Skier Jill Kinmont Boothe dies

Jill Kinmont Boothe was the national women's slalom champion and on the cover of Sports Illustrated when she set out to win a 1955 race that would help put her on the U.S. Olympic ski team. As she sped down a Utah mountain slope, she lost control on an icy bump, struck a spectator, crashed and tumbled into a tree.

When she finally came to a stop, she couldn't feel anything. This must be death, she later recalled thinking. Her neck broken, she was paralyzed below her shoulders, her promising career as a skier over at 18.

But Kinmont Boothe became a role model of a different sort, the subject of a book and the movie "The Other Side of the Mountain," a teacher and a painter who refused to let her injuries turn her into a different person.

She died Thursday at a hospital in Carson City, Nev., the local coroner's office said. She was 75.

Kinmont Boothe's father ran a dude ranch in Bishop, Calif., in the shadow of the Eastern Sierra. She learned to ski at nearby Mammoth Mountain and in 1954 won both the national junior and senior slalom championships.

Adding to her appeal, she was, in the words of 1950s press accounts, a "plucky, pretty" blue-eyed blonde -- the mid-century ideal of young womanhood.

"Everybody that I knew at that age thought Jill was about the cutest thing around; she really was a beautiful young lady and a phenomenal skier," said Alan Engen, a former U.S. ski competitor and ski historian who met Kinmont Boothe as a young racer."At the time that she had her accident, she was probably the premier up-and-comer women's U.S. skier."

Her crash before several thousand spectators at the Snow Cup giant slalom race in Alta, Utah, made headlines. When she returned to Southern California on a stretcher after two months in a Salt Lake City hospital, crowds of reporters and cameramen greeted her at the train station.

Despite a broken neck, she told them she hoped to walk and even ski again. She had the use of neck and shoulder muscles and learned to write, type and paint with the aid of a hand brace. But she spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

She earned a college degree and teaching certificate but had trouble landing teaching jobs because of her disability, she said. "To get mad, to scream and holler, to tell the world -- that doesn't get you anywhere," she said in 1968, when the Los Angeles Times named her a Woman of the Year for 1967. "You sort of look for what's good that's left, I guess."

Her life and losses were the subject of a 1966 book, "A Long Way Up: The Story of Jill Kinmont," by E.G. Valens, and two films, "The Other Side of the Mountain" in 1975 and a 1978 sequel, both of which were panned in the media.

In Bishop, Kinmont Boothe continued to teach, instructing learning and physically disabled children in the last years of her career. A school in town is named after her.

"My life has really been very full," Kinmont Boothe said last year. "I've had lots of wonderful experiences."