Polartec-sponsored athlete, Greg Hill decided on New Year’s Day this year to attempt to ski 2 million vertical feet before 2011. To achieve his goal, he is skiing around 5,500 feet a day (a total of 900,000ft so far) with an HD camera on his back. With $60K in sponsorship money, and a rockstar wife and two kids that travel with him across the globe, this Revelstoke local took some time out to talk to ESPN’s Devon O’Neil and explain just what it feels like to have skied almost one million vertical feet this year, and still have one million ahead. Polartec is proud to be helping him get there. Follow his progress on www.greghill.ca.
To read the entire interview on ESPN Freeskiing, click here. Read below for excerpts. Story by Devon O’Neil, photos by Aaron Chance-ESPN.
Greg Hill is a skier unto himself, and not just because he once climbed and skied 51,100 vertical feet in 24 hours, or because he will probably notch 270 days on snow this year, or because his short film “The Unbearable Lightness of Skiing” was a Banff finalist a few years back, or because he failed his ski guide exam in 2009 yet still maintains a backcountry profile that is as admired as any in North America.
An ex-randonee racer who grew up in Quebec, Hill now lives in Revelstoke, B.C., where he logs giant days in the Rogers Pass backcountry. He is skilled enough to drop 40-foot cliffs, fit enough to average 2,000 vertical feet an hour over a full day in perilous environments — ascent, descent and transitions combined — and yet conscious enough to actually stop and enjoy his environment, as he did numerous times last November when I tagged along for an early season descent of a Colorado fourteener.
Beginning on New Year’s Day 2010, Hill, 34, set out to climb and ski 2 million vertical feet this calendar year, a feat that no one (to our or his knowledge) has even remotely attempted. To support his quest, he has raised nearly $40,000 from sponsors like Backcountry.com, Dynafit (which released Hill’s pro model ski this year, the Stoke), Arc’teryx and Polartec.
The sponsors’ primary return on investment comes in Hill’s self-made videos, which straddle the line between ski-bum trip reports and rare windows into very raw adventure. (Watch them at www.greghill.ca.)
At the time of our interview on June 25, Hill had summited and skied 44 peaks this year, topping out on 16,644-foot Mt. Steele, the 10th highest in North America. He spoke via a spotty Skype connection in Las Trancas, Chile, where he is skiing volcanoes and hanging out with his wife Tracey, a part-time waitress and full-time mom; daughter Charley, 4; and son Aiden, 3, as he pursues his 2-million-foot objective.
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