Industry News
This November, Utah voters will be faced with a unique opportunity: to elect the first professional skier to the U.S. Senate. Caroline Gleich, a 38-year-old professional ski mountaineer and Park City resident, is running for Mitt Romney’s seat after he said in a speech that it was “time for a new generation” of leaders. Gleich hopes to continue to fight for action on the climate crisis and to protect public lands.
Inspired by Warren Miller and TGR movies, Gleich said she had always wanted to be a professional skier. Gleich was born in Rochester, Minnesota, a place known for its cold winters but not its downhill skiing, then later moved to Utah at the age of fifteen. After graduating high school she attended the University of Utah and worked at REI as a cashier and greeter, eventually saving up enough money for some avalanche rescue gear and training. From there, she slowly started building her ski career. “Always be on time, be prepared, and be fed,” she told me. The most important thing is to keep showing up, says Gleich.
Though being a professional skier may seem like an unlikely career to prepare someone for public office, Gleich sees a lot of overlap between helping a brand and serving a constituency. “You don’t have to be the raddest skier,” Gleich said. “You have to create deliverables and then fulfill them. It’s very similar in a way to being an elected official. What really matters is what you can do for your constituents. Being a person of action and being able to listen, learn, serve, and deliver, those are the most important things.” Being a professional skier also sometimes involves working on projects that may seem impossible at the outset, or may take many years of concerted effort. In a historically unproductive Congress that passed a decades-low 27 bills in the last legislative session, such skills in persistence and knowing how to chip away at larger goals may prove essential.
In 2017, in the culmination of a five-year project, Gleich became the first woman to ski all 90 lines in Andrew McLean’s Wasatch guidebook, The Chuting Gallery. After years of skiing for the camera and working to keep photographers and sponsors happy, Gleich told me she was drawn to the project because it was a space for her to do something to reconnect with the pure love and joy of skiing. She began the project in 2012, skiing all of the three-star lines in the book, some of the most classic ski lines in the Wasatch. Then came the difficult part. Over the next five years, she kept steadily working away at the other lines in the book, some of which are extremely technical and consequential.
Gleich faced misogyny and undue criticism from the ski community throughout the project, seeking to invalidate her accomplishment. In 2018, she responded in a blog post that was also published by Outside, saying, “The way these local guides have fabricated a story about the style in which I climbed and skied the lines in The Chuting Gallery illustrates the kind of toxic masculinity that runs rampant in our culture.”
Around 2011, Gleich met Liz Daley, a professional splitboard mountaineer and guide of similar age. Gleich and Daley became friends and Gleich said that Daley’s proficiency and confidence as a splitboard mountaineer inspired her to develop her own technical skills. Daley died in an avalanche in 2014, and Gleich said that her loss was one of the biggest challenges of keeping the Chuting Gallery project going.
“Having her as an example, it really showed me it’s ok to be true to who you are,” Gleich said. “She would guide people on Mount Baker for splitboard mountaineering camp and she would bring tweezers and do her eyebrows and bring mascara. It sounds silly but it gave me more freedom to lean into my femininity and that it’s ok to like pink and sparkles or whatever you like. Sometimes working in a male-dominated industry, you feel like you have to leave your femininity behind and be like a man to be successful. I think there’s a large part of me that tried to be something that I wasn’t for a long time.”
Since finishing the Chuting Gallery in 2017, Gleich has taken her skiing to some of the biggest mountains in the world. In September 2018, Gleich summited and skied Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest peak in the world at 26,864 feet. The following year in May 2019, Gleich summited Mount Everest with a torn ACL. During all of these journeys, she has worked to make skiing and mountaineering more inclusive and to educate the public about the growing threats of climate change.
Gleich has spoken up about her experiences being a professional skier in a changing climate in testimony before Congress. In September 2019, she appeared before the Senate Democrat Special Committee on the Climate Crisis alongside other mountain athletes, like Jeremy Jones and Tommy Caldwell, with Protect Our Winters. She analogized her own experiences of being doubted as a female skier with ambitious goals to stress the urgency of action despite the gargantuan nature of the crisis. “When we talk about big ambitious climate goals, people say it’s impossible. I’m here to say we can’t listen to what anyone else says we are capable of when it comes to acting on climate.” Gleich also testified before Congress in February 2020 about the importance of protecting public lands from fossil fuel extraction.
Outside of Congress, Gleich’s activism work has taken her everywhere from Taos, New Mexico, to ski with New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich, to Bears Ears National Monument in Utah for a 50-mile run advocating for the protection of the area. Gleich told me about how activism in your own community can be a powerful way of turning feelings of frustration, anger, and apathy into something more productive. She identified Patagonia Action Works as a good resource for people to find environmental non-profits in their community to serve as a starting place for their own activism. “Continue to learn, continue to show up, continue to speak up,” Gleich says.
Gleich has emphasized that the demographics of Congress are not reflective of the demographics of the country. “I think part of the reason Congress is so unproductive is because of the people we have there,” she told me. “We can’t keep sending the same people over and over and expecting a different result.” Gleich originally intended to run for Utah’s state legislature but decided against running because she felt that the gerrymandering present in Utah’s state legislative districts made it hard for legislators to represent their communities since she felt many of the legislative districts are not comprised of cohesive communities.
In January 2024, Gleich was asked by Utah Democrats if she would consider running for the U.S. Senate. With only 48 hours before the filing deadline, Gleich consulted with friends, family, and other politicians before opting to throw her name in the ring. “Sometimes you pick the line you’re going to ski on the mountain and sometimes the mountain picks it for you,” Gleich says.
If elected, Gleich hopes to continue her work on climate and conservation. Though seemingly intractable issues, Gleich has identified several small steps that can be taken that will contribute to an energy transition. The biggest step will be modifying and upgrading the nation’s electrical grid. Beyond addressing problems related to meeting peak power demands and mitigating the effects of natural disasters, an updated electrical grid would help address intermittency and storage issues related to incorporating more renewable sources into the grid, a key step in cutting carbon emissions.
As a professional skier, Gleich derives a lot of her income from social media. As a self-described “elder millennial,” she is a lot more familiar with the ins and outs of social media and algorithms than many members of Congress. “I think it’s pretty ridiculous that in 2024 we haven’t passed anything to help with digital privacy, algorithmic transparency, or to regulate and plan for the future of artificial intelligence.” She also talked about the need to address the dissemination of misinformation and election interference of ‘troll farms’, which are large groups of fake social media accounts focused on stirring up online disagreement and ill-will. Gleich said social media companies are ripe for regulation, and she is looking forward to working on the issue.
Gleich certainly faces long odds in Utah, a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the senate since Frank Moss was elected in 1970 and one that has never elected a female senator. Though Utah has among the largest skiing population in the country, to get elected Gleich will have to build a coalition of skiers, working-class people across Utah, young people, moderate conservatives looking for change, and, of course, snowboarders. If elected, Gleich would hope to serve her constituency by fighting for action on climate change and protecting public lands, helping to preserve the sports of skiing and ski mountaineering that she and many Utahans love and cherish.
More from Zach Armstrong:
- Inside the Ski Industry’s Post-Pandemic Boom
- How Eldora, CO, Ski Patrollers Finally Got Their Union
- How the Fatal GS Bowl Avalanche at Palisades Tahoe, CA, Happened and Why it Could Happen Again
- Public Money Gets Funneled into Massive Deer Valley, UT, Expansion
- Ski Industry Unions Across America Fight For Experienced Staff Retention and Training Incentives
