A New England-Forged Skiing Star
Professional skier Jim Ryan ’14 is known for his ability to excel in tough conditions
Western mountains are known for their piles of soft, powdery snow that make skiing and snowboarding a dream.
Eastern ski mountains are infamous for ice. Frequent freezing and thawing cycles often lead to hard, unforgiving surfaces that demand a lot from a skier. Powder aficionados sometimes refer to the East Coast as “the ice coast,” and it’s not a compliment.
But for Jim Ryan ’14, who grew up ski racing in Vermont and was a member of Colby’s Alpine ski team, his New England-forged ability to excel in tough conditions has been a big asset since he graduated from the College.
Ryan has made his mark as a professional big-mountain skier with the technical chops to confidently head down icy trails that others eschew. He’s starred in ski movies, been featured in ski magazines, and was part of a small team in fall 2023 that made the first ski descent of the east face of Malte Brun, one of New Zealand’s highest peaks. Last spring, he set the fastest known time on Jackson Hole’s iconic Central Couloir, a narrow, steep line that descends from towering Cody Peak.
His success is exciting—but it wasn’t always a sure thing. At first, Ryan felt lost in the crowd of aspiring elite skiers and only found his way after he embraced the skills that set him apart.
“People just hadn’t seen anything like it. They’d seen the formula of people from the West, or with freestyle backgrounds, going big off cliffs and doing tricks. I brought in this other thing, which was just high-angulation turns in scary places going fast, often on bad snow,” he said. “My entire career changed, and I found a lot more success because I started celebrating the things that I was good at.”
Finding the joy
Ryan also has a gift for bringing the joy of skiing to life. Genuine, funny, and warm, he has a reputation in the skiing circuit as “your mom’s favorite skier,” according to a 2021 profile in SKI magazine.
He joins an elite group of Colby alumni who are making a name for themselves as skiers and adventurers. Those include Ben Freeland ’20, who is skiing the tallest mountains in the world; Joey Searle ’20, a filmmaker who makes action-packed extreme sports movies; and Erin Bianco ’22, a professional Nordic skier who represented the U.S. in the 2024 World Cup competition circuit.
Ryan’s singular talent shines on screen in ski movies like Warren Miller’s Winter Starts Now and Future Retro; Teton Gravity Research’s Magic Hour and Stoke the Fire, which he worked on with Searle; and in the 2022 short film Beauty Full Send, which is billed as a “love letter to all mountain skiing.”
In it, he and three other skiers take to the slopes of an Alpine ski resort and exuberantly chase each other down the trails. They carve graceful turns into fresh snow, bounce over moguls, and zip through peaceful glades, grinning widely and cheering for each other, the whole thing scored to the propulsive rhythm of the Jethro Tull song Locomotive Breath.
“I’m moving through places and down mountains where it doesn’t even feel like humans should exist. And I’m moving through it at 40 miles an hour and feeling good. It’s the best feeling in the world. It’s awesome.”
Jim Ryan ’14
The short film bucks a trend in the ski movie world: rather than hitching a ride on a helicopter to get to a remote backcountry location, these athletes needed only chair lifts to access the groomed trails of a ski resort.
Inbound skiing, or skiing within the boundaries of a resort, is familiar to anyone who’s put downhill skis to snow. For some adrenaline junkies, it might not seem to offer enough thrills to be the subject of a ski movie. But Ryan and the other skiers in Beauty Full Send highlight the skill, speed, fun, and exhilaration that are inherent parts of the sport.
“Best video in years and not a single backflip!” one fan wrote on YouTube.
Becoming part of a team
Ryan, from the small town of Mendon, Vt., grew up skiing at Killington Ski Resort. As a competitive kid who loved to be outside and push his limits, he excelled at racing.
“Ski racing was just so much fun,” he said.
For high school skiers, ski racing is often an individual sport, and skiers like Ryan think of themselves as solitary athletes. Danny Noyes ’02, Colby’s associate athletic director for communications and digital display, worked hard to change that as head coach of the men’s and women’s Alpine ski team from 2007 to 2019.
“He had to take all these people who have never seen themselves as part of a team and transfer that to a team mindset. I think that has helped me so much now in my profession because you can’t just be a professional skier as an individual,” Ryan said. “I operate with a lot of teams now and I like to think that I’m a pretty good team member. And that really started with Danny.”
During his senior year, Ryan won the E.W. Willett ’25 Award, which is given to the student athletes who contributed the most to Colby athletics in their four years.
For Noyes, it was a pleasure to coach Ryan, although at times it came with a bit of anxiety.
“Jim was very athletic. He was very competitive. But more importantly, he had an edge about himself that encouraged him to take chances and trust himself in situations that were borderline dangerous,” Noyes said. “And wow, it’s incredibly exciting to see him now. Part of you is worried about him, because of the danger aspect. But that’s going to be part of Jim forever. He’ll be doing something like that for a long, long time.”
Surviving the avalanche
After graduation, Ryan worked as a coach at a ski and snowboard club in the Rocky Mountains. It seemed like the perfect fit, but Ryan became restless and decided to leave the club.
“I had discovered this thing, which was the adventure mindset of the West. I met a lot of people who were doing a lot of things that seemed very exciting,” he said. “I wanted to be part of that.”
Ryan and a friend moved to Jackson, Wyo., and spent two years trying to establish themselves in one of the country’s premier ski areas. It wasn’t easy. There is no clear path to becoming a professional skier, so the duo resorted to things like skiing really fast under the chairlift in hopes that someone would notice them.
Along the way, he learned firsthand the risks and dangers of backcountry adventure. The friend who moved with him to Wyoming broke his back in two places in a fall while skiing. Another almost died when he was swept up into an avalanche that barely missed Ryan.
“I watched him get sucked into the avalanche, and he disappeared entirely,” Ryan said.
“I started doing things with intense calculation, and also focusing on the aspects of big-mountain skiing that I was good at, rather than trying to mold myself to the professional skier that I had seen before.”
Jim Ryan ’14
He and the other skiers there that day spotted a piece of their friend’s avalanche airbag, which, when inflated, makes it less likely that a person carrying it will be completely buried in snow. They raced over to dig him out.
“At that point, I had a sort of black-and-white idea around risk. You were either alive or dead,” Ryan said. “When I uncovered his face and saw him breathing, I just thought, ‘We’re OK. You’re alive.’ Then over the next 45 minutes, it quickly became apparent that there’s a gray zone where someone is dying.”
It was a life-changing experience for everyone there that day, including Ryan. Before the accident, he and his friends had been so hyper-focused on succeeding in the professional skiing world that they told themselves that the potential for reward was worth any risk. Afterward, as the magnitude of the accident hit him, he realized that wasn’t the case.
“I totally changed my approach to skiing after that,” he said. “I started doing things with intense calculation, and also focusing on the aspects of big-mountain skiing that I was good at, rather than trying to mold myself to the professional skier that I had seen before.”
Enjoying the ride
When Ryan embraced his technical prowess and ability to ski fast and well in icy conditions, his career took off. He attracted the attention of sponsors, who paid him to represent their brands in ski movies and other venues. That’s how he makes his living, and he’s good at it. Ryan, who has an agent, now represents brands including German ski company Völkl, outdoor and sporting goods company Helly Hansen, and Dermatone skin protection.
“Everything I wear and use, goggles, helmet, hat, gloves, all my outerwear, even my sunscreen, is a sponsored product,” he said. “Navigating that is important because I’m doing these things at a high level, and whatever I’m using, I have to actually trust with my life.”
Perhaps his authenticity, about sponsorships and more, is one of the things that sets Ryan apart. After all, when he describes what he loves about skiing, there’s no pretense. Only enthusiasm.
“When I’m skiing and skiing well, it actually feels like something separate from me,” Ryan said. “I’m moving through places and down mountains where it doesn’t even feel like humans should exist. And I’m moving through it at 40 miles an hour and feeling good. It’s the best feeling in the world. It’s awesome. And when you finish something like that, there’s this feeling inside you. You just explode. It’s just like adrenaline and joy.”
