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A ski career stretched into politics without losing its center

Susan Mangion’s “The Mountain Bellwether” treats Caroline Gleich’s 2024 U.S. Senate run less as a detour from skiing than as a change in altitude. Gleich enters the article as a familiar kind of mountain figure, a professional ski mountaineer whose public identity is built on bright outerwear, big objectives and years of climate and public-lands advocacy. What makes the piece interesting is that Mangion refuses to frame politics as a betrayal of that identity. Instead, she argues that Gleich’s campaign was an extension of the same commitments that already defined her life in the mountains.

That framing gives the article immediate tension. Gleich was running in Utah, a deeply Republican state that had never elected a woman to the Senate, and she did it as a young progressive political outsider. The odds were plainly bad, and the article does not pretend otherwise. But Mangion also shows that the effort mattered on its own terms. Gleich campaigned hard, reached voters across the state and ended up with 464,515 votes, more than any previous non-Republican Senate candidate in Utah. The result is not presented as a moral victory in the empty, consoling sense. It is treated as evidence that mountain-world advocacy can become real political labor, even when it does not end in office.

The point is not celebrity activism, but the cost of trying to govern

What gives the article weight is its attention to what the campaign demanded. Mangion does not write about politics as a glamorous add-on to an athlete’s life. She shows how completely it consumed Gleich’s ski season and professional routine. Instead of dawn patrols and regular touring days, Gleich spent months giving speeches, taking meetings, fundraising and moving constantly between public appearances. Her friend Brody Leven’s observation that skiing already consumes a narrow and precious part of the year sharpens the point: a serious campaign is not something a professional skier can casually bolt onto an existing life.

Mangion is especially good on the bureaucratic and financial friction that came with that shift. Election rules complicated Gleich’s relationships with sponsors and nonprofit partners, and the campaign pulled income away from the small business structure that had supported her athletic and advocacy work. Those details matter because they move the story beyond the usual outdoor-industry language of purpose and platform. Gleich was not simply “using her voice.” She was entering a system with real legal constraints, fundraising burdens and personal costs. The article argues, quietly but clearly, that if mountain athletes want to shape policy rather than merely comment on it, this is the level of sacrifice and seriousness the work requires.

A broader idea of what leadership in mountain culture can look like

After the election, Mangion follows Gleich back into the Wasatch and shows that skiing still anchors her sense of self. The campaign leaves her mentally and physically drained, but it has also changed the scale at which she thinks about responsibility. She returns to sponsorship obligations and major mountain objectives, yet the article makes clear that she is no longer only an athlete with political opinions. She has become an organizer, surrogate and prospective mentor for other people who may want to run for office. Her focus on public lands, climate and the 2026 midterms suggests that the campaign expanded her field of action rather than narrowing it.

That is why the title lands. Mangion casts Gleich as a bellwether not because she perfectly represents every skier, but because she points toward where at least part of mountain culture may be heading. For years, outdoor athletes have spoken about climate, access and conservation as matters of personal conviction. “The Mountain Bellwether” asks what happens when one of them tries to convert that conviction into institutional power. The answer is messy, exhausting and unfinished, but also more substantial than branding. The article is compelling because it treats democracy the same way serious mountain travel should be treated: as something participatory, risky, communal and impossible to outsource.