SILVERTON – When the pandemic shut down the world in 2020, Griff Pinto was 8 and made a big decision: It was time to go all-in on skiing.
Five years later, the 13-year-old from Silverton is a backcountry skiing phenom, climbing more than 500,000 vertical feet a winter and skiing long lines off remote peaks that challenge skiers many times his age. Under the careful eye of his dad, Cliff, and mom, Kim, he’s become a social media superstar with helmet-cam videos of his audacious descents.
Griff’s dad, a longtime volunteer with the San Juan County’s intrepid Silverton Medical Rescue Team, said “it’s taken a village” to hone Griff’s skills and avalanche awareness.
“There are not a lot of people who are willing to go into the backcountry with a 7-year-old, or even a 13-year-old,” Cliff says. “It’s pretty unique the number of people in this community who have worked with Griff and mentored him and supported our sort of unorthodox parenting. And they’ve mentored me and my wife, too. That support system has really enabled us to take this, like, different path, you know.”
Griff was 9 when he sat his mom and dad down and said he wanted to be homeschooled in the winter, so he could ski more. His folks came up with a program that blends physical training with schoolwork. They’ve made skiing a formal education.
Griff gets up at 6 a.m. and does 45 minutes of exercises with weights and balancing. A friend put together an exercise program to develop core strength.
“It definitely helps. I can definitely push a lot harder than I could two years ago. I can go a lot faster without taking breaks,” Griff says. “My best time up Irene’s is an hour and three minutes.”
Irene’s is a 2,200 vertical-foot climb of a popular, well-trafficked avalanche path just outside town. (For comparison, Griff’s one-hour ascent of Irene’s is about twice the pace of most backcountry skinners. So, he spends a good amount of time waiting on peaks as adults stomp up his skintrack.)
In January, Griff and his dad climbed three peaks – Anvil, Battleship and Bear mountains – totaling more than 8,300 vertical feet of climbing and three descents in less than nine hours.
Not every day is like that, of course. Some days the Pintos climb and ski small pillow lines in the trees. Other days they do long-haul traverses along timbered ridgelines and skip descents through avalanche terrain. Other times, when conditions are good and avalanche risk is manageable, they climb and ski off peaks. And some days, they just tromp through the woods, making their own trail in the hills above their town.
“We do this one that, there’s like three people in town who actually enjoy it,” Griff says.
“There’s a running joke in town where people tell us, ‘Call me when you aren’t going to go do one of those things,’” Cliff says. “But those things help us. Get enough of that type of work in and we can go stack 8,000 to 10,000 feet on a powder day. That’s what we want to instill in Griff. There’s a lot of work to do to be great.”
“It’s pretty inspiring to see a kid more physically fit than most of the adults who are into it,” said John Shocklee, a legendary ski and river guide who has worked at Silverton Mountain since 2002.
Shocklee gets out often with Griff and Cliff and serves as a sort of backcountry mentor for both the skiers.
When Griff was 8 he was climbing as much as 4,000 feet a day. Today he’s climbing as much as 10,000 feet a day and more than 500,000 vertical feet a season.
“He’s got so much mileage out there,” Shocklee says. “He’s definitely learning in an accelerated manner. But he’s still a kid, you know. He really loves his Legos.”
Shocklee said some skiers and locals in Silverton worry about Griff. He charges some aggressive lines and Shocklee said he always makes sure someone is on the slope behind Griff in case he needs help on a descent.
“They keep it pretty safe,” Shocklee says. “They definitely push it in the perspective of a lot of people around here, but I’ve spent a huge amount of time out there with them and they are pretty levelheaded.”
Cliff said there are people who politely pass on ski days with Griff as well. The San Juan snowpack is notoriously avalanche prone – this winter there have been two avalanche deaths just outside Silverton – and Griff is out there six days a week.
“That is something as a parent I battle with daily,” Cliff says.
Griff said he listens closely to his backcountry partners, most of them much older than he is. He discusses terrain challenges and avalanche hazards on the skin track. He also prods older skiers for tips to improve his skiing. He skis often with renowned ski photographer Sven Brunso. (He had a quick part in Brunso’s short biographical documentary “Sven – Life in Front of the Lens” – last year.)
“A lot of the best advice I’ve gotten is like how to improve my pole plants and other small things to help me get a little bit more forward,” Griff says. “And of course how to land jumps better.”
Griff gets invited to avalanche clinics at the famed Silverton Avalanche School. He’s accompanied the school’s snow scientists on forecasting trips. The Silverton Avalanche School offers a “Micro Groms” two-day avalanche education course for kids ages 9-11. In the spring, as the snowpack settles down, Griff will go out and choose lines to ski and climb them while his dad watches from below.
“We have started giving him more little freedoms like that, just getting him out there and experiencing the decision-making process,” Cliff says. “That’s what we are starting to do but it’s because of what we have built on over several years.”
Cliff hopes that nudging Griff toward good decisions at age 13 will empower him in his 20s with the tools he needs to understand the consequences of a wrong call in unforgiving terrain.
“We talk about decision-making and voicing opinions, don’t we?” Cliff says.
But a 13-year-old’s brain is not as developed as a grown-up’s brain. So Cliff and other mentors work to keep Griff tuned in.
“We’ve got crampons and ice axes and we are in no-fall zone terrain and he’s talking about Legos. And we’ll be like, ‘Dude, shut up and focus,’” Cliff says. “Sometimes he’s too comfortable, you know. And I wonder if that’s a good thing. There are a lot of those kinds of grounding moments.”
Griff says his backcountry adventures can often influence his regular life as a kid in a small town.
“I think I have a pretty good awareness of what’s happening around me,” he says.
“What’s the word your dad always uses?” Cliff says. His son looks at him for a second and squints his eyes. Then he smiles when he remembers.
“Be present,” Griff says.
Cliff and his wife, Kim, were hauling Griff on long bike rides when he was a toddler. Sometimes they would bring the Strider bike – a pedal-less balance bike for aspiring cyclists who just learned to walk – and Griff would fly downhill, revealing what would become a defining characteristic of his youth.
Cliff runs his Pedal the Peaks Silverton Bicycle Shop out of the garage behind their home and in the summer the duo pedal as much as they ski in the winter. Griff is not as much of a boss on the uphill on bikes, pedaling a machine that weighs half as much as him. But he crushes on the downhill.
“They are both more proficient mountain bikers than they are skiers,” Shocklee says.
Shocklee has talked to Griff and Cliff about burnout.
“It’s insane how much he’s out there. Even if it was your full-time gig every single day, you might get a little tired of it,” he says. “But Griff is motivated. He really wants to be out there doing this stuff.”
Even at a young age, Griff was project-oriented. He hammers out his homeschool assignments in bursts to sustain his days outside. He likes to dream up stuff to build with Legos when he’s on those long climbs. He and his younger brother, Talon, often spend hours assembling Lego structures of their own design.
Cliff says he’s watching closely for any sign that he’s pushing too hard. Still, he’s definitely pushing his son.
“He and my wife call me ‘Svetlan’ when I act like a Russian trainer,” Cliff says, laughing. “We obviously are kind of intense in what we do and we are pretty regimented and people have asked us about burnout. I don’t think you can do anything at the frequency we do and add a workout routine and totally avoid burnout. We are having fun, of course, but we are putting in a lot of work.”
When it comes to future plans, Griff talks about traveling the world as a professional skier. Maybe he can star in ski movies. He hopes to someday draw the attention of Matchstick Productions, a Crested Butte ski moviemaker renowned for highlighting young up-and-coming skiers.
That’s already happened. Murray Wais, the co-founder of Matchstick Productions, has been watching Griffin for several years. Wais and his business partner, Steve Winter, were among the first to profile up-and-coming superstars like C.R. Johnson and Tanner Hall in the late 1990s.
But those guys were older than Griff in their ski-flick debuts. And they weren’t climbing mountains.
“At MSP we always feature some young kid every couple years but Griff does seem to be a bit of an anomaly,” says Wais, who expects to film Griff at some point. “I have not heard of a kid his age skiing so much vert. I don’t think anybody has. He’s an inspiring kid and just a shredder.”
Griff, at 60 pounds, is only now ready to graduate from high-end kids’ skis and boots into adult gear. But it’s hard to find quality technical outerwear for kids, so Griff either has to choose between lower quality children’s gear or more technical gear sized extra-small for women.
Even though he’s a bit of a sensation on Instagram, Griff does not have a phone. His folks handle his social media posts and screen online messages.
“We’re in this weird thing where it’s like he needs to be part of social media to build this brand and have it grow around him, but at the same time, we see how bad it can be for kids on social media in today’s world,” Cliff says. “We want him to be a part of that world … but that’s kind of a thing we are wrestling with right now.”
Griff isn’t really wrestling though.
“I feel like having a phone is a waste of time,” he says.
