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It was a training week unlike any other for Aspen-based enduro athlete John Gaston — and that only means good things for the future of ski mountaineering in the U.S.
In his own backyard at Aspen Highlands, the USA Skimo national team held a weeklong inflection point for the burgeoning sport ahead of its Olympic debut in 2026. For the 37-year-old — the self-described “Granddad” of the national team — the time from Wednesday through Sunday was a major step forward in “professionalizing” the team.
“It’s an absolute landmark,” Gaston said. “I think for sure we’ll look back on this in 10, 20 years as like the first real kickoff, if you will, for what becomes a proper competitive team.”
The national team is preparing for its first bid to the Olympics, with qualifiers to the Olympic squad going on this fall. The sport’s national governing body brought together its athletes in what Gaston said was a first-of-its-kind team training week, not just preparing members with endurance work or team-building (as he said last year’s training week mostly entailed), but focusing on the particular details of the sprint disciplines that have come into favor on the World Cup and Olympic schedules.
For high-end endurance athletes like Gaston — a U.S. skimo champion, 12-time winner of the Power of Four in Aspen and multiple-time podium winner at the Leadville 100 mountain bike race — and a large portion of the national team, “it’s an entirely different sport” than what they’re used to: more of a sprint than a marathon.
The national team chose to focus on the mixed-relay discipline as its most likely path to Olympic success due its “more robust” component. The discipline involves a team completing a short circuit one after another.
The training week involved time trials to determine spots on the competition roster, but also a lot of time focusing on transitions between skinning, downhill skiing and bootpacking. In a long-form race like the Power of Four, those few seconds lost from an unrefined transition game are negligible, but not in the shorter races.
Gaston said that many of the multi-lap time trials over the week were determined by just a few seconds — and that the team is well-served for focusing on technical parts of the races in ways they haven’t before.
“I thought I had great transitions until I came here and got smoked by high-schoolers,” Gaston said. “We’ve never had this attention to detail. … Living here, it’s pretty natural to focus on logging a lot of vert, a lot of time on skis, a lot of hours because we have the fun mountains, fun terrain. But especially as these distances get shorter at the World Cup level and then Olympic level these small skills — even if it’s just a second or two here or there — those are the margins that we’ll be working with against other teams.”
Gaston said he’s never had a real training week with the team. He missed last year’s camp in Summit County due to injury, but said he was told there was only one or two days on snow and “a lot of lectures.”
“From what I gather from people who were at both, this was a whole other thing, they’re not even globally related,” Gaston said. “This is a great first one. I think it worked out really well.”
But with the growth of the sport and the Olympic carrot dangling in front of the team, USA Skimo is getting organized.
Sarah Cookler, the founder of and managing director of Silverfork Ski Mountaineering Club in Brighton, Utah, was announced as the head of sport in August. In the same press release, USA Skimo introduced “Project Podium,” a donation-driven initiative to make U.S. athletes more competitive in the sport on the global stage, including World Cup and the Olympics.
“There’s no reason our athletes can’t be as competitive as an athlete in France,” Cookler said. “Physically, they’re there. We just have to have the resources to put on training camps and provide support to our athletes.”
The team hired Oscar Angeloni to be the head coach after working with teams in Italy, Switzerland and China to help develop the specific skills. The decision was made to come to Aspen, giving the athletes a chance to come together in the ways that other national ski teams do.
Cookler said that the decision to come to the Roaring Fork Valley was multi-pronged, but fundraising and awareness building was a big component.
“There are a couple of reasons (the team came to Aspen), but the primary reason is we are a completely privately funded organization, so we rely on donations at this point and a lot of our funders are from Aspen,” Cookler said. “There’s a great community here that supports ski mountaineering, and the mountain does too, which doesn’t happen everywhere in the country.”
Gaston is one of three athletes from the area on the team: Joseph DeMoor is on the senior squad with Gaston and Tiernan Pittz is on the junior team. Both are based in Carbondale. Other locals Jessie Young and Kristin Layne are likely to join the team throughout the season, Cookler said.
Of the 37 athletes listed on the national team roster, 16 are from Colorado and 20 are from Utah. The other three are from California and Montana.
The likelihood of having snow on the hills helped draw the team to Aspen, and that came to fruition — though some of Highlands’ snow machines were working just as hard as the athletes. The strong uphilling community also drew out some local interest and makes Aspen an appealing prospect for the team, at least from the local perspective.
“We are a hub recreationally for uphilling now, but I think as a competition sport, that’s our aspiration: we want to be the hub of competition skimo,” Kevin Roop, lead coach of the new skimo program at Aspen Valley Ski and Snowboard Club, said.
AVSC launched its development program ahead of this winter season due to public interest and the growth of the sport as a whole. Currently, only four athletes are rostered to the team, but they spent time with the national team athletes and networked with its administrators. Roop was with the team during multiple days of their five-day stay.
“I think the partnerships that the ski club made with USA Skimo is just incredibly important,” Roop said. “We all now know each other. We all know what we need to do because the mission of USA Skimo is to not only get people to the Olympics but to develop other teams, other places.”
And the same reasons that USA Skimo came to town for a week are the reasons it should put down roots, Gaston — also an adviser for the AVSC team — said.
“To be blunt — and I think we’re not there quite yet — but I think Aspen is the obvious choice to be the dedicated home of the U.S. ski mountaineering team, both at a marketing partnership level but also as a genuine base of operations and training home for the team as it grows,” Gaston said. “U.S. Alpine teams have Park City (Utah); we should have Aspen. There’s nowhere in this country that has as passionate an uphill and skimo-ing community as Aspen and there’s no resort network that has as flexible and friendly uphill policies.”
Cookler said that there have been preliminary discussions about how Aspen has been discussed as a place that has everything the team could be looking for — aside from affordable housing — if it chooses to go that route. It doesn’t appear that anything formal has been discussed at length at this point, though.
“I don’t know if I would say that it’s a necessary thing to have a centralized home base, but I think Aspen would be a great place that’s what we wanted to do,” Cookler said. “I think having an area where we can routinely have the resources to train and provide training access is key to a team like this and a sport that doesn’t have uphill access in many places. So having a town like Aspen that allows training to happen without significant hurdles would be pivotal for the sport.”
Cookler said that the exact selection process for the Olympic roster is yet to be decided, but will happen over the course of the 2024-25 World Cup season and may include some of the early 2025-26 season. The first International Ski Mountaineering Federation schedule starts in Courchevel, France, on Dec. 12.