Still skiing strong: 88-year-old Gisela Boris still gets out and skis Vail Mountain each winter
Gisela Boris starting heading to the slopes in the 1950s
Prisca Boris/Courtesy photo
As an octogenarian, Gisela Boris still gets out and skis Vail Mountain each winter. The 88-year-old started skiing in the mid 1950s at a small ski area once called “Suicide Six” in Vermont. “What a name for a ski area,” Boris said. “And if you think it is expensive now, it was expensive then. So, we just did day trips.”
Boris worked in New York City and went skiing with friends before meeting Bob Boris, who eventually became her husband. As their love bloomed so did the love of traveling all over New England to different ski areas. They would go with other couples who were discovering the sport and sometimes even barter for lodging.
“Bob played banjo and the ukulele and he and some friends made up the Killington Trio,” Boris said. “Through their talents we got lift tickets, and if we were lucky, we got room and board too.”
The couple were a part of Killington ski area in the early days, but always knew they wanted to try to ski out west.
“We went to Aspen in the early 1970s and I thought I had gone to heaven. I used to call the snow in Colorado ‘cheater’s snow’ because it was so much easier to ski than the ice in Vermont, and the cold back east was so ridiculous. Out west was a very different story,” Boris said.
Support Local Journalism
Bob and Gisela Boris had two daughters, Prisca Boris and Kendra McKinley, and the family grew up skiing and traveling together to new ski resorts.
“They started taking us everywhere because they figured out that we could keep up and we were fun,” Prisca Boris said. Prisca lives in Vail and Grisela stays with her daughter and husband Rick Petrillo during the winter for three months before returning back to the South Shore area of Boston once the snow melts.
“We just had these family ski trips every single year out west. We did Aspen. We did Snowbird. We did Jackson. And once we found Taos, we just continued to go there every single year and really got to know everybody down there and just had a really good time,” Boris said. “Skiing was the only thing that my husband was really interested in. He needed to be on vacation where there was some action. He was not a very good sightseer or good at visiting museums and all that.”
The Boris family went to Taos for 12 years before coming to Vail. On one of the Taos trips, the group added on a visit to Vail while they were all out west.
“Bob hit a tree while skiing Taos and broke his ribs. So he had to go home and not go to Vail, but he told me he wanted me to go to see it, so we had some people to care for him once he got back home and I went to Vail with the group,” Boris said. “And I loved it, and it was a little easier to get to than Taos.”
Bob and Gisela sold a place they had purchased in Killington and bought a place in Vail for ski trips and got to know the ski area and the town very well.
“My mom always loved skiing the bumps because the groomers made her cold and she was bored,” Prisca Boris said.
“We would ski on Sundays at Beaver Creek and we’d do all the runs in the Birds of Prey area, so lots of moguls. We’d call it ‘bumpin’ at the Beav'” Boris said. “We would have 30 people. It was like a Warren Miller movie every Sunday. It was crazy, I really wish I had some footage from back then because it was all the bumpers, and then the guys that were flipping and they would do these amazing tricks.”
Boris has seen quite a few things in her ski career, from lace-up leather boots, to the advancement of the buckle and her favorite pair of skis were the Head 360s.
“It was a metal ski and it was light. That was the first ski that I could make a decent turn on,” Boris said.
She also was a fashion plate on the slopes. From stirrup pants with a nylon shell, wool sweaters as base layers, to one-piece suits and the neon era of the 80s to the fashions of today.
Boris was dialing in her new equipment this year, but still managed to get out quite a bit. She skis with Vail Club 50 but said most of her ski friends are 10 to 15 years younger than she is. When she is on the slopes, people who meet her on the chairlift are shocked to learn her age.
“Most of them are quite surprised because everybody thinks I look younger. There was one guy telling me on the lift how he sees some older people skiing here that are in their 80s. And my girlfriend pipes in and says, ‘Well, you’re sitting next to somebody like that,’ And he just flipped out. He said, ‘I’ve got to take a picture with you because my mom is 85!'”
Even after all these years on the slopes, the feeling doesn’t get old for Boris.
“I always feel that I can’t possibly be 88 years old and doing this. It’s the best, I feel like a little kid again, I definitely do,” Boris said. Even though Bob passed away in 2014, there are still three generations out on the slopes. Kendra McKinley’s teenage daughter Maeve McKinley joins the family on ski trips.
“It’s one of the few sports that everyone can do. And even if you ski at different ability levels, you could still ride the same chairlift and maybe take different runs down. But it really is a great family activity,” Prisca Boris said.
“Some people will say to me, ‘aren’t you afraid?’ But you can’t be afraid when you’re skiing. You just go at it. You don’t have to be a maniac. You don’t have to go fast, just be in control and it works. It’s awesome,” Boris said. “My motto is ‘use it or lose it.’ Keep on skiing, keep on moving, don’t complain and have a good attitude.”
