Eric Carter is an alpine athlete and endurance coach who discovered the niche sport of ski mountaineering, or "skimo," and never looked back. Skimo involves skiing uphill in the backcountry and riding the slope back down. Eric also founded Ridgeline Athletics, where he helps mountain athletes chase their own wild outdoor adventures.
Eric Carter is an alpine athlete and endurance coach who discovered the niche sport of ski mountaineering, or "skimo," and never looked back. Skimo involves skiing uphill in the backcountry and riding the slope back down. Eric also founded Ridgeline Athletics, where he helps mountain athletes chase their own wild outdoor adventures.
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Eric Carter:
You're just hanging on for dear life and trying to ski as fast as you can, on the edge of control down these lines. Skimo turned to be this really cool way of still competing and still using that fitness and all those things that I'd developed, but getting to experience the mountains a bit more.
Shelby Stanger:
Over a decade ago, Eric Carter fell in love with the mountains and discovered a niche sport called ski mountaineering or skimo. Ski mountaineering is a relatively simple concept. It basically means skiing uphill in the backcountry so that you can ride the slope back down. No chairlift required. In a few short years, this hobby turned into a profession. Eric became a top-ranked member of the US National Ski Mountaineering Team, and after a very successful competitive career, he retired in 2020. Since then, Eric has gone on some epic mountain expeditions around the world. He also founded a coaching company that trains mountain athletes to go after their own outdoor adventures. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-Op Studios production brought to you by Capital One. Eric Carter, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living, all the way from Squamish, British Columbia. I love it.
Eric Carter:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm curious how you decided to pursue endurance sports in the cold.
Eric Carter:
Yeah, well, I'm originally from Minnesota and so I grew up cross-country skiing, and my dad got me started with that really quite young, and then that progressed into high school and college skiing competitively. So I went to the University of Vermont to compete and as I was wrapping up my undergrad, I was performing relatively poorly and quite enjoying school. So looked around for graduate school options and saw UBC had a program that was really interesting in my field and it's a unique place, Vancouver, and the Olympics were going to be here. So it was all these things that pushed me towards Vancouver and so I ended up coming out here to do my master's and my PhD in exercise physiology and then really just stayed forever. So transitioned from the cross-country skiing into more mountain sports like ski mountaineering, rock climbing, running, all these things that we have available to us here.
Shelby Stanger:
You're a ski mountaineer, which you're the first ski mountaineer we've ever interviewed, I think. Skimo. What is skimo, to those of us who are completely in the dark on it?
Eric Carter:
Yeah, totally. The best way to think about it is this transition from competition to adventure. I started out as a cross-country skier, which is very purely competitive. And then when I moved to BC, I was doing a lot of skiing and a lot of climbing and I had that fitness that I had built up from competing in college and all that. So I was with my partners. We were moving pretty quickly and going out to these climbs, climbing and then coming home. And I always joke that I like sleep in my own bed and have dinner and all that, so I don't really love camping. I do like camping. It's mostly a joke, but I have a sweet house and a sweet place and a nice bed and a nice family, and so I like to be home at night, so that's some of the motivation for moving fast.
But a friend had seen us doing this and we had relatively lighter equipment for skiing and all that, and he was like, "Hey, you should check out this sport called skimo. So showed a video and actually thought, "Oh, that seems a bit silly, but also kind of interesting."
Shelby Stanger:
Ski mountaineers attach sticky carpet-like material called skins to the bottom of their skis. These skins give athletes the traction to hike up challenging terrain in the backcountry. When they make it to the top of the mountain, they take them off and ski down. In competitions, skimo athletes usually go up and down the run three times and the person to do it fastest wins. This sport requires quick gear changes and huge amounts of endurance. Because of Eric's history as a cross-country skier, skimo came fairly naturally to him. He started entering some races in Canada and he did extremely well. Within a couple of years, Eric qualified for the US National Team. He moved to Europe where he spent the next three years racing at the World Cup. What does a skimo race look like?
Eric Carter:
It's kind of funny, slightly embarrassing. Everybody wears relatively tight, they're called skinsuits, and so it's a one-piece zip up suit, not a whole lot different from a cross-country ski or downhill ski outfit, but it's basically designed so that the zipper at the front you can open up and then the inside of the shirt has pockets. And so the skins that we put on the bottom of our skis, you obviously need to be able to put them on to go up and take them off to go down. And so we stuff them in our suit in this kangaroo pocket when we're skiing down, and then you have multiple pairs of them, and so you end up with this stuffed-up shirt that looks a bit silly and it's a mass start, so it's, "three, two, one, go," but then at some point, it comes down to a two-ski track, kind of like if you imagine a classic cross-country ski track, that they've prepared in the mountain.
And then you're on your way, switchbacking up the mountain. At the top transition, everybody rips off their skins, clicks their skis into ski mode and then just starts skiing down. And yeah, it's really about skiing as close to the edge of control as you possibly can and going as fast as you possibly can. You still want to be in control, but you want to be as close to being out of control as possible, which is a little different from how I ski in the back country where we want to be in control. The upside of this is in a race you're often right at a ski area, so ski patrols around, there's often a helicopter filming and all that stuff. So there's a lot of people there to help if something happens. But generally, I'd say it's a relatively safe sport. People don't actually get injured as much as you would think watching it.
Shelby Stanger:
I was going to ask how many crashes are there?
Eric Carter:
There's often crashes, but you can roll in the snow, the skis release easily. They're shorter, so you can tumble with them almost. It sounds bad, but it's relatively safe sport, I would say.
Shelby Stanger:
It sounds really amazing and fun. I would love to watch one. So I'm guessing you did this from 2012 to 2015? Is that when you raced on the World Cup Team?
Eric Carter:
I started in the World Cup in 2015 and then my last World Cup was in 2019. I was realizing that I was aging out in 2019 and I was hoping to do one more World Championship cycle. So they do the World Championships every other year, and I was aiming for that 2020 World Championship, but I knew that that was going to be the end of my competitive career and as luck would have it, Covid made that decision for me. Everything got shut down, the season got canceled, so my season ended basically in March, 2020, right?
Shelby Stanger:
Yep, yep, March, 2020.
Eric Carter:
Yeah, so that was a firm end of my competitive career, which was kind of nice, to be honest. Obviously, not to make light of the situation or anything, but I think a lot of athletes drag out competition further than they probably should, and you have a peak and then there is always a downturn on that performance curve. You can't perform at the highest level forever, and it sucks to see somebody who's really on that down slope still trying to make it happen and all those things. And it's inspiring sometimes, but it's also kind of like, "Okay, maybe it's time to move on." And so for me, that was a really easy decision.
Shelby Stanger:
While Eric was competing in Europe, he was also pursuing a PhD in kinesiology. He was fascinated by human movement function and performance, and Eric applied this knowledge to his skiing. The brand Arc'teryx noticed his talent and offered him a sponsorship deal. They were launching a new line of mountain gear and Eric was the perfect athlete to test it out. When we come back, Eric talks about what he's been up to since retiring from competition, how he started coaching other outdoor athletes and his advice to build strength and endurance for winter adventures.
Eric Carter's life as an outdoor athlete has been untraditional. After five years on the US National Ski Mountaineering Team, Eric retired from competitive athletics. He was itching to explore the mountains in a new way and started planning skimo expeditions around the world. So you spend some time racing the World Cup, doing these other really fun races in Europe. Covid's like, "Hey, Eric, you're done." You were in graduate school pursuing kinesiology, and after that you decide, "I'm just going to be a ski mountaineer adventurer"? Is that how you transitioned?
Eric Carter:
Yeah, more or less. So by then I was on the Arc'teryx team and they were supporting me with racing, but Arc'teryx isn't so much a race brand, they're more into climbing and skiing and just being in the mountains. They're Vancouver based, so they're super keyed into the style of mountain travel that we do here in BC. And so when I stopped racing, they were like, "Oh, that's great, now you can do this other stuff." And it even aligns better with what they were after. Not that that really drives my decision making, but it was sweet that the company that I was working with was so supportive of that. So it seemed like going on expeditions was a natural evolution of what I was doing.
Shelby Stanger:
I watched a video of you and I want to dig into this. So you had this really wild idea just a couple years ago to go ski this line with your buddy. You went all the way to India, looked like a nightmare of a travel situation, and you get there and you're like, "Oh, my goodness, this doesn't even have snow on it. It's a mountain of ice." Talk to me about this. A lot of people would have forced something.
Eric Carter:
Yeah, no, India was an interesting one. So it was the first big trip after Covid. So yeah, it was four of us from Canada flew over. This was in May, 2022, I think. We landed in Delhi and it was quite hot but not outrageous, and immediately got on a bus and drove up to the Uttarkashi region in the Himalaya there. And I had been planning this expedition for basically a whole year, and I was looking on Google Earth, just looking at the satellite imagery, flying around because that's how we find a lot of stuff, and I saw this shining face and I was like, "Wow, that looks a lot like a ski line. It's really beautiful."
So then started digging into it and it seemed like only one British team had tried to climb the face and they hadn't gotten to the top. So drove into the mountains, you're on this bumpy bus, the roads there wash out every year during the monsoon, so they were just in the process of finishing fixing them back up. And we were going to this town called Gangotri, got into the village, got all our things sorted, got our porters, headed up into the mountains. It was a fairly intense trek into the mountains. It was three days to get to our base camp. The first day was on this tourist trail. And then we turned off that, we had to cross the Ganges, which was terrifying, fording it with all the porters. Then we just turned up into the mountains and up this other valley and ultimately ended up at the base camp at the base of the glacier that we were heading to.
And we get there and they're giving me a hard time because there's no snow, and the locals were all telling us, oh yeah, normally the snow here would be up to their thighs. It's like, "Oh, cool. Cool, cool, cool." So we started pushing our way up the mountain and we still hadn't seen the peak that we were heading to, now two weeks into this trip. And we established an advanced camp at the base of this icefall and on all of our satellite imagery, it looked very mellow. We're like, "Oh, we'll just skin up through that. No problem." When we arrived, it was a sheer cliff with the glacier spilling off the top of the cliff and these giant seracs, or blocks of ice tumbling down. We were like, "That's a bummer."
But we had climbing equipment to climb ice. So we were like, "Well, we came this far, we should probably go have a look." And so two of us, Justin and I, hiked up. We got right up to the base and we were like, "Oh, we have a drone, so why don't we just fly that and see if we can see the mountain?" And so we put the drone up and it goes up the icefall, and that was already illuminating, but we get it flying up the glacier and we see the image of the face that we wanted to ski, and it was just pure ice, almost no snow. And so the heat wave that had been affecting us when we landed in Delhi, and obviously we were experiencing a base camp where there was no snow, it extended all the way up the mountain and it was super deflating. We were like, "Oh man, it just doesn't work. This is not skiable."
So luckily, there were some other options around us in the area that we could still try climbing. We did a little bit of skiing, we did some running and scrambling, but we certainly didn't do the 7,000 meter first descent that we wanted to. But that's the way it goes.
Shelby Stanger:
A lot of times the real adventure is not what we think it's going to be. Things going wrong can be just as impactful as when they go right. Since traveling to India, Eric has continued to take expeditions around the world. He also guides winter trips in the mountains and coaches other outdoor endurance athletes through his company, Ridgeline Athletics. Okay, so you've turned your whole background into a career, which is really impressive because a lot people think they know what they want and then they take a lot of side routes and you've took some side routes, but you've been like, "I'm going to figure out a way to make this my job." And now you have this coaching company, Ridgeline Athletics, which sounds very interesting. Tell me about that.
Eric Carter:
Yeah, so as I was working through my PhD, you obviously need to supplement grants and all that stuff. And I was actually talking with a good friend of mine, Gary Robbins, who's our professional trail runner, and we were just out doing an adventure and I was like, "Oh yeah, it'd be really cool to do some coaching because I'm trained in it, but I am just not heeded enough to the community yet and having a hard time getting clients, basically. And he was saying, "Oh yeah, the coaching thing's really interesting to me. I get lots of requests, but I just don't feel like I know enough about it and I'm not trained." And so we had this light bulb moment while we're talking to each other and it's like, "Oh, maybe we should try to do something together." So that's how it was born.
So we formed the company Ridgeline and initially, just started taking on a few clients at a time, and then that has really expanded out. And now we have four other coaches that work for us that are all really awesome folks and do great work. And it's great for me. I can pick and choose my athletes. I certainly like to work with athletes doing non-traditional stuff, and I like to see people succeed. I think that's the coolest part. But the thing about mountain athletes is often our performances aren't on a specifically defined date in nice periodic intervals on well-prepared tracks. There's lots of variables going on. And even in training, it depends on the weather, it depends on the partners you have available to you. All these things factor in. And so I think it's a cool puzzle to figure out a way to build a training plan that keeps someone consistently able to perform and also building up towards bigger performances and all this stuff and factors all these things into play. So that's most interesting thing for me for coaching.
Shelby Stanger:
The world of mountain sports has changed a lot in the past 10 years, especially when it comes to training. Instead of going out into the mountains and practicing skiing, running or mountaineering, Eric's athletes are moving towards more dedicated training plans. He works with all kinds of adventurers, skiers preparing for the winter season, photographers getting ready for expeditions in the Himalayas and mountaineers taking on their first big ascent. In order to build the most effective training plan, eric and his team take into account the upcoming expeditions, weather conditions, and overall goals of their clients. Well, I think you're one of the first people that we've talked to who really trains athletes with wild ideas. Ones that aren't necessarily have a set date and has been done before. And so you're creating these maps for them where there has been no map for them before. Let's say I just want to get in shape and go to Whistler all winter, and I'm pretty much an average Joe with very limited skiing, no skiing experience and some limited snowboarding experience.
Eric Carter:
Yeah, it depends, and for some folks I might say, "You're better off just going skiing." If you've never trained before and you've never done the sport, I had a talk actually with a racer who wants to start skimo racing, and he hadn't done any racing, and I was like, "I'd love to work with you, but you're going to get a lot more value out of just renting the gear and trying to go to as many races as you can and having fun, and then let's talk about it next year."
Shelby Stanger:
No, I like that. I think that's really good. I think sometimes we just need to do the thing and get information about it before we train for it. We just need to go do it and then see how it goes.
Eric Carter:
Totally. And I think sometimes our sports attract folks that are highly motivated
Shelby Stanger:
Type A?
Eric Carter:
Yeah. And our just assume that they can jump into anything. And that's probably true, to an extent, but yeah, I think especially with mountain sports, we have to be careful because motivation and fitness are, I think, risk factors a lot of times in the mountains. A really, really strong trail runner can get into the mountains and they can get up high really quickly and get themselves into positions where all of a sudden they don't have a ton of experience that the highly experienced mountain runner would have no problem doing. And so that can be a really risky thing.
Shelby Stanger:
Give me five athlete mistakes that you commonly see, and maybe five things our listeners can do to just get winter ready, whatever that sport may be.
Eric Carter:
I would say as far as winter sports go, I want to see athletes dedicating the same amount of time in the summer as they plan to do in the winter. And so if an athlete is hoping to ski all day every weekend, then I want to see at least that similar amount of training coming through the summer and the fall. There's a little bit of a difference between training to do something to complete it and optimizing performance. A lot of people can just go on that two week ski vacation that they go on every year and get through it, but there might be a lot of suffering. A different way to think about it is to go there and optimize it and be fit enough to actually have fun.
Shelby Stanger:
So let's talk about this because it's winter time when this comes out. People are going to get ready for the winter. What can they do to get ready starting in the fall when maybe this will come out?
Eric Carter:
Yeah, I think the biggest thing as skiers is we overlook strength training. And that's been a huge evolution of my own training and how I look at the sport. But we think of, especially ski touring, as a very endurance-based sport, but it is really, really critical to have strength as well and power. If we think about the movement of ski touring or mountain running or hiking, we're doing a whole lot of single leg step ups. And then skiing down, especially running downhill are all really, really quad demanding, glute demanding. And so all the stuff we need to have power, not just endurance. And so that really only comes from spending time in the gym, and that, I think, is hugely important.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, and if I'm going to pick just a couple of exercises, step ups? Squats? What can I do?
Eric Carter:
Yeah, I mean, think about the movements that you're doing when you're doing your sport. So I think for skiing, yeah, it's a lot of single leg movements. It's stepping up. It's squats, deadlifts, lunges, single leg squats, things like that. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely hard, especially in the middle of the summer when you want to be outside playing in the mountains. But I've found that dedicating more and more time earlier and earlier in the season, fall, even late summer, really pays off with being able to ski, especially early in the season.
Shelby Stanger:
What if you live in an area that's flat, like Kansas or something? How do you replicate hill training?
Eric Carter:
Yeah, that's a huge challenge, and that's something a lot of my athletes have to work with. Often, even the flattest places, we can find river valleys that have gouged out and created small hills, so that's the go-to try to find something like that. Parking garages often have good staircases, stadiums, those kind of things, and they work. It's a lot more mind numbing than running out in the mountains, but it works.
Shelby Stanger:
Eric's knowledge about the body and his experience as a winter athlete make him a great resource for people who are interested in mountain adventures. If you have a wild idea coming up and are interested in connecting with Eric and his team, check out their website at ridgelineathletics.com. If you want to learn more about Eric or connect with him directly, you can find him on Instagram @skiericcarter. That's S-K-I E-R-I-C C-A-R-T-E-R. 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 producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Motolla and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it 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.