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Caroline Gleich was 55 miles into the 65-mile trek to base camp on Pakistan’s Gasherbrum II when she started to feel queasy. It was July 2022, and temperatures were in the triple digits. A few minutes later she threw up. The 38-year-old ski mountaineer felt weak and dizzy. Over the next three hours she vomited 30 times.

After a few rough days, she and her husband, 43-year-old realtor Rob Lea, finally made it to base camp at 16,900 feet. This was just the first part of their journey: they hoped to ski from the peak’s 26,362-foot summit, a longstanding shared dream. Then, just as Gleich started to recover, Lea got sick. They languished in their tent for a week, feeling miserable, before calling off the expedition. They’d paid the money, invested the time, flown across the world, and bailed before they even laid eyes on the mountain.

“It’s hard to put your goals out there and to fail,” Gleich .

For an athlete like Gleich, part of an alpine objective’s allure is that there’s no guarantee of success. The whole point is to do something hard—like climb Mount Everest, which she did in 2019 (with a torn ACL, no less). This particular ethos might help explain why Gleich is running as a Democrat for a U.S. Senate seat in deep-red Utah, a state that has exclusively sent Republicans to the Senate since 1977 and has never elected a woman to the post.

“How many people are so stuck on trying to ensure success that they don’t even show up to the start line?” Gleich says. “You’re definitely not going to win if you don’t show up.”

Gleich’s ski career really took off in 2017, when she became the first woman to ski all 90 lines in The Chuting Gallery, a steep skiing guidebook that chronicles the most coveted, difficult descents in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. Then, in 2018, she climbed and skied 26,906-foot Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest peak, and solidified her reputation as a talented high-altitude mountaineer. She has appeared on the covers of Powder, SKI, and Backcountry, picked up sponsors like Patagonia, Clif Bar, Leki, and Julbo, and gone on expeditions in Peru, Ecuador, Alaska, Antarctica, the Himalaya, and the Karakoram.

She is also no stranger to Sisyphean political tasks. She has spent much of her professional ski career moonlighting as an environmental activist. As soon as she built an online audience for her skiing—she has —she started using that platform to advocate for protecting public lands and taking action on climate change.

For the past decade, she has gone to Capitol Hill every year to lobby with organizations like Protect Our Winters, Heal Utah, the Access Fund, and the American Alpine Club. She , at a hearing about the climate crisis; spoke at rallies to save the Great Salt Lake; and at the Colorado State Capitol. In 2022, she was to meet President Biden and Vice President Harris and to celebrate the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. She also hosts a podcast, The Caroline Gleich Show, where she talks to guests about topics like , , and . (Editor’s note: The author works as a video contractor for Protect Our Winters.)

Normally, to win an election in Utah, a politician needs to have certain attributes. They tend to be male, Republican, have the backing of large political-action committees, and belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Gleich is not any of those things. Current gives her a less than 1 percent chance of beating her opponent, Representative John Curtis (who has served in the House since 2017 and does check all those boxes). In 2018, it to win a Senate seat. As of this writing, the Curtis campaign to Gleich’s $665,000.

“I have always been an underdog for my entire life,” Gleich announcing her candidacy. “When I told people about my dreams of climbing and skiing the biggest mountains in the world they told me, ‘You’re too small and delicate, you’re not strong enough, you don’t look like a mountaineer,’ so I’m used to doing what people tell me is impossible.”