Kit Des Lauriers - Freeskiing Championship

Freeskiing Championship

She is a two-time women's world freeskiing champion, winning back-to-back titles in 2004 and 2005 after only two years of competition. In August 2005, she won the women's division of the Rendezvous Hill Climb to the top of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. The idea for the Seven Summits adventure was visualized during her time on the freeskiing circuit. The initial notion came from a 2005 meeting with Richard Bass, the first person to climb all of the peaks.

DesLauriers is the first woman to climb and ski Mount Aspiring/Tititea in New Zealand, and the first woman and first American to ski from the summit of Mount Everest. She is only the third woman to climb and ski Grand Teton in Wyoming. She is a certified Wildnerness Emergency Medical Technician, a Telluride Professional Ski Patroller, a Rescue 3 International low to high angle rope rescue instructor, a Helicopter Rescue Technician, and volunteers with Search and Rescue.

At 11 a.m. on October 18, 2006, DesLauriers pushed off of the summit of Mount Everest and made history as the first person to ski from the summit of the highest mountain on all seven continents. Her quest began in May 2004, when she became the first American woman to climb and ski from the summit of the highest peak in America -- Mount McKinley, in Alaska. This was followed in 2005 with a trek to Mount Elbrus in Russia, Europe's highest peak, a descent from Mount Kosciuszko, the highest mountain in Australia, Vinson Massif, the highest peak on Antarctica, and Aconcagua, Argentina, the highest peak in South America. In spring 2006 she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain.

DesLauriers and her husband, Rob Deslauriers, met in 1999 while on a mountaineering trip to Mount Belukha in Siberia. The couple live in Teton Village, Wyoming, where she is a stonemason and runs landscape design company Rockit Corporation. DesLauriers also coaches other women in skiing, and runs the "Turn It Up Women's Ski Camps." She also is a road and mountain bicycle competitor.