Christina Lustenberger Skis the Impossible

High in the thin air of Pakistan’s Karakoram Range, Christina Lustenberger paused to look up. A mere 900 feet above her, the snowcapped summit of a granite spire known as the Great Trango Tower soared to over 20,600 feet. Scaling its bulging face felt like climbing on a giant basketball, the world falling away into empty space on all sides. Her pack, pulling on her petite five-foot-six frame, was heavy with skis and climbing equipment. Her toeholds in the snow were shallow. The hanging glacier a few hundred feet to the right calved relentlessly, each time sending the energy of the place up through her feet.

She and her two expedition mates, American ski mountaineer Jim Morrison and Canadian professional skier Nick McNutt, were perched together below an enormous horizontal crevasse that stood between them and the summit like a dragon guarding a castle. They’d already been climbing mixed rock and ice for several hours. This chasm was bigger than they’d expected—probably bigger than anyone would have expected, given that this behemoth spire had only been climbed a handful of times, and only in summer. They had traveled there in April 2023. Likely no one had even thought to ski it before Lustenberger, or Lusti, as she’d been nicknamed, dreamed up this expedition.

Lusti, 39, had spent the previous decade quietly blowing open the doors of what’s possible in the mountains. The feats revealed her as one of this generation’s great explorers, one who moves through seemingly impassable terrain in remote ranges with a combination of ski mountaineering, technical alpinism, and genuine creativity. Her racing career laid a hard-charging foundation: she skis with graceful, powerful style. If you’ve never heard of her, it’s because she’s more interested in drawing improbable lines than in proclaiming her lengthening list of first descents on Instagram.

Lusti examined the problem of the crevasse. It yawned at least 25 feet wide, bisecting the full 600-foot width of the slope. To cross it would require building an anchor, belaying one of them into it to climb up the other side, then building another anchor there to create a fixed line. If they succeeded, they could possibly reach the summit that day to win an elusive prize: skiing a first descent on their first attempt.

But Lusti is as calculated as she is creative. Years ago, when the industry and her fellow skiers were just waking up to what she could do, she often thought about the inherent risk of following this path: a career-ending injury, losing friends to the mountains, the possibility of her own death and what that would mean for the people she loves. Back then there was something else, too, harder to articulate: a sudden can’t-touch-the-bottom feeling when she imagined her full potential, realizing that what she was truly capable of might be off the current map. In such terra incognita, she determined, only mastery, humility, and careful decision-making would keep her safe.

But in the months leading up to their April 2023 expedition, Lusti had been wondering whether even those cultivated qualities were enough. Her mentor, accomplished ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson, was supposed to be here, in the Karakoram, on the team. But Nelson had been killed in a fall while skiing off the summit of 26,781-foot Manaslu, in Nepal, just five months before. The question of risk haunted Lusti anew ever since.

It was already late afternoon, leaving the trio less time than they would have liked to tackle a crux this complicated. They decided to retreat, armed now with the knowledge of the obstacles they faced.

But once she had her feet back on firm ground, the sense that the world was falling away wouldn’t disappear.

Lusti’s father, Peter, likes to say that she and her older sister, Andrea, skied before they could walk. He and their mother, Jane, ran a ski shop at Panorama Mountain Resort outside the small town of Invermere, British Columbia, all through her childhood. Skiing was the family legacy. And Lusti was a natural. She won the first youth ski league race she entered, at five years old.

“I was fast at a very young age, and I gravitated toward wanting to win,” she says. “I always compared myself to the fastest, best person. And that was usually boys. My girlfriends didn’t ski race.” Her competitiveness wasn’t confined to racing. If a boy hit a jump with big air, she would start higher up to hit it bigger, even if it meant missing the landing and completely exploding upon impact.

“So many of our generation’s strong females—Hillaree Nelson and Kit DesLauriers and others—we spent so much time with boys, because that’s how you learn,” she told me. “Those are the strongest people in the mountains, the people who make us stronger. And you see that their strength comes from these deep-rooted masculine traits.” She cites a few: speed, fearlessness, trust in their own expertise, stoicism.

When she was 17, Lusti made the Canadian alpine ski team. As a teenager, she’d travel the globe to race for weeks at a time and then try to fit back in with her high school friends upon her return, going to local hockey games she didn’t much care about, drinking Smirnoff Ice at parties with everyone else. “I was trying to be everything all at once, and make it look easy,” she says.

At 21, she was ranked in the top 30 in the world in giant slalom; at 24, she raced in the 2006 Olympics. Over the course of her racing career, Lusti tore her ACLs repeatedly, three times on the left, once on the right. Each was heartbreaking and required a yearlong recovery. When she injured her left knee for the third time in a competition at age 25, she realized racing might destroy her body so thoroughly that she couldn’t ski at all.

But Lusti had already been dreaming about a different path, one that took her deep into the wild. She already loved to ski tour, and she’d pinpointed potential lines all over her home range, the Purcells, that had yet to be skied. It could be that they were impossible—or perhaps she had a unique vision.

She knew that what she was truly capable of might be off the current map.

At 26, Lusti began a five-year process to become certified with the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides. Step one was enrolling in a two-year program at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) Adventure Guide Program, in Kamloops, British Columbia, which would lay the foundation for her training. Her new career path would offer both a source of income and the chance to develop skills to ski the technical terrain she was drawn to—like that untouched line down the rocky, ribbed face of Mount Nelson, the 10,869-foot pyramid out the front window of her childhood home.

In 2008, after she graduated from TRU, she moved east to Revelstoke, where a friend had offered her a job as an assistant ski racing coach while she finished her guide certifications. Revelstoke and the Selkirks weren’t yet on skiers’ radar as a must-visit North American destination, and the location was perfect: she now lived at the foot of Rogers Pass, home to some of the most storied backcountry skiing on the continent.

Danyelle Magnan, now one of Lusti’s climbing partners and a forecaster on the Rogers Pass avalanche team, remembers first meeting her on a narrow, icy luge track of an exit trail from a popular zone on the pass. “Some small girl comes shredding out Connaught Trail with these giant-slalom turns,” Magnan says. “That was the early days, so there weren’t that many people out there in general, and there certainly weren’t that many women. Some people stood out.” Magnan recalls skiing the Vent Shaft couloir, a 50-plus-degree convoluted chute in the pass, with her a few years later. “I probably side-slipped the whole thing. And Christina comes down after me and says, ‘Don’t you just love it when you’re doing jump turns and landing 30 feet below your jumps?’”

Lusti had leveraged the traits she honed in ski racing—a white-hot focus and a perfectionistic streak—to quickly develop the skills she’d need as a guide. She became adept at interpreting snow and weather conditions, assessing avalanche danger, and moving safely in slide-prone terrain. She learned to use ropes, crampons, and ice-axes for glacier travel, mountaineering, and rescues, and she mastered the art of navigating in a whiteout. When she began working for heli-ski and ski-touring operations, however, she also made some disheartening observations, notably how women’s voices were less valued in the guiding world. She noticed that, in briefings, men talked over the few female guides; as a result, the women were the quietest in the room. “The frustration of that only fueled my drive. I felt just as strong as any male guide,” she says. So she let her technical skills and skiing do the talking. “To navigate the boys club, you have to be strong, elbows out a little bit. But also, you don’t just want to fight your way. You have to earn the respect and let your actions speak your power. That was a huge amount of pressure.”

Between guiding gigs, Lusti turned her eye toward the lines she’d been intent on tackling. Her inaugural first descent was in 2011, on the south couloir of 10,947-foot Mount Adamant, north of Rogers Pass, a 55-degree rocky chute that was listed in a guidebook as an alpine climbing route. Her partner, a fellow guide, opted to wait at the bottom. Sponsors came knocking: Arc’teryx, Black Crows, Petzl, Smartwool. She started filming with Sherpas Cinema and Teton Gravity Research (TGR). She dialed back her guiding commitments and turned to what she considers phase three of her mountain career: professional skiing. But while her peers were heli-skiing, following guides into the backcountry, and entering competitions, Lusti was a different kind of athlete: she was drawn to ski mountaineering, and notching at least one jaw-dropping first ascent, if not more, each season.

As her career took off, Lusti sought out partners with complimentary technical skills and ambition, like Andrew McNab, a ski guide and Revelstoke local, and Brette Harrington, a skilled alpinist she met through their then-mutual sponsor, Arc’teryx. Lusti likes to joke that Harrington is a skier trapped in a climber’s body; Harrington returns that Lusti is an alpinist trapped in a skier’s body.

In 2020, Lusti and McNab climbed and skied a first descent of Mount Macdonald, a 5,249-foot line that called for three rappels between disconnected couloirs and hanging benches. In an interview with Powder shortly after, Lusti called it “just a day’s hit in Roger’s Pass.” The following winter, she and Harrington attempted what they named the Gold Card Couloir. It required a 19-mile snowmobile approach, a two-hour skin, and navigating an enormous bulge of vertical glacier to access the 55-degree slope above. They turned back two thirds of the way up when the ice boomed and shifted above them, but returned the following day with McNab, tried a different route up, and skied it successfully. Lusti posted a few pucker-inducing photos of the adventure on her Instagram account, captioned simply with a few stats and their names.

A month later, she finally skied Mount Nelson, with childhood friend and ski mountaineer Ian McIntosh, which required a technical 6,900-foot ascent. After that, every turn down the near vertical, rock-interrupted chute was “life and death,” Lusti said in a short film about the project. In characteristic form, Lusti simply posted the video on her Instagram with the concise caption: “Nelson edit.”

After all, no one likes a woman who extols herself. But neither does the ski industry like a wallflower. Lusti walks that tightrope with grace. If a photographer or filmmaker can keep up with her, fine, but woe to the media maker who asks her to pose and reenact things, or who gets in the way of the day’s objective. Her resistance to the spotlight, though, only added to Lusti’s mystique. She developed a reputation among local skiers, national media, and an in-the-know fan base, who lauded her blistering uphill pace, powerful skiing in terrifying no-fall zones (on ultralight alpine gear, no less), her dedication to skiing nearly every day of the season, and her seemingly superhuman knowledge of, and intuition about, the mountains.

If the idolization was a bit much for an introvert who rarely drinks, goes to bed by eight, and hardly participates in skiing’s party culture, Lusti graciously worked to hide it. McNab recalled an episode in 2018 when he and Lusti met a couple of young guys on a skin track in the pass who “fanboyed the shit out of her.” She was kind to them, he said, but he could tell she was uneasy. “She was comfortable walking along this massive cornice ridge, rappelling 60 feet, and skiing this fully exposed line. But these dudes wanted to take a selfie with her and she got so uncomfortable.”

Even in the largely masculine ski and mountaineering worlds, she wasn’t afraid to be classically feminine in some ways. Pro skier Hadley Hammer says their text thread often consists of a screenshot of an outfit Lusti likes, “and then two photos down is some insane ski line wants to do. She’s a strong example of a woman who’s at her pinnacle but is also very much herself. And that self is complicated. It’s very cool to see her create room for that.”

Lusti is the whole package: an alpinist and an ice climber, an Olympic-level skier and a guide. And it did not escape her notice that she was making less of a living than her male counterparts.

“Everyone in the ski industry is a dude,” she says. “Your managers, your teammates. They’re speaking louder, getting bigger contracts, getting pro model skis, while you’re getting the short end of the stick. So often brands say, ‘Well, this is our budget, the best we can do. Take it or leave it.’ I can’t come across the way I need to without being considered a bitch. Female athletes without agents, you just take it, because they make you feel like you’re replaceable.” Sure, she could hire an agent to help her with the negotiations. But, she points out, it would cost 20 percent of her salary just to secure what men in the industry were getting for free.

When the North Face courted Lusti for its athlete team in 2020, it offered an invaluable resource: Hilaree Nelson, ski mountaineer and captain of the North Face athlete team. Twelve years her senior, Nelson “was this strong, beautiful, capable expedition explorer and skier,” Lusti says. “And I always thought, That’s what I want to do. Create the skills to truly live in the wildest, remotest, scariest mountains, and ski lines that take your breath away.” This was a chance for mentorship unlike anything Lusti’d had before, a chance “just to be within her greatness.”

In 2022, Lusti finally got the opportunity to ski with her idol. She and Harrington invited Nelson, along with climber Emily Harrington (no relation to Brette, although they love to joke that they’re sisters), on an expedition to Canada’s Baffin Island, in the Arctic Circle. On that trip, Lusti zeroed in on a magnificent, 4,000-foot vertical crack in a mountain of dark stone: a hanging face atop a colossal bulge of glacier-blue ice, with a narrow ribbon of snow below. Neither Nelson nor Harrington chose to try it, opting for less technical couloirs the day that Lusti and Brett attempted the line they’d named Polar Moon. To reach it, they ascended a couloir on the back side of the ridge. Then they rappelled over glacier ice atop the hanging face and skied more than 1,000 feet of the exposed slope before reaching the 600-foot ice bulge. Descending that serac required several rappels, during which their rope developed a core shot (damage that threatened its structural integrity), then got stuck. They had to cut it and make slow, short rappels to the snow ribbon below, forcing them to spend significant time on possibly unstable ice. Celebrating their success back at camp, Nelson lauded them ecstatically on camera: “We’re really moving forward. This was them seeing that line, figuring out how to put it together, and executing on it, to a very high level. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.”

In Baffin, Lusti felt the lightest she’d ever been in the mountains. There seemed to be nothing to prove among the four of them. “We fell into this place of joy in each other’s company. We had so much respect for each person’s drive for mastery in their own craft,” she says.

After all, no one likes a woman who extols herself. But neither does the ski industry like a wallflower.

While Lusti and Nelson climbed a couloir together in Baffin after Polar Moon, Nelson invited the younger woman to Antarctica the following spring to attempt a line on 15,919-foot Mount Tyree. “I was completely humbled,” Lusti says. “To meet someone who has that same passion and fire and drive for adventure, who you see eye to eye with and click so perfectly—it’s almost like that feeling when you meet the person you fall in love with.”

While Nelson pitched the Antarctica expedition to the North Face for funding, Lusti pitched the company an expedition to the Karakoram with Nelson, Nelson’s life partner, Jim Morrison, and Brette Harrington. An alpine climber had sent Lusti a photo of a climbing route on the Great Trango Tower, the second-highest vertical wall on earth, with a hanging glacier on its face. She’d never seen terrain like it and immediately imagined a ski line through it. It would be the test of all the skills she’d put together.

With Nelson’s mentorship and partnership, and Lusti’s breadth of skills, the new possibilities felt endless. She felt like a rocket ship exploding from the launchpad.

The North Face approved the Karakoram expedition in mid-September 2022, while Nelson was on Manaslu, the world’s eighth-highest mountain, with Morrison. Then, on September 26, the news came from Nepal: Nelson had been swept off the upper face by a small avalanche and killed.

Lusti was crushed with grief. She also lamented that Nelson’s achievements hadn’t been celebrated on the level of her living male counterparts until she’d passed away. “What would it have been like if we celebrated Hilaree the same way when she was alive?” she says. “I don’t think she knew her impact on all of us in this community—male and female—which is tragic.”

Some might question whether it’s still necessary to point out discrepancies like this. But while the outdoor industry has published hundreds of stories and images of women in male-dominated fields, those are just good optics. The reality, especially for women alpinists, is that sexism continues to run rampant. And this wouldn’t be the last time Lusti was reminded of it.

Lusti almost let the Karakoram trip go. Her dream partner was gone. She wasn’t sure Morrison would want to return to big mountains so soon after Nelson’s accident, and Brette Harrington was leaning into sport climbing. Also, Nelson’s passing had ignited a smoldering suspicion: Lusti’s perfectionism might not be enough to keep her safe.

“To have that beacon in front of me perish was daunting,” Lusti says. “The more time you spend in these wild places, the more likely it is that things will go sideways, usually because of something you didn’t anticipate. All you can do is make yourself harder to kill. Focus on mastery. Climb fast, ski fast, be efficient. Be diligent. Make calculated and humble decisions. But in the back of my head, there’s the feeling that I have a target on my back. At some point, it’s just luck over skill.”

And yet thoughts of that Himalayan tower wouldn’t leave her alone. She knew where her heart lay. “This is where I belong, and what I love and am good at and what drives me,” she says. “Hilaree talked about that, too. It’s who she was. She couldn’t just turn it off. She knew the risks. And you still go, because it’s what you breathe for.”

It turned out that Morrison still wanted to join the expedition. Lusti also reached out to Nick McNutt, with whom she’d developed a strong relationship after a fateful TGR shoot. He’d been buried in an avalanche while filming, and Lusti’d helped rescue him. He felt lucky to have gained her respect enough for the Karakoram invitation. But he also suspected he was invited simply because he could keep up with her.

Because it was a North Face–sponsored trip, they needed to bring photographers and filmers, who all happened to be men. By the end of March 2023, Lusti was neck-deep in the complicated logistics of getting six people to a remote mountain range during a season when few people, if any, went there. She only knew from studying images that there might be snow on the face of Great Trango Tower to ski in the spring.

Before any big objective, skier Hadley Hammer says, Lusti can get quiet, all her focus turned toward it. “You know it will be something amazing, because she goes full in on it. I think that’s the required sacrifice of the kind of skiing she does. There’s not much room for balance.”

A few days after the crevasse turned the team back from the summit, Lusti woke from a fitful night of sleep to a twisted stomach, unable to eat. McNutt felt similarly. This was the morning they’d decided to return to high camp for a second attempt. Lusti thought, This isn’t so bad that I can’t go. She made her way up the gully slowly, in the unfamiliar position of bringing up the rear. She felt a sudden urge to relieve herself, but she couldn’t get her pants down in time. Weak, tired, and in pain, she was forced to take off her boots and all her layers to clean herself up. Then, she continued to struggle upward. When she made it to camp, camera on her, she admitted what happened.

“When you’re the only girl with five dudes, and you walk up and you’re like, ‘Yo guys, I just shit my pants,’ you are so emotionally vulnerable,” she says. She kept deteriorating and soon was unable to even sit up in the tent to take water to swallow pills. McNutt was still sick as well. They made the call to retreat again. Lusti felt frail and exposed.

By the time she and McNutt had recovered, four days after their second attempt, time was running out for a third. The forecast called for a weather window, so the team headed back up to high camp. But those predictions were wrong. Powerful flurries swept through, dropping snow on the sloping granite walls that could release into the gully they had to travel below. Lusti didn’t feel good about it; however, not everyone agreed.

“She would say something,” says photographer Drew Smith, who was also on the Baffin trip. “And then one of the other guys would speak up and everybody would pay attention more, probably without the men on the trip even noticing.” Although Lusti was the leader and had planned the entire expedition, the team naturally gravitated to Morrison, by virtue of his experience in the Himalayas. “I could tell a lot of things were bugging her. But she’s pretty private and super tough,” says Smith.

Lusti couldn’t help but think of the difference between this trip and the Baffin expedition. What would it be like if Nelson were there with her on Trango?

In the relative safety of high camp, the group set up beneath a house-size boulder, and dispersed to their tents. Then came a great roar. Two filmers outside yelled. Those inside the tents were engulfed in darkness. When the violence subsided, Lusti ripped her tent open. The men outside were alive, but caked in snow. Some small pieces of gear were gone. A size-two avalanche had released, split around the boulder, and thundered down the gully they’d just climbed.

“It was really frightening for me,” Lusti says. “I was the expedition leader and felt like I’d just exposed the whole crew to more uncertainty and risk than I wanted. And I thought, We’re done.”

As they trekked away from the mountain, the weather cleared to reveal a heartbreaking blue. It was easy to question the call to leave. “In the end, you have to let it go for what it was, be proud of the decisions and the efforts that you made, and glad that everybody came home safe,” Lusti says, “But that’s hard. These things can really consume you.”

When Lusti returned home, she felt disconnected. She replayed the Trango expedition over and over in her mind, analyzing her decisions. She was still mourning the loss of Nelson. Then, in August 2023, she lost another person close to her. She prefers to keep the details private, but if Lusti was a rocket ship, this person would be her support crew back on the ground. This loss, on top of Nelson’s, cracked her wide open. She finally learned that no one can be everything all at once, all the time.

In the past, Lusti would go to the mountains to bury hard feelings. This time, she left her home in Revelstoke and moved to a remote, isolated 12-by-12-foot cabin a few hours away in the Purcells. She passed up an expedition to Nepal. Alone and adrift, she turned to face her internal expanse.

“In ski racing, ski guiding, and professional skiing, showing vulnerability, especially as a woman, was weakness. I think so many women feel that we’re only able to show our strengths, that we’re constantly trying to prove ourselves,” she says. “What’s the next expedition, next sponsor, next training? Am I running today, am I climbing today, am I doing both? I used to ski every single day. It’s exhausting. I felt like I had to be the best version of myself. I’ve been this prisoner of perfectionism.”

She saw that she’d marked her life in milestones requiring physical strength. She’d sacrificed emotional strength, and that had cost her dearly. She loved the physical vulnerability of her skis tipping into space, but she’d never let herself be vulnerable in other ways—she’d never seen room for that in mountain culture.

For months, Lusti felt completely untethered. She considered, more than once, ending her life—the same life in which, a mere year before, she’d manifested every dream she’d imagined for herself. Now, each wave of grief stretched her beyond what she thought she could handle. “It felt like an insurmountable amount of pain and hopelessness,” she says. She was, way off the map. But slowly, with the help of friends and family, Lusti began to explore where these less tangible limits of hers could expand.

Last fall, Lusti started working with a few therapists. And she leaned into one of her two greatest fears: public speaking (the other is snakes). Lusti spent October touring the U.S. and speaking to audiences as part of publicity efforts for the premiere Earthside, a film about the Baffin expedition. In all the times she’s shown it, she’s only been able to watch it twice. It’s still too raw.

Alone and adrift, she turned to face the internal expanse.

Her suffering began to dissipate, she told me, when she committed to rebuilding herself from what she calls the very bottom of her broken foundation. “I’m confronting what I’ve been hiding from, which is maybe just self-approval,” she says. She’s in the midst of a full inventory of what she wants to keep and what she wants to move away from, including a hard look at the masculine traits that have defined her career, and, in many ways, landed her in such pain.

Now Lusti wants to be transparent about her struggles, in hopes it will help others move through their own. “Everyone’s fighting the same fight, in a way,” she says. “Men, too. There’s a lot of pressure on them to be stoic, strong, never show emotion. I still want to let my strength do the talking. But I want to be as vulnerable and disheveled as I can. I’m going to be a lot more open about that.”

On February 13, Lusti skied a first descent on the south couloir of 11,545-foot Mount Sir Sandford, the highest peak in the Selkirk Range. She had envisioned it since she moved to Revelstoke: a 3,600-foot descent encompassing 50-degree skiing and a 100-foot rappel through a rocky choke. From the top, she could see her inaugural first descent off Mount Adamant across the valley, separated by 13 years: the time it had taken for conditions to align and for Lusti to develop as a skier, an alpinist, and a person. “With that dream descent, I felt like part of my spirit returned. It had felt so extinguished through the summer,” she says.

Lusti is returning to the Karakoram later this spring with Morrison to try for that still untouched line off Great Trango Tower. “After not getting it the first time, there’s this deeper awareness that there’s happiness in pursuit,” she says. “The process is just as important as standing on that summit or skiing off of it. In ski alpinism, we don’t get instant gratification. Just like this place I’m at in life. I’m not trying to rush through it. I’m trying to feel the hardest parts so that I can process it and come out wiser.”

Lusti knows this is ongoing work, and she doesn’t have all the answers. And she no longer thinks she should. As one of the great explorers alive right now, the unknown calls to her: both the external wild and, now, the uncharted reaches inside.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline toll-free from anywhere in the United States at 1-800-273-8255, or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.