MOVED BY MOUNTAINS
She changed her life with extreme skiing — and even found love
In 2009, marketing consultant Stephanie Jagger was sitting on the ski lift taking in Whistler, British Columbia, when she spotted a small blue sign.
“Raise Restraining Device” it said, above a a stick figure reaching to lift the safety bar.
“I felt a little shiver go through my body and I asked myself, ‘What’s my restraining device?’ ” Jagger told The Post.
Earlier that morning, Jagger had declared to her ski buddies that she wanted to quit her job and speed down slopes around the world. Her friends had laughed at the impracticality of her suggestion but, after seeing the blue sign, Jagger swore to herself that she would make it a reality. And, she wouldn’t just ski around the world, she would ski a staggering 4 million vertical feet in a year. That’s the equivalent of descending Mount Everest from the summit to sea level about 137 times.
She cashed in her savings, refinanced her apartment in Vancouver, got a line of credit and left a job where she was making six figures. Seventeen months later, she flew to Santiago, Chile, to start her mission. After 10 months, visiting five continents, skiing down 45 mountains and blowing through $70,000, Jagger accomplished her dream.
“The journey changed my whole attitude to life,” she said.
She also broke a world record, though unofficially. A British man named Arnie Wilson holds the record for skiing 4.12 million vertical feet within a year. Jagger accomplished 4.16 million vertical feet; she tracked her distance with an instrument called an altimeter but failed to document it correctly for Guinness World Records.
No matter. The 36-year-old chronicles her impressive conquest in her new memoir “Unbound: A Story of Snow and Self-Discovery,” (Harper Wave, out now).
In one key moment in the book, Jagger described her worst day ever, on New Zealand’s South Island. After a terrifying day on the slopes — conditions were icy and treacherous, and she struggled to work with an outdated, 1940s ski lift called “The Nutcracker” — she threw her body on the ground in the gravel of the parking lot and cried like a baby in exhausted frustration.
“Everything around me was shrapnel,” Jagger wrote in her book. “Thick splinters of rock and fragmented stone had been cast off the mountains and crushed into a fine chalky powder . . . this was a place for the rugged.”
She managed to pick herself and ski another day, but conditions remained difficult, thanks to the temperamental New Zealand weather, with its brutal sleet and gale force winds.
“It was not unlike trying to predict the disposition of a teenager,” she wrote.
In Chile, there was so little snow, she had to slide over patches of gravel.
“I felt like I was skiing over a series of jerky washboards,” she wrote, “bits of rock snagging the bases of my skis, grinding my feet to a gravely halt.”
The skiing journey didn’t just bring Jagger a new outlook, it also brought her love. She met her husband, Chris Rutgers, 42, on the mountains of Patagonia. Their relationship began as a friendship, but after they parted ways in South America, they kept in touch and it turned into something more.
They married in May 2012 and now live in San Diego. Jagger today works as a life coach.
While skiing around the word broke her both physically and mentally at points, she’s glad she did it.
“Becoming one’s best and being one’s bravest involves cracking open,” Jagger wrote. “It means shattering most, if not all, of ourselves.”