Peak performances: Skier tests sanity as well as ability

Kaylin Richardson is used to having to defend her sanity.

That will come in handy, because after the extreme-ski movie "No Turning Back" is screened Friday and Saturday at the State Theatre in Minneapolis, the Edina native is going to have a lot of explaining to do.

"There are some real risks in our sport," said Richardson, who will be present at both screenings. "People ask me all the time if I'm crazy. For most people, what we do probably seems crazy."

Richardson, 30, is an elite high-mountain skier. She climbs to the tops of mountains, straps on her skis and rockets down the sheer slopes, carving her way past rock outcroppings and flying over two-story drop-offs.

The movie is the 65th annual offering from Warren Miller Productions, the company founded by the guru of spectacular ski films (Miller retired in 2004). His films, originally shown at ski shows before they became so popular that they moved into theaters, "marked the unofficial start of the ski season each year," said Richardson, who remembers seeing several of them when she was young.

This year's film features Richardson skiing on mountains north of the Arctic Circle in Norway. In one of the runs, she's heard gushing, "This is so awesome!" followed a few seconds later by her hitting a patch of ice and squealing, "I'm gonna die."

Richardson has turned her molehills into mountains.

"My parents were hoping that I could make the varsity ski team at Edina High School," she said.

She made the team, all right — the U.S. national team, to which she was named as a ninth-grader. That's where she discovered the other trait needed to schuss down mountainsides: a love of speed. She went on to win four national titles and ski in two Winter Olympics.

The movie highlights a number of elite mountain skiers. Most of them used helicopters to get to the top of their mountains. With the precarious Norwegian peaks offering no place for a helicopter to land, Richardson and another skier sweated their way up.

"It's called 'earning your turn,' " she said. "It was the most physically challenging experience of my life. It would take us three to four hours to climb up."

Coming down was an eye-opener, too.

That often meant that there were surprises waiting. On one run, she went over a ridge of snow expecting a two-foot drop on the other side. It turned out to be a 20-foot drop. But she landed it.

"You have to be totally confident," she said. "You pick your lines [to ski down the mountain] and you calculate the risks. Then you have to ski with the utmost confidence."

Jeff Strickler • 612-673-7392