#ski-mountaineering

#ski-mountaineering

Long before SkiMo earned Olympic status, athletes were honing their legs and lungs in the rugged terrain surrounding Aspen. The Elk Mountains have quietly served as a proving ground for Olympic-caliber talent, including U.S. SkiMo Team members Jessie Young and Cam Smith. Young, now a 2026 Olympian, won the Power of Four in 2024 and has called it her favorite race for its sustained effort and technical demands.

From mapping and land ownership to avalanche forecasting, weather, and now high-resolution satellite imagery, onX has become a go-to platform for people who spend real time in the mountains. Today, we get into the nuts and bolts - how onX Backcountry actually works, how big their team is, how many people are using it, what problems they are trying to solve, and why their user experience stands out in an increasingly crowded space.

Every time Nikita Filippov races, it's an uphill struggle. At the Olympics, even more so. The 23-year-old from Russia's far eastern Kamchatka peninsula is a medal contender in the rugged new Olympic sport of ski mountaineering sprinting up a slope and then skiing back down. At the Milan Cortina Olympics, he'll be one of the few Russians competing as Individual Neutral Athletes. They cannot wear any Russian symbols and won't hear the Russian national anthem if they win a gold medal.

she was 17th overall and almost 34 minutes ahead of the second-place woman - she's been a world-class athlete in other sports nearly her entire life. At 33 years old, she's won world championship titles in six different sports, ranging from skyrunning to ski orienteering to snowrunning, and is currently tied for the most successful foot orienteer with 23 world titles, 11 of them won consecutively.