Hanging with Chad

Some people look like they simply belong on snow, as though their first movements as a human were not baby steps but rather tiny turns on tiny skis. Chad Sayers is one of them. 

On a late April morning, clouds swirl around the peaks of Whistler and Blackcomb. Sayers shoulders his skis and boot-packs up the “chimney.” Ten minutes later, he clicks in and pushes off into the steep glades of CBC. The snow is as unpredictable as the tempestuous spring weather. One turn, there’s a dusting of powder on windblown hardpack. The next, sun-softened then refrozen tracks that could quickly dismantle the ligaments of a knee. They are the sorts of conditions that will expose a lifetime of bad skiing habits. Sayers makes it look easy. 

For one, he’s fast. He’s also flawlessly smooth no matter what crud a mountain throws his way. No flapping arms, speed checks, or jerky corrections. It’s a big reason why – 25 years into a professional skiing career and age 47, well past the best-before date for most pros – Sayers is still skiing for the camera.

Invariably, skiing life delivers the good and the bad. If being a professional skier is a form of combat, then Sayers has the scars to prove it – physical and emotional.

Watching him hobbling up stairs on shot knees after a day of skiing, it’s hard to believe he’s the same guy who, an hour earlier, arced Super Gs through cut-up powder in flat light down Ruby Bowl.   

“It’s the kind of pain that goes straight to your skull,” he says stoically, describing what every turn feels like these days.

A high tolerance for pain has served him well. So has stubborn faith, the product of a Christian upbringing, and a naive belief that a higher power will ensure that everything will work out. 

To a remarkable degree, for someone who has never plotted a conventional career path, things have worked out.  

Sayers was born in Ontario, but moved at a young age with his family to Vernon, British Columbia. Surprisingly, he didn’t start skiing until he was 16.

“I was into hockey, soccer, and dirt-biking,” Sayers says.

He was a natural and quick learner. The freedom of skiing and quest for the perfect turn unlocked in Sayers a latent passion and drive. He burned through his certifications. By age 19 he was a CSIA (Canadian Ski Instructor’s Alliance) Level III instructor, helping coach the SilverStar Mountain Resort freestyle team for which he had previously competed.

Ski instruction served him well. He acquired solid foundational technique. Yet there was something about this disciplined world that was at odds with a young free spirit like Sayers. He yearned for more. The big mountains called. In 2000, he moved to Whistler with the goal of turning skiing into a career. Teaching it was the practical choice, but practicality isn’t a Sayers trait. That first winter at Whistler-Blackcomb, he was wide-eyed. He had never before skied true alpine terrain.

“The town was full of young ambitious pro skiers,” he says. “You’d see JP Auclair, the Treadway brothers, Chris Winter, Eric Pehota, and Richie Schley in the lift lines and then you’d see them in films and magazines.”

The world of freeskiing competition was going off. Sayers dove in, eschewing the sensible and safe life of a ski instructor for big mountain skiing with an eye on competition. 

“I was teeing off on bigger and bigger features. It was a dangerous and intense time,” he says.

It was also exhilarating. Hard work paid off. He qualified for the Freeride World Tour and over the next several years bagged two second-place podiums at the Canadian National Championships and a first at a comp in Switzerland. Sayers was getting noticed. The 2005 season was shaping up to be a banner one. Then, while training for the US Nationals at Snowbird, he suffered an horrific crash. He misjudged a jump, big time, and hit a boulder at speed. Sayers broke ribs, pelvis and femur and punctured his lungs. He could have died.

“I should never have skied again,” Sayers says.  

But ski again he would.

His competition days ended but a new chapter began. Post recovery, he would embark on a seemingly endless nomadic quest for snow and mountains. A 2008 meeting with talented Vancouver photographer and filmmaker Jordan Manley led to the Arc’teryx-sponsored series of evocative short films called A Skier’s Journey. Over the next few years of near-constant travel, Manley and Sayers, as well as American ski mountaineer Forrest Coots, ventured to Kashmir, Argentina, Japan, Dubai, Iceland, China, and their own backyard mountains. 

“I was making good money with sponsorships and photos, and I was traveling the world,” he says.

For Sayers it was a dream project. Getting paid to ski in many places most people could only dream about. But even nomads need places to anchor. Sayers has two of them – Whistler-Blackcomb, where his pro skiing career began, and La Grave, that mystical mountain place that continues to draw him back for a hit of what he calls “soul skiing,” where he says he goes to recover emotionally and physically. On the surface, the two spots couldn’t be more different. Vail Resort’s flagship Canadian property can feel corporate to the core while La Grave, whose winding streets and stone houses seem little changed since the 17th century, feels soulful to the core. Scrape beneath the surface and both have the raw and rugged big-mountain terrain that shaped Sayers’s career as a skier and still inspires him.

It’s the end of a long ski season. Sayers limps into the Dubh Linn Gate Irish Pub in Whistler Village. He slips onto a stool and orders a Guinness. Then he turns his attention to a Toronto Maple Leafs game, chronic under-performers in the National Hockey League Playoffs. He belongs to a legion of long-suffering Leaf fans. It’s a cross you bear as an Ontario boy.

At age 47, his signature shoulder-length, straight dirty-blonde hair is thinning slightly at the temples. His arms are ripped and muscular and his complexion perpetually tanned copper from a life lived in the elements.

The ski season is almost over. Now it’s recovery time. That means seeing therapists three times a week and hitting the weights and mountain bike hard so he can coax more skiing and adventures from a body that has paid the price.

“There have been so many times when I’ve thought ‘If I fuck up this turn, I’m dead. I’m going to tomahawk,’” he says.

Sayers is in a reflective mood these days. He has a five-year-old daughter Aiya whom he loves deeply but carries the burden of a toxic breakup with the mother. Legal bills have piled up. He admits the sponsorship contracts aren’t as fat or as plentiful as they once were. But there is a silver lining. By necessity, fatherhood has curtailed the traveling life and regular work guiding for Extremely Canadian keeps him close to his daughter in Whistler.

“Guests love skiing with Chad. He’s a great instructor and he has lots of stories to share about his adventures,” says Extremely Canadian co-founder Jill Dunnigan.

Nelson-based photographer Steve Ogle first met Sayers more than 20 years ago in Portillo. They became good friends, both stubborn in their own way, and built a kind of fun uncle-nephew bond forged on ski adventures to the Patagonia Ice Cap, Mount Logan (Canada’s highest peak), Pico Simmonds in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Madre, among others.  

“For a lot of pro skiers, it’s all about riding the lifts and getting the banger shots. If you have good light and the snow conditions, then Chad’s the guy to have,” Ogle says. “But it’s never really been about the cover shot on those trips. It was always about the experience. Chad is keen and capable to pull off those big adventures, even when the chances of success are minimal.” 

There’s another thing about Sayers. He’s a kind and loyal friend with a global network of people who look out for him. 

“And he’s also nostalgic. Nostalgia drives him,” Ogle says.  

It shows in the rituals Sayers keeps. Like sitting on the steps of La Grave’s Église de Notre-Dame de l’Assomption and smoking a Drum, basking in international camaraderie following a descent of La Voûte, Couloir des Fréaux, or any number of other classic test pieces that make this bit of France so intimidating and so special. 

Similarly at Whistler-Blackcomb, Sayers likes to cap a day with a ritualistic pint and burger at The Dubh Linn. The servers in plaid skirts are pretty and friendly. The bartender knows him. 

Sayers has never fit easily into a world gone hyper-self promotional. Though he travels the globe, he’s not necessarily worldly in the common sense of the word. He gets his news from friends, not from the internet or TV. If he’s on a mountain trip and finds a rock he likes, he’ll stuff it into his backpack even if his wrecked knees will hate him for it. When the universe went digital, Sayers clung to his SLR film camera, building a library of beautiful slide images from his travels. Some ended up in his coffee-table memoir, Overexposed, a passion project years in the making. True to form, while working on the manuscript Sayers typed it out and didn’t keep a digital copy. After visiting his publisher, he drove off with the draft on the roof of his battered Subaru. His carefully crafted words were scattered and lost to the streets of North Vancouver. He drove back to Whistler to start over.

“It wasn’t that bad. I had most of it up here,” he says, pointing to his forehead.  

The minor mishap was another testament to his perseverance and ability to keep alive the dream of skiing for a living. That is the Chad Sayers way.  

“Skiing is my life,” he says.