JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING — Kai Jones, who at 14 is already a
professional adventure skier with the videos to prove it, likes to reminisce
about the old days.
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Like, when he was an 11-year-old sixth grader. His goal
then, aside from seventh grade, was preparing for his first leap off a
menacing, craggy, 10m mountain cliff in Wyoming backcountry known as “Smart
Bastard.”
“I had butterflies in my stomach — looking over the edge was
intimidating,” Kai said last month, still in ski boots following a lightning
dash down the slopes of the Jackson Hole resort near his home. “But you close
your eyes and envision the approach you’ve planned. You open your eyes and hope
for the best, but you know it’s going to work out because you’ve put in the
time to study it.”
Airborne for three seconds, Kai nailed the jump, landing in
a splash of snow that temporarily enveloped his 1.2m plus frame. As cameras
rolled, he emerged from the powdery plume to carve deft, buttery turns in the
ultra-steep landscape beneath the famed rocky precipice.
Sliding to a stop, he called his mother, Shelly.
“I just stomped it, Mom,” he yelped.
“I congratulated him,” Shelly Jones said later. “I wasn’t
going to say, ‘Oh my God, you shouldn’t be doing that.’ We’re a ski family.”
The footage was turned into Kai’s action movie debut, which
found its way to YouTube, quickly attracting more than 3 million views. A
winter sports prodigy — undaunted in expanses of perilous out-of-bounds terrain
— was born.
A few months later Kai, who began skiing when he was 2, won
the International Freeskiers Association’s North American championship for
skiers younger than 12. As sponsorship deals with Red Bull and Atomic skis
rolled in, Kai turned pro, becoming a preteen celebrity who routinely stops for
autographs and rubs elbows with adults in the pantheon of big mountain ski
personalities — even though he still plays with Legos.
“Being famous is cool, for sure,” Kai said with a laugh last
month, sitting on a high-back barstool chair that left his feet dangling well
above the floor. “But you have to be humble and a good mentor.”
Kai’s incandescent career arc in the ski community, while
atypical, is nonetheless familiar.
Time and technology have quickened the pace exponentially.
Since at least the 1970s, pro adventure skiers and snowboarders have earned
their renown and made their money by performing in visual media. But the films
that featured their derring-do and mesmeric skills were produced only a few
times a year. That meant it could take years to develop a marquee name or
lasting status in a world that prizes near-vertical, high-speed descents
through or above snow-covered couloirs and fearsome stony bluffs.
Moreover, film production was costly, with temperamental
cameras and clunky equipment that had to be dragged up windswept mountains.
The evolution of the genre, however, has benefited
significantly from the use of drones, sophisticated video techniques and the immediacy
of social media.
Kai can be captured vaulting off the sheer face of a boulder
outcropping as he executes a double backflip — one of his specialties — just
after the sun comes up and, by noon, have his 45,000 Instagram followers
forwarding the clip around the world.
“The internet has changed everything, maybe because it’s now
kids inspiring kids,” said Todd Jones, Kai’s father. “And the training
capabilities for them are so much more advanced — they’ve spent years trying
out their moves over air bags, foam pits and trampolines. No more waiting for
it to snow in the backyard.”
Todd Jones is well positioned to assess the generational
changes, with a foot planted in eras past and present. A former pro skier, he
co-founded Teton Gravity Research in 1995, and it blossomed into an
action-sports culture powerhouse that has produced nearly 60 films.
Kai, the older of the Joneses’ two sons, was bred to take a
prominent role in the family business. As a 7-year-old, he was slicing
impressive lines in the snow as he accompanied his father on desolate,
breathtaking shoots around North America. Not surprisingly, as Kai’s renown
grew, he became familiar with the insinuation that his accomplishments had been
built on the back of his father’s influential snow sports enterprise.
“I’ve had friends say, ‘You only have what you have because
of your dad,’” he said. “I credit my dad with everything and he gave me this
door to walk through, but I also worked my butt off every single day. I get up
before the sun rises to head to the mountain, and I train year-round. I’ve
probably done 5,000 backflips.”
The Joneses are also used to addressing a more obvious
topic: Isn’t such out-of-bounds skiing, with soaring jumps off mammoth cliffs,
just a bit dangerous?
Especially since Kai freely admits, “I crash a lot.” (He
also concedes, “I always say to myself, ‘How far can I push it and not make my
mom scared?’”)
Shelly Jones, who started skiing when she was 10, was
philosophical about the risk.
“Of course, any mom seeing their child going off a cliff is
going to be a little nervous,” she said. “But there’s a lot of prep that goes
into it first — way before anything happens. We really are safety conscious,
and that’s been ingrained in Kai’s head.”
Todd Jones, noting that strict safety procedures have been
an overriding part of his company’s protocols for 25 years, also insisted on
perspective. He said that a single film might represent an entire winter of
footage from the mountain, because many days and weeks are deemed too hazardous
for a variety of reasons, including the stability of the snowpack in a region
prone to avalanches.
“We take as much pride in walking away and not doing
anything that day as we do from achieving things,” Todd said.
Kai has had a few serious injuries, all of them unrelated to
skiing, and some of them more likely associated with being 14. He broke his
foot doing a backflip off a pool table. “In front of a girl,” Todd said.
Kai broke the same foot and some ribs while mountain biking,
another of his competitive sports.
“I’m really bad at just sitting around,” he said.
The next steps for Kai are less certain. He is a high school
freshman enrolled in the Picabo Street Academy, a private school based in Utah
and named for the Olympic skiing champion. The academy has a flexible, virtual
educational model that is attractive to high-profile youth athletes and other
students with demanding extracurricular pursuits.
Although the sport of freeriding or freeskiing — which means
skiing or snowboarding on ungroomed, usually off-piste terrain without a set
course — is not currently included in the Winter Olympics, Kai has other
interests and options, like college film study programs.
Todd Jones joked that everything his son had done so far
might be just a ploy “to build a really rad college résumé.” Todd added: “He
does need a backup plan. You can’t be a pro skier forever.”
Kai said he had no set goals for the distant future. In one
breath, he said he could quit skiing in three years if it is no longer fun. An
instant later, he suggested that he wanted to be ranked with the legends of the
sport, like Tanner Hall, an American who as a 17-year-old won a freestyle
skiing gold medal at the 2001 Winter X Games and then won six more golds by
2008. Simultaneously, Hall began a celebrated film and endorsement career.
On a recent walk through the busy village at Jackson Hole,
where the gaggle of A-listers can include the Kardashians and Justin Bieber,
Kai Jones was repeatedly stopped by children roughly half his age who wanted to
pose for pictures with him. Others wanted him to sign their ski helmets, while
their mothers and fathers waited for selfies as well, even though they would
tower over the photo’s centerpiece.
Kai, appearing both accustomed to the attention and heedful
of it, tended to end each exchange with a playful laugh and the same message: “Have
fun, OK?”