In March of 2021, deep in the guts of the COVID pandemic and stuck at home in Canada, Christina Lustenberger made her way to the top of a mountain that’s always been core to her sense of place. Mount Nelson, the 10,869-foot massif that rises above her hometown of Invermere, BC, had been on her mind since she was a kid—she could see it from the house she grew up in and from the chairlift as a young ski racer at nearby Panorama Mountain Resort. 

“I remember being 12 and looking over my shoulder on the chair and thinking, ‘I wonder if you could ski that,’” she says.

At that point, no one had. It was in the back of her mind when she was away from Invermere, racing giant slalom on the World Cup circuit starting in 2003, and she was still dreaming about it when she transitioned into big mountain lines, ticking off other first descents from Baffin Island to the Bugaboos…

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