Photo by Matthew Turley
Hustle & Snow
The evolution of a ski guru
By Melissa Bond
She's been known alternately as Dancer Girl, Goddess of the Extreme, and Man-Chick. And for many in the ski industry, Kristen Ulmer was either the adventure poster-girl who’d sold out or the woman who broke all the rules and made you love her for it. In 2003, after more than a decade of being paid to nourish her inner adrenaline junkie, Ulmer made a dramatic shift. She began marketing the Zen of skiing.
When Ulmer moved to Utah from New Hampshire at 19, she was a small-town girl who skied in jeans and picked lines that were often directly below the chairlift. She got noticed. Within three years, Ulmer had earned a spot on the U.S. Ski Team as a mogul skier. She thought little of throwing herself off 40-foot cliffs and became known for her showoff maneuvers. By 23, many considered her the best female extreme skier in the world. Steve Casimiro, editor of Powder magazine during the late ‘80s and ‘90s, still calls her “Princess.” He also claims that no one was doing what Ulmer was doing. “Back then,” he says, “women really had their work cut out for them. Like it or not, they weren’t given their due. Ulmer was the first. It was like she just reached out and shook everyone up with her skiing. She made you pay attention.”
And pay attention they did. Sponsors like Red Bull came knocking at her door. Salomon came. Atomic. The girl knew how to hustle. She scored enough free Prada swag to make Paris Hilton envious and used her renown to become a regular columnist for Skiing Magazine, among others. She was an egomaniac and a hedonist and she was beautiful. The ski industry ate her bread like manna and offered up, it seems, the promised land. And she lived there for a while. She consumed it. What most people don’t know is that, despite the props and the constant ego strokes of being the ski industry’s goddess icon, Ulmer started to hate it. After years of hustle and pushing her body to its limits, the entire thing—the industry, the language, the hype—all felt stupid, wrong. She felt, she tells me one night in her home at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, like she was covered with spiders.
Here's the thing," Ulmer says, stretching her long, scarred legs out on the massive, fire-engine red couch that dominates her living room, “I felt like I was in school and I was taking the same course over and over and never passing, never learning the lesson.” And this feeling, she tells me later, is where it all started. I’ve come to interview Ulmer about the Ski To Live clinics she started in 2003, four-day affairs that blend ski coaching with a particularly Western form of Zen teaching called Big Mind. But back then, with the help of the ski industry, the perfect blend of childhood insecurities, and an insatiable and undefined hunger, the only thing Ulmer practiced was the Zen of Kristen. In a culture that celebrates the rugged individual, who wouldn’t eat at a banquet set specially for them day after day after day? What Ulmer began to realize was that her life was playing out like some glamorous existential nightmare from which there was no exit. She played the same role over and over and over and, despite the thrill, despite the industry that fed her dirty, pretty things, the spiders crawled in.
Everything changed, she says, the year she attended Burning Man. This yearly, week-long festival in the Nevada desert is as controversial in character and myth as is Ulmer. While some see Burning Man as a playground for hedonists, others view it as one of the most profound experiments in social interaction and radical self-expression that exists in this country. Regardless, something in the matrix of Ulmer’s character changed after her week in Black Rock City, Nevada. She returned home and wrote Dear John letters to all of her sponsors, breaking up with each and every one of them.
“A few of the letters were posted on the Web for maybe half an hour,” she tells me. “And people went ballistic.” Comments ranged from virulent attacks on Ulmer’s character to one ski magazine editor lamenting that her exit would leave a gaping hole in the world of skiing. Ulmer found the whole thing amusing.
“Well ... amusing and really, really scary,” she confesses. “My whole identity was wrapped up in the ski industry. I was special there.” Wanting to be special is something that Ulmer admits was one of the driving forces in her career. “I’d never felt special as a kid until I discovered skiing. Because I wasn’t just good. I had more balls than anyone and suddenly, because I’d throw myself off cliffs, I was special.”
She shifts on the couch, gets up to retrieve an ice pack from the freezer that she attaches to her wrist with a long, red scarf. Ulmer doesn’t talk much about the physical toll of being a professional extreme athlete, but you can see it in the scars that map the territory of her knees, in the ice packs that line her freezer. During her heyday, she had four ACL-reconstruction surgeries in three years and didn’t miss one of those seasons. She often skied “you fall, you die” lines with knees that were nearly liquid from the precarious attachment of ligaments and tendons simply because her sponsors expected it, injury or not. Imagine a trapeze artist swinging on a single, fraying rope. Now imagine a film crew or photographers and the trapeze artist’s belief that she’s not only got to fly, but she’s got to fly big. And she will. And she does. And everyone applauds and she’s a pretty cover girl again on the front of yet another magazine and she goes home to nurse her injuries alone.
And so, after making a successful living in the ski industry, she up and quit. Just like that. I ask her the typical journalistic question of why she did it so drastically. And then I ask the awkward, more honest question. She was nearing 40 when she broke up with her sponsors. Would Ralph Lauren really have kept her that much longer? And what about her other sponsors? I ask if part of the reason for her Dear John letters could have been simply to avoid the embarrassment of being dropped.
Ulmer’s response is surprisingly insouciant. She shrugs and then leans forward. “I was making twice as much in my late 30s than I ever made at the peak of my skiing career.” She explains this by saying that her ski career went beyond skiing. “My sponsors loved me because I exuded the sexy, crazy side of skiing. I literally couldn’t get a nosebleed without somebody writing about it.” Her writing also made her a media darling. “I was controversial and wasn’t afraid to speak the truth.” Her sponsors were more than loyal. Ulmer says: “Honestly, I could have kept things going like that for decades.”
In describing how she got the idea of the Ski To Live clinics, Ulmer is uncharacteristically vague. She gives the kind of response she would typically dismiss as New Age woo-woo.
“I don’t remember how or why I started these clinics,” she says. “I don’t remember making the decision to do them, and all of a sudden I’m doing them.” She thinks for a minute. “Let me back up. I didn’t set out to be a spiritual teacher. I set out to create a clinic that would help me figure out what sports had taught me. I had no idea. I was in that classroom of the extreme athlete, taking the same course over and over again, but I never learned what I was supposed to learn.”
This is where Ulmer’s story gets interesting. How does a ski-industry hustler, cover girl, and adrenaline fiend turn, in the space of a few years, into a dispenser of Zen wisdom? Ulmer could easily have taken any number of offers that sailed her way. Atari had sent her a proposal for a video game. X Games wanted her to host. She’s unapologetically confident when she says, “I could have done just about anything.” Instead, she took a radical left.
In 2003, Ulmer was at a party when a friend suggested that she contact Dennis Genpo Merzel Roshi of the Kanzeon Zen Center in Salt Lake City to help with the spiritual component of her clinics. Genpo had been making his own headlines. His radical new technique for guiding students into the experience of Buddha Mind was drawing a lot of attention in the Zen Buddhist community.
Named Big Mind, the technique is specifically suited to Westerners who’ve grown up in a post-Freudian psychological landscape. The Western mind is used to analyzing aspects of self. Words like “subconscious,” “repression,” and “neurosis” are part of our cultural lexicon. We use them without batting an eye, but our analysis typically stays in the realm of the ego.
What Genpo has done is to take the study of the self and make it accessible through a system of dialogue. The self talks to the self. More specifically, the self talks to various aspects of mind: desire, fear, control, arrogance, seeking mind, etc. It also speaks to the mind’s counterparts, those aspects of mind that represent the absence of desire, fear, control, arrogance, or seeking. The self becomes revealed through exploration into its own territory. Nothing is condemned—just noticed, just explored. Genpo’s claim is that through Big Mind you experience no separation of self and other. There is no point. There is no counterpoint. There is no center. Through studying the self, one is able to go beyond it.
In the end, the self is forgotten—you’ve caught some huge Buddha air—and there’s nothing but boundlessness. Not bad for one weekend. The self skis. The self watches the voices that emerge while skiing. The self sees its own feeble construct. To Ulmer, the combo sounded unbeatable.
The next day she walked into Genpo’s office at the Zen Center and told him her idea about integrating sports with Zen. He loved the concept. Genpo grew up swimming and playing water polo in Long Beach, California. His experience reaching the zone in his own athletics convinced him that it was a perfect fit with Big Mind. “And,” he tells me, “she was someone who made a very good impression on me from the beginning. She wanted to do something to help people not just be better skiers, but be better people.” They began teaching together and Ski To Live launched Ulmer into Zen and, to her surprise, into what she describes as the biggest risk of her life.
At the start of each Ski to Live clinic, Ulmer asks participants the same question: what’s Zen? Participants fumble and give awkward answers. The consensus is often that Zen is about moving through the world without being negatively affected by it. The “life is suffering” bit that the Buddha talked about resolves itself if you can eradicate the ego. Life becomes a cakewalk. Wrong, counters Ulmer. There’s no eradicating the ego and there’s nothing cake about this stuff.
“There’s a saying in Zen,” she tells me. “’We’re born, we die, and in between we suffer.’ The goal in Zen is not to suffer less. It’s to suffer more, but care less. You follow me?”
She’ll talk about the ego as the “me” that feels separate and special and isolated from everything else. And the way to Big Mind is not via an attempt to peel yourself away from your ego, it’s to ski a hard line right through the heart of it.
And Ulmer’s just the woman to help you meet your ego. Chairs are arranged in a circle. People introduce themselves and talk about their intentions for the clinic. Ulmer encourages full sharing and asks the participants to explain one of the most embarrassing moments in their lives and one of the most proud. People talk of being fired, of having their blouse fall off at a dinner table, of being booed off the stage during a dance contest. They also talk about their children, their art, the time they saved a friend’s life. The circle grows closer. This is important, according to Ulmer. When people feel connected, they’re willing to take greater risks. And while many in the room think that they’re at Ski To Live to improve their skiing with a little Zen, Ulmer claims that they’re going to improve their lives with a little understanding. The understanding comes from Big Mind. Skiing just happens to be the medium through which Big Mind will travel.
Ulmer typically divides the clinic into two parts: ski sessions in the morning, Big Mind discussions with Genpo in the afternoon. A teacher offers yoga in between. The parts of the day merge. The Big Mind discussion of the previous afternoon may have explored the voices of fear or anger or doubt. On the slopes the next day, Ulmer will encourage an exploration of these voices. What happens when you ski in the voice of fear? Or anger? Or doubt? What happens to your breath when you have the thought that your last turn sucked? “Notice how much you’re in your mind,” Ulmer tells the participants, “then notice how that affects you on the mountain.” And, by extension, in your life. Each line of discussion is pulled through the mind and the body. This is a whole new way of skiing, especially for those who may have expected exhortations to “become the ski” and, while you’re at it, to keep your shoulders pointed downhill.
During one of the first Ski To Live clinics, a very successful financial planner from the East Coast broke down in the hallway. Ulmer found him sobbing in a poorly lit alcove. He grabbed her in a fierce, sloppy hug and simply said over and over again, thank you, thank you, thank you.
One of the jokes that Ulmer likes to tell during her clinics explains, she says, the power of Big Mind. The joke goes like this: Two young fish are swimming in the ocean. An older fish swims by and says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The younger fish keep swimming and after a while they look at each other and ask, “What’s water?” Ulmer loves this story. She tells it to me at least twice during our interview. She explains that most people don’t know anything beyond their own, personal ego experience. She certainly didn’t. Big Mind gives people a view of the water, gives them a sense of what life would be like if the self weren’t a separate entity from the rest of the world. Ulmer talks constantly about collective consciousness and unity, about the one mind that unites us all. She stops often, hearing herself. “The language is tricky,” she says. “People hear words like ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’ and ‘collective consciousness’ and their eyes glaze over.” This is part of the reason that she started Ski To Live. “People won’t meditate,” she says, “but they will ski.”
At this point in our conversation, it’s gone black outside. We’re bleary-eyed. Ulmer tells me that the Zen practice is good for her. She’s so used to a particular type of self-absorption and adrenaline-fueled hedonism that it’s just automatic to fall back into that. “If I don’t constantly check my ego and check in with collective consciousness,” she says, “then I’ll just go spinning off into outer space.” She uses the phrase “spinning off” frequently in regard to her habitual movement back in the world of Kristen. There’s a recognition that the gravity of the self pulls with Newtonian certainty. If she doesn’t stick with her Zen practice, she’ll get lost in just being human, just being Kristen. She tells me that she wants the idea of collective consciousness to become part of her DNA, part of her bone marrow. Otherwise, she says, she’ll swim the way she’s always done it and forget about the water.
Ulmer's claim that at least one person per clinic makes a major life change has not gone unnoticed. Ski To Live has been profiled in USA Today, the Boston Globe, the Robb Report, and Outside magazine, to name a few. Ulmer has been asked to speak about Zen at the U.S. Air Force’s National Leadership Conference in February of 2008. She’s been interviewed by the Forbes television show.
I ask Ulmer how her role is different now than it was when she was the über-ski princess. She’s recently launched two new clinics, Climb To Live and Fly To Live, that combine climbing and trapeze with Big Mind. Has she just shifted into being an über-Zen princess? Ulmer stops and thinks for a full minute.
“My ski career,” she says slowly, “was about my massive ego and about wanting to express things that were fueled by anger and fear and insecurities. Don’t get me wrong. Those aspects of my personality gave me delicious experiences as an athlete. I own this. Anger is fuel. Insecurity can be fuel. Ski To Live is different because the fuel comes from things like compassion and heart.” She stops again, runs a finger down the length of her arm. “When I’m running these clinics,” she says, “I’m not Kristen Ulmer anymore. I’m something else. I don’t matter because it’s not about me. The thing is, the other 350 days of the year, I’m back to being Kristen Ulmer. And, honestly, I struggle with that.”
Melissa Bond is associate editor and poetry editor for the Wasatch Journal. She is the 2002 recipient of the Mayor’s Artist Award for the Literary Arts and was named the Best Poet in Motion by Salt Lake City Weekly in 2006. Her book of poetry, Hush, was published in 2006. She lives in Salt Lake City.
