Words THOMAS KOHNSTAMM Photos COLTON JACOBS LATE in the 2022 season, Sophia Rouches made up her mind to hit the infamous Mt. Baker road gap. For generations of locals, jumping over Highway 542 has represented a pinnacle accomplishment, a rite of passage and cause for top bragging rights rolled into one death-defying, camera-friendly stunt. approval. And while she would continue to hit the road gap again for both the challenge and the thrill, perhaps it was time to re-envision her intentions as a pro skier and help create the ski industry she would like to see. ROUCHES GREW UP IN Fall City, WA, just a quick 30-minute drive from Snoqualmie Pass. She spent much of her childhood chasing her older brother and his friends around Alpental backcountry and the Summit Central ter-rain park. “Skiing with my brother taught me how to be the only girl skiing with guys. I became fluent in ‘bro culture’ real fast and learned how to show up in spaces where there were no other girls,” she says, “like knowing how to explain to a ski tech why I need 130-flex boots even though they don’t make them for women.” Beyond looking up to fellow Washington-raised skier In-grid Backstrom, who was frequently the only female featured in Warren Miller movies, Rouches didn’t imagine a career for herself in skiing. “It was an after-school escape, a slice of free-dom,” she says. Unlike many of her current peers, she didn’t come up in a structured racing or freeride program. “I never thought about competition,” she says. “Skiing was all about enjoying the mountains with my family and friends.” If anything, teenage Rouches seemed destined for a Divi-sion I soccer scholarship. But a period of disillusionment with the grind of competitive soccer combined with a senior-year ultimatum from her coach to stop skiing to avoid “unneces-sary injury,” forced her toward a difficult crossroads. “Dropping in 10,” she announced to her crew, then swal-lowed hard and thought: I guess this means I’m really doing it. When the count ended, she tucked down the narrow in-run between the trees for 10 more long seconds and launched over pavement. Rather than simply straight-airing it, Rouches laid out an arcing, heart-stopping backflip. As she rotated, the snow-bank on the far side of the road came into view and passed comfortably under her skis. Unhappy that she didn’t quite stomp the landing, she hiked back up and did it again. At Baker, Rouches had worked her way up as a pro skier at a mountain better known for under the radar personal pro-gression than access to the wider ski industry. With no initial connections, direct mentorship or even female ski partners, she gradually collected sponsorships with ski and outerwear brands like Outdoor Research and Faction, took trips to Japan and Alaska, and scored movie segments with The Approach and The Faction Collective —and now, with the road gap, she’d checked the box of indisputable Baker ski bravery. Shortly after flipping over Highway 542, a man came up to Sophia and explained that now that he’d seen a girl do it, he knew he could do it too. She brushed it off. These kinds of interactions are an occupational hazard in her line of work, especially as she can go way faster and way bigger than most guys. But the timing of the comment, right on the heels of this major feat, got her thinking that perhaps she’d been chas-ing the wrong goals. The expected goals, for other people’s 074 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 4: Page 74
