When Lara Hamilton started skiing as a child her parents would not let her join them on the slopes until she could keep up. Off she went to ski school, while her mum and dad traversed the New South Wales ski town of Perisher unshackled by children. Her dad raced World Cup Nordic skiing, so they didn’t dawdle. Now, Hamilton is about to make her Winter Olympics debut, and she is solely focused on keeping pace with the best ski mountaineers in the world.
“It was just in the family and we had a lot of old gear and he taught me and my sister how to Nordic ski,” Hamilton says. “Then I found backcountry skiing when I moved to the US for college in 2019, and then slowly the backcountry skiing turned into ski mountaineering because I saw a way to do what I was doing on a heavy setup, much faster. I invested in the lighter stuff and made friends who taught me what they knew, and off I went.”
