For years, Kristen Ulmer was aware of most everything that swirled around her in the zany world of extreme skiing.
She knew she was the top woman in the world, she knew she was better than a lot of the men and she knew a lot of those men were drawn to her bigger-than-life personality and pioneering ability. She knew she had a chip on her shoulder, had something to prove, was a rebel with a cause and was fast evolving into a film star, helping to promote the sport that seems to defy gravity.
One thing that she failed to realize, however, was her view on fear. Ulmer, who grew up in Henniker and trained exclusively at Pats Peak as a junior skier, tried to fight the feeling, conquer it, beat it out of her system while preparing to ski down snow and rock at near-90 degree angles.
As Ulmer told me by phone, the “extreme” in extreme skiing translates into “risking your life.” Surely there was no room for this sort of emotion while trying to focus on the task at hand: dropping off a cliff.
Now Ulmer sees things differently. Invite fear in for a cup of coffee, maybe even a full dinner, she says. Introduce yourself, get to know each other. Do more than merely accept it. Use it. Your body and mind will thank you later.
She’ll bring that philosophy with her into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in April. Superstar Alpine skier Bode Miller of Easton is going in as well. She’ll also bring her words of wisdom to Pats Peak on Wednesday, when she’ll participate in the Pats WOW group, or Women’s Only Wednesday program, a seven-week class that began this month.
Topics include proper boot fitting and equipment in general. This Wednesday, with Ulmer leading the program, it will have to do with Zen philosophy, the mind and coping. It will have to do with nurturing your relationship with fear.
“I was good at ignoring fear,” Ulmer said. “Repressing fear will cause problems. The part of fear I merged with made me great, the best in the world, but the part I repressed caused burnout and injuries.”
She spoke from Florida, where she was visiting her parents. She grew up in Henniker and attended Henniker High School, which is now John Stark Regional.
She’s 52 and married, spending half her time in Salt Lake City, Utah, half her time in Mexico, and full-time trying to teach athletes and regular people that acknowledging fear is more than okay; it’s a must. She uses camps, one-on-one discussions and seminars to spread her message.
“Emotional intelligence is taught by everyone as the ability to understand and control your emotions,” Ulmer told me. “That’s what causes emotional issues in our culture. The treatment is the cause.”
While listening to Ulmer and digesting her philosophy, it’s easy to forget that she is one of the state’s hidden gems, a towering figure, of course, within the skiing community, but relatively unknown elsewhere.
In 1997, she became the first woman ever to ski the Grand Teton, at a time when a lot of men were shying away from trying. She was considered the best big-mountain extreme women’s skier in the world, a title she held for 12 years.
She was a member of the 1991 U.S. Ski team, bouncing down mountains in mogul competition with a staccato flow that hurts your knees just to watch.
Later, she began her film career, often featured in famed ski filmmaker Warren Miller’s movies. She’s been featured in the New York Times and NPR, and she appeared on Megyn Kelly’s morning show last August.
The freestyle skiers on the World Cup circuit sought to improve so they could join the best of the best in Ulmer’s world, the one of independence and exhibitions and movie-making.
Fellow extreme skier Danny Egan of Campton nominated his friend to the Hall of Fame. His background traveling the world with Ulmer gives him the best platform with which to provide context on who this woman is and what she has meant to the sport.
We spoke by phone from Montana, where he was powder skiing and talking over the wind that snapped like a flag in the background. Ulmer was an early pioneer on the North Face Extreme Team, making six videos in seven years.
“She is featured and she often out-jumped most of the guys,” Egan said. “She punched it as hard as she could on any cliff. She wanted to be and was one of the guys. Her New Hampshire background is key. She’s not afraid to put her chin to the wind. She made her name by skiing with all of us.”
Then, Egan dropped the bottom-line message here, the reason Ulmer is so important: “She broke the ground for other women today,” he said. “Women pro-skiers today are standing on Kristen’s back.”
Ulmer was one of about 20 female extreme skiers worldwide back in her peak years. She went into each exhibition with a mountain-sized chip on her shoulder, telling me, “Not in a hostile way, but playful. There would be five guys and me filming a movie and I would secretly say, ‘I’m going to kick your asses,’ and ‘Okay guys, let’s see what you got.’ ”
Egan said Ulmer’s intentions were never much of a secret. He recognized what she was doing, which was to put men in their place, calm their egos, bring them back down to earth.
“In skiing there is a combination of the physical, confidence and ability, and she had all three,” Egan said. “That created her personality. When you watched the old movies, she is skiing with attitude. You can see that part of her. This was a guy’s world, and to make it you needed to have that attitude.”
Ulmer spoke out against the FIS – the governing body of the World Cup circuit – saying in an old interview that the members should “keep their noses out of our business. They’ve killed the spirit of skiing in the past by making too many rules.”
She skied where many men had not gone before, and she looked good doing it. Attractive, outspoken and edgy, magazine articles from 20 and 25 years ago mentioned Ulmer’s sex appeal, adding that the male extreme skiers wanted to do more than merely get to know her.
“All the men skiers wanted to sleep with me,” she told me.” People who are extreme skiers are outrageous people, over-the-top personalities, and over-the-top men want to date over-the-top women. I was the poster child for that.”
Her videos and movies say a lot. In one clip, Ulmer drops vertically on a landscape of snow interspersed with big patches of rock. She does a backflip, lands, disappears in a cloud of snow, then re-emerges on her skis, back in control, continuing her descent, doing what she once did better than any woman in the world.
By the end of the 1990s, though, Ulmer says she
began to change. Sure, she was older, but that’s not what was hampering her performances.
Instead, all those years of skiing in the world of make-believe, of convincing herself that fear and extreme skiing could never form an alliance, had taken its toll.
“I had to be stoic and rigid and masculine to be fearless,” she told me. “You can get away with it for 10 years, and then your life unravels. I started to break. Repression of my fears was causing more injuries, and I was burnt out by not dealing with fear. I had PTSD, saw friends die in the mountains and had 15 near-death experiences.”
She went to a Zen master, learning to coexist with fear and studying for 16 years. When I mentioned that accepting fear seemed to be important, she quickly corrected me, saying, “It’s not mere acceptance. That is passive.”
Ulmer told me she agreed with Franklin Delano Roosevelt when, during his 1933 inauguration, he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
“You don’t want a war with fear, because it’s unwinnable,” Ulmer said. “It’s killing us.”
She’s written a book, The Art of Fear, published in 2017. She’s the focal point of a film, Voices of Fear, and is on tour conducting question-and-answer segments after screenings, including an appearance Thursday in Boston and next Friday in Reading, Mass.
She’ll be at Pats Peak for the WOW program on Wednesday, coming home to where she once ignored her true feelings in the name of toughness.
She was tested on Megyn Kelly’s show last summer, telling me, “You don’t meet her or see the bright lights until 20 seconds before you are on. You go from a windowless, dark back room to going on live, so, yes, of course I was nervous.”
And that was just fine.