hbiden@onlyfans.com wrote: Sat Apr 05, 2025 10:59 am
When 21-year-old Dallas LeBeau vowed to clear a highway to win a contest and social media clout, his parents felt helpless to stop him. Now they’re left with regret.
The Washington Post
By Roman Stubbs
April 5, 2025
Black Hawk, Colo.
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.
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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.
“You could get really hurt,” Valerie pleaded with him.
“Mom, you’re going to manifest something going bad!” Dallas snapped, then excused himself from the table and went to his childhood room. He shut the door for the night. Valerie and Jason looked at each other, not knowing what else to do.
Jason eventually went into his son’s room and kissed Dallas on the forehead. He told him good luck and that he loved him. The next morning, Valerie sat on the edge of his bed, her son half-asleep, and told him to make sure everything felt right that day before he tried it. Then she gave him her camera to use.
She texted him later: “Love you. Please let me know when you’re safe.”
“Will do. Love you,” Dallas wrote back.
An hour passed in silence. Valerie didn’t want to call and stress him out. She checked Google Maps and saw the orange lines of a traffic jam on Berthoud Pass. She soon knew something horrible had happened.
Dallas began to ski before he even knew how to walk, tightly holding on to a rope tied to an iron bar his parents pulled around the driveway. Valerie and Jason were first-time parents from Maryland who had dreamed of raising a family in the mountains. They settled at nearly 9,000 feet near Eldora, and by the time he was 8, Dallas was building ski jumps in his backyard. He would invite his friends over to try stunts, and he would brag to all of them that he was born Oct. 17, the same day as Evel Knievel.
But unlike many of his friends, Dallas could only ski once or twice a week growing up; his friends could go five or seven days a week if they chose. He didn’t live near a resort with a competitive program. He begged his parents to enroll him in a full-time ski academy in Colorado, but between Jason’s job as a pastry chef and Valerie’s work at a photo shop, they simply didn’t have the thousands of dollars it would cost.
“He always sort of felt like he was playing catch-up,” Valerie said.
He still became a fixture in the local scene, mostly for his jumps in the backcountry. “He loved backflipping everything,” said Bob Holme, a former Olympic ski jumper who is now the director of mountain maintenance at Winter Park and became accustomed to hearing legends about Dallas’s stunts at the resort.
Dallas @b00nie_rat loved to make mash-ups of his tricks and post the videos on Instagram. There he was, all 5'5" and 140 pounds of him, trying to jump off a 60' cliff, only to wipe out and rise to his feet to try again. There he was in his signature orange ski hat, double-backflipping from a ramp he made over a trail in the backcountry. There he was, several weeks after dislocating his hip, hopping off an elevated staircase meant for tourists. Valerie and Jason sometimes wondered whether their son was living in another universe.
His friends and family were proud of him; his 18-year-old brother, Dusty, was known for interrupting high school classes to show his science teacher the newest clips of his brother’s tricks.
Dallas had helped Dusty develop as a skier, and Dallas searched for more meaning in coaching. “Why do you want to coach?” his supervisor, Kayla Riker, asked him when he interviewed to be an instructor in 2023. “I want to give back because of all of the awesome coaches that I had,” he replied.
He also wanted to get paid to ski. Riker put him through a battery of big mountain tests; he did most of them backward. “Incredible,” she thought about her newest hire’s skills on the mountain, and by the time he took over a team of a dozen teenagers, most watched his Instagram videos on the first day and were comforted by the fact that he wouldn’t ask them to do something he wasn’t willing to do. They could very well be challenging Dallas in a few years in competition. But he still taught them everything he knew.
“His thing was just like: ‘Do it. Do it scared,’” said Connor Clemens, a 16-year-old coached by Dallas. Clemens was freaked out to try a backflip on a jump they had built; he had the skill but had watched his friend get hurt on it previously. “He was like: ‘Dude, you’ve put in all the work to do it. You just have to trust yourself that you can. Even if you’re scared, just push through.’” Clemens stomped his first backflip a few minutes later. “I knew I was progressing, but I finally felt like I had something to show for it,” he said.
Dallas was living the life he had envisioned. “I’d rather be waist deep in snow than waist deep in a desk,” he once wrote to a company he hoped would sponsor him.
He was in love, too. He would chase storms all over the West to ski with his girlfriend, Sophia Morris, and they would never run out of things to talk about in his black Toyota Tacoma. He told her he thought he was born in the wrong generation and joked that he didn’t think he was going to live a long life. They would sing old songs together and agreed that one day they would live on a secluded farm.
But his foremost dream was to become someone in the ski industry, and despite all his talent, he was struggling to make a name for himself.
“He wanted to stand out,” Valerie said, “and he felt like he wasn’t standing out.”
He wanted to become a mainstay on the Freeride World Tour, a prestigious circuit that showcases elite skiers and snowboarders who are judged on skill, creativity and precision on backcountry terrain. But the tour was becoming more and more difficult to gain entry to. It cost him thousands of dollars and days of travel just to get to qualifiers. He felt guilty asking his parents for help. His skis were falling apart. He struggled to accumulate points in four qualifiers and was ranked 204th. But he kept pushing.
In one of his final competitions, at Grand Targhee in Wyoming, he fell during a run as Sophia watched from the sideline. They left early before the competition held an award ceremony in which the skiers voted to recognize the athlete who most exemplified the free ride spirit that weekend. They chose Dallas, cheering for him even though he wasn’t there.
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. He thought: What if I could jump that gap? Dallas knew of the GoPro contest and talked about gaining more followers on social media. He wanted to do something memorable.
Clearing 40 feet of asphalt on a highway? That would qualify. He texted a friend about the idea. “How else am I ever going to make a name for myself in the ski industry?” he wrote.
The GoPro Line of the Winter contest paid upward of $10,000 to the best clip submitted each month from January through April; he could win another $20,000 if the judges voted his clip the best for the entire year. Not only that, it would be shared on the company’s social channels, which meant millions of viewers could see his jump. And he was convinced that it could lead to other sponsorships. There had been a great tradition of road gap jumps in the Colorado ski scene for years, captured in vintage photographs and contemporary ski films.
“They’re so visually ‘Wow,’ because the consequence is obvious,” Holme said. “There’s always this allure to jumping over things that should not be jumped over. A road gap has always just been undeniable.”
Within a few weeks, Dallas returned with a saw to cut down tree branches and a shovel to move ice and snow. He began to build his jump. He planned to do it in late March, but he fell ill and postponed it. It was getting late in the season.
“Might have to push it back till next season unless we get some miracle April dump. If we get a solid 12 [inches] I’d send it. Just not something I wanna f--- up,” he texted a group of friends April 1.
“It’s your jump bro,” a friend replied. “Do what feels right, there’s no rush.”
On the morning of April 9, Dallas was ready, even though Berthoud Pass had received only about seven inches of snow the previous week. His plan was to perform a double backflip above the pavement while three friends filmed.
The ramp jutted out over a bluff, so all he could see was past Berthoud Pass for miles. On the other side of the highway, Dallas and his friends had removed ice blocks for a landing, which was less than 100 feet from a row of timbers.
He picked up his friend Eli Abendroth, and together they rumbled up the mountain toward the jump. Eli was a budding videographer living a couple hours away in Grand Junction; Dallas had wanted him to have a breakthrough in his profession, too, and believed this clip would help.
They had planned for months, and now they studied the conditions: 50s and sunny. They talked positions. Eli would film from the ground and with a drone overhead.
Another friend, Ziggy Avjean, would film from the top of the jump. A third friend would be taking photos from farther down the road.
Eli had never seen Dallas scared of a stunt. “Balls of steel,” Eli always thought of Dallas’s mindset. But he could tell some anxiety was setting in. Dallas was nervous, even if he tried to brush it off.
“Everybody thinks I’m going to get hurt,” Dallas said to Eli. “I’m going to be fine.”
Dallas hiked to the top of the jump. He tucked his curly brown hair under a red cap and put a gray nylon mask over his blond mustache. He wore a thin beige jacket and a pair of green camo pants. He strapped on a helmet and a back brace. He checked his chest-mounted GoPro camera.
Originally, the path was to begin above a cliff. He practiced coming off those rocks and into the runway of the jump, but his ski kept popping off as he landed. Eli told him to make sure it was fixed before he tried the jump.
“If your ski is malfunctioning, this might not be the best thing to do,” Ziggy chimed in as Dallas tried to fix the bindings.
There was no changing his mind. He decided to start the run underneath the bluffs. He had about 150 feet of runway to the jump. He stood at the top of the slope for a few minutes by himself. He texted Valerie and FaceTimed with Sophia. His girlfriend did not want him to do this stunt in the weeks leading up, and the couple had resorted to not bringing the subject up when they were together. But she also wanted to support him that day. “You got this. I love you,” she told him on the call.
Dallas was ready. Ziggy knew Dallas wanted a car in the shot as he went airborne, so they waited for one to become visible on the road. After a few minutes, a vehicle approached. All members of the team had radios to coordinate their moves. Finally they heard Dallas’s voice over the feed.
“Three, two, one,” he slowly counted into the radio. Eli and Ziggy hit record on their cameras. The drone buzzed overhead. Then Dallas dropped in.
The conditions were icy. He picked up speed. Within seconds, he made three turns and barreled toward the lip.
But just before he went airborne, the left ski popped off again. He lost speed as he launched into his planned double backflip with the right ski attached. The other ski fell down to the road.
Through their camera lenses, Eli and Ziggy could see Dallas suspended in the air without enough trajectory to make it to the other side. After he completed the first backflip, he aborted the second and appeared to open up his stance to brace for the fall.
He dropped from the sky. “Whoa!” he yelled as he hit the asphalt. He skidded across the road, and his back slammed into the guardrail. The sound cracked through the valley.
“Dallas!” Ziggy screamed from atop the jump. He stopped recording and called 911 as he raced down the mountain.
When Eli and Ziggy arrived, Dallas was lifeless. His goggles were above his eyes. He had shattered both of his femurs. His ribs were broken, his liver and right kidney lacerated. His skull was fractured in multiple places. Blood poured from his mouth and ears.
The first car to approach was driven by an off-duty EMT, who pulled over and showed the men how to do CPR. They took turns doing chest compressions.
“We’re here, Dallas!” Ziggy cried.
Eventually the police arrived and then the coroner, who told the men to wait by the tailgate of a nearby ambulance.
A few minutes later, paramedics told Eli and Ziggy that their friend was dead. He suffered blunt force trauma and was killed instantly on the fall.
After the ambulance hauled him away, the road fell silent. The sun began to set. A raven perched on the guardrail above the spot where Dallas landed. His blood was still on the pavement. Ziggy gathered the photo equipment and called Valerie.
“I’m so sorry,” he told her. “He’s gone.”
Valerie and Jason stayed up into the night holding one another. They sobbed and wrestled with questions they couldn’t answer.
Should they have stolen his truck keys to stop him from going that morning?
Were they, after years of watching their son do dangerous things, too easy to convince he could pull this off?
And mostly, did they do enough to make him understand the potential consequences?
They agreed that most people Dallas’s age believed they were invincible. But they also wondered whether constant social media feeds of successful jumps and tricks had deluded their son into a false sense of security.
People rarely saw the calculated nuances of the sport on Instagram and easily could take its risks for granted.
They asked each other whether they should sell their condo in Winter Park and give up skiing altogether. For days, they took turns sleeping in Dallas’s bed. His room remained untouched from the day he left it. His skateboard was stashed in the corner. A couple of Zyn cans and PlayStation controllers were on the nightstands. The log walls were still plastered with autographed posters of skiers gliding off jumps, and a layer of dust coated his ski trophies.
“I go to sleep to forget just to wake up to remember,” Jason often told his wife before heading out the door, and every morning he would have to pull himself together in his truck before starting his shift as a chef at a nearby resort.
“I wish I was more of a father figure than his friend and had a bigger, larger talk of the scope of severity of death and consequence,” Jason said.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. He’s my firstborn child. He’s the one that taught me how to love outside of his mother. He taught me how to be a father. I believe he probably would have done something else. Or if he had made that jump, what would have been the next thing, you know?”
Jason refused to look at any photos of his son’s final days skiing, but Valerie wanted to absorb it all. She found texts to his friends the week before the jump. One of his friends suggested Dallas get a slope angle reader for the landing to measure the length, height and speed so he could calculate whether it was clearable. Dallas responded with a thumbs-up on the text, though Valerie doesn’t believe he performed the measurements.
She replayed the conversations with Dallas about the jump in her head. She had pleaded with him to do a two-lane jump at a nearby mountain, but he explained that it had already been done. She reminded him there was a guardrail on the highway and said it was too high to clear, but he convinced her he would have more than enough speed. She told him he could be seriously hurt — but even she couldn’t have imagined that he would crash onto the road.
She always wanted him to make his own decisions. She told herself he was 21, an adult now; Valerie had spent a lifetime yelling at him to get off high ledges or not to try jumps when he was kid. She and Jason never pressured him to be a big shot in the ski world. He was a creative like them. He could fix anything with his hands, a talented welder and woodworker. He was an artist. They talked about enrolling him in business classes. He could have done anything.
But he wanted nothing more in his life than to nail that jump. They could see his eyes light up when he talked about it. Over the years, his stunts were growing bolder — and he somehow would pull them off. They wanted to be supportive, and after months of arguing, they opted to trust him and let go.
“I was just trying to believe in him,” Valerie said. “And he had convinced me that it was going to be okay.”
The community rallied around the family after Dallas died. Thousands were donated for funeral expenses, and Valerie and Jason used the leftover cash to collaborate with the family of Finn Mahoney, a young skier who died in a car crash in 2023, to start a class that would teach younger athletes about backcountry safety. Holme took the lead on developing the curriculum. He called it Dallas’s Class.
Holme knew the pressure facing Dallas; three decades earlier, he had felt the same burden while trying to qualify for the 1992 Winter Olympics as a ski jumper.
“Once I took it with me, that’s where when I thought about Dallas and what he didn’t know he didn’t know on that day would have been really helpful and could have changed the outcome,” Holme said. “There was such a period in time when people didn’t think of me in one way, and then suddenly I made the Olympics and people thought all of the time I had put in was suddenly worth it.
“Fast-forward to Dallas, to our time right now, and all of that is magnified, where you’re immediately recognized on social media for something good you do,” Holme continued. “It becomes: ‘How can I let people know how good I am?’ These days, it’s harder to break through the clutter, to prove that.”
And so when Dallas’s Class opened Dec. 7 in a lodge at Winter Park, the message was clear to dozens of young athletes: No social media clip was worth their life. Holme didn’t want the class to feel preachy. But he told the kids that they were going into the backcountry uninformed. He posed hard questions: Did they know how and where to build a jump? Did they know where to position their photographers and how to communicate with a crew? Did they know what variables to weigh when deciding whether to go for it?
Some of the teenagers were still struggling with the trauma of the loss. Some were having a hard time finding the confidence to ski again. Most of them showed up for the class anyway, along with Riker, who had hired Dallas less than a year earlier.
“If you’re in this [sport] long enough, you’re going to have people that are close to you die, which is really sad reality. But I think for someone so young, so full of life, someone who seemed like he could pull anything off, for this to happen, I think for a lot of my athletes I think it kind of broke that bubble,” Riker said. “It was a moment of reckoning for them, where it was like, ‘Okay, this is the ultimate risk, and he took it.’
“They ski for him now,” she said.
Dallas had planned to relocate to Montana with Sophia this year. After his funeral, Sophia moved there without him. There were too many memories of him in Colorado to stay. She largely lost her joy for skiing because her partner was no longer by her side, but she decided to apply for the job he wanted in Big Sky. She found herself teaching kids lessons that Dallas had imparted to her on the mountain.
“It’s nice to do something that I feel like he would enjoy,” she said.
Valerie and Jason visited her after she moved, and they all went skiing. Some of Dallas’s buddies joined, and Valerie yelled at one of his friends for jumping off a cliff without a helmet.
Back at their log cabin home, the reminders were still everywhere. They hung portraits of Dallas jumping on his skis near a wooden urn holding his ashes. Outside the living room window was the halfpipe Dallas built as a teen; for three days last October, friends passed through to skateboard and celebrate his birthday.
Valerie still calls his phone every once in a while, to hear his voice. Hi, it’s Dallas, can’t get to the phone right now, probably skiing.
She left his line open on her phone plan so his friends could still text him.
“Yo really miss you, team just isn’t the same this year,” texted one of the skiers he coached.
They kept all of the photos that Dallas took that day. The last images he snapped were of the jump. Valerie and Jason wanted to be close to their son, so they visited the jump a few months after his death.
They planned to camp and sleep there for the night, but the slope was so rocky and steep that it wasn’t possible to set up a tent. They were forced to scale on their hands and knees to the top of the ridge, joking that they would need a search and rescue team to pull them out. Jason left flowers and stapled Dallas’s orange ski hat to the bark of a pine tree. He cried with his wife, and they screamed their son’s name at the top of their lungs.
Valerie looked out across the mountains. For a moment, she didn’t have to think about all the times she asked her son not to do this. The snow had melted. She could no longer see the jump at her feet, but she could choose how she imagined it. She told her husband that she could see Dallas launching off the ramp, flying above the road and, maybe in another universe, landing on the other side.
