Laura Kottlowski is, first and foremost, an explorer.

“And skating is a lot of times my vehicle,” she says.

That’s the opportunity that drives her to Colorado’s winter backcountry — the opportunity to skate atop a frozen alpine lake.

Kottlowski is Colorado’s famous wild ice skater. Her social media following has boomed for the better part of a decade, with legions of fans living vicariously through the lifelong figure skater who has taken her jumps, twists and twirls to some of the more stunning backdrops imaginable.

Onlookers have come to know an explorer first — Kottlowski embarking on snowshoes across treacherous terrain — and then, yes, the ice skater carving intricate, white lines over a blue, glassy canvas set amid soaring peaks.

Now, Kottlowski calls herself more than an explorer and skater.

“In recent years I’ve become an ice scientist,” she says. “That stems from me being a main rescuer in an accident in Truckee, Calif., a few years ago.”

Kottlowski risked her life that day while trying to save fellow skaters who had fallen through the ice. One of them, a 72-year-old man, did not return to shore.

In coping with his loss, Kottlowski dove deeper into the nuances of ice that she thought she understood from nearly 15 years of wild ice skating. Fortunately, on that tragic day, she had a life vest and other self-rescue essentials including ice picks and rope.

But “I do this annually 200 hours a year, and I didn’t see that that was going to happen,” Kottlowski says. “I was mad at the wild ice scene for not being more vocal about sharing safety content and stuff like that.”

So she shifted her focus on social media. While she wanted to continue to inspire with images of a beautiful sport in a beautiful world, more than that she wanted to educate on ice science and safety.

“That’s why I built Learn to Skate Outside in the past few years,” Kottlowski says.

Her workshops aim to instill a healthy fear of wild ice skating. That’s while Kottlowski continues to skate against any fear.

Her goal endures: “finding the world’s most beautiful lake and skating on it.”

The lifestyle has taken her from the country’s highest lake off a peak above Breckenridge to more dizzying heights: Nepal’s Gokyo Lakes near 15,000 feet. Ice skating 30 miles on Colorado’s largest body of water, Blue Mesa Reservoir, made for another memory.

From her home in Idaho Springs, our conversation with Kottlowski covered more memories — starting with her figure skating origins as a child growing up in Pennsylvania.

What drew her to the sport: It’s the art of flying basically. Where you get that flight is all up to you; there’s no jump like in snowboarding or skiing. You have to make the force and lift yourself off the ice and into these jumps. That feeling of gliding and knowing you’re creating that energy, it feels like flying.

How she got started in Colorado: My boss introduced me to the fourteeners here, and so I started obsessing over hiking all the fourteeners. It was around the time I started hiking them in the winter when I discovered wild ice. And I was like, “Why don’t I have my skates with me? This is insane!”

What she loved about wild ice: This was the root of the sport, outside. We’re all used to these man-made arenas that in many ways have become materialistic from a competitive standpoint. Much of skating is so competitive. But when you’re out there in the wild, none of that matters. It’s just you and the ice. So it became kind of this meditative thing and exploratory thing.

What makes it worthwhile: What you see. It’s like the glass bottom of a boat. … You’re skating over fish or sometimes turtles or weird mining stuff at the bottom of the lake that you wouldn’t normally see because of the reflections of water during summer.

How she has given back: Through my workshops, I have now trained over 80 to 90 people firsthand. All of the stories and information I tell them is a ripple effect. They have the story of my accident so they can share that and spread that. It’s creating that culture of safety.