Hot Laps with Sage Cattabriga-Alosa
A talk with a legend about how his skiing is informed by the mountains he lives in and the terrain he skis
This is the third story in a series—Hot Laps—that focuses on a concept that has fascinated me for years. The idea is simple: where we ski shapes how we ski. It's about nature and nurture.
The hypothesis behind Hot Laps is that we ski the way we ski because of where we ski. Big-mountain skiing legend Sage Cattabriga-Alosa agrees!
In the first two stories in Hot Laps, I spoke with:
Daron Rahlves about how Sugar Bowl and the Hahnenkamm inform his approach to skiing. Silver Belt and The Streif left an indelible imprint on the way Daron looks at skiing.
Aspen’s Baker Boyd about how Aspen’s steep pitches, terrain undulations and local vibe. “The awesome community in Aspen and the terrain we access here is what keeps me around,” says Baker Boyd. “There’s a lot of terrain and different transitions to work with and I have fun trying to generate speed out of those transitions on Aspen Mountain. Some other places have consistent steep pitches, but I don’t want to make the same turn over and over.”
Recently, I caught up with Sage while he was in Girdwood, Alaska with Ian McIntosh, Alex Armstrong, Kai Jones and others to talk about two things. First, we dove into the Hot Laps hypothesis. Second, we talked about his epic episodic YouTube series “Let’s Take a Lap!” Stay tuned for a sweet story from our second part of this conversation in a real magazine.
For now, here’s the Hot Laps conversation with Sage Cattabriga-Alosa…
Greg Fitzsimmons (GF): For a long time, I’ve been fascinated with this idea of where you ski dictating how you look at terrain and how you ski—it’s along the lines of nature and nurture. You’re doing this cinematically with “Let’s Take a Lap.” Think about Candide compared to Rahlves. La Clusaz is inextricably tied to how Candide skis. Right?
Sage Cattabriga-Alosa (Sage): Totally. I was just talking about that with Kai Jones and Mac. We were talking about Candide. I’ve been to La Clusaz and skied with him there, and it makes a lot of sense that he skis that way.
GF: Talk about your roots in skiing. Where’d you get started?
Sage: I grew up in Alta, Wyoming skiing Grand Targhee. My connection to skiing was through the race team because it was an impetus for a lift ticket. I joined the ski foundation and that gave me a season pass and some coaching. My parents were psyched because I clearly loved to ski and this package helped. Grand Targhee is known for its powder, soft snow and soft groomers, not hard, firm, icy conditions prime for learning how to ski race. It was good because the ski race program taught me how to make a turn, but bad for becoming a ski racer because once I touched hard snow I was gripped. Targhee is also a perfect training ground for skiing powder, hitting cliffs. The backside of Targhee has 60-foot cliffs you can basically just ski off. Now there are permanently closed zones, but when I was a kid you just had to hike to it. You’d drop in, ski a few turns, and then huck a cliff. We had to figure out how to line those airs up. Targhee taught me a ton about line selection and how to navigate terrain. You could just tee off a cliff without skiing into it, and then the next level was skiing five turns down to a cliff where it all looks the same from the top, so, how do you figure out where you are? Targhee was a sick training ground for that experience.
That was the initial foundation and what you’re getting While I was chasing ski racing early, naturally the terrain and snow quality took over. I didn’t become a ski racer.
GF: After laying that foundation, what was next? Was it straight to Little Cottonwood Canyon?
Sage: Almost. There was an intermediary, which was Mount Bachelor. I graduated high school and moved to Bend to go to community college by getting residency because my dad lived in Oregon. And, that Oregon school I could ski out of. Bend was the only college that was within my budget where I could ski. So, I moved to Bend. It was low budget and working for lift tickets. But, Bachelor had a key part in my foundation as well. Bachelor is crazy wind lipped and has all these wind-sculpted features with tiny little lips and tiny little landings. So, it taught me all about precision. From skiing those wind lips, Bachelor taught me about popping and not landing at 20 feet or 25 feet because of uphill wind-lipped landings. I learned you couldn’t go too far and you couldn’t too short. You could double them or triple them or single them, but you couldn’t go in between. I trained my eye to match how hard do you pop, how fast do you go, and where are you going to land, and landing with precision. Bachelor was a cool middle ground. It was a middle ground before Utah.
GF: Then, Utah?
Sage: Yeah. I met Chris Collins, and he told me to move to Utah and get a job at one of the lodges. Bachelor was where I linked up with somebody who influenced my life in a big way.
GF: Talk about Utah’s impact on your approach to skiing.
Sage: I was skiing every single day at that point in my life. And, I was skiing with people who were better than me in challenging terrain. That combination in my first year in Utah made for the biggest learning curve I had in my whole life.
GF: What was that scene like?
Sage: That was when the gap scene was going on. People were discovering how big could you go. It was about big air and not about the tricks you were doing so much. I realized I liked to go big and I felt smooth in the air. I didn’t have a lot of tricks yet, but I could go big. I was figuring that out. The terrain there with the mine tailings gave us the opportunity to go big. The first year I was there was when I hit Pyramid Gap, a 90-foot gap in Alta’s backcountry. The next season I hit Chad’s Gap. There aren’t a lot of places in the world you get to go that big to a perfect landing transition. Again, the terrain was shaping my world, for sure.
GF: Do you take this war chest from Targhee, Bachelor and Alta with you? Do you carry these with you? Does your time spinning laps and learning in different zones give you confidence when standing on top of an exposed line in AK with TGR’s cameras pointed at you from a helicopter?
Sage: Yeah, very much! That experience then shapes how I think about the mountains and how I ski the mountains. One of my favorite things about skiing is the terrain, how the terrain dictates where you’re going to go and what you’re going to do. Having those pillars definitely gives me a guide on how I’m going to get through the terrain, where you’re going to make your turns, how you’re going to turn, what types of turns you’re going to make—when and where and how. The airs you’re going to take, how you take off, where you’re going to land. All that stuff is all information in the system that you’re then computing to get down. Especially in natural terrain in my favorite places, like BC and Alaska, where you have really unique wind, snowfall and terrain—like the rock underneath—mixed together to make features that look out of this world. [My experience helps me know] not only can I get down this but it’s kind of like an orchestration or a dance down this to put the pieces together. Very much in confidence of seeing stuff come together, but also the ultimate joy I get from skiing is putting this stuff together.
Listen to this excerpt from our chat when Sage talks about terrain and “the ultimate joy” he gets from skiing:
[I cannot wait for the second part of this story to come to life in a real ski magazine. Stay tuned for our conversation about “Let’s Take a Lap!” Thank you, Sage, for taking the time to chat. There’s more TK from this awesome conversation. —GF]
In the meantime, watch this nugget from a lap Sage spun with Andrew Pollard in Alta!