DECEMBER 04: Danger Kitty

The first time you hear it, it catches you off guard. Faint and authentic, high pitched, very kitten-like. You look around the room—under tables, at windowsills. You wonder if maybe you just imagined it. Then you hear it again.

Meow.

If you press her on it, Ingrid Backstrom will shrug it off. "Sometimes everything just builds up inside," she'll say, never breaking her gaze from the task at hand—maybe washing dishes or baking muffins or fixing a flat on her mountain bike—"and you just need to meow."

There's Ingrid at a glance: a bit eclectic, somewhat enigmatic, always distinctly herself.

This puma has emerged as the world's most promising female big mountain skier since Wendy Fisher, but you'll never hear it from her. Modest to a fault, if she's winning a contest, it's next to impossible to get her to say what place she's in. Instead, she'll just smile enthusiastically, answering your query with a "pretty good." And while competition is still a focal point of her skiing, titles and accolades are secondary. She's finished on the podium in 11 of 12 career contests, but has never completed the three-event Freeskiing World Tour, and thus finished second the past three years. She has an aggressive, hard-charging approach to competition that's practically unbeatable right now, if she can—and this is where the cat analogy lapses—only manage to stay on her feet.

"I think attitude is everything," says Ingrid, 26. "If you go into the contests like, ‘this is awesome, this is fun, I'm just skiing with my friends and challenging myself,' then it doesn't matter how you finish, and I think you end up skiing a lot better. I didn't get into this with a goal of winning the World Tour. What was foremost in my mind was just doing well in the contests that I went to."

Born and raised in Seattle with two younger brothers, Ingrid spent most weekends of her childhood skiing at Crystal Mountain, where her parents, Betsy and Steve, were volunteer ski patrollers. "We were up there every weekend, since I was tiny, little," she says. "I wasn't super into skiing until I started making friends with some of the kids who skied up there. I started racing when I was 11, more as a social thing because I was tired of skiing by myself or with my parents." Fifteen years later, however, skiing is much more than just a way to make friends, much more than just something to do on the weekends.