AST Athlete Journal: Katie Smith

Hello everyone! My name is Katie Smith and I am a new member of the Alberta Ski team. I’ve spent my last three seasons of FIS with the Lake Louise Ski Club and was part of the Alberta Development Group last season. I’m very excited to be part of the AST this year!

Prior to our first pre-season camp in Saas fee I had a great summer working in Canmore as part of the trail crew for the Canmore & area mountain bike association. The outdoor work of digging trails and moving lots of rocks worked well to keep fit along dryland at CSI with our coach Nate. I did a lot of mountain biking, mountain climbing and even finished my first stage mountain bike race, TransRockies Singletrack Six.

After our first successful pre-season camp in Saas Fee we headed home for a few weeks where I spent a lot of time riding my mountain bike and enjoying the fall weather and in the gym at CSI. I was able to work for a few extra weeks with CAMBA and competed in the Canmore Enduro bike race. It was really nice to spend time with my family before we headed off to Chile which will launch us into the beginning of a busy ski season. After a pretty epic journey, the team is now in Chile, and have had three days of skiing so far. The travel to get here was long as we flew from Calgary to Montreal to Bogota to Santiago to Temuco and then had a 2 hour drive to our cabins near Malalcahuello just a few minutes down the road from Corralco. It was a long but totally worth it! The team is loving the new scenery and the chance to immerse ourselves in the local culture, practicing some spanish, trying some new foods and soaking in Chile.

We started our first day of skiing by exploring the mountain and learning our new environment for the next three weeks. It’s always exciting to explore new resorts and Corralco is definitely different than anywhere I’ve trained before. The past two training days we’ve loaded at 7am and have enjoyed the pretty volcano sunrises. The conditions haven’t been the firmest but after salting the course we’ve had productive gs environments and we’ve been able to push for more volume. After training we’ve been enjoying doing some dryland or hikes to explore Malalachullo and maintain our fitness. For me some of the coolest things so far have been training on a volcano and seeing the monkey puzzle trees.

Thank you to our team sponsors, GMC Dealers of Alberta, Karbon Sports and Genstar who help make it possible to do what we love!

I’m Looking forward to sharing more updates from the rest of our time in Chile and hope to see everyone at the Highest Peak Gala on November 7th!

-Katie Smith