Three times in Angel Collinson’s life she felt like the universe was sending her a message she had to listen to. The first time was when she was 13 years old and she was watching pro skier Sage Cattabriga-Alosa ride a steep Alaskan spine in a ski movie. “I felt deeply, with every fiber of my being, like I was going to do that someday,” Collinson said. “I felt a calling to ski that kind of terrain.”
It took another decade or so, but by her early twenties, Collinson did ski that kind of terrain. Widely considered one of the top professional big-mountain skiers in the world, Collinson has earned high rankings on the Freeskiing World Tour and Freeride World Tour, and she's twice won Best Female Performance at the Powder Awards for her segments in films from Teton Gravity Research, the same movie company Cattabriga-Alosa films with.
The second time in her life she felt a deep calling was when she met someone who lived with an Indigenous tribe in the high Andes of Peru. “I knew I wanted to go and do that at some point in my life,” she said. She hasn’t made that happen yet, but it’s on her list.
And the third? She was on a friend’s sailboat off the coast of British Columbia a few years ago and the feeling came like a flash: “I knew I would spend a chunk of my life on a boat,” she said. “It felt like second nature to me, even though I’d barely ever been on a boat before. I just needed to learn how to sail first.”