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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Caroline Gleich, a professional ski mountaineer and environmental activist, is running for the U.S. Senate with the aim of inspiring more young people to enter politics.
• Despite the challenges of running as a Democrat in Utah, Gleich hopes her campaign will encourage others, particularly youth, to pursue political office.
• Her platform focuses on climate change, drawing on her personal history of finding solace in nature and advocating for clean energy initiatives.

Editor's note: Caroline Gleich is running for U.S. Senate against Republican candidate John Curtis. You can read about him here.

SALT LAKE CITY — Rock climbers use the term "sandbag" to describe misrepresenting the difficulty of a particular route to make it seem easier to climb than it really is.

Sandbagged routes are often graded lower than their actual difficulty, but the term can also apply to climbers who top out on a climb with relative ease — masking the true challenge of the route.

It's that second meaning that Democrat Caroline Gleich uses to describe her motivations for running for U.S. Senate. Gleich — a professional ski mountaineer and environmental activist — launched her campaign early this year, pitching herself as a departure from the typical statesman. At 38, she would be the second-youngest senator in Washington.

Now, win or lose, she tells KSL.com she hopes her candidacy will be an example for more young people to run for office, at all levels.

"Running is the hardest thing I've ever done," she said — which says a lot coming from someone who has climbed to the top of Mount Everest and was the first woman and fourth person ever to ski every line in "The Chuting Gallery," a guidebook of nearly 100 of the toughest skiing descents in the Wasatch Mountains backcountry.

"It's about making it look easy and fun to run," she said, hoping that if she sandbags her campaign to fill Sen. Mitt Romney's seat, more young people will end up following in her footsteps.

The outdoorswoman

Gleich began skiing with her parents as a teenager and has spent time outdoors ever since. Her husband, Rob Lea, is a triathlete who has also summited Everest and swam the English Channel. Gleich proposed to Lea on the summit of Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest peak in the world.

Even her dog, Lila RBG Gleich Lea — who shares her middle initials with the late U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — has her own Instagram and Strava accounts dedicated to her exploits. Gleich said Lila "has a goal" to reach the summits of 100 individual peaks, of which the rescue dog has already ticked off 45.

Just as the outdoors play a key role in Gleich's personal and professional life, she has made combatting climate change a key plank of her 2024 platform. She pushes for a swift transition to phase out fossil fuels, wants greater access for recreation on public lands and helped advocate for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which invested billions in clean energy and greenhouse gas reduction.

Her focus on climate change isn't solely about preventing some of the more cataclysmic scenarios climate researchers project with a warming climate — although she is concerned about that — it's also about preserving the outdoors experiences that have shaped her life.

During a debate earlier this month, Gleich described struggling with depression and anxiety as a teenager and the solace she found outdoors.

"I found a lot of happiness and healing through my time on Utah's federally protected public lands," she said.

Gleich has participated in several events with Utah Women Run, and did some of her early training with the organization. But, she said, voters — especially young ones — seem to connect with her more based on her love of the outdoors than they do based on her gender.

"The outdoors — it brings a lot of people in from all ends of the political spectrum," she said. "That's kind of my starting identity. ... A lot of climbers and outdoor people, we have that strong, independent spirit ... so a lot of people that I've heard from are just really excited to have someone who comes from (that) world."

An uphill climb

In middle school, Gleich played several instruments, including piano and saxophone. As an eighth-grader, the high school marching band put out calls for a new tuba player and, despite her diminutive size, Gleich volunteered.

"They had a team of people that were flanking me because they thought I was going to collapse or pass out, but there was no way that anyone was going to take the tuba out of my hands," she recalled. "I was going to finish that march."

When she was contacted about running for the Senate, Gleich agreed in large part due to this same attitude — along with a strong measure of support from her husband.

"I learned how to play tuba so that I could help, and be what (the band) needed," she said. "I think when it comes to picking what I ran for, I wanted to help serve Utah and this is something where we needed a strong candidate, and I felt like I could do it and I wanted to serve."

Gleich knew she was taking on the Sisyphean task of running as a Democrat in Utah, but the realities of the campaign trail have been more difficult than she had imagined, she said. The grueling daily schedule has been one thing, but it has also prevented her from being outside as much as she would like.

She rarely leaves the house without breakfast and lunch packed by her husband, who has been a mainstay throughout the campaign. Lea compared the time away from the outdoors to time missed while recovering from injury, saying he hopes it will make it even sweeter when he can return to it full time.

Gleich agrees.

She has already spoken with several elected officials from western states about how to balance outdoor recreation with the schedule of a senator, and has a plan to keep following her passion if she wins in November. If she loses, she won't be hard-pressed to find her next adventure.

Whatever the result, when she is done pushing this particular boulder up the hill, she will be happy to ski down the other side.

Election Day is Nov. 5. Mail-in ballots must be postmarked the day prior to Election Day in order to count. In-person voting locations and hours are available on your local county clerk's website or at vote.utah.gov. Voters have until Friday at 5 p.m. to register to vote in the general election.

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The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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Utah electionsU.S. electionsUtahPolitics

Bridger Beal-Cvetko

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Bridger Beal-Cvetko is a reporter for KSL.com. He covers politics, Salt Lake County communities and breaking news. Bridger has worked for the Deseret News and graduated from Utah Valley University.