The night before he would try to ski jump over a busy three-lane highway in the Colorado high country, Dallas LeBeau sat down with his parents for dinner in their log cabin home. Valerie and Jason served grilled cheese and soup to their 21-year-old son, and as in the months before, the conversation quickly turned to the jump. Dallas announced that he was going to go for it the next day. His parents stopped eating and stared at him.

“Have you done the math?” Valerie asked him, even though she believed he probably didn’t know how to compute the required speed and lift needed to clear a 40-foot stretch of pavement. He planned to do it on pure instinct.

“Mom, if anything, I’m going to overshoot the landing,” Dallas said.

“Maybe you should wait,” his father said.

Dallas was a thrill-seeker who loved to put himself in danger, but he usually took measured risks. This didn’t feel like a measured risk, especially in April with the snowpack melting, although most people who knew Dallas didn’t doubt he could pull it off. When Valerie and Jason looked into his eyes that night, they saw a free spirit but also the reflection of what the ski industry had become for many young athletes like their son: an expensive, relentless chase to prove themselves in a social-media-driven world, where skiers often were emboldened to push their limits for the sake of views and clout.

Dallas had worked for years to make it to a top professional tour in skiing, only to stall in the standings last winter. He wasn’t getting younger. He had no sponsors. He felt desperate to win respect — online and on the mountain — and one of the last chances of the year to make some noise was by submitting video of a jump to GoPro for a contest.

Read the full story at WashingtonPost.com.

Learn about LeBeau’s impact on the big mountain skiing program at Winter Park Resort here.