By David Goodman

The wind was roaring near the top of Mt. Mansfield. Micheline "Michy" Lemay leaned into the hill to keep her balance. Her ice-encrusted pony tail poked out from beneath her colorful Skida hat and whipped across her face. Lemay tried to say what she was feeling at that moment but the wind drowned her out. Then she let out a full throated scream.

It was November 24, 2024, and Lemay had just achieved a hard earned goal: she skied, biked, and hiked over one million vertical feet on Vermont's tallest mountain in the span of a year. "Michy's Mansfield Million," as she dubbed her quest, was a Herculean feat. Doing it while recovering from cancer?

That's next-level badass.

I find Lemay where she works and plays, in the Mt. Mansfield Academy clubhouse at the foot of Spruce Peak. She directs the junior alpine program and her husband Igor Vanovac is the executive director. Bright white light pours through the windows from the surrounding ski slopes. Lemay's photos adorn the walls, gorgeous winter landscapes that she shoots with her iPhone during her sunrise ski laps.

She is like a tiger at rest as she sits to talk with me. Her eyes dance and her muscles twitch, as if ready to hit the trail at a moment's notice.

Setting lofty goals and crushing them is what Lemay does. She is in perpetual go-mode. A few years ago, the 46-year old mother of two logged 2,000 miles on single-track mountain bike trails in one season. "I love challenges. They keep me focused. They keep me goal oriented. They keep me going back up every day—and, like, maybe sometimes two times," she tells me.

Lemay's fierce drive is a throughline in her life. She grew up in New Hampshire and ski raced at Gunstock, the local hill. She attended the University of New Hampshire and made the Division 1 ski team by showing up unannounced at their dry land training and outperforming other team members. After college, she ski bummed in Colorado for a few years before moving to Stowe to coach aspiring racers.

Being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021 was an entirely different kind of challenge than she'd ever faced. "I am a competitor by nature, a mover," she says. With cancer, "what I was most upset about was losing my vitality and my grit and my perseverance."

She decided that her best therapy would be to be outside, moving her body. "Everything that makes me feel whole and alive happens in the mountains, in the woods," she says. "I just love it."

Lemay was determined to remain active, forcing herself to mountain bike, hike, and ski through her chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation. The Stowe community embraced her, holding fundraisers and cheering her on, just as she does for the many kids in her ski programs. Local sock company Darn Tough made a pair of ski socks that she helped design, bearing the motto, "I Am Darn Tough." Sales helped pay her medical bills.

Lemay's cancer treatment was successful. But surviving wasn't enough. She set her sights on another challenge.

On January 1, 2024, Lemay got up at 4:30 a.m., taking care not to roust her family, and quietly slid out the door to "skin" up Nosedive. Also called uphill skiing or alpine touring, skinning is when skiers hike up the slope on climbing skins, textured adhesive strips that attach to the bottom of your skis and allow you to ascend without sliding backward.

She told hardly anyone about her grand plan for the year. Each day, she would wake before the sun and skin up Mansfield. She usually went alone, but brought along countless others virtually, through her Instagram posts at @michysmindfulnessmission, where she shared pictures of mountain sunrises and uplifting messages.

"Try to get out & enjoy the sun today… it heals your mind body & soul," she posted in February 2024, alongside a breathtaking photograph of Vermont's highest peak set against a fiery orange dawn.

By the middle of 2024, she publicly revealed her Mansfield Million mission. "Many people have asked me, what are you doing this for?" she posted in September. "The answer is me. To prove to myself that I am healthy and strong. To feel alive. To inspire. To share mindful moments. To wake up every day for ONE WHOLE YEAR with a goal in mind." She also raised money for the Lamoille County Cancer Network and developed a large and loyal following online.

Past challenges prepared Lemay for new ones. She has had five knee surgeries in the last 25 years and dislocated her shoulder 18 times. "Life has been a roller coaster," Vanovac tells me. "She had lots of setbacks. Instead of giving up, she saw them as an opportunity. She wanted to show her family and friends that if you look forward and don't look back, somewhere down the road it will get better."

As they cheered Lemay onward and upward, Vanovac reflects, "Our community truly learned what strength and resilience looks like."

For Lemay, mindfulness is central to everything she does. She discovered meditation in one of her many periods of recovery from injury. "I started meditating five minutes a day, six minutes, then 20 minutes. Sitting still, as you can see," she says, rocking up in her chair, "is not an easy task."

The impact has been profound. "Mindfulness taught me about introspection and understanding that I'm the one that ultimately has the power to get through these things," she says. "I'm in charge of how I manage my emotions." Mindfulness isn't just a personal practice for Lemay—it's something she actively passes on. As a coach, she regularly leads young ski racers through breathing and meditation exercises, and many have told her that this has helped them far beyond the slopes.

While Lemay was making progress toward her goal, she periodically shared the skin track with Noah Dines, another Stowe local who spent 2024 setting a world record by skiing over three million human-powered vertical feet in a year. "She is an incredible figure in our community and has been such an inspiration to so many," Dines tells me. "With her Mansfield Million venture, she further highlighted how much can be done in our corner of the mountains."

Lemay fit in her alpine activities around a busy schedule of being a mom and ski coach, plus running a summer camp that she co-owns, Rugged Adventures. She confesses that it wasn't all rosy. "Some of the hardest days [on the mountain] were when it was absolutely pouring rain, and you're like, ‘I don't want to do this.‘"

But whenever she was tempted to throw in the towel, she would remind herself that being outside was her self-care. "So many of us forget to take time for ourselves. But the 45 minutes it takes to skin up the mountain is going to make the rest of your day better: you'll be a better employee, a better mom, a better wife," she says. "You're going to be a better everything because you went outside, moved your body, and connected with nature."

A highlight for Lemay came in October, when she led a group hike of women up the Haselton Trail, her favorite hiking route, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Scores of women dressed in pink showed up to join her. The night before, friends had lined the climb with pink hearts. That's when she realized how many people were touched by her journey.

At the top of the mountain, "I just started bawling my eyes out," Lemay says, her eyes watering as she recounts the story. "I could not believe how nice that was. It was so beautiful." She continues to spread the beauty of her year-long odyssey through the photos she took along the way. Her images now hang in the Octagon and other locations around town and the resort, and at michylemay.com.

For Lemay, photography became an extension of her mindfulness mission—a way to share the sense of wonder she finds in nature. The pictures capture what she refers to as the pinnacle of her journey: the experience of awe. "When you're sitting on top of a mountain and the sun comes up, that's about as pinnacle as it gets," she says. "It's a magical moment."