Skiing With Fear: How the Best Skiers Stopped Fighting It

Overcoming Skiing with Fear: Mental Game Strategies

Steep terrain doesn’t bother me as long as it doesn’t require a “drop-in”. You know, that moment where the slope falls away and you can’t see what’s below until you commit. The drop plus the steep is where my fear stops me cold. Give me a continuous pitch and I’m good. Ask me to step off an edge into uncertainty, and something in my nervous system revolts.

I learned how real that fear could get one afternoon in the upper chutes at Alpine Meadows. I’d hiked up feeling confident – the snow looked good from below – but then I hit a patch of ice and went down hard on my hip. Suddenly I was sliding straight for an edge I couldn’t see over. Time did that thing it does in emergencies: it stretched. I remember scraping the ice and snow, thinking why didn’t I get my edges sharpened, the absolute certainty that I was about to find out what was on the other side of that lip. Then my skis caught some exposed rocks and I stopped.

I lay there for a while. Then I got up and skied the rest of the way down, careful and a little shaky. But those few seconds of not knowing – that was fear in its purest form. Not the low-grade anxiety of a challenging run. Not butterflies. The actual, primal conviction that something very bad was about to happen and there was nothing I could do about it.

This is why I’ve always been fascinated by people who deliberately seek out terrain where that feeling is a constant companion. The guides and athletes who stand at the top of forty-five-degree couloirs and somehow find the clarity to make their first turn. What do they know about fear that the rest of us get wrong?

The Twelve-Year Experiment in Being Wrong

Kristen Ulmer spent twelve years being called the best female big-mountain extreme skier in the world. She jumped off cliffs. She completed the first female ski descent of Wyoming’s Grand Teton in 1997. She collected accolades for her apparent immunity to the terror that paralyzes normal people. The outdoor industry voted her North America’s most extreme woman athlete across all disciplines. She was, by every available metric, winning the war against fear.

Then she retired in 2003 and discovered that she’d been losing the whole time.

The symptoms accumulated like unpaid debts: flatlined cortisol levels, exhaustion requiring ten hours of sleep per night, a growing hatred for the sport that had defined her identity. “What I was doing, and what everybody else on the planet does around the subject of fear, is I was trying to conquer it, overcome it, let it go, rationalize it away,” Ulmer has explained. She was exceptional at suppressing fear. The strategy was also, she realized, slowly destroying her.

Her conclusion, now taught through clinics and codified in her book The Art of Fear, inverts the conventional wisdom: fear isn’t the problem. Our resistance to feeling fear is the problem. “The awful feeling we associate with fear isn’t fear itself,” Ulmer argues. “It’s our resistance to feeling fear. Fear is only good.”

This reframe – from fear-as-enemy to fear-as-information – is the foundation of how professional mountain guides actually manage their clients’ psychology in consequential terrain. It differs radically from the grit-your-teeth-and-charge approach that dominates recreational ski culture, which may explain why recreational ski culture produces so many frozen skiers at the tops of slopes they can’t bring themselves to descend.

The Chemistry of Standing Still

Dr. Nicole Detling is a Utah-based sports psychologist who has worked with professional outdoor athletes including Olympic medalists at the Vancouver, Sochi, and PyeongChang Games. Her understanding of fear begins not with positive thinking or motivational slogans but with cortisol – the chemical that floods your system when you’re standing above something that scares you.

The effects are measurable and immediate. Cortisol increases muscle tension, directly diminishing your ability to make precise movements – exactly the movements steep skiing demands. It narrows your field of vision, causing you to miss environmental cues. It slows cognitive processing. The anxiety changes the messages you give yourself, transforming “I’ve got this” into something considerably less useful.

“Once you’ve hit your anxiety threshold,” Detling notes, “you get freaked out about being freaked out, which exacerbates the problem.”

This feedback loop – fear triggering physical responses that impair performance, which creates more fear – is familiar to anyone who has frozen at the top of a steep pitch. But here’s what guides know that many skiers don’t: some anxiety is actively beneficial. “I would actually be more concerned if you had no anxiety,” Detling explains. “Your focus would be too broad. You could miss something. Not having any anxiety is just as dangerous as having too much.”

The goal, in other words, isn’t to eliminate fear. It’s to calibrate it. Which is considerably harder to fit on a bumper sticker.

The Counterintuitive Stance

Joe Vallone cut his teeth in the freestyle scene of the 1980s before pursuing mountain guiding. He now holds the IFMGA pin – the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations certification that requires mastery in rock, alpine, and ski mountaineering – and lives in La Grave, France, where he guides steep terrain as frequently as anyone in the profession. His approach to client fear starts not with psychology but with physics.

On steep terrain – forty-five degrees or more – the instinctive human response is to lean into the slope. This feels safer. Evolution spent millions of years programming you to hug the hillside when gravity gets aggressive. The problem is that evolution wasn’t optimizing for ski performance. Leaning back or into the hill reduces your angulation, makes your skis more likely to skid, and actually gives you less control.

The correct position requires you to be balanced over the center of your skis, shoulders facing mostly downhill. “On the steepest slopes, this will feel as if you are leaning into the abyss,” Vallone acknowledges. “If you find yourself unable to commit to this position, you simply aren’t ready for that steep a slope. No shame – we’ve all been there.”

This is where technique and psychology merge. The physical act of committing to a proper stance – counterintuitive as it is – reduces fear by increasing control. You feel more stable because you are more stable. But getting there requires building confidence incrementally, often on terrain far gentler than the objective, until the correct position becomes automatic rather than terrifying.

The Coombs Method

Any serious discussion of steep skiing’s mental game eventually circles back to Doug Coombs. The two-time World Extreme Skiing Champion (1991 and 1993) died in 2006 during an attempted rescue at Couloir de Polichinelle in La Grave, but his influence persists in techniques still taught and attitudes still emulated.

Coombs had what observers describe as an almost uncanny ability to make impossible terrain look casual. “He had a way of communicating with clients in clear, direct, uncomplicated instructions that would at once calm their fears and get them to ski terrain beyond what they thought themselves capable of,” wrote Mark Newcomb, who worked alongside him. Coombs was the first to develop a systematic approach to guiding recreational skiers in genuinely big mountains – his steep skiing camps, now continued by Miles and Liz Smart, remain the standard for progressive instruction.

His approach combined relentless technical refinement with what might be called aggressive mental rehearsal. After every day of skiing, Coombs would talk through each run in the bar – this turn here, that terrain feature there – physically skiing every line, then mentally skiing them all again out loud. The preparation never finished. The rehearsal was constant.

One of his technical innovations, the “folding pole plant,” has become standard technique for steep descents. “Invented by the one and only Doug Coombs,” Vallone explains. “You turn around your downhill pole, not across the fall line. The downhill pole folds forward as you pivot around it.” The technique forces your uphill shoulder to stay square to the fall line, keeping you in an aggressive, balanced position. It’s elegant, effective, and – like most things Coombs developed – requires you to commit rather than retreat.

Before You Drop

Detling recommends that skiers develop a consistent pre-descent routine executed before every consequential line – the same sequence, in the same order, every time. The consistency creates a psychological trigger that signals readiness.

Start with a body scan. Where are you holding tension? Most skiers find it in their shoulders, their jaw, their death-grip on the poles. To release shoulder tension, inhale while pulling your shoulders up toward your ears, then exhale and let them drop.

Next, breathing. Stressful situations cause people to hold their breath, which releases more cortisol, which increases tension. Detling suggests thinking “breathe in” while inhaling, “breathe out” while exhaling – the deliberateness interrupts the panic cycle. The extended exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s not meditation; it’s chemistry manipulation.

Then the visual check. Look at the line – not the entire terrifying expanse, but the next twenty meters. Where’s your first turn? Martin Bell, the British ski racing expert, calls this “taking it one turn at a time,” refusing to let the psychological weight of the whole slope compress into a single overwhelming moment.

Finally – and this is where the sports psychology gets interesting – visualize not just the terrain but your internal state. “Imagine that your heart is racing before your descent, and remind yourself that that’s a good thing,” Detling advises. The reframe matters: “my heart is racing because I’m scared” becomes “my heart is racing because I’m ready.” Same physiology, different story.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s what guides understand that the conquer-your-fear industry prefers not to mention: on genuinely steep terrain, you are not fully in control. The slope angle, the snow conditions, the consequences of a fall – these are variables you can assess but not eliminate. The mountain doesn’t care about your preparation or your credentials or your breathing exercises.

Accepting this – genuinely accepting it – is paradoxically liberating. “Fear is actually kind of wonderful because it’s what causes the flow state in skiing,” Ulmer observes. “It can show up as excitement, as focus. It’s like you’re Batman, fear is Robin, and you two are stronger together than apart.”

Dr. S. Gerald Hann, a clinical psychologist and ski instructor, uses the term “habituation” to describe the process that allows skiers to expand their comfort zones. Simply approaching anxiety-provoking situations causes the anxiety to reduce over time. But the approach must be deliberate, progressive, honest about current capabilities. Sometimes turning around is the right call. Not a failure – a data point.

I think about that afternoon at Alpine Meadows sometimes – those seconds of sliding toward an edge I couldn’t see over. The guides and athletes in this article would have handled it differently. They’d have had techniques for self-arrest, mental frameworks for staying calm, years of habituation that would have kept the cortisol from overwhelming their decision-making. I just got lucky that my skis found those rocks.

But maybe that’s the point. The guides who ski consequential terrain every day don’t do it because they’ve eliminated fear. They do it because they’ve learned to work with it – to treat it as information rather than obstruction, as ally rather than enemy. The abyss looks back, as it always has. The question is whether you can meet its gaze and find, in that moment of honest confrontation, the clarity to make your first turn.

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