, "Yes. And you can come if you want. You can trek to base camp, but you're not trekking with me because I can't be around worry."
But I'm really proud of her. She did come.
Shelby Stanger:
It's really cool how you've always stuck to your guns. I'm such a self-doubter and flip-flop.
Kit DesLauriers:
I'm a self-doubter, too.
Shelby Stanger:
But it seems like you have it so figured out, and you're like, "I've made up my mind. I'm not going to let these voices get in my head or these outside influences."
Kit DesLauriers:
They get in my head, for sure.
Shelby Stanger:
So, how do you... I mean, you did it. You skied Everest!
Kit DesLauriers:
I know. They get in my head. I mean, I think it happens to everybody. I just try and sort through them, and I try and pay close attention to... I am not always successful, believe me. I'm sitting here like I'm not going to run through the laundry list of the places that they don't.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you know that this is what you were going to do?
Kit DesLauriers:
Because it felt right, and it felt like I would be not living my life if I didn't try.
Shelby Stanger:
That's a wild idea. A wild idea is wild if it's wild to you, and you know it'll make your life better if you do it, but it'll scare the crap out of you. And on your way, you're going to want to turn back around. But if you keep going-
Kit DesLauriers:
But if you don't try, it's like you've wasted your precious life.
Shelby Stanger:
And you have resentment, and you become an artist who didn't pursue their craft.
Kit DesLauriers:
You become one of the normals, like one of the everyday world that people are afraid of trying something. We can do hard things. We can do more than we think we're capable of.
Shelby Stanger:
So, this was Everest 2006?
Kit DesLauriers:
Yeah, we're coming up on the 20th anniversary.
Shelby Stanger:
Amazing. Okay. So, you do Everest, and on your team is Jimmy Chin. What was Everest like? I mean, first you have to climb up it.
Kit DesLauriers:
It was quiet. It was the post-monsoon season, so there was nobody there except for our team.
Shelby Stanger:
And it was also 20 years ago, so it wasn't like what it is today.
Kit DesLauriers:
Yeah, it kind of still was.
Shelby Stanger:
It was!
Kit DesLauriers:
I mean, I don't know because I haven't climbed it in May, but I pay attention. Difference was maybe instead of 300 to 500 people a day, maybe it was 185 a day or something. Doesn't matter. It was not conducive to skiing. If there are people out there anywhere near those numbers, it's not conducive to skiing, but I studied imagery and stories, and it was like I wanted to go when there was a greater likelihood of being able to ski the whole thing.
Shelby Stanger:
Had you climbed it before? Was this the first time climbing it?
Kit DesLauriers:
No, ma'am.
Shelby Stanger:
Awesome.
Kit DesLauriers:
Never been on 8,000 meter peak.
Shelby Stanger:
So, you climb it, you get to the top, and then how soon after are you putting on skis?
Kit DesLauriers:
Pretty darn quickly.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay.
Kit DesLauriers:
Yeah, maybe 15 minutes.
Shelby Stanger:
15 minutes, you put on skis, and there's not a lot of room at the top to put on skis.
Kit DesLauriers:
No.
Shelby Stanger:
That itself looks terrifying. And then when you ski down, what's it like to ski down? And I'm just going to... Full disclosure, we're interviewing Jim Morrison, and so I've seen a little footage of his line on Everest, which is probably different than your line you skied down Everest, and there's some Anderson Cooper clip, and it's ice.
Kit DesLauriers:
Yes, it's ice. It's everything. Wind is a super big variable in what it does to snow. It moves snow around faster than snow can ever fall out of the sky, and that is of great impact. It changes immensely, constantly. It's incredibly variable, and it's very hard. So, it was very simple to say it's icy. It's really hard. It's not smooth. So, it's rippled with sastrugi that's difficult, like when the ocean is really alive, and it's absent in some places.
Shelby Stanger:
Meaning there's no snow?
Kit DesLauriers:
Yeah. Well, you have to cross rock bands or whatever. There's just so many different things. I think the hardest thing... The story that I want to tell about the skiing on Everest is our ski descent of the Lhotse Face, because it was direct from Camp 4, and it's still unrepeated, and it's over 5,000 vertical feet of over 50 degrees. It was just Rob, Jimmy, and I. We didn't have a rope. We had just about run out of oxygen. We ran out of oxygen shortly after we started it. We were hanging it out there, and fully committed and fully competent. We left together, the camp, but I was skiing first, probably most anxious to get started, who knows why, but I was kind of skiing first, and as it just got steeper and steeper, and it got worse and worse, like icier, if you will.
And I turned around and looked at Rob and Jimmy coming down after me, and I lifted my arms into a big X, into a cross with my ski poles to warn them, "Heads up, danger." And that's how it was. And it took us an hour and 45 minutes to get down or something. But the snow was... There was snow and there was ice, and there was all sorts of things in between, but if there was a patch of snow that was in the shape of massive, massive giants, like literally a giant from a fairy tale's tongue, it was kind of white and kind of snow, and kind of carvable, not carvable, but enough you could get a ski engine. It was also littered with icy, white ice, ball bearings to golf ball size chunks. Those are not good to ski on. And then those tongues, those white tongues of snow weren't connected.
So, to get to the next one, you had to cross shining blue, hard ice, like ice climb ice. It was crazy. And at the bottom we had to cross a big bergschrund, which is just a massive crevasse that separates glaciers when they're at significantly different angles. And we had to catch air across it, which I've done. I had to learn to do that on the Freeride tour and stuff, but it's not my comfort zone. It is Rob's comfort zone. And so he went first, and all I knew is I didn't want to go last because I might never decide to go across that thing. So, I went second, and then yeah, we got to the other side. And then Jimmy went third, and we got to their side, and I grabbed his camera, and captured a selfie of the three of us.
I look back on that and I realize it's the most alive I've ever felt that moment in life. And I asked a friend who is like this high level Buddhist lama about, hey, years later, can you help me do a better job of interpreting or explaining what that means? And he gave it some careful thought, and then he said it is when you had the greatest degree of impermanence.
Shelby Stanger:
Your sense of self and your knowing is so clear. Is it from Buddhism, or skiing, or have you always been that way?
Kit DesLauriers:
It's probably mostly from my wolf. That wolf, Alta, he... I'm going to start crying. He taught me to be myself. And the only time to consider shifting away from what's right and true for you is if somebody that you really care about asks you with deep love, then you consider it. I've said this up and down, and I will not stop. I don't know all the answers. Life is very muddy for me at times. I get caught in the ultimate loops of like, I don't know what's next, or why can't I let go of this? I have all the same questions as any other human. I feel like I spend a lot of time outdoors and I spend a lot of time in contemplation, not looking back, like negative spirals that some people might call rumination. I try not to do that, but I do analyze, I pay attention, I look at things, and I try and learn from everything.
And if I've got a big question, I go ground myself, I look at it, and I think about it, and the answers might take weeks to come. It might still be really muddy for a while. So, I'm not different like that, but I try not to stop until I know what feels right and what feels true. And those are my guiding principles.
Shelby Stanger:
What's your advice today in 2026 for someone who wants to go pursue something that's a wild idea, but maybe they feel a little scared or stuck?
Kit DesLauriers:
Shelby, I say it in different ways at different times. And the thing that is coming to me right now is challenge your perceptions of your limitations.
We come up with these things and where do we come up with this idea that we have this limitation and what is real anyway? I mean, look at Jim Morrison's ski descent now. Look at how things are changing. How could we have ever seen that X, Y, Z, insert whatever you want right now or a year from now, is possible. We're human and we're also full of pure potential, and look at it from quantum physics, and then figure out what is it that is holding us back and we're human.
And I'll go back to, and we're human. And so, yeah, we have limitations. We all do. And we're all unique in whatever our limitations are. And yet we are so much more than we think we are, and we're capable of hard things. And so if you follow your heart, then that's where you're meant to be.
Shelby Stanger:
You can follow Kit's Adventures on Instagram @kitdski. That's K-I-T-D-S-K-I. You can also check out our website at kitdeslauriers.com. That's K-I-T-D-E-S-L-A-U-R-I-E-R-S. Kit has a book about her experience skiing the seven summits titled Higher Love. You can get it wherever books are sold.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. Thank you again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.
As always, we love when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.