Sister from Another Mister—A Backcountry Friendship

Jen Dial Santoro reflects on finding a deep lifetime friendship that has evolved from the Ohio steeps to the backcountry.

“Check out over there!” I don’t remember which one of us said it. The grizzled, maybe 70-year-old Alta local who had jumped out of the singles line to ride the Supreme triple with us spoke up:

“That’s out of bounds. You’d need some different equipment, and it’s dangerous…”

The year was 1990. I was 16, Brittany Walker (now Walker-Konsella) was 13, and we flew to Utah from Cleveland with her family for winter break. Too young to be let loose alone in the Wasatch, too old to ski with her parents, I guess I was a good solution to their dilemma. Also, that guy was probably only 50.

The bearded dude on the lift had AT bindings—at the time, unheard of in the U.S. We noticed. The fire was lit. A seed was planted.

I grew up in  the middle-class city of Lakewood, OH, adjacent to Cleveland and sitting on Lake Erie. My family did not—does not ski. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to ski, and the opportunity first came in 7th grade when the school advertised “Ski Club.” As much as my parents didn’t ski, they did provide me with the skis and the fees to join ski club. 

I remember my first day—reaching to crank down the binding on those rental skis at Brandywine Ski Resort just southeast of the Home of Rock and Roll. Yep, in 1986, rental skis still came with all metal bindings you had to put on with your hands and leashes for your ankles. Wearing the recommended leather-palmed gloves, I caught a tow rope to the top of the bunny hill for a ski lesson. The lesson was boring. Twenty minutes later, I skied away from there and became a solo skier for the next two years.

As a high school freshman, I ran cross country and track, but all I ever thought about when I put my head down on the pillow at night was skiing. Lakewood High School had an enormous ski club—five fancy tour busses that trekked to Boston Mills (right up the street from Brandywine). The show was orchestrated by  Mr. Terry Walker, a popular elective history teacher and someone who was as stoked on skiing as I was. He’d gather us in his classroom on a brisk October day, when rain was pelting the windows of the same high school where my parents and grandparents had gone, to teach us the ways of skiing and the foundations of ski bumming.

We learned to sharpen and wax our skis, and we all definitely got in trouble at home for stealing the iron—my dad’s work shirts were probably shiny and a little stiff in those years. He even taught kids how to Scotchgard a pair of jeans, because he made skiing affordable for over 400 kids at that school. He and a whole group of teacher/chaperones organized trips to bigger destinations, and it was on the first one to Jay Peak, Vermont, when I should have been introduced to Mr. Walker’s middle school daughter, Brittany. But she was homesick.

Hindsight being what it is, I’m sure the head of the ski club wasn’t pleased that this 90-pound freshman kid, for whom he was responsible for the weekend, was planning on skiing a big mountain in Vermont all alone. He invited me to ski with him. I wasn’t very good, and he could ski anything without ever being out of control. He told me about his daughter. He said he thought we should ski together sometime. She had been skiing since age 3, but I was too dumb to be intimidated.