Crystal Wright Finds Balance in the Tetons

Crystal Wright’s competitive skiing career took off at age 12. By 2012, she was after her second Freeskiing World Tour win having transitioned from ski racing to big mountain competitions. On the last run, she was locked in a tie after eight months of being neck and neck with fellow skier, Angel. The win came down to her performance on the final run. “It made me push myself more than I ever have,” Crystal said of the moment, which was a highlight of her twenty-three year competitive skiing career. In the end, she won. “It was one of those things, you know, that comes true in dreams,” Crystal remembered. 

The moment was years in the making. She’d been pushed by her community to level-up her skiing since childhood. “I guess I’ve always thrived on competition. Not so much with other people, but with myself, hence the individual sports,” Crystal said. 

Eventually, the mental side of ski racing began to wear on her. She raced through college until she was 25 and couldn’t wait to transition to big mountain competitions. “It was kind of my sanctuary to keep racing as long as I did,” she said about the change. Big mountain competitions gave her an outlet to address her unfinished business from ski racing but with more confidence and a healthier mindset. 

She’d grown up skiing Jackson’s famous powder, and the move from the cutthroat, coached world of ski racing to the tight-knit family approach of the tour eased the tension. “Some of those people are still my best friends to this day. We’ve never lived in the same place, but it brought us together,” she said of her fellow athletes from her years on the tour. 

Still, the high of her victory in 2012 quickly crashed. While she was no stranger to injury throughout her professional career, a mountain biking accident only a month after she won the tour derailed her plans at the height of her career. Instead of training for another season on the snow, Crystal began picking up clients as a trainer herself, and her business grew enough to open her own brick and mortar gym, Wright Training, by the end of the year. “All I can say is that my gym started me,” Crystal said about how much she’s learned about business and life from the gym’s scrappy beginnings. 

Helping her clients and focusing on the growth of the gym got her through being sidelined by the tibia and fibula break, and, in turn, the injuries she’d experienced as a competitive skier informed her approach to coaching. Having been through double ACL surgery as well as a knee replacement at 43, she’s become more mindful about how injuries can be prevented with practices like strength training.

Jackson is a town known for tending towards the extreme when it comes to sports, and Crystal aims to give her clients the tools to find the balance between going on wild adventures and keeping their bodies protected. “I’m like, stop overdoing it. Rest. Take a rest day. Nobody in this valley is very good at doing that. Everyone just wants to go, go, go. And then we feed off each other,” Crystal said. While she’s aged out of feeling the pressure to run up the Grand because her friend did it the day before, she sees this drive in her younger clients. “They’re amazing, but I’m just like, calm down. Don’t get hurt.” 

2012 was a big year for Crystal. Alongside winning the tour and opening her gym, she also started the Jackson Hole Babe Force. At the height of her career on the competitive circuit, she recognized that there were a lot of women who didn’t have anyone to ski with or help them level up, and she also saw a gap in recognition of the epic women skiers, like her own mom, who routinely conquered Jackson’s most difficult terrain like Corbet’s Couloir. “They don’t have the support they could to be better, be more confident,” Crystal said when talking about her motivation to bring women together on the slopes. 

When Crystal couldn’t find a community group for women in the valley, she decided to have a women’s ski day. Over 50 women showed up to ski together, demonstrating a clear desire for a ski community. From there, the Babe Force continued to grow, launching scholarships to get more women into backcountry education courses. Crystal recently took a step back from running the operation, and that iteration of the Babe Force is now carried on as Women in the Tetons, but she’s bringing back the Babe Force through her patch program where skiers can nominate important women who mentored them in the outdoors. She’s still deeply dedicated to the Babe Force’s original mission to “find like-minded women to get buckwild in the mountains with.”

In the midst of building her gym and the Babe Force, Crystal had her daughter. “I have that work hard, play hard mentality. That play hard now happens to be a lot with my daughter, which is amazing,” she said of finding balance now that she’s a mom. A huge part of this is making time for what’s important but being realistic about how much time that can be. “For me, exercise is the most important because it makes me a better mom, a better business owner, everything. So that takes priority. But now, instead of being a couple hours, I’m psyched if I get 45 minutes.” She feels similarly about skiing. While she used to need three full days in the mountain, now, a big day every other week feels like a cherished moment. More often, she’s finding herself on the slopes leading a camp at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort or teaching her daughter to ski. 

Becoming a mom has also altered Crystal’s mindset when it comes to making risky choices on the slopes. “I still wanna push myself, and I definitely have urges to get adrenaline rushes, but I am not nearly as confident or wild as I used to be. I mean, that’s age, but mainly, that’s being a mom. You think way differently now, especially when it comes to stuff like avalanches,” she said. Reflecting back on some of the risks she took on high avalanche days when she was younger, she cautions young women to be patient and assess their ability and risk factors before following other skiers into potentially dangerous situations. “Don’t feel like you always have something to prove. Do it because you love it and take time to get the education or find support for it,” she cautioned. 

These days, as Crystal heals from her knee replacement, she’s in search of a new goal to throw herself into. When she gets back to training, she’s looking forward to the concrete metrics of preparing for the race, but she’s looking for outlets that are more friendly to her body. Eventually, she wants to get back to her tick list of places she wants to ski in and around Jackson and the Wind River Range where she grew up. While she wrote the list in 2016, her progress slowed as she focused on motherhood. Now that her daughter is older, she’s ready to get back to working through the list and checking off some epic, big days in the mountains.