Nordic Extreme: From the Olympics to Aspen, XC champion Simi Hamilton makes tracks

This story first appeared in the December 2014 issue.

There are those who go to Aspen for the parties and those who go for the X Games. Some visit for the foliage and others settle down for a season or two. And then there are those who made the trip decades ago, jostling and tumbling across the plains and into the Rockies. Such is the legacy of Simi Hamilton, a fourth-generation Aspenite who’s made a few treks of his own including to two Winter Olympic Games and on the Nordic World Cup circuit. But if there’s a rest day in sight, Simi would spend it on fat skis.

He first strapped skis to his feet at the age of two, and they’ve stayed there pretty much ever since. “We actually had this rule in our house called the ‘eight inch rule,’” Hamilton, 27, says. “If it snowed more than eight inches we got to skip school and go ski.”

It’s likely a family rule—Hamilton’s grandfather, D.R.C. Brown, was the president of Aspen Skiing Corporation in the ’60s and ’70s, after leasing his father’s mining lands for Aspen Mountain’s first chairlift. And the popular ski trail Ruthie’s Run on Aspen Mountain? That’s named after Hamilton’s grandmother, Ruthie Brown.

The Nordic champ atop Mt. Daly. Northern Elk Mountains, Colo. [Photo] Simi Hamilton

Skiing’s been a family affair ever since, but not always at the resort. “My family’s always been into touring,” Hamilton explains. “I grew up telemark skiing and tele skied for about 10 years and did a lot of really cool backcountry tours around the Elk Mountains.”

Those formative years left their mark—by the time he graduated from Aspen High School and headed to Middlebury College in Vermont, he held three Colorado State Championships and nine Nordic Junior National Championship titles. He went on to place in the top 10 at the NCAA Championships while at Middlebury and spent his college-era summers in Jackson Hole working as a rock guide for Exum Mountain Guides.

After graduation—and a 2010 win in the U.S. sprint freestyle—Hamilton earned a pair of top-10 finishes on the 2011 and 2012 World Cup tours and competed at the Vancouver and Sochi Olympic Games.

But with the rigorous training and traveling required for high-level performance, Hamilton searches for balance in the off-season. The answer lies in a basin near Chair Mountain, about an hour from Hamilton’s Aspen roots. A six-mile skin down a 4×4 access road in Marble, Colo. sits a cabin his family built, and it offers plenty of room to decompress.

“When I come home I usually spend about a month up in the cabin. We’ll go out for 10 hours a day—it’s such a nice change to not be looking at your watch,” Hamilton says. “You don’t have to think about racing the next weekend or getting on the plane the next day. It’s a really nice way to take a little bit of a break while still beating your body up a little bit.”

And those who tour with Hamilton are in for a trip. “It’s hard to keep up, but Simi’s always content to break trail,” says his older sister, Jenny, a Nordic athlete who also raced for Middlebury. “Even if he’s 20 minutes ahead of you, he’ll just be waiting at the top, drinking tea and eating chocolate.”

His friends concur. “A lot of athletes work hard, and so does Simi,” says Ben Koons, a friend who also competed at the 2010 Olympics. “But he’s a natural, true athlete. It comes through in technical descents and aggressive skiing. And he’s got this good, positive energy.”

That energy comes in handy on long days—and nights. Last Christmas, Simi and his sister decided to make their well-traveled trip to the cabin at 10 p.m. at night…in a snowstorm. “Simi was on cross-country skis, and he had put my new kitten in his pack,” Jenny says. “The cat stayed out in the cabin with us for the whole week.”

But as Hamilton reaches his late 20s, his days in the backcountry begin to take new meaning. “I hopefully have a few more years left in me of Nordic racing. But at the same time, I’m kind of getting up there in age,” he says. “I think it’s a pretty common thing for those who are still racing to start thinking about what they want to do afterward.”

As to what shape the future may take, his guess is it won’t be far from the mountains. “Snow safety actually grabs my attention,” Simi says. “I think it would be really cool find a way to contribute to what is such an awesome backcountry community.”