Hey everybody, welcome back to the Blister podcast on the Blister Podcast Network. I'm Dylan Wood,

senior editor at Blister, and you can check out everything we're doing and reviewing at

blister review.com. I'm really excited to bring you all this conversation today.

This is one of the many panel sessions we hosted at the Blister Summit 2025,

and while I wish you all were there with me in person to listen to this discussion,

it's just too good to keep to ourselves.

You'll be hearing Mallory Duncan, Annie Wangler, Noah Gaffney, and Jake

Hopfinger talk about some real behind-the-scenes things that you don't always get to hear from

pro skiers. For some context, I had some pretty fun yet simple questions outlined for these panelists,

and the morning before our panel session was to take place, a couple of them came up to me

and told me that they were pretty dissatisfied with these questions.

They told me they wanted to talk about the hard stuff, the uncomfortable stuff.

So in this conversation, you'll hear these four get pretty candid about whether they

choose to share or not to share their

personal struggles, how they make it work financially as a pro skier, career longevity as a

snow sports athlete, and much more. Before we get into that, I want to share a story that happened

to me a little over a week ago now. I was paddling the

class three section of the upper Taylor River in my kayak with some friends, and we were showing

down someone who had never paddled a section river before. We were cruising through rapid after

rapid, and this new paddler was just crushing every move and looking like a pro on a section

of white water that was new to her.

As we floated through some very chill water before the most technical section on the river,

...