Through the windows of the Huntsman Cancer Institute, Mali Noyes looks out past cars with license plates tagged with the motto “Ski Utah” and “Life Elevated,” toward the towering Wasatch Range. An oncology nurse and Salomon-sponsored skier, Noyes just skied all 93 lines in the Chuting Gallery in less than 2 months. “Life Elevated” isn’t just a slogan. It’s the story she wrote across the Wasatch, line by line. She “Skied Utah” and did it faster than anyone else in history.
Mali Noyes raised the bar.
No Asterisks
The Chuting Gallery, published by Andrew McLean in 1998, is a definitive catalog of the steepest, most technical lines of Utah’s Wasatch mountain range. It took McLean five years to complete the project before putting it to paper. In 2023, Mark Hammond set the previous Fastest Known Time (FKT), skiing all lines in five months. In Hammond’s record-setting season, Utah received a historic 900 inches of snow, extending ski dreams into June. The record-setting season sparked Noyes’ interest in this project, which she titled Rapid Fire. But this past season, the one Noyes tackled, brought different challenges: poor snowpack, lower snow totals, leaner lines, and tighter windows. Her record was born out of a unique combination of speed, skill, and strategy, down to a color-coded spreadsheet that helped visualize and plan each descent. She finished the project in just 47 days.
When asked how it felt to “raise the bar,” Noyes reflected with the competitive edge of an elite athlete. “I can read the headlines, but I’m critical of myself, looking at how I can improve. I’m like, I know I could’ve done this better,” she said. It’s a commitment to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in skiing and endurance sports. She also paused to recognize those who inspired her, highlighting friend Christina Lustenberger, an influential figure in the ski community, and the late Hilaree Nelson, a pioneer of first descents who left a lasting impact on women in the mountains. Finally, Noyes let the feeling sink in.
“There’s no asterisk of fastest female. It’s just the fastest. That part I’m really proud of.”
Good Partners = Good Skiing
“You can have the best ski conditions, but shitty partners and it’s a bad day. Then you can have the worst ski conditions, but the best ski partners, and it’s like the most fun day.” For a project as demanding as this one, Noyes needed great partners. The lines in The Chuting Gallery are objectives. She didn’t get to pick the conditions. She often found herself skiing through crust, wind slabs, and terrain barely filled in. One of her most significant partners was legendary freerider Sam Smoothy. Among the gallery’s most iconic descents is Ciochetti’s Ribbon. A barely-there traverse etched into a massive cliff face, high above Little Cottonwood Canyon. It’s a narrow band of snow clinging to rock, technically within Alta Ski Area bounds, but rarely touched. The fall exposure is dizzying. The skiing itself? Simple, if you can ignore the drop.
“I was pretty nervous for the Ribbon,” Noyes said. That’s when Smoothy gave her a mantra: “Don’t look left.” “And it was so good,” she said. “Like, it sounds so simple, but as my brain would start to look left and then figuratively look left. You start thinking about falling and dying and what are my parents going to think? Then you’re like, ‘Why am I thinking that?’”
“Just stay in my bubble. He was like, ‘Keep your feet moving, keep your hands moving.’ It was great. We as humans can get so distracted by all this… and really, it’s not that hard to traverse the Ribbon. The exposure is huge. The skiing is easy. It’s just mentally massive.” Smoothy wasn’t her only rock. Greg Hill gave her the nudge to start the project and the crucial advice in spring skiing conditions: “Sometimes the weather models don’t match at all, and you don’t know which one to go with. The key is to just go with the model that has the weather you want.” Fellow Salomon athlete Cody Townsend, the “List King” behind The Fifty Project, also served as a mentor throughout. And then there was Spencer Harkins. Noyes’ boyfriend, a skier in his own right, and the one who supplied the now-iconic Pit Viper heart-shaped glasses. Harkins skied nearly two-thirds of the lines with her and helped document the record-breaking effort.
Off the mountain, her support team kept the engine running. Nutrition, as every endurance athlete knows, is as crucial as gear. When the taste of gels got old and the miles stacked up, Noyes’ best friend stepped in with baked goods and home-cooked meals. Even downtime mattered. The White Lotus series with Smoothy offered mental reprieve. “It was so nice because it distracted my brain from thinking about the project,” she said. “I have a pretty obsessive personality. And Sam had been watching The White Lotus, so we could talk about it and have other things than just the list.”
What’s Your Why?
For Noyes, skiing isn’t just about summits or speed. It’s a well-rounded perspective and purpose. “I love to ski, and I love to ski with my friends,” she said. “Now I have so many memories out there of times where, if I wasn’t doing this project, we wouldn’t have skied as much.” That joy and movement through the mountains are at the core of her life. “Skiing is such an efficient mode of travel. You can just move over the snow and go anywhere. In the summer, you can’t move through that terrain the same way.” But her deeper why goes far beyond efficiency or fun. It comes from a place most skiers don’t know: a hospital oncology ward.
“Basically, all my patients die,” she said plainly. “I mean, we understand cancer. It’s pretty rare that you survive.” She’s learned to compartmentalize, to stay calm in chaotic, high-stakes situations. “I think that works really well in ski mountaineering too…I can stay calm and do what needs to be done, no matter the stress or what’s going on. You can’t let emotions complicate things in the mountains.”
Still, she doesn’t shut herself off entirely. The people she meets—people at the end of their lives—shape her perspective in the peaks. “I had this one patient who stood out so much to me. He had a brain tumor. He used to be a principal and had all these dystopian books on his bedside table. I was like, ‘Why are you reading these?’ And he said, ‘Because they make my life feel better by comparison.’” She pauses. “That stuck with me. Perspective is everything.”
That perspective also shapes how Noyes views her place in skiing. She’s not just trying to be one of the strongest women in the field. Rather, she wants the whole idea of gendered limits to dissolve. “It’s so cool when girls reach out and are like, ‘I saw this video of you, and now I realize girls can do that.’ And I’m like, ‘Of course girls can do that!’”
She’s proud to be a role model, but she’s not done breaking trail. “Someone told me in your 30s, you hone your skills. In your 40s, you mentor. I’m still honing. Still pushing. But I know it won’t last forever.” The Chuting Gallery was a challenge, but also a cage. “My boyfriend and I used to joke that this book was trying to ruin our lives. You just get obsessed with the list. And I’d be cursing Andrew McLean in my head like, ‘Why did you put this in here?!’ But then I’d be like, wait, I did this to myself. I chose this.”
Now, she’s choosing something new. “I’m so ready to not follow a list. I’m going to make my own lines…ski the unknown.” Because in the end, her “why” isn’t just about skiing. It’s about seeing how short life can be and not wasting a second of it.
Watch Rapid Fire
It’s one thing to complete the Chuting Gallery faster than anyone in history. It’s another thing to film it. Over the course of the 47 days, she not only climbed and skied all 93 lines but mic’d up her crew, synced audio, managed multiple GoPros, and made sure batteries stayed charged, even after long days navigating avalanche terrain “I’d hand a GoPro to my friends every morning and say, ‘This is your GoPro now,’” she said. “Some days I didn’t deal with it, I was just moving through it. But I was always thinking: how am I going to tell this story?”
She captured the highs, the breakdowns, and the near misses—like the time she was “smashed by a wet slide over a cliff” and still managed to keep her camera rolling. “I wish I had talked to my GoPro more during those moments,” she said. “But when you’re just trying to survive, you don’t always think about filming.” The result? A full video series, Rapid Fire, is now in the works, dropping this fall on her YouTube channel. The episodes will offer more than jaw-dropping lines. They’ll showcase her decision-making, vulnerability, and the mental fatigue that comes with pushing yourself past your limits.
“I didn’t think I was going to do it. I cried. I bailed. But I learned to work through it, too,” Noyes said.
And just as importantly, her footage serves a purpose for the community: helping other skiers better understand and safely approach the Wasatch’s most iconic lines. “Hopefully it inspires people,” she said. “But also gives people some data on these lines…I’m really going to try to show my decision-making so people can gain insight from that.”
In a season defined by scarcity, Noyes gave us something rare: a record without caveats, a story without shortcuts, and a reminder that when life is truly elevated, no line is left unskied.
