Gear Sports

MINNETONKA, MN — Jamie Pierre is well known to skiers around the world for his extreme skiing. He even calls himself a professional ski bum.

But what this Minnetonka man has done has stunned skiers around the world.

Pierre, 33, learned to ski at Highland Hills, Buck Hill, and a half dozen other Minnesota ski areas.

In 1991 he turned pro and started looking for the perfect place to ski into the record books. This past January he found it.

Grand Targhee in Wyoming has a 255 foot drop. That’s the equivalent to a 25 story building, or to put it another way, it’s a little over half the height of the Foshay Tower.

Pierre said it was simply a matter of the right place at the right time, “The wind stopped, the sun came out, I knew it was go time. I never, ever looked off the edge of the cliff. I’ve never really done that before but I knew if I looked off the edge of the cliff I wouldn’t have gone off. It was like looking off the edge of the world.”

He said once he hit the snow, he was like, “Ahh, this is over.. I’m never doing that again.”

Pierre now has that cliff named after him, Pierre’s point.