This story by Tommy Gardner first appeared in Stowe Reporter on March 23.
Jan Reynolds, the Stowe skier, writer, alpinist, photographer, explorer and ethnographer known in some circles as “Indiana Jan,” is off on another trip this week. This time it’s to Big Sky, Mont., where she might try some backcountry skiing if the avalanche danger isn’t too high.
If not, she’ll have to settle with being inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame.
While some of the marquee names in this year’s class are known for singular sports — Bode Miller in Alpine skiing or Shannon Dunn for snowboarding — Reynolds is finally getting her due for doing it all and often doing it first, from setting altitude and speed records in the Himalayas, to skiing on the U.S. Biathlon team, to writing about the places she’s been and the people she met along the way.
Fellow hall of famer and extreme skier Kristen Ulmer wrote in her nomination of Reynolds, “Current extreme mountain skiers, male and female, stand on Jan’s shoulders.”
Reynolds herself, while deft at a jaw-dropping tale, is also very good at understating the momentous.
“We kind of put ski mountaineering on the map a little bit,” she said recently.
That’s like saying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had a thing for rocks.
Record breaking
Reynolds, who lives on Mountain Road in Stowe, grew up in Middlebury as the sixth of seven kids, and her siblings still live in the area, which gives her a sense of grounding whenever she’s wherever. She has two adult children of her own.
“I’m an eighth-generation Vermonter and it’s just the sense of place that makes it easier for me to go away, because I have a place to come back to,” she said.
And she has been places, from the depths of the Pacific Ocean to the peaks of the Himalayas.
In 1980, she set the women’s world record for high-altitude skiing when she and a group of guys bombed down the side of Mount Muztagh Ata in western China, becoming the first skiers to descend a slope higher than 7,500 meters — at 4.7 miles above sea level, it’s roughly 4,500 feet lower than Mount Everest.
But wait, she did that one too, the very next year, becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the world’s tallest mountain, and doing it on a pair of skinny, free-heel sticks.
According to Ulmer, before Reynolds and a small crew did it starting in 1981, no one had used light cross-country skis in the Himalayas.
Ever the historian, Reynolds noted the first ski lift, in Germany, wasn’t built until 1908, but people have been free-heel skiing for almost 10,000 years, and archeologists have discovered skis dating as far back as 8,000 BCE. She said the first recorded ski race was a biathlon, using skis and a bow and arrow. And they were free-heel skis just like the ones Reynolds was using in the 1980s on the world’s highest peaks.
“It’s the all-terrain vehicle of skiing,” she said. “You go up, you go down, you go across.”
Hap Klopp, co-founder and longtime CEO of The North Face gear company, said Reynolds was the first female athlete the company sponsored, and was one of the company’s leading product testers — i.e., she wore the heck out of The North Face on innumerable actual north faces.
“Jan’s exploits around the globe were critical in helping build The North Face’s female (and male) customer base and pioneered the era of outdoor women sponsored athletes,” Klopp wrote in his nomination, calling Reynolds a “skiing and outdoor legend” and “an inspiration for female participation in the outdoors.”
Dan Egan, a fellow Hall of Famer and legend of the Mad River Valley, echoed that sentiment.
“Her accomplishments are not only bold but have shaped the outdoor action sports world as we know it,” Egan wrote. “Many if not all adventure, extreme and professional athletes have her to thank for the direction her impact forged in the industry. When you add in her international records, plus her impact on the type of equipment used and developed by her experiences, the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame is empty without her.”
Reynolds has never been to the resort of Big Sky, but she will be staying at a place called Lone Mountain Ranch, which is the same place she stayed almost 40 years ago when she was part of the U.S. Biathlon team. It almost seems like a lark — she joined in 1984 after deciding she needed a break from breaking world skiing records in the loftiest spots in the world.
According to Ulmer, Reynolds was the top athlete picked for the women’s team, which finished third in the 1984 World Cup in Chamonix, France.
Dr. Bob Arnot, a Stowe resident and television medical correspondent, described Reynolds’ lung volume capacity as “world class,” a discovery he made after hooking her up to a spirometer while she hit the treadmill, back when she was training for the biathlon squad.
Again, for all that, she’s still a hometown girl.
“And she has given back to the community in spades,” Arnot said. “Stowe’s favorite kid’s ski instructor!”
Record taking
There’s a reason people call Reynolds “Indiana Jan,” and part of that may be her pulp novelistic exploits — while setting an altitude record for hot air balloon flight over Mount Everest, the aircraft crashed and caught fire; while soloing in the Himalayas she found herself on the China side, being chased away by that country’s army. But also, much like how Indy frequently trades in his fedora and whip for horn-rims and bowtie, Reynolds regularly swaps out her skis and backpacks for pen and camera.
Reynolds is the author of more than 20 books and counting, including a series of photography books called “Vanishing Cultures,” in which she spends time living with Indigenous tribes on each of the world’s continents — including the Sherpa of the Himalayas, the Tuareg of the Sahara, the Yanomami of the Amazon Basin, and the Tiwi of Australia.
“When I would climb and ski in the nooks and crannies of the world, I fell in love with the people that I met that were still living very basic, indigenous lives,” she said.
In the Himalayas, she hung out with the women in their yurts, milking goats and trading earrings. In the Atlas Mountains of northern Africa, she met the Berbers and learned about a subset of that group, the Tuareg, whom she would eventually meet.
Her writing career was hastened in the late 1980s when she was holed up in her house recovering from a bad back injury and ensuing surgery. During her conversations, she often refers to this point of her life as her “timeout.”
“I think everybody needs to have a timeout somewhere in their lives, because it really changed the way I see things,” she said.”
Back home in Stowe, she pivoted to writing and photography, at first drawing on all those memories from that picaresque prior decade, penning articles in publications like National Geographic, the New York Times and Outside.
Much of this would culminate in her 2019 book “The Glass Summit: One Woman’s Epic Journey Breaking Through,” which author John Krakauer called an “inspiring, unsparingly honest book.”
Her next endeavor will see her branching out into fiction, but right now she’s engrossed with a tribe that might seem like something out of a science fiction story — the Bajau people of Indonesia.
The seafaring tribe has evolved throughout millennia to the point where they can regularly hold their breath underwater for more than five minutes — Reynolds says some of them approach 15 minutes — longer than highly-trained divers from other populations. The Bajau utilize this natural ability to spend hours every day underwater hunting fish.
“They run on the bottom, hunting, and they can see underwater in a way we can’t because they’ve lived on the water and boats for so many generations that their bodies changed,” Reynolds said.
Remember Arnot’s remark about Reynolds’ “world-class” lungs? That’s nothing compared to the Bajau. And that’s what gets Reynolds excited, not only spending time with a new culture, but challenging herself well into her 60s to do so.
She’ll be 67 next month, but at the age of 66 she trained hard to get her scuba certification. All so she can leave her familiar environs of Stowe and go somewhere new.
“There’s always something new to explore, and you don’t have to go someplace no one’s ever been before to explore,” she said “Everybody has their own sort of adventure zone. It’s just stepping into something new so that you have to see the world and participate in the world in a different way, and then you start finding out all these new things about yourself.”