If you’ve read the book or seen the film The Other Side of the Mountain, you know about California teenaged ski racer, Jill Kinmont, who suffered a catastrophic injury in a high-speed giant slalom at Alta, Utah, which left her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Jill Kinmont Boothe died Feb. 9 in Carson City, Nev. She was 75.
Click here for the LA Times obituary.
Dave McCoy with Jill Kinmont in November, 1955, less than a year after her accident. Photo by John Stephens, from the Jill Kinmont Boothe Collection
Kinmont was a knock-out beauty and very likely would have become America’s best woman ski racer in the late 1950s. Instead she broke her neck in a tragic fall during Alta’s 1955 Snow Cup race
You can ski the approximate route Kinmont raced by taking the Collins lift and heading down the Saddle race course. Just above Corkscrew heading to Lower Rustler, you will encounter what is known as the Kinmont bump. Here, moving at high speed, Kinmont failed to pre-jump, was flung into the air, glanced off a tree and smashed into a spectator, severing her spinal column at the neck. Catapulted to a kind of fame no one wants, Kinmont salvaged her life, becoming a schoolteacher and model of accomplishment for the world’s disabled.
John Fry
John Fry is the former editor-in-chief of SKI, America's oldest ski magazine, and founding editor of the award-winning New York Times magazine Snow Country. He, has received the FIS (International Ski Federation) Journalism Award, and lifetime achievement awards from the International Skiing History Association and from the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA). Fry launched NASTAR (National Standard Ski Race), The Nations Cup of alpine ski racing, and the Graduated Length Method of teaching, and has been elected to the U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame. He is president of the International Skiing History Association.
