At 7:45 a.m. in early January, Jessie Young started her first workout of the day: an “easy” skin from the base of Aspen Mountain to the summit.
The total elevation gain is 3,000 feet, and the route will take her a little over an hour.
It was unusually warm for the season, and Young was wearing loose-fitting pants and a matching jacket. She slapped a pair of skins on the bottom of her skis, clicked into her bindings and began striding uphill over freshly groomed corduroy snow.
“I love being in the mountains and climbing mountains,” she said. “And it’s more fun to ski down than walk.”
Young, who is 42, competes in ski mountaineering, better known as “skimo.”
The sport involves climbing mountains using carpet-like strips attached to the base of a racer’s skis, called skins, that provide traction on the snow. At the top, athletes rip off the skins and ski down.
Skimo involves several disciplines, from short sprints and relays, to what many consider the heart and soul of the sport: long, multi-hour races involving multiple ascents high in the mountains across technical terrain.
Young has dedicated the majority of her career to performing in those longer races.
“Her bread and butter and her skill sets really rest in long format, grueling individual or teams formats,” said Nikki LaRochelle, a former member of the U.S. Skimo National Team. “Because she is so tough and tenacious, and I believe her pain threshold is off the charts.”
Almost two years ago, Young began training for a chance to compete in the biggest race of her life.
For the first time ever, the 2026 Olympic Games in Italy would feature skimo, but only the shorter disciplines were included — an individual sprint and a co-ed relay.
Young decided to compete for a spot on Team U.S.A., but she’d have to become a completely different athlete at age 40.
An unlikely journey
Growing up in Snowmass, Young mostly snowboarded. In high school, she joined a nordic team practice, thinking she might enjoy more endurance-oriented skiing, but the sport wasn’t for her.
“It was way too hard,” she said.
She competed on the rowing team in college instead and hiked 14ers when she was back home. After graduating, she moved back to the Roaring Fork Valley and wanted to try backcountry skiing.
But Colorado’s snowpack is notoriously dangerous, prone to avalanches. To Young, the burgeoning sport of skimo was a way to explore the mountains in winter relatively safely, since races often include sections of avalanche-controlled sidecountry or backcountry near resorts.
“It was really just a cool way to get to experience the mountains,” she said.
She loves how skimo allows her to cover huge distances — sometimes entire mountain ranges — using only her lungs, her legs and a pair of lightweight skis.
In the beginning, she competed solely for the fun of it. One of her first races was the Grand Traverse, a 40-mile competition across the Elk Mountains from Crested Butte to Aspen. The majority of the race takes place at night, much of it at over 12,000 feet in bitterly cold conditions.
Young did not immediately excel. In the Power of Four, a local race that features over 10,000 feet of climbing and skiing across all four Aspen Snowmass ski areas, she remembers finishing last or second to last.
But she kept at it, and in 2015, she qualified for her first World Championships.
Young has remained one of the top female athletes in the sport for more than a decade, said Sarah Cookler, the head of sport for the US Ski Mountaineering Association — despite having a job, and two children.
Road to the Olympics
In 2023, Young received a call from the U.S. Skimo Association. Would she consider helping the U.S. team qualify for the 2026 Olympics?
Young agreed. She hired a coach, developed a training plan, and for the next two years, gave it her “all.”
In her case, it meant re-wiring her body from the long, aerobic efforts she excelled at to the short, intense bursts of speed necessary for the sprint and relay formats in the Olympics — a bit like transforming a diesel truck into a Formula One race car.
“Jessie is amazing at doing these long-distance races,” said Cookler. “But in these long-distance races, you don't have to do transitions in under 20 seconds, and have that kind of strength and explosive power to run up a boot pack.”
Young put in the work. In the off-season, she ran intervals up Aspen Mountain using ski poles, conditioning her body for sprints. She spent more time in the gym lifting weights.
In November 2024, Young attended a national team training camp in Aspen. Cookler was impressed. Despite being a decade older than most of her competitors, “she put down the fastest times out of all the women.”
But to ensure geographic diversity in the skimo competition, Olympic organizers only allocated one team spot to North America for the mixed relay. That meant the U.S. had to accumulate more points than Canada before it could send any athletes to the Games.
Last winter, Young spent a good chunk of time racing in Europe on the World Cup circuit, helping her team rack up the points needed to qualify for the Olympic mixed relay.
The time Young spent away from her family was hard, but she raced well and finished in the A final four out of the six qualifying races — competing against the best skimo athletes in the world.
By the end of last winter, Canada and the U.S. were neck and neck. It came down to a final qualifying race in Solitude, Utah, in December.
But U.S. team officials knew that with their current athlete line-up, it was a long shot. “If Canada showed up on a good day and we showed up on a good day, we were going to fall short,” said Cookler.
Young was the top U.S. woman in skimo, but she couldn’t quite close the gap with her Canadian counterpart.
In a last-ditch effort to boost their chances, U.S. skimo officials recruited Anna Gibson to the team.
A 26-year-old from Jackson Hole, Gibson had never competed in a skimo race, but on paper, she looked promising. She was a junior national champion in nordic skiing turned professional trail runner, and she knew how to alpine ski.
“At that point, it was pretty obvious that she was going to be our best chance in making that deficit up on the female side,” said Cookler.
A Bittersweet Victory
With Gibson in the mix, Young knew her chances of making the Olympic team had dropped. She felt strangely relieved.
“I think when Anna was brought into the team over the summer, it kind of alleviated some of the pressure,” she said.
Young was proud of her race at Solitude. She pushed herself so hard that she later blacked out, but Gibson went faster.
Gibson and her partner, Cam Smith of Crested Butte, won the A final. Crucially, they beat Canada.
The victory was bittersweet for Young. Gibson’s win secured the U.S. team’s spot at the Olympics, but Young likely won’t compete. Instead, she’ll be going to Italy as an alternate.
“If I'm honest, I think there's a little bit of heartbreak there for those women who have put so much time and energy into performing, like Jessie, like Hali Hafeman, who have been staples on the U.S. team,” said LaRochelle. “And then in comes this woman, Anna Gibson, who had never done the sport up until, you know, six months prior to Solitude.”
But Young isn’t one to linger in disappointment.
“I’ve put in so much training, so I kind of want to funnel that into racing in some way,” she said. She has her eye on some races in Europe after the Olympics — longer, individual events that take racers into the real mountains.
It’s a different goal than what she had going into the season, but it’s one that brings her closer to why she started this sport in the first place.
