SHE WAS ALWAYS the person who brought everyone else together -- the magnet, friends called her -- so they traveled from across the world to see Sarah Burke one final time. High school classmates came from the East Coast, and family members flew in from Canada. Professional athletes traveled from Norway, Sweden and Japan. They arrived en masse at a hospital in Park City, Utah, spilling from Burke'sroom into the general waiting area and the hallways until, finally, doctors found a conference room big enough to accommodate them.

For nine terrible days in January, they sat there, waited and prayed. They rehashed questions that made no sense.

How could they remain hopeful when the most optimistic among them was lying unresponsive in the other room?



How had skiing's most daring athlete suffered a brain hemorrhage while practicing an utterly routine trick?

Why now, just months after she had engineered her sport's inclusion in the 2014 Winter Olympics and had become, at long last, a gold medal favorite?

Sarah Burke had visions of the podium in women's ski halfpipe and slopestyle at the 2014 Olympics. Cole Barash/Roxy

Mostly, they spent the long hours in the conference room trying to reconcile the Sarah Burke on life support with the one they had known for 29 years, the one who had lived in perpetual motion and supported everyone else. This was a woman who had visited the troops in Iraq, hit a 75-foot ski jump in the Canadian backcountry, posed for a magazine cover and designed a jacket for a sponsor in Europe -- all during the course of one typical month. This was the first woman to land a 720, a 900 and a 1080 in competition. This was a skier who had won four gold medals at the X Games; a friend who dropped everything to make a Jay-Z concert in London; a businesswoman who signed deals with nearly a dozen companies; and a prankster who launched a website, Scarah.com, to post videos of herself jumping out from behind doors to surprise other skiers.

At Burke's memorial, one candle was used to light hundreds more, including one held by her mother, Jan Phelan. Hubert Kang

"She did everything to the fullest all the time," says her husband, Rory Bushfield. "The joke was always that there had to be, like, four or five Sarahs."

And now there was this one, in the hospital. Hemorrhaging prevented oxygen and blood from reaching her brain, resulting in a coma. Doctors tried emergency surgery to no avail. Tests showed that her heart was still beating, but her brain was damaged beyond repair. She was gone.

As Burke's family members prepared to say their final goodbyes, the hospital staff came with more bad news. Burke was a Canadian citizen who had been skiing in the U.S. without health insurance because her national ski team policy covered her only during competitions and some practices. Her hospital bills would total hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nobody in her family could afford to pay them. Her agent, Michael Spencer, retreated to the conference room in grief and decided to take up a collection. Spencer also wanted to raise money to start a foundation on her behalf. He joined GiveForward.com and designed a page for Burke on which anyone with an Internet connection could donate money and post a tribute. "Sarah did so much for females and winter sports during her time with us," Spencer wrote at the top of the page. "Now we are asking for your help."

Burke, who wanted her organs to be donated, had always been a giver herself. She had started at least one tradition that had spread among her friends. At the end of the night, she liked to ask a bartender to change a few $20 bills into quarters and dimes. Then she would walk home tossing the change along her path, building a trail of coins that stretched for a mile or more. She believed that joy and generosity could be contagious. "Think of how happy it will make people to find these in the morning!" she sometimes said.

Maybe now some of those coins would circle back, Spencer thought. On Jan. 19, a few hours before Burke died, he hit a button on his laptop to make the fundraising site public. He hoped that a few hundred people would post tributes. He wanted to raise $15,000.

"I had no idea what could happen or who might see it," he says, because nothing in his life had prepared him for what would come next.

"Thank you for the oohs and ahhs."

Carolyn, $50

"May we all have the courage

to stare fear in the face."

Anonymous, $75

SHE STARTED SKIING just after she turned 5, the daughter of two artists in Midland, Ontario, who saved their money for weekend lift tickets. She became a good moguls skier, but she preferred to careen through the woods and build jumps. Freestyle skiing was just beginning to take off in terrain parks and halfpipes around the world, and Burke wanted to try it. Midway through high school, she signed up for a big air competition at the Canadian Nationals.

She arrived in Quebec City, 10 hours from her home, only to find out that no other junior girls had signed up to compete. There were also no registered women and no junior boys. Officials encouraged her to drive back to Midland, but instead, Burke decided to compete against 23 men -- most of them already professionals, some at least twice her age, and a few couldn't help but chuckle at the teenage girl with a toothy smile, blond pigtails and old lift tickets stuck to the zippers of her bulky jacket.

Burke and her husband Rory Bushfield were constant thrill-seekers. Hubert Kang

She finished fourth.

For the next several years, Burke divided her time between building her skills and building up the competition. She graduated from high school and moved into a group house in Mammoth, Calif., where she kept the water bill affordable by showering only a few times each week, saving her money to travel to freestyle competitions around the world. Other women were stronger or more athletic, but nobody else had her body control and sense of ease in the air. "Most people get scared up there, but she was totally at peace," says her coach, Trennon Paynter.

Burke won most events she entered. Her audacity in the backcountry made her a cult star in ski movies; her flirtatious smile and beach-blond hair led FHM to name her to its list of the 100 sexiest women. She signed contracts with Salomon, Smith, Roxy, Monster and Helly Hansen, and soon the water bill didn't seem to matter.

Meanwhile, as she emerged as one of skiing's few mainstream stars, she scoured ski chat rooms on the Internet and randomly messaged any girl who seemed interested in freestyle, knowing the sport's credibility depended on having a deep and talented field. She launched a series of weekend halfpipe clinics for women and became a counselor at an elite freestyle summer camp, sharing her tricks in the offseason with women who tried to beat her in the winter. "She could have been scared or resentful about losing her place at the top, but instead, she taught us everything she could," says Roz Groenewoud, a student at those camps and the reigning gold medalist in the X Games. "She was carrying women's skiing on her shoulders."

Burke helped start a movement to force the Dew Tour to include women's skiing, and she begged her sponsors to kick in for equal prize money when one contest paid $20,000 to men's winners and $2,000 to women's. She traveled to the X Games four times to perform an exhibition while the men warmed up, because the event didn't yet offer a competition for women. "It was a constant frustration, and sometimes you could see the tears fog up her goggles," says Jessica Vander Kooij, a close friend from Midland. "But then she'd take off the goggles and be smiling, like, 'Okay. I'm fine.'"

She was always fine -- that was her brand of toughness. Mangled thumb? Fine. She'd have surgery and make it back to the hill three hours later, even if she was still vomiting from the anesthesia. Dislocated shoulder? Fine. Broken hands, busted ribs, torn-up knees, knocked unconscious? Fine. All fine. Broken back? Fine -- and, just to prove it, why not throw up a casual peace sign to the crowd at the 2009 X Games as paramedics carted her down the mountain?

Once, while filming a ski movie in the Canadian backcountry, Burke's friend Mike Douglas suggested building a different jump for women. The jump for the men was a monster, a skyscraper of snow built in avalanche country that required a flight of 90 feet to reach the landing area. Naturally, Burke wanted to try it, but the physics didn't add up; it was too much speed and air for someone who weighed 125 pounds.



"Please let me build you something a little more reasonable," Douglas said.

"No way," Burke said.

They fought for 30 minutes, but there was no winning once Burke had made up her mind. She flew off the jump at full speed, lost control in the air and barely reached the landing area. "It wasn't really a crash so much as an all-out explosion," Douglas says. Skis and boots and goggles scattered across the mountain. Five other athletes hurried downhill to check on her. Douglas dug into his pocket for a cellphone, prepared to call 911.

"I'm fine," Burke said, standing up, waving them off. Then she hiked back up the hill and hit the jump again.

"Sarah is my 6-year-old daughter's role model,

and I could not be more proud of her choice."

Anonymous, $1,000

"She's inspired me to start jumping cliffs and

experience a new way of skiing. Thank you!"

Sylvie, $50