Kim Porter’s life on skis to be honored in a challenging torchlight ski down at Vail

Vail ski instructor Kim Porter loved to participate in the annual torchlight ski-down events on Vail Mountain, but he never found the skiing to be very challenging.

On Feb. 5, a torchlight ski down will be held in his honor, and the run chosen for the event is a little more up to his speed. It will be held on Pepi’s Face, one of Vail’s most difficult runs, something Porter would have loved to see.

Porter died on Dec. 31 after experiencing a health event while skiing before the start of a lesson on Dec. 28. It was a sudden end to a life spent on skis, said his younger brother, Jeff Porter, who was one of his oldest ski buddies.

Not many people have memories of skiing the rope tow in Sinks Canyon, Wyoming, the birthplace of the National Outdoor Leadership School. But for the Porter brothers, growing up in Riverton, Wyoming, that rope tow is where they began their life as skiers.

“He probably started when he was 7 or 8 years old there, burning his gloves on that rope tow,” Jeff said of Kim.

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The Sinks Canyon Ski Area didn’t last long, operating from the 1950s to the 1970s, and by the time it closed the Porter brothers had outgrown it anyway, Jeff said. By the mid-1960s they had moved on to Jackson Hole, with their parents making the long drive there after it opened in 1965.

“Jackson Hole was like 160 miles one way from Riverton. We’d leave at 6 a.m., get up there by 9 a.m., ski all day, have some dinner in Jackson and drive home that night,” Jeff said.

A few years after that, Kim was driving and the brothers had a friend working at Jackson Hole who could get them on the gondola before normal business hours began.

After a long day of skiing, “we’d flop on his couch,” Jeff said.

Kim then moved to Driggs, Idaho, for a season, skiing at Grand Targhee as often as possible. By 1974, he was living in Laramie, skiing at Snowy Range Ski Area where he was a member of the ski patrol. After serving on ski patrol for a few years, he began instructing.

In the early ’80s, Kim met Susan Augustine, and as they began dating, he took her to the now-defunct Berthoud Pass Ski Area in Colorado because he thought it would be an easier place to learn.

“It snowed like crazy,” Susan said. “It was some of the most powder I have ever skied in, and I was trying to learn how to make a turn.”

Susan said many people, including Jeff, got a laugh out of the fact that she and Kim managed to stay together and get married despite the fact that Kim taught her to ski.

“We had a few heated moments, but mostly it was really fun,” she said. “He was a great teacher.”

The couple had two daughters together, Kaylee and Michelle.

“He skied with the girls from birth,” Susan said. “He had one of those little chest packs and skied with them when they were infants. I was a really protective mom, and I don’t remember being concerned at all because he was such a good skier.”

One of Kaylee’s earliest memories is of her dad making a chairlift simulator in their living room so she would be prepared to board the lift when she was 2 or 3 years old.

“I was too little to get on the chair by myself, so he took all the couch cushions and made it the height of the chair, and we would practice me jumping up and backwards so I could learn to get on the chair by myself,” Kaylee said. “It became such a fun game.”

The family lived in Laramie, with Kim working at Snowy Range into the early 2000s before Kaylee left for college and he and Susan divorced. Kim became an instructor at Vail in 2004, commuting from Laramie at first. Once he moved to Vail full-time, he continued to keep everyone outfitted with gear, despite the separation and the miles apart.

“Even when we were no longer married, he was still buying skis for me,” Susan said.

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Kaylee went on to become a ski instructor herself, living with her father in Vail, and was always surprised by his constant desire to ski.

“He would work sometimes 20 or more days in a row during the holidays, and then on his day off I’d ask him, ‘What are you going to do?’ and he’d say, ‘I’m going skiing,'” Kaylee said. “It always blew my mind. I liked ski instructing but when I had a day off, skiing was the last thing I wanted to do. But he just loved it.”

In 2019, Kim met Julie Winters, and by 2021 they were spending most of their time together. They bought a house together in Montrose, living in Vail during the ski season and Montrose during the offseason.

“Our motto was recreate first,” she said. “We were always making sure we were getting out and enjoying this wonderful place we lived.”

After a few years together, Kim came up with a perfect gift for Julie, commissioning a hand-painted ski with images of Julie on her sailboat and skiing Lover’s Leap on Vail Mountain with Kim.

“It took us a lifetime to find each other,” Julie said. “But we had the most wonderful years together, and it flowed for us. We knew it was special, and we would articulate to each other that we were very lucky to have found each other, and that we knew we were happy and we knew we had something special. We were thankful in the moment about that.”

Julie was herself a lifelong skier before she met Kim, but she said being with him upped her game a bit. But even with her becoming his main ski buddy, he never forgot his original ski partner, his brother Jeff. The two continued to ski together and kept in contact about skiing right up until Kim’s death. Jeff said he talked to Kim just before his last run on Dec. 28, with Kim describing what kind of skier his client was that day.

Jeff said he was hoping to get another 20 years of skiing with his brother, but he’s thankful for the many decades they had together nevertheless.

“One time Kim was coming from the Front Range, and I was coming from Grand Junction, and we were going to meet in Breckenridge,” Jeff said. “When we pulled in the parking lot, we were two cars apart from each other.”

The Feb. 5 event in honor of Kim will begin at 5:45 p.m. at Express Lift Bar at the base of Gondola One, and the torchlight skidown is expected to start around 6:15 p.m. The celebration will continue afterward, and anyone who knew Kim is invited to share stories and join his family in a special toast.