27-year-old Jake Filarski chased fish before he chased ski edges. Boats before vans. The ocean before the mountains. In summer he runs rivers in Alaska. In winter he wants to ride—and to pay for it without killing the dream.
“I started the ski tuning business to support the fishing,” he told me. “And the fishing has kind of gone back and forth…basically it gives me another thing to spend money on.”
He calls it Salty Ski Service, a mobile ski and snowboard tuning shop in Salt Lake City. The work is simple on purpose: show up, sharpen, wax, patch what needs patching, hand you back your boards—ready for tomorrow. No leaving your gear in a shop line for a week. No missing the storm.
“That’s the whole point of this,” he said. “Right away you get an edge and wax right now—and you’re gonna have a really fun time tomorrow.”
From tugboats to Wasatch wax
Filarski grew up with docks and hulls and tide charts. “I’ve always worked on the water. Before that, I worked on tugboats.” The schedule was two weeks on, two weeks off. When he was a young adult, he’d stash a car somewhere out West, clock out, fly to it, live out of it, and ride until he had to fly back east again. “I would leave my car out in, like, Denver or somewhere out West, and then just fly back to work, go to work, fly back to the car, and live in the car and just go ride.”
The fishing itch pulled him north. Alaska. Commercial salmon. Then fishing guiding. “I’ve never missed a year working on a boat,” he said. “It’s always been the route for me.”
Riding full-time out of vans and trucks is a young person’s sport. It’s also lonely. “For two winters I’m living in vehicles and you’re by yourself. There’s no real community at that point.” He needed a winter plan that wasn’t just chasing storms. He needed a home base and a craft.
Filarski had seen a guy in Summit County, Colorado, making it work—tuning out of a van and riding every day. “This guy’s riding every single day, and he’s working for himself—working with his hands.” The job didn’t pan out, but the model did. He picked a place with snow and access and cheap rent: Salt Lake City, Utah.
“I was like—there’s snow. It’s great. Bunch of resorts. It’s cheap to live here,” he said. He found an apartment on Facebook, registered an LLC off that address, and walked into the 7even Skis shop in March 2021. “I never had any ski tuning experience.” Todd, the owner, hired him anyway. He learned fast.
That summer he went back to Alaska to fish and guide. In September he came back to Utah and sprinted. “I bought the van, built a website, built out the van in like 10 days, and then bought all the equipment and then just started tuning.” First day of business: Shred Fest in Sugar House. He paid for a vendor spot, parked the van, set up a table and a giant Jenga tower to pull people in, and went to work.
What “mobile” means in SLC
Most shops are built for volume. Filarski’s is built for convenience.
“Most ski shops are built to do 1,000s of pairs a year like an assembly line,” he said. “I think I’m more specialized in just the 60% of the industry of just like, ‘Hey, I just want a quick tune that’s convenient.’ It’s easy and it’s going to improve the performance of your skis and board overall.”
With Salty Ski you book online. Filarski drives to you. “Edge and wax take about 20-30 minutes and then they can get it back right then and there.” Hot wax and de-burr? “40 bucks.” Edge-and-wax? “Around $60.” P-tex fills? “Like 70-80 bucks.” If your bases need heavier surgery, he partners with 7even Skis—picking up, base-welding, ceramic-disc finishing, the works. “In the shop we base grind everything to flat and reset all your edges to a two degree side edge and a one degree base edge.”
The on-the-spot part is the killer feature. “If you want to get your skis tuning in December, you’re probably not gonna see your skis for a week,” he said. “To me, that’s ridiculous.” His answer is a van in your driveway, or a parking lot outside Fisher Brewing, or the Front Climbing Club in Salt Lake. Events, pop-ups, and a lot of house calls. “People traveling into town—they fly in. I grab their skis. I tune them up…no chasing down a ski shop.”
It’s gritty logistics. The Valley is big. “Some days I drive from the Avenues to Sugar House to Daybreak, to Draper to, and then all the way back up to Deer Valley.” The work is real work. “Man, it’s stressful,” he said. But when it clicks—ten minutes between houses, quick tunes, happy skiers—it feels like the city was designed for it.
The year the van died
Last winter tried to break him. “The transmission went out and a misfiring cylinder pretty much destroyed it,” he said of his first Ram ProMaster. It happened mid-December, in the crunch period. “That’s my only vehicle.” In five days he sold the dead one, found a new one, swapped the bench and tools, and got back on the road. “I only missed five days, which was one of the hardest times in my life to be honest.”
But he kept grinding. “It almost feels like… this is the year,” he said of the new winter. He still rides a lot—early tours, done by ten in the morning, then the rounds. “The whole point of this is for me to ride, right?” Last season, even with the van saga, he logged roughly 75 ski days, snowboarding three to five days a week.
Salt Lake is built for ease of access. The canyons are close. The snow is good. People decide to ski at breakfast. A service that meets them at their door, tunes in half an hour, and hands back sharp edges for the next day fits the rhythm of this place.
“I think for the most part, I’m just building something,” he said. The surprising part isn’t the business. It’s the community it opened. “The money’s like, fine, but I’m not necessarily crushing it. But I get to snowboard every day,” he said. “The community it’s gotten me involved in is unreal.”
Filarski rattled off moments that would make a 12-year-old grin: tuning for riders he once watched in ski films, swapping stories at ski movie premieres, connecting with local brands, or getting a print signed by a hero and hanging it in the van. “It still kind of gives you that ‘in’ and that feeling of, like, ‘hey, like, I’m actually kind of worth something in this space,’” he said. “That’s pretty fucking special.”
He credits 7even Skis for giving him a runway. “Todd at 7even Skis gave me a job and he’s never once questioned anything I’ve done.” It turned competition into collaboration. “It makes all the worries of money and financial stress not such a huge problem because I’m going through it with him.”
Two lives that feed each other
For Filarski, winter is tuning and riding, now involving his new coworker, Bryn. Summer is salmon and boats. They don’t clash; they sharpen each other. Salty Ski taught him how to run a business. Fishing demanded that he grow one. “Salty ski service helped me a lot to get approved for loans,” he said of buying his boat. It forced him to learn scheduling, money, tools, people. “There’s so much bullshit you don’t think about when you start it,” he said. Now the lessons cross-pollinate.
Fishing is its own storm—biology-driven openers, 24-hour pushes, mechanical roulette, ten-day peaks where you catch most of your year. “It’s a constant battle to figure out the next step,” he said. “It’s very competitive…and it’s just a wild thing.”
The long game? Keep both, but make winter lighter. “Long term, I really want to work towards just getting my winters back. I want to shred in the winter.” He’s nudging Salty Ski toward brand, not just service—hosting events, films, creating merch, and taking a grand road trip north. “I want to go on a really long ski trip and film it,” he said. Thompson Pass in Alaska, Girdwood, Anchorage. A van parked outside a brewery. A movie on a wall. A wax iron humming.
Craft, stripped down
He doesn’t pretend it’s grand. Filarski likes tools that do something and days that end with sharper edges than they started with. He likes seeing you click in on fresh snow you didn’t miss because your skis were trapped in a tune line.
“People are stoked about skiing and you’re also stoked about skiing, so you can share this,” he said. “Whenever somebody’s stuff is tuned, they get stoked, and they ski better, and they’re just happy.”
Then he said the part that sticks. “That’s really what makes this whole industry go around…it’s a path of enjoyment for everybody here. That’s why we all do it. To have a little piece of that—or to be able to give that to somebody through an edge and wax is pretty sick.”
Jake Filarski started Salty Ski to stay afloat during the winters—just like his new fishing boat in the summer. But somewhere along the way it became something else: a clean, useful craft in a city crowned by some of the snowiest mountains in North America, providing the skiing community an easy, expedient, wholesome way to ride The Greatest Snow on Earth with edges sharp and bases waxed.
To book a mobile ski tune service with Salty Ski, visit their website.
