They also go to Antarctida. The American couple met in Siberia.

Any mountain, any time for this skiing couple By Gary Hook, USA TODAY

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo.
— Ask Kit DesLauriers about how she has lived her life and you can`t stop listening.

"I was trained as a helicopter crew chief," she says matter-of-factly. "I`ve jumped out of helicopters into lakes. I`ve rappelled out of them to the ground. I`ve been the one called first to organize back country rescues. Everything from dead avalanche recoveries, to swift water rescues to hanging underneath helicopters to reach someone stuck on a cliff."

That was when she was younger.
Now, at age 35, she is the reigning women`s world freeskiing champion having won the title back-to-back after only two years competing in a sport where many of the competitors are in their late teens, or in their early 20s. She was the first American woman to climb and ski from the summit of Denali, Alaska`s Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America; the first woman to climb and ski the north side of Mount Elbrus, Europe`s highest peak in Russia`s Caucasus mountains; the first woman to climb and ski Mount Aspiring in New Zealand; and only the third woman to climb and ski down Grand Teton in Wyoming.
Ask her how often she is scared, she says, "Often enough to be comfortable with it. It`s knowing what your limits are."
Friday she and her husband, Rob, 40, head off to Antarctica where they plan to climb and ski down Vinson Massif, the highest peak on that continent. This is the safest time of year to attempt the summit, but the conditions are still severe. The temperatures average around 30 below zero with the wind being the key factor. The ridge at the summit is quite exposed to the wind, meaning it could be extremely cold.

"The cold is a risk," Rob says. "The crevices are always an unknown. And the remoteness is the big issue."
Such factors are part of ski mountaineering, which is the lifestyle they have chosen. That is a big part of who they are as a couple and as individuals. "This trip is so special," he says. Kit smiles and nods in agreement.

Meeting in Siberia
In many ways Kit and Rob DesLauriers are America`s adventure couple. Rob, famous in ski circles as one of the earliest extreme skiers, accompanied Kit on each of her first descents. He is her biggest fan and proudly wears his affection on his sleeve. He calls her "Mountain Momma." She says they`re soul mates. They met in 1999 on a mountaineering trip to Mt. Belukha in the Altai Mountains in Siberia on the border with China, Mongolia and Kazakstan.
Kit and two friends had approached The North Face to help with funding the trip. The company agreed, but in return wanted one of its athletes to go along, as well as one of its cinematographers by the name of Rob DesLauriers.
"When we met it was magic," he says. They knew within the first week they met that they would be married.
"He`s a big part of my strength," Kit says, "because, in a large part, he doesn`t doubt me. Whatever I set out to do he knows I have the ability to excel and that helps me excel because it allows me to tap into my potential."
Ask her about being soul mates and she tells you about her 86-year-old grandmother, who was married more than 50 years.
"My grandmother has been a big source of wisdom for me with some of these sorts of questions," she says.
"I remember being a young girl and asking her, because of her incredibly successful marriage, is there only one person out there for you, only one potential husband, or spouse, or soul mate with who you could really and truly happily be married to for the rest of your life. And she surprised me. She`s a very well practiced Presbyterian Christian woman and she actually said no. She said I bet there is a handful, maybe five or six out there in the world. It`s just whether you happen to meet them in this lifetime or not. Maybe they don`t live in your country and maybe they don`t speak your language, but when you meet one of those people you`ll know. And I knew when I met Rob that he would be one of those people." Rob says the mountains are where they go to stay connected.
"When we have an issue, as happens," he said, "we go into the mountains and find ourselves and keep life in perspective."
The view from the living room of their home, nestled among tall trees in Teton Village near the base of the Jackson Hole ski area, looks out at the mountains in two directions.
And while ski mountaineering is a big part of their lifestyle, it`s not everything. Rob is an accomplished businessman having developed and built the luxurious Teton Mountain Lodge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. A graduate of Cornell University school of hotel management, he also drew upon the experience he gained working with his father, who developed Bolton Valley in Vermont, while working on Teton Lodge.
The opportunity to build the lodge provided Rob with an important creative outlet beyond the glamorous and exhilarating life of a professional skier. It took three years to design and their travel was put on hold until the lodge was completed three years ago.
Kit is an accomplished stone mason with her own landscape design company whose name is a play on her name and the material she uses — Rockit Corporation. She got started, she says, because she wanted to experience something other than academia.
"I wanted to learn to build with my hands and my mind," she says. And she found that being a woman in the stone masonry business was not a detriment because, "My work spoke for itself."
Building beautiful spaces helps her feel connected with the out of doors and that connection is at the center of who she is.
"I am very spiritual," she says. "I am not practicing any religion in particular. But I am very spiritual. I feel very connected with a greater power. Personally, I think it comes from being in tune with nature. I believe nature is the physical manifestation of that greater power. It`s really got all the lessons out there for us that we need to learn."
She says that Rob, too, is spiritual, but his spirituality comes from another place. "We joke that I am of the earth and he is of the stars," she says. It was in 1998 when Kit had an experience that put her on the road to ski mountaineering. Because of her blend of rescue and backcountry skills, she had been invited to climb a mountain named Siniolchu in Sikkim, India near Nepal. It was her first big expedition.

"On this trek I was looking all around me and I had this life changing moment," she recalls. "I saw all these mountains. The Himalayas are hard to describe to someone who hasn`t seen them. All I could think was why didn`t I have my skis with me. It was an epiphany for me in that I was interested in climbing mountains that I could ski down."

Understanding the risks
Kit`s mountaineering expertise is extensive — certified Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician, Telluride Professional Ski Patroller, Search and Rescue volunteer, Rescue 3 International low to high angle rope rescue instructor and Helicopter Rescue Technician.
She doesn`t distinguish when discussing the rescues in which she`s been involved. "Rescue work is so emotional," she says. "It`s very rewarding and anytime anybody`s life is really on the line, that they really could die, I can`t make any one of them any more important than another."
She does talk about the event that launched her medical rescue career. It occurred on August 6, 1995. A woman named Cathy Goralka hiking with four others near Ophir, Colorado at an elevation of nearly 11,000 feet was struck between the eyes by a rock dislodged by another hiker from above. The blow cracked her skull and knocked her unconscious down the hill about 20 feet where she landed upside down stuck between a couple of trees. Two of the hikers ran down the mountain to a house where a woman called 911 only to learn the helicopter and crew were out on another rescue. The woman knew Kit and knew she had medical training, so she called and asked Kit to help. Kit grabbed her gear, rendezvoused with one of the hikers and headed up the mountain.
"About 20 minutes later we came up on the victim and it pretty much looked like a man holding his dead wife in his arms," she recalls.
Goralka also had a cracked vertebra in her neck. Kit wrapped her with what she had available to keep her warm, applied pressure to the head wound to stop the bleeding, repositioned her slightly uphill to help relieve the cranial pressure and kept one hand on her wrist to monitor the woman`s pulse.
"At one point I lost her radial pulse," Kit says, "and I turned to her husband and her sister-in-law, who were the only other people there with me, and I asked them whether they knew CPR. And when they said no, I pretty much decided that it was not going to be an experience that I was going to have to lay on the side of this mountain holding a dead woman. I just pleaded with her to come back and amazingly enough I felt her pulse come back. And it never left again after that and this whole thing lasted for almost 3 hours before the search and rescue team arrived."
After Goralka was lowered down the mountain on a litter and put aboard a helicopter, she was flown to St. Mary`s Hospital in Grand Junction. She underwent three different surgeries and in the end lost sight in one eye because the left optical nerve was severed, but suffered no other lasting injuries.
"She was definitely was my guardian angel that day," Goralka says of Kit. "If it weren`t for her swiftness in climbing that mountain, her ability to get up there in a hurry and quickly access the urgency of the situation, then I wouldn`t be here.
"It is because of Kit that every year on Aug. 6 that I celebrate my re-birthday," she says.
When Kit walked off the mountain she was met by the lieutenant in charge of the sheriff`s department. He shook her hand and asked her if she wanted to be part of the search and rescue team.
As Kit finishes telling this story the emotion is detectable in her voice and her eyes are moist. This happens one more time when she describes her life with a wolf she rescued and raised from a 14-day-old pup. The mother had developed mastitis and couldn`t care for the pup. So, when she graduated from the University of Arizona where she majored in environmental political science, she moved to Ophir, Colorado, a small town of 100 people or so at an elevation of about 9,500 feet. She says she dedicated her 20s to being true to herself and being true to the wolf. He died five years ago from an inoperable tumor on his adrenal gland. He was nine years old.
"It was the best thing I`ve ever done with my life," she says. "He taught me a lot. And he knew that little valley in which we lived very intimately. In my mind it was a success because he didn`t die from being a wolf in a human`s world."
It was during this period that she had met Rob on the expedition to Siberia where she was the primary medical person.
Rob`s fame began in the late `80s when he and brother, Eric, began appearing in Warren Miller ski films. Such films helped bring extreme skiing to the mainstream. They joined another brother duo — John and Dan Egan — and mutual friend Dean Decas to start the Xteam Advanced Ski Clinics for strong intermediate to expert skiers that are going into their 16th year.
He and Eric had their own film production company — Straight Up Films — and they also wrote Ski the Whole Mountain, a book that provides advice on how to ski any terrain.
For Rob, the transition from traveling the world to ski in front of the camera to ski mountaineering began in 1996.
"After seven years of doing two films a year, I was drawn to ski mountaineering and wanted to ski remote places in the world," he says. "I had the attitude that if it was skiable anyplace on the planet, I wanted to go there.
"Ski mountaineering is a slower pace," he continues, "but it takes very intense focus over long periods of time and requires acute technical execution. It wraps all my experiences together in an incredible challenge."
As for the risk, he says, "When in doubt, don`t. You have to feel good about the ski. The uncontrollable risks like avalanches scare me most. I say a lot of prayers in the mountains."