This story by Aaron Calvin was first published by the Stowe Reporter on Feb. 22.
Kasha Rigby — a Stowe-born legend of telemark skiing, a globe-trekking adventurer and humanitarian aid worker — died in an avalanche at a ski area in Kosovo last week.
Last Tuesday, Euro News Albania reported that a woman, later confirmed as Rigby, 54, died at the ski resort in Brezovica. She had been skiing off piste in an area known as the Eagle’s Nest, an area known for its avalanche risks, according to Ski Magazine.
Rigby dropped in for a run in the area despite the rain, high wind and snowmelt, which she observed in her final Instagram post, triggering a 25-meter-wide avalanche that dragged her into a stand of trees.
She was reached within moments by her fiancé Magnus Wolfe Murray, who attempted to save her, but the severe injuries she suffered in the event proved too great to overcome.
Though apparently dangerous terrain in risky conditions, it was, in many ways, no different a run than the countless Rigby had made in her globe-spanning, death-defying life, differing only in that it happened to be the final one she took.
As news of Rigby’s fate trickled out of eastern Europe, the ski world erupted in mourning.
“The love, sparkle, and joy you brought to everything you did, and the people you cared about, and the world you cared about, is something I will remember and aspire to for the rest of my life,” wrote professional skier Mary McIntyre.
“Kasha was a brilliant big-mountain skier who inspired many younger female skiers to live out their dreams,” wrote travel writer Jon Krakauer in a caption for a photo of Rigby atop Denali, where the two once shared a tent for a month. “Losing her is a cruel blow.”
By all accounts, Rigby was the kind of magnetic personality that made a remarkable impact on everyone she met, no matter how briefly or infrequently. Always on the move and always looking for the next adventure, she was transient to the extent that she took on the nickname “flight risk.”
As she matured, those who knew her well say she began to focus more on her lifelong penchant for service through her work with humanitarian aid groups like the World Food Group and in disaster response.
“She could just show up somewhere and just make anyone feel good, no matter who it was,” lifelong friend Jesse James Davenport said. “From the kids in Bangladesh to whoever — she was a great friend; she was just good at that.”
Stowe born
Rigby may have led a restless, itinerant adult life, but it was always Stowe from which she came, and it was always Stowe to which she returned.
Her otherworldly charisma was, according to Davenport, evident from the moment they first met in kindergarten at Stowe Elementary School to the moment in third grade when Rigby asked her to sit next to her and their lives became irrevocably intertwined.
“Kasha was just so naturally good at everything she did, from athletics, to not having to study for a test and getting straight As, to just being able to show up when you needed and didn’t have to tell her — she was just very good at doing everything.”
Rigby’s parents, George and Debbie Rigby, owned the Hob Knob Inn for nearly 38 years, and with her parents busy working, Rigby was left to roam the verdant forests and steep mountainsides, though Davenport remembers that George always ensured they were well fed.
It was this childhood, which Debbie described as essentially “feral,” where Rigby whetted an early appetite for daring and adventure. Though outside of the ski school institutions like the Mt. Mansfield Ski Club, Rigby and Davenport honed a passion for skiing on Mt. Mansfield and surrounding peaks that would shape the rest of their lives.
By the time she entered high school, Rigby was already developing a skill in telemark skiing, a combination of alpine and Nordic skiing with skis that feature a backless binding. In skiing as with much of life, Rigby could not help but gravitate toward the unique.
“I remember her coming into school with bruises, and she was like ‘I telemarked down Nose Dive, and I made it this time,’” Kristina von Trapp Frame said. “She was just always pushing herself.”
“In my high school, where almost all the skiers were (alpine) racers, people thought I had become a freak of nature,” Rigby told Powder in the early ’90s.
“Alpine skiers look like their feet are stuck in cement,” Rigby told Outside in 1996 after she established herself as an extreme skier. “Telly skiing is about mobility, rhythm, and balance and, of course, speed. I love to go fast — really fast.”
Rigby was, apparently, unstoppable. Despite being a passenger in a car crash on Stowe’s Mountain Road that killed two others, including a fellow member of the close-knit Stowe High School Class of 1988, Rigby survived as she was the only one involved wearing a seat belt.
After high school, Rigby followed Davenport out West to New Mexico and university.
“We would drive through Colorado, drive north and pick up friends from other universities like Boulder, and then we’d end up in Laramie, Wyo., where at least three to five kids from Stowe were going to school at the University of Wyoming, party for the weekend, and then drive back nine hours to New Mexico,” Davenport said. “That’s how she was, just wanting to keep moving and visiting people and having those adventures.”
Her globetrotting began early as well. She declined to return to New Mexico after a semester and instead decamped to Mozambique where she helped develop gardens, before she returned stateside and to Crested Butte, Colorado, to make her name in skiing history.
Extreme career
After winning a sponsorship from Grand Butte Hotel where she worked as a waitress in 1993, a 23-year-old Rigby entered the U.S. Extreme Skiing Championships — “as sort of a joke,” she told the Stowe Reporter — and took third overall in the women’s division and was the only telemark competitor of either sex to make it to the final day of the competition.
“That kind of allowed her to punch her ticket as a professional athlete,” said Adam Howard, a Cambridge-based Backcountry Magazine editor who knew Rigby. “From there, she kind of embodied what telemark skiing was about, which was just that free heel, free mind sort of way.”
After establishing herself as a name in the extreme skiing movement, Rigby’s star only rose. She joined The North Face ski team in 1995 and began traveling the world, making first descents on some of the world’s tallest peaks. In 1998, she appeared on the cover of the premier issue of Women Outside in a story in which she was christened “the best female telemark skier in the known universe.”
Among many accomplishments, she’s credited with the first ski descents of Mongolia’s five holy peaks, including Khuiten, the highest peak in Mongolia, first descent of the RFHP in the Himachal Pradesh region of India, first ski descent of Mt. Udina and Mt. Zimina, both in Russia, and the first telemark descent of Cho Oyu in Asia.
She skied everywhere from the highest peaks in Siberia to the Cotopaxi and Chimborazo volcanoes in Ecuador, and trekked into the frozen Zanskar River in Ladakh, India.
Through it all, she always did it her way, and with few of the pretensions one might expect from a world-class athlete.
Davenport met her husband, U.S. Ski Hall of Fame member Chris Davenport, in the extreme skiing milieu in which Rigby came up. The couple settled near Aspen, where she’s been a member of the ski patrol for more than 30 years.
Though their paths differed, Rigby had a knack for always returning to Davenport’s life when she most needed her.
“We did an all-girls expedition for the North Face in Kamchatka, Russia,” Davenport said. “We were there for over a month. She was telling me, ‘You’re coming,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, I’m not a North Face athlete.’ She would just always include people in everything.”
“The thing that’s notable to me about Kasha is she could have kept doing that stuff. She could have been that career pro-athlete, but I don’t know that it fit her perfectly well,” Howard said. “Kasha was more comfortable traveling the world on her own terms.”
Life of service
Having grown up around the service industry, Rigby never shied away from waiting tables and washing dishes to save up money for her next trip.
For a time, she settled down in Boulder, Utah, with her friend, skier-photographer Ace Kvale, and lived among the slot canyons. Davenport remembers driving up with her family and finding her at work at the Hell’s Backbone Restaurant.
As she aged from her youth in extreme skiing, her travels increasingly included a more explicit service element.
“As she matured, she focused more on aid work as opposed to adventure,” her mother Debbie said.
After having skied the eastern Himalayas, she returned in 2015 after a devastating earthquake killed and injured thousands.
“She went on expeditions to Nepal, and then when the earthquake happened, she went to work there for six months, because she felt like she wanted to do something for that country,” Davenport said.
She went on to work for the World Food Program for three years in Bangladesh, where she helped Rohingya refugees who were forcibly displaced from their homes in Myanmar. It was there she met Wolfe Murray. The couple planned to marry in September.
At the time of her death, the couple were in Kosovo awaiting approval of visa paperwork that would allow her to continue helping the victims of the earthquake that tore apart Turkey a year ago.
She was also, increasingly, drawn back to Stowe, first by the death of her brother in 2017 and then by the death of her father in 2019, and again when Debbie fell ill last year. In her return, she found time to catch up with old friends, hiking the Pinnacle Trail with chiropractor Kirsten Alexander and skinning up Mansfield with builder Chapman Smith.
“She really had found a new appreciation for Vermont and coming back to Stowe,” Smith said.
While Rigby may have touched countless lives with her charisma and made her name as an unapologetic and fearless skier of the world’s tallest peaks, it may be back in her hometown, with Davenport and the rest of the Stowe Class of 1988, where her legacy is richest.
“While being a total badass and so strong and so amazing, she also was super feminine and just owned her femininity and her beauty,” von Trapp Frame said. “You were just kind of in awe of her, she just was uninhibited and didn’t hold anything back and just did everything to her utmost.”
