The Other Side of the Mountain

If you’ve read the book or seen the film The Other Side of the Mountain, you know about California teenaged ski racer, Jill Kinmont, who suffered a catastrophic injury in a high-speed giant slalom at Alta, Utah, which has left her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

Kinmont was a knock-out beauty and very likely would have become America’s best woman ski racer in the late 1950s. Instead she broke her neck in a tragic fall during Alta’s 1955 Snow Cup race

You can ski the approximate route Kinmont raced by taking the Collins lift and heading down the Saddle race course. Just above Corkscrew heading to Lower Rustler, you will encounter what is known as the Kinmont bump. Here, moving at high speed, Kinmont failed to pre-jump, was flung into the air, glanced off a tree and smashed into a spectator, severing her spinal column at the neck. Catapulted to a kind of fame no one wants, Kinmont salvaged her life, becoming a schoolteacher and model of accomplishment for the world’s disabled. -- John Fry

Previously: KT-22, Squaw's Olympic Mountain

Whistler/Blackcomb: Skiing the 2010 Olympic mountains

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