Thank you, Ingrid Backstrom!
Ingrid Backstrom, you can come back to the Winter Speaker Series any time! In fact, please come back again and again.
Last night was another Winter Speaker Series show for the ages, and we couldn’t be more grateful to Ingrid for sharing her honest, funny, down-to-earth, and raw reflection on what skiing means to her today.
This was not just a presentation about rad skiing, although that was included in spades throughout, but it was a much deeper study of skiing and life; how one reflects, supports, and influences the other, and more, how the interplay between the two is constantly evolving. The evening was punctuated throughout by moments of stillness, big belly laughs, and cheers from the audience.
Skiing: More than just a career
Ingrid started with her question, “what does skiing mean to me today?”, and she brought us along on her journey as she set out to find the answer. Starting from the very beginning of her 20 year professional ski career and filming with Warren Miller, Matchstick Productions, Sherpas and more, to the incomprehensible loss of her brother Arne, to both soul filling lines, and frustrating crashes, to the birth of her daughters and growth of her family, and ending with her recent goal to ski 100 consecutive days.
What it's all about
The answer she found is that skiing reflects and amplifies what you are experiencing in your life. In the face of so much growth and change, it is only natural that the skiing mirrors that. There are moments when it is your everything, and moments when it is a mechanism to process what you are experiencing elsewhere. At times, her story echoed the sentiment from the Morrison brother’s show — the mountains give so much, but they also take, and through it all they offer an opportunity to process.
Ultimately though, after completing her 100th day of skiing she decided that what it all comes down to is quite simple - skiing is fun, silly, and weird, and it gains meaning when shared with others. She ended the show with a picture of her family out skiing together, and concluded that, “this is what it is all about”.
A beautiful pairing
The pairing of her show with the non-profit beneficiary, The Scotty Lapp Foundation, was kismet. With images of Scotty filling the room, you could feel his contagious energy and high spirits bringing even deeper meaning to the night and the words that Ingrid imparted. Through bar, and giveaway ticket sales, as well as anonymous donations from the Donor Party, $75k was raised for the non-profit working tirelessly to bring a skate park to Tahoe City in memory of Scotty Lapp.
