Backcountry skier Hill reaches 2,000,000 FT goal
Press Release / 26.02.2011
Over the course of his skiing career, Hill has been a climbing/ski machine, racking up 1,000,000 vertical feet in 2004/2005 and an additional 990,000 in 2006/2007. "Drawing on my previous experience, I was able to hone mytraining schedule in order to plan a 2,000,000 vertical foot year."
Climbing uphill is only part of the effort – for most of his runs, Hill had to 'break trail' – which means plowing through fresh powder. The resistance of the snow adds greatly to the challenge of carrying momentum up hill.
Hill's quest has made him intimately familiar with the supremely rugged Selkirk Mountains in and around his Columbia Valley home, but also took him on a four-month trek to South America in order to log enough vertical to reach his goal, since there isn't much year-round skiing in North America.
Getting to the finish line was not easy. With snow late in arriving in Revelstoke after Hill returned from Argentina, Hill had his work cut out for him in order to finish the quest, needing to average almost 8,000 vertical feet (2,500 metres) per day through the month of December, when daylight hours are short. "Those final days featured some serious trail breaking, but also really great powder skiing," Hill says. "I carried two high-power Petzl Ultra headlamps which enabled me to push on and do one or two more laps at the very end of the day. My touring buddies and I really enjoyed skiing deep powder with the headlamp; it really adds another dimension to backcountry skiing," Hill says.
