Photo: TGR
Kai Jones knows it would be easy to call March 7, 2023, the worst day of his life, but he doesn’t. Jones dropped a large cliff deep in the backcountry and broke both legs and tore both his medial and lateral meniscus. The 16-year-old athlete was airlifted off the mountain and the same-day surgery was only the first of three more to come. He took his first steps again on May 5 with screws in his legs with several more months of therapy and training ahead. The accident could have been career, or even life-threatening, but Jones was back on skis by the following winter.
The human body and mind are capable of some miraculous things.
“Like every adversity I’ve faced, I kept moving forward. One turn at a time I built back my foundation and found the childlike joy in skiing again,” he said earlier this year, admitting that the whole experience had made it “hard to love skiing” when his body still hurt anytime he did it.
“In hindsight, that day showed me how special life is. In today’s world, we spend our 24 glued to our devices constantly living in tomorrow’s world,” he added. “If I learned one thing this past year, it’s that the ups and downs make you who you are. Live every single day to the fullest and don’t tip toe through life.”
Jones had cameras pointed at him through a lot of that process — a project that turned into TGR’s newest documentary film, Falling Into Place. It highlights Jones’ rollercoaster ride through recovery, literally and figuratively learning how to walk again, and confronting the idea that he may not even want to continue his career as a professional skier. You don’t have to watch the film to know Jones came out on the other side of that struggle.
“The director told me I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t tell this story,” Todd Jones, Kai’s father and co-founder of TGR said recently.
“I have this amazing family that’s given me so much support,” Kai says now, “but, in the end, it’s really the work that you put in, and you got to put in 100 percent. It’s just a decision you make to come back.”
