The only constant in Chris Davenport's skiing career is change. One of freeskiing's pioneers, "Dav" first made a name for himself in big mountain freeskiing competitions, winning world championship titles in 1996 and 2000. Naturally, this segued into highly-visible roles as a featured athlete in ski films (he's appeared in more than 20), but lately Dav's ski mountaineering missions - climbing and skiing - is the stuff that's keeping him at the forefront of skiing's progressive backcountry realm.

A ski racer at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Dav's ever-growing ski mountaineering "tick list" now includes all 54 of Colorado's 14ers - or 14,000 foot peaks - in a single year (a first); new and multiple routes on the tallest peak in North America, Denali; classic Alps routes on the Matterhorn, the Eiger, and Mt. Blanc; and an assortment of other notable sojourns in the Tetons, Sierras, Cascades, Rockies, and most recently, Antarctica.

Regarded as something of an ambassador for the sport (he was featured in the recent documentary film Steep, and he authored a popular book about the 14ers Project), Dav sees skiing as part of a larger dynamic journey. "I didn't set out to become a big mountain skier," he says today. "As skiers, whether you're tourist or diehard or whatever, we evolve as we grow older. And I've evolved as a skier too - from a racer, to a cliff-hucker competitor, to a hard-charging ski filmer, to having an epiphany to try to ski all the 14ers, and mostly recently, to continue climbing and skiing beautiful peaks around the world."