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.

Yes kids, there were selfies even before the invention of the smartphone: capturing the 1992 stoke.

The author (left) and Brittany (right) reconnecting in the backcountry in 2010.

Eventually, I’d meet Brittany when she came on the trip to Colorado the following winter. Then, too, eventually,  she’d come to high school, and finally, I stopped skiing alone. We took advantage of the free lessons, making a goal to earn our “gold medals” and be the first from our school to take home the top honor from ski school. This was probably Brit’s first ski goal and certainly mine.

“I’d like to do what that guy was talking about,” one of us must have said that day at Alta (or something close). I know it sat in my brain like some parasitic amoeba—a seed, dormant, waiting for years to sprout.

Mr. Walker had VHS tapes of Scot Schmidt and Glen Plake, and for sure, Brit and I didn’t just want to meet those guys; we wanted to BE those guys. I only ever had two posters of people on my wall—Glen Plake and Andy Hampsten. During the fall, when we couldn’t ski, and Mr. Walker attempted to fire our stoke, he’d get us to do wall sits to get in shape, and he’d screen those “extreme skiing” films. Maybe the most extreme part was actually getting your hands on those movies in the late 80’s in Ohio.

Thursday after school we’d pile into the buses for the 40-minute drive to skiing. Sometimes on snow. Other times on brown snow, grassy snow, in the rain—didn’t matter. I never once saw the inside of that ski lodge because Brittany and I got off the bus in our ski boots and got back on last. Considering each run took about 3 minutes to the top and 15 seconds to the bottom, it was a repetition driven by pure joy. We didn’t ski with boys, even cute ones, unless they could hang. We even tried to start a race team, but it didn’t take. 

There were two Colorado trips with school. It’s amazing they still let me hang out with their kid, considering all the trouble I was always trying to affect. On one trip, I convinced her we should rent snowboards. We got separated, and both of us were a half-hour late to the bus. The only thing more stressful than angering your dad is pissing off your slightly younger friend’s dad.—who is in charge of the ski club and holds all of your joy in his hands. Also, we learned that we were not interested in snowboards.

Despite the two of us pushing boundaries, always hiding at the top of the mountain, waiting until the last possible moment to arrive at the bus, exhausted and sunburned, they also took me with their family to ski in Utah.

On one trip, they registered us for the Ski Utah Interconnect—a tourist version of a backcountry ski tour that uses lifts and minimal hiking on alpine skis. Brittany and I were live wires. It was, up to this point, the best thing I had ever done. More brain seeds. Lying in wait.

I had chosen a path that took me to college in Ohio (go Miami) and ended with a full-time career in bike racing of all sorts, while Brittany took the Boulder route, skiing moguls for the Buffs. As happened often before social media and Internet, we lost touch for a while and the years got away.

I retired from bike racing, became a math teacher, and married Jonathan, another bike racer. I had put skiing away while racing bikes—partly because of the injury risk. I lived nowhere near it either, but the main problem was that skiing is expensive, and women’s bike racing at the time was not lucrative. 

We got married the September of my first year of teaching, and teachers can’t just go on vacations, so I had one request after the judge pronounced us hitched: a belated honeymoon to Utah to ski.

Skis had changed a bit—the 180cm GS skis of my youth were replaced with something considerably shorter, wider, and with the curves of a 1940s pin-up model. We flew to Utah and skied for six days, bell to bell, and the seed cracked open. Jonathan was a good sport, faking it until he made it ski-wise.

We got tired of flying. It got more expensive, less convenient, and the only time I could go skiing was on a designated school break. Jonathan and I did the Interconnect Tour twice. We eventually obtained touring equipment and hired a guide on our vacation. Each trip brought us closer to the conclusion that we didn’t want to live somewhere we couldn’t leave our house and go skiing quickly. Annapolis, Maryland was not going to feed the seed. I knew from visiting Utah that it was the place where normal people with non-ski jobs could live to ski. With no kids and nothing to do but sell our home, we decided to just go west.

The seed planted in 1990 on a chairlift at Alta was my new reality as I learned how to safely get to that place I saw all those years ago. It wasn’t lost on me either—that Brittany and I had peered out on the very terrain that I could finally ski. It was 2010.

I can’t remember which year or even how, but soon after our move, Brittany and I found each other online. After almost 20 years, our parallels were astounding. Both of us were teaching Algebra 2 at the time, though neither of us majored in teaching or math. She had been racing mountain bikes, and also making a name for herself in the ski mountaineering world. Both of us had met our partners in our sports—mine in cycling, hers while looking for partners to ski Colorado’s 14,000ft peaks. 

While I had been trying to kick down barricades in cycling by being in the first crew of US women to race the cyclocross World Cups in Europe, she had set herself a goal to ski every one of Colorado’s 54 14ers, and her soon-to-be husband Frank Konsella was her main team for that project. He ended up being the 4th person ever to complete it, and Brittany was on her way to being the first woman. An ACL got in the way of that, making her second, but in that game, finishing and being able to talk about it is accomplishment enough.

Brittany’s backcountry bachelorette party.

Brittany and Frank had a wedding, whereI was a bridesmaid for the only time ever. The bachelorette party was a girls’ hut trip, and now Brittany can’t drink tequila. The wedding was a gorgeous Crested Butte affair, full of mountain friends and my old high school teachers, and now I can’t drink gin.

When we were welcoming our first of two children, Brittany teamed up with a friend of mine who she had never met and planned a baby shower. She drove out and made the food, decorations, the whole deal. She and Frank don’t have kids, but have become de-facto aunt and uncle for mine. 

When you’re skiing in as many places as Brit does, there lie sleeping dragons in the mountains. Of course, as a friend, I worry that even though she is a smart, educated person who is really thoughtful in the mountains, some strange and tragic event will befall her. A few years ago, it did, but her own Subaru broke her femur and neck— a freak accident in a parking lot. It was a very serious set of injuries that threatened not just skiing, but her life. 

In true Brittany fashion, she rehabbed herself back. Not to diminish this—from the ICU to rehab, and back to Crested Butte, she may have worked harder at making herself well than climbing and skiing all those peaks. When they removed the titanium hardware from her leg, one of her first skis back was a pre-season skin up Alta with my family, including my kids. 

It’s hard for me to get away, but Brittany makes sure she visits here at least twice a year, when we pick up where we left off last time. We’ve shared lots of firsts, some that shouldn’t be mentioned here in case her dad or my kids read this. My daughter, who is nearly 11, thinks Brittany is by far the coolest person ever, and she aspires to “ski like Brittany”. Which honestly, she does, because Brit and I learned to ski together so long ago that we ski alike—including my kid. Maybe we should get her a Brittany poster for her wall.

I’m coaching cross country skiing and Brittany is coaching backcountry skiing. I guess we have both followed in her father’s footsteps of being educators, though not as traditionally—our classrooms being outside and on foot—a natural progression from her dad’s animated style that involved sailing a desk and pantomiming Civil War battles in front of seated high schoolers.

Brittany sliding along in 2022 as she find some early season snow stashes in the Utah backcountry.

I have about four backcountry ski partners at most. One is my husband, the other is Brittany. I need to really trust who I’m with to feel safe. Maybe I’m not alone in that, but I’d know more if I had more ski partners, I guess. They all share a healthy respect for what mountains full of frozen water can do under the right (wrong) circumstances, and they all want to get home to ski another day. 

It was spring this year when we last skied. We were doing the usual, “should we keep kick-turning or just boot this,” bit in an unnamed couloir in the Salt Lake area. She didn’t feel great about continuing on the ascent, and I always defer to the least risky option. We turned a few meters from the top and had a great ski down to wait for Frank, who did the last few meters on foot and safely returned. While sitting on a rock having some cheese, I recalled a quote from the OG Teton climber Paul Petzoldt, and it was apropos as Brit had finally notched a Grand Teton ski this year.

“There are old mountaineers and there are bold mountaineers, but there are no old, bold mountaineers.” It would be nice if we could be old mountaineers together someday. 

We’ve learned the art of turning back and being satisfied with doing that again tomorrow. As kids, we chased each other all over the big resorts of the U.S., always challenging each other to ski harder, hit the fall line on a bump run, get lost for hours in the trees in Vail, try (and kind of fail) at snowboarding, wait a little longer to go in, to go home. In sport and life, I like to surround myself with people who make me want to do my best, and perhaps Brittany was the first of those people.

I just celebrated a milestone birthday. Every year I get out of bed a little slower, hear an extra little creak in my knees, and need an extra day of recovery after a bunch of long days in the mountains. Maybe it isn’t age, but the parenting of two elementary-aged kids. Whatever the reason, when Brit comes to town, I’m a 16-year-old kid again. 

As soon as I snap into my skis, which now don’t require bending over to clamp to my boots, when I’m done obsessively checking to make sure the key to the car is safely stowed, beacon on and verified, all those years melt as fast as spring snow after a dust storm. Brittany and I are kids again, but this time with the knowledge and experience to go to all the “over there’s” we want to. I relish the duality of feeling like a kid, but armed with the experience of middle age. Most of all, I’m grateful that after over 30 years, I still get to go skiing with my sister from another mister. 

Cheers to all the old mountaineers, and may our oldness actually be our boldness.