Deep Reads: A beloved skier, an audacious jump and the complex grief left behind
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 April 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dallas LeBeau had worked for years to make it to a top professional tour in skiing, only to stall in the standings last winter. He felt desperate to win respect. One of the last chances of the year to make some noise was by submitting a video of a jump to GoPro for a contest.
In January 2024, on the drive back after a long day on the mountain, he snapped a photo of the turn before Highway 40 crests Berthoud Pass in Colorado — a 40-foot-wide stretch of asphalt. With the GoPro contest in mind, he thought: What if I could jump that gap?
This is the story leading up to Dallas’s jump, his attempt to clear Highway 40, and the grief that followed. The piece was reported, written and read by Roman Stubbs. Audio production and original music by Bishop Sand.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Roman Stubbs. I'm a sports enterprise reporter for the Washington Post. I wrote this story as part of our deep read series, which showcases narrative journalism at the post. |
| 0:11.4 | This story is about a 21-year-old skier named Dallas LaBeau, who vowed to jump over a three-lane highway in the Colorado High Country. |
| 0:23.4 | I reported this story in Black Hawk, Colorado. |
| 0:27.3 | The story is about a young skier coming into his own |
| 0:32.7 | and feeling like he needed to prove himself in the social media-driven world. |
| 0:40.1 | And his parents felt helpless at times to keep him from doing dangerous things to accomplish that. |
| 0:48.5 | I felt like it was important to tell this story. |
| 0:52.3 | First off, I felt like it was a big story in Colorado when it happened last April, |
| 0:59.7 | but then when I dug deeper into it, I realized that this could be kind of a cautionary tale for not just skiers, |
| 1:08.5 | but for all adventure athletes, you know, we see this in climbing. |
| 1:14.6 | We see this in sports where athletes are pushed to do extreme things on camera. |
| 1:25.3 | A note to listeners, |
| 1:29.3 | the story includes descriptions of physical harm. |
| 1:33.8 | Okay, here we go. |
| 1:55.2 | Okay. The night before he would try to ski jump over a busy three-lane highway in the Colorado high country, |
| 1:59.3 | Dallas Lobo sat down with his parents for dinner in their log cabin home. |
| 2:02.4 | 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. |
| 2:09.3 | Dallas announced that he was going to go for it the next day. His parents stopped eating and stared |
| 2:14.4 | at him. Have you done the math? Valerie asked him, |
| 2:18.7 | even though she believed he probably didn't know how to compute the required speed and lift |
| 2:22.8 | needed to clear a 40-foot stretch of pavement. |
| 2:26.2 | He planned to do it on pure instinct. |
... |
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