The Ski Journal • Volume 13, Issue 3 • A CERTAIN INTENSITY: Elyse Saugstad Sets the Bar

The morning after the storm, during a routine parking lot beacon check with husband Cody Townsend, they learned that three quarters of the group had no avalanche gear whatsoever. This didn’t go over super well.

“She just railed into everybody. And for good reason,” Townsend recalls. Elyse said no to going into the backcountry with the crew and made new plans. Sure enough, Elyse and Cody saw multiple slides, burials, and search and rescues that day.

But rather than walk away from the problem, Elyse did the thing she’s done her whole life, the thing that has caused dropped sponsors, as well as fame. She got vocal. She worked with the crew and educated them, and voiced concerns on social media, calling out the misinformed decision-making. It worked. A few articles commented on the couple’s social media activity, and it sparked discussion.

“Her willingness to tell the truth in those situations and just speak out regardless of it making her look bad is going to help the culture of skiing down there,” Townsend says. “I think she’s singlehandedly helping to change the backcountry culture in Australia.”

If it seems unbelievable that her commentary could have moved the needle of a nation’s attitude toward safety over a week, look at the rest of her life and think again. In fact, the level to which Elyse has grown her own profile, helped those around her, grown equality within women’s skiing—and perhaps for women’s sports writ large—makes the Australia experience just a tidy footnote in a long and healthy career for Saugstad.

“[Elyse] has placed the bar at a place where people respect women’s skiing, and proven that we are capable of skiing at that level,” big mountain contemporary Angel Collinson says.

It’s a career that has also put Saugstad through the industry’s wringer. It’s a career that has taken more than a decade of blood, sweat and tears to nudge to its current place, but that struggle is necessary, according to Saugstad.

“The bumps along the road, they sure keep it interesting,” Saugstad says in a downplayed, casual tone. “It helps create drive. If you don’t have low points or hardships or things you’re trying to get over, if it’s all too easy, then it probably gets kind of boring.”

Elyse grew up in the wilds of Girdwood, AK and is the third generation of Last Frontier Saugstads. Now retired, her mom Kathy worked as an electrician and her dad Mark in construction. As a kid, skiing and figure skating introduced her to athletics. She raced, as did her younger brother Christian, throughout high school. Elyse excelled in downhill and super G, and won the Junior Olympics in the downhill and overall at 17 years old. She worked at both sports relentlessly, training as many as seven hours some days in the summer for figure skating, and traveling constantly in the winter for races. This helped develop a tank-tough work ethos and a Ginsu-sharp turn. But in addition to athletic prowess, she also found a calling for speaking her mind, regardless of the repercussions.

“In third grade we get a call from her teacher, complaining that she had started turning her desk around to face the class so that she could notify her classmates when the teacher got the facts wrong,” Mark says with a chuckle. Though she has refined her delivery over the years, her need to speak the truth has never tempered. At age 12 she saw Greg Stump’s License to Thrill and was excited to see a female in the movie but aggrieved to see her go-go dancing in the credits. “I was like, ‘Screw that, I want to be in a ski movie, and I don’t want to have to go-go dance for it,’” Saugstad says. “I remember very vividly at a young age thinking that you shouldn’t have to do that as a female.”

After finishing high school in the late 90s Saugstad started college in New Mexico, but needed skiing, so she transferred to the University of Nevada in Reno, an hour from Tahoe’s burgeoning freeskiing scene. She graduated in 2002 with a degree in international relations, but the powder-choked Tahoe world corrupted her former vision of law school. She moved to Squaw Valley to bask in the cold joy of a post-college, ski-centered life. There, she worked nights, skied days, and turned heads with her graceful turns in technical terrain and her ability to go big.

By 2006 she had attracted sponsorships and started competing in freeride contests to prove herself. She met Cody around then as well, and interest grew in the most ski-bum-romantic way possible: Boy hucks big cliff to impress girl, boy turns around to see girl hucking same big cliff, they both stomp, and then date—the two married in 2011.

Saugstad joined the Freeride World Tour in 2008 and won three events and the overall title in her first year, while at the same time filming for ski movies. She won Line of the Year for ski women in 2009 on the FWT, and filmed more. She won Powder Magazine’s Best Female Performance in 2013 for a TGR’s Co-Lab contest, where she was the only female to crack the top five, and she did so with a self-produced edit. She also started SAFE AS avalanche clinics in 2012 alongside other women in the industry.

Additionally, Saugstad helped keep women’s big mountain competition afloat. In 2010, organizers on the FWT released an unexpected statement that they planned to relegate the women’s component of the tour to the existing qualifying events. In response, Saugstad wrote a letter arguing why women were needed on the tour. She got signatures from all the current female competitors and others in skiing, and sent it to the FWT, as well as the title sponsors. “Immediately the women were not being separated from the tour. There was success,” Saugstad says.

But it wasn’t all podiums, movie accolades and advancements. Saugstad saw ghastly inequalities in pay between the guys and gals, and let her sponsors know how she felt. She cites this as the reason she lost a major sponsor around 2013, which left her scrambling for a replacement. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease doesn’t always mean that the grease is positive,” Saugstad says.

Additionally, she came incredibly close to losing her life in the tragic and widely publicized Tunnel Creek Avalanche in 2012 at Stevens Pass, WA. She was the only one out of four people buried by the slide who survived, and the only one wearing an airbag. In the wake of all this, she spoke openly and relentlessly about the fact that the BCS air ag (one of her sponsors) probably saved her life; in advertisements, on national TV and at speaking events.

“On Feb. 12, 2012, I had an epiphany: I’m not dead yet. Stay positive, you’re still alive,” she said in the opening lines of a Ted Talk she gave in 2013.

For speaking up, she was again met with criticism, in article comments and on social media, for what some saw as inappropriate promotion in the wake of a tragedy. But she didn’t let it get to her. “I think Cody was more mad about that stuff than me,” she says, before moving to a new topic.

“Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”—Baseball great Satchel Paige

Saugstad picked up a new outerwear sponsor, Orage, and ski sponsor, Blizzard Skis, in 2015, and attracted interest from the bigger film companies around that time as well. The last five years have been perhaps her best years on skis. But it’s not lost that she was already in her mid-30s by then, an age when sports careers commonly twilight (if not well before). But, if you’re improving, who really cares? Fellow pro skier Nick McNutt says Saugstad is “skiing better every year; and with the mentality and confidence she carries from her experience, it’s a truly deadly combo.”

In 2014, she was named one of ESPN’s top 50 Women in Action Sports, and in 2018 won her second Best Female Performance from Powder Magazine for her segment in Matchstick Productions’ All In, and was also named Freeskiing Magazine’s Best Female Skier that year. She has been nominated for Best Female Performance by Powder every year from 2014-2018.

Jackie Paaso, who has spent a decade on the FWT, credits Saugstad with leading by example. “I’m 37 now and remember hearing when I first went through my 30s, from another female athlete, that once you’re at that age it all goes away. That was seven years ago, and instead of listening, I’ve watched Elyse and seen what she’s done,” Paaso says.

Still, Saugstad knows it can’t last forever. “There’s a freakin’ shelf life to skiing for sure; it’s a sport,” she said, a few weeks shy of her 41st birthday. “But in this moment where I can still feel like I’m one of the top female skiers, I want to continue what I’m doing by making a bigger snowball of my persona in our skiing industry.”

When it comes to bridging the gender-equality gap, which is a big tenet of Saugstad’s mission, she sees progress, but it’s hard to quantify. She is thrilled to report that recently she has bumped up to equal pay with some of her sponsors. Yet it took her almost 15 years to see this through and she knows it’s still brutal out there. “I have great sponsors, but there are still plenty of ski brands out there that treat women very poorly,” Saugstad says. “[In skiing] women are vastly underpaid, it’s not even 80 cents to the dollar. I bet if you found out real numbers, it’s more like 30 to 50 cents to the dollar.”

She digs into the problem the best way she knows how. “My approach has always been trying to do it from the inside out instead of using social media as my platform to complain and cry for help,” Saugstad says. “I’m aiming to change the industry by gaining my peers’ and the industry’s respect, and that helps create space for women.” Others see her contribution in straightforward terms. “Elyse is one of those athletes that is helping women in sports in general go in the right direction,” says Paaso. Saugstad approaches gender equality with a “rising tide lifts all boats” attitude, even though she knows better than anyone that only a few spots are available to aspiring skiers.
“The number-one thing holding women back is not knowing how, or not being taught how to be supportive to each other,” says Collinson, who is regarded as one of the best female big mountain skiers ever. “But Elyse, from day one, has been so genuinely supportive of me, while maintaining her own competitive edge, and pushing herself so hard, and that really speaks to her success.”

Saugstad’s alarm clock routinely chirps at 4 a.m.—she’ll eat a healthy breakfast, then spend 12 hours in the backcountry seeking heavy terrain. Upon day’s end, she avoids the après party world, because a) she’s not in her 20s anymore, and b) she’s likely doing it all over tomorrow.

It takes a certain intensity to maintain this routine for days, months, years and decades. Her words come fast, and intricate, and while nimbly weaving through a handful of topics such as social media influencers and the ski industry, external versus internal motivation, income generation, and tenacity, an intelligent focus is usually there. It’s easy to mistake that for a full-time disposition. But it’s a switch that can be flipped, according to her friends and ski partners, and they say in reality she’s a bit goofy.

“What many people don’t see is she doesn’t take herself too seriously,” Collinson says. “She pokes fun at herself all the time. It’s an almost impossible juxtaposition of character traits. She goes from a serious discussion on safety to dropping an incredibly inappropriate joke with a dry sense of humor.”

Her social media has a few fart jokes, dolled-up dog photos, and instances of self-deprecating humor. Epitomizing this, the “It’s Called Backcountry Skiing” edits (produced by her and Cody, which have about 100k views each) satirize the pro-skiing lifestyle, and the comedy of a husband-and-wife duo living the anti-9-to-5 lifestyle.

“To us it’s sharing the fun of the sport,” Cody says. “It’s not just, ‘Hey, look at me, I rip at skiing. It’s, ‘Hey, look at me having a lot of fun.’ You want to translate that to the audience.”

There’s business to the buffoonery as well. Saugstad knows her audience will detect if she’s forgetting to have fun. She says early season resort laps, chock-full of laughing and catching up with friends, fill that need, and can help balance the rest of the season. In 2019, she committed to staying around Tahoe in January for exactly that reason.

“My job is to continue to sell that dream and get people stoked on going skiing,” Saugstad says. “What I do is an escape.”

Given that Saugstad has survived for more than two decades in a challenging industry and is finally getting some due compensation for it, the question of what’s next is so inevitable it sounds like a cliché.

Nevertheless, she has a vision for the next year or 10. She speaks of continuing working with her sponsors, even if that might not always mean full-throttle skiing. She is intrigued by public speaking, knowing she has a plethora of topics of interest to the public to speak about. Potential motherhood comes up, but more in the sense of if that happens, how it would open a new chapter of challenges for the female athlete that simply don’t exist for men.

“As a professional skier, over the years you train yourself to not make too many plans and be really flexible, and I kind of feel like that’s a bit of a metaphor for how I think I need to proceed through the rest of my career,” Saugstad says.

Maybe, likely, she just doesn’t know how it will shake out, but in the short-term, she’s thriving doing what she loves. This fall she appeared in Teton Gravity Research’s Winterland. She’s been training hard in the gym, prepping for what she says is a good chance of filming again with TGR. She knows more than anyone in the game that there are no guarantees.

“It feels pretty amazing, knowing how far respect for female skiers has come,” Saugstad says. “But we had to fight for it. You have to ask for what you want and continue to put forth an argument to see it through. People are never going to just do it for you.”

Photo Caption: Elyse Saugstad at home in Tahoe City, CA with her 2.5-pound Yorkie, Theo The Brave. Like every good Yorkie should, Theo documents his adventures on Instagram. Relish further @theothebrave. Photo: Tal Roberts

The Ski Journal - Volume 13, Issue 3

A CERTAIN INTENSITY: Elyse Saugstad Sets the Bar

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