![]() Soon, the entire community became involved. She then took the students on two daytrips, to Red Deer’s Canyon Ski Resort and to her first love, Nakiska. She was able to negotiate a total cost of $50 per student for equipment rentals, lift tickets and transportation. In January 2023, Holt brought roughly 80 Grade 5 students to the ski hill as their two-hour Physical Education class, once a week for three weeks. She joined the Board herself and was soon given the green light for her project, investing hundreds of hours of her time between the responsibilities. Volunteering as a ski instructor with her husband once a week, she says jokingly that she badgered the Board of Directors President Brent Jackson for years to allow her to run a program for her students at the hill. She got involved with iSkiHill in Innisfail, the local hill containing six runs, including a little rail park, with tow rope access. I never in a million years thought I’d be skiing with people who are world champions and Olympians and have ski movies and they’re giving me their time and their energy to help me be a better skier and that just lit a fire in me how can I pay this back? How can I give this to the people around me,” she said. “It’s absolutely surreal to me, as a person who’s fairly new to the ski sport, the people who have scooped me up and mentored me and given me their time. Holt wanted to find a way to continue paying it forward for students to experience the magic of skiing. The bright young minds were filled with excitement as they prepared a paper crown with the words “World Champs Only” for Hotter, a red carpet, and sprinkled snowflakes on her head from a ladder as the athlete walked through the door.Ĭrown created by Grade 5 students at Innisfail Middle School for Freeride World Tour champion Jess Hotter. In an effort to share the experience with her students, Holt reached out to Hotter, who was in Fernie, BC, at the time, to see if she would be interested in coming to speak to her class. There, she not only built lifelong friendships with people from around the world, but also met Jess Hotter, FWT World Champion that year. In February 2022, she met two key members of Peak Performance, a ski jacket company and main sponsor of the event: Anders Norrin, who chose her as the winner, and Niklas Lundgren, who later supported her student ski program. ![]() Sitting in a school staff meeting, Holt says she jumped out of her chair screaming when she received the email that she had won. Holt says she heard about the opportunity the day before the deadline on a podcast and poured her heart and soul into her application, telling the tale of how she started skiing, where it has brought her, the hours of videos she watches for inspiration and the motivation she feels from the female athletes. The FWT was holding a contest for Canadians, offering tickets to the competition in Golden, British Columbia. The Freeride World Tour (FWT) is an international freeride competition for a style of skiing and snowboarding on natural ungroomed terrain. In 2022, Holt would soon take the ski world by snowstorm. “It just gives me this time in my life where my brain is turned off and I’m just in sync with what my body is doing and where I am, and it just gives you this complete feeling of freedom that I don’t really get anywhere else,” she said. She says she enjoyed being outside in the powder-covered mountains and the unique personal journey of the sport. By the third year, she skied 58 days, determined to improve. ![]() ![]() She says she went skiing every weekend that year, and even more the next. “That could be me,” she thought to herself, adding that moment “created a monster”. Holt said she was stuck at the top of the hill, consumed by fear and tears, until her nerves were soon replaced with awe as she watched skiers fly by, with big smiles and boasts of laughter. However, he heard that she had been skiing since she was 12. At 35 years old, she headed to the Nakiska Ski Area in the Rocky Mountains one day with her husband Curtis, telling him she skied once when she was 12 years old. ![]()
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