Kai broke the same foot and some ribs while mountain biking, another of his competitive sports. He broke his foot doing a back flip off a pool table. Kai has had a few serious injuries, all of them unrelated to skiing, and some of them more likely associated with being 14. “We take as much pride in walking away and not doing anything that day as we do from achieving things,” Todd said. 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. Todd Jones, noting that strict safety procedures have been an overriding part of his company’s protocols for 25 years, also insisted on perspective.
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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. Todd Jones is well positioned to assess the generational changes, with a foot planted in eras past and present. No more waiting for it to snow in the backyard.” “And the training capabilities for them are so much more advanced - they’ve spent years trying out their moves over airbags, foam pits and trampolines. “The internet has changed everything, maybe because it’s now kids inspiring kids,” said Todd Jones, Kai’s father. Kai can be captured vaulting off the sheer face of a boulder outcropping as he executes a double back-flip - 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 evolution of the genre, however, has benefited significantly from the use of drones, sophisticated video techniques and the immediacy of social media. Moreover, film production was costly, with temperamental cameras and clunky equipment that had to be dragged up windswept mountains. 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.
But the films that featured their derring-do and mesmeric skills were produced only a few times a year. Since at least the 1970s, pro adventure skiers and snowboarders have earned their renown and made their money by performing in visual media. Time and technology have quickened the pace exponentially. Kai’s incandescent career arc in the ski community, while atypical, is nonetheless familiar. As cameras rolled, he emerged from the powdery plume to carve deft, buttery turns in the ultra-steep landscape beneath the famed rocky precipice. 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.”Īirborne for three seconds, Kai nailed the jump, landing in a splash of snow that temporarily enveloped his four-foot-plus frame. “But you close your eyes and envision the approach you’ve planned. “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.
His goal then, aside from seventh grade, was preparing for his first leap off a menacing, craggy, 35-foot mountain cliff in Wyoming backcountry known as “Smart Bastard.” Like, when he was an 11-year-old sixth grader.
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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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