This story was published in Volume 1, Issue 1
Chloe Hehir was practically born on skis.
Raised in Ophir, Colorado, a small town just outside of Telluride with dirt roads and a population of less than 200, Hehir could be seen as the poster child for granola Colorado kids.
“[We] didn’t have internet for, like, the first 14 years of my life,” she said.
Her parents, who met at the University of Colorado Boulder, leaned into the state’s outdoor vibe before getting “real jobs.” When she was younger, they would take her up the mountains in a backpack so she could ski down with her “little baby skis.” She’s kept at it ever since.
“It’s just been a part of my life for so long,” Hehir said. “The community within the sport is so awesome that it kind of just made me fall in love with it.”
At age 12, she began competing in big mountain skiing, which features off-piste, technical terrain — the kind of stuff in ski films. Athletes choose their own line down an ungroomed mountain and are judged on line choice, difficulty, control, style and fluidity.
Now a senior at CU and fueled by her love of the sport, Hehir is part of the CU Freeski team and competed in the 2025 Freeride World Tour.
The World Tour is the pinnacle of freeride. It features elite skiers and snowboarders in a circuit of big mountain competitions around the world, where some of the very athletes Hehir grew up idolizing became her peers.
“The Wildest Dreams Coming True”
The way Hehir approaches big mountain skiing is largely influenced by Telluride, where she learned to ski.
“In Telluride, our snowpack isn’t the best,” Hehir explained. “A lot of times, there’s a lot of rocks and your skis get scratched up, so I’m kind of just used to skiing on rocks.”
This translates into her style in freeride competitions, where she often chooses lines with more technical elements.
“People think that I really like techy stuff, but I kind of just like trying to find something that excites me,” Hehir said.
In addition to skiing, Hehir also competed in gymnastics up until college. While she ultimately focused on skiing, she says the skills she learned in gymnastics like air awareness helped her in big mountain competition.
“I feel like it taught me a lot about working hard, perseverance, falling, getting back up, all the classic, cheesy sports things,” she said.
Qualifying for the World Tour is a multi-level process, beginning with the World Tour Qualifier, where the top performers move on to the World Tour Challenger. The Challenger pits the top qualifiers against the lower performers on the pro tour to determine the roster of the next World Tour.
Hehir had qualified for the Challenger circuit, the foremost obstacle in her underdog journey. However, her performance in the first two competitions at the 2024 Challenger didn’t point towards qualifying for the Tour.
She had secured fourth place in Crested Butte but had fallen at the competition in Silverton. Going into the last competition of the season at Kirkwood, in California, she had no expectations of qualifying.
“I was just soaking up the moment,” Hehir recalled. “I was like, ‘I’m here. I’m going to do what I want to do. I’m going to ski a run I want [and] stay true to myself.’”
Her line choice at Kirkwood was exactly that: technical, with a tight shoot into a cliff drop, where she “delivered it with style, showing full control and fluidity from top to bottom,” according to the Freeride World Tour’s summary of the competition.
But despite how much her run impressed, Hehir didn’t think much of it.
“It was just fun, but I didn’t think it was anything crazy,” she said. “And then they said that I won. And then I was like, ‘okay yay.’ But then, I didn’t realize that meant I qualified.”
Her qualification came down to a tiebreaker. There was another athlete who also had a first and fourth place, just like Hehir. However, even with her fall, Hehir had snagged eighth place at Silverton, which put her ahead.
“It was like, fake, straight up,” Hehir said. “And then they called my name for the Tour. The dude came up to me and he was like, ‘You did it, you qualified.’ It was just, out of body, the wildest dreams coming true.”
Dropping In
In the early months of 2025, Hehir joined the ranks of elite athletes competing on the world stage.
“I just felt so grateful to be there because [there were] a lot of the people I’ve been looking up to for my whole life,” she said.
One of the highlights of the Tour was her very first competition at the Baqueria Beret Pro in Spain, where they took a helicopter up to the venue. She recalled it being icy, with everyone falling down.
But the real moment came at the top of the run, overlooking La Bamba, the mountain face she’d be skiing down. At the top of every World Tour run, is a pyramid structure, where athletes begin their line. To Hehir, it is an iconic symbol of the World Tour.
“It’s like standing in the pyramid and dropping in,” Heir said.
At 19, Hehir was the youngest woman competing on the Tour.
“It was more just kind of pushing [to] see what I could do,” she said about her mindset during the Tour. “Even though I didn’t accomplish all my goals, I was just trying to be proud of what I did.”
Hehir ended the season outside the rankings to requalify in 10th place. She went back to the Challenger but didn’t requalify there either.
“It was so hard coming from that whole season and then going back to where I came from,” she said. “So hopefully I can qualify again for Challengers, and hopefully I could qualify again for the Tour, but right now I’m back at the beginning.”
Although she didn’t requalify for the World Tour, Hehir said her experience was still valuable and motivating. While she’s looking ahead to getting back to where she was, Hehir is making sure to stay in the moment.
“I learned so much about myself, how I react in situations … how I handle stress, how I handle failure, because that happened,” she said. “But now I’m like, I’ll just try again. I think it worked out because I’m still in college, so I get to compete with all my friends.”
