At Kings & Queens Of Corbet’s In Jackson Hole, Women Reign—On And Off The Slopes

Per 2021-22 National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) participation figures, skier and snowboarder demographics in the U.S. still skew heavily male—63 percent, to be exact.

It’s not surprising, then, that this trend carries over to action sports events in general. Even though the industry has made strides with equal prize purses for men and women, few events have equal fields—and even fewer have women running, organizing, filming and producing. Even established competitions like X Games, Dew Tour and the Olympics frequently put men’s events in primetime slots.

That’s one of several reasons why Kings & Queens of Corbet’s at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort (JHMR) stands out among ski and snowboard competitions. The event, which celebrated its sixth year this month, is helmed almost entirely by women—JHMR president Mary Kate Buckley; event creator and JHMR director of events and partnerships Jess McMillan; show director Rima Rackauskas; and, of course, the female skiers and riders who push the sports’ progression in every year of the contest.

It’s a notable collection of women in crucial roles—from resort leadership to live TV production—where that’s not yet the norm in action sports.

And it’s exactly what McMillan was hoping for when she dreamed up Kings & Queens in 2016.

“I wanted to create equality for everybody across the board,” McMillan told me in Jackson Hole two days after the 2023 iteration of the event, while the team of editors frantically cut together the replay show in the next room.

To ask the athletes, she has succeeded. “Everything in the competition feels so equal between men and women—having the run order mixed, the equal prize purse, and the camaraderie among the athletes—so all of us female competitors are so stoked to be a part of it,” 2020 Queen of Corbet’s Veronica Paulsen said.

McMillan, a professional skier herself who competed on the Freeride World Tour for 10 years and was the Freeskiing World Tour Champion in 2007, had a front-row seat to how snowsports started to change in the early 2000s—going from having a “token female” in the years prior to sponsors actively investing in female athletes.

“Being an athlete and knowing your sponsors provided you with opportunities, to the point where sometimes it felt like only X sponsored athlete was going to win this event or get invited to this event, it was disappointing to me because there are so many talented people out there who maybe just haven’t met the right person or haven’t had the right opportunity,” McMillan said.

“So I wanted to create an opportunity for everyone–athletes, sponsors, production, helicopter pilots, rescue–everybody’s involved and plays a key role so I wanted to capture that.”

As McMillan envisioned an event that would mimic the experience she had on the Freeride World Tour—men and women, skiers and snowboarders, one big family—she and her husband Eric Seymour, now the director of brand communications and content for JHMR, realized that the iconic Corbet’s Couloir would be the perfect place to hold it.

Doug Coombs, who helped pioneer extreme skiing before his death in 2006, was known as the King of Corbet’s, so the event, naturally, became Kings and Queens of Corbet’s.

Kings & Queens is one of the few competitions to group skiers and snowboarders together—and only one male and female winner are selected, regardless of discipline. In its first year, it also featured equal fields of 12 men and 12 women for 24 total athletes—“that’s for 24 bombholes that we felt like Corbet’s could handle,” McMillan said. Equal prize purses came in year two.

The competition is also athlete-judged, which is exceedingly rare for major snowsports events. That was an extremely important piece for McMillan. But is it ever challenged?

“Every year,” McMillan said with a laugh. “But they’re the ones there, doing it, experiencing it all at the same time. There could be a person who’s judged for 10 years who hasn’t done a backflip in 10 years, and meanwhile the athletes are like I did one today, into Corbet’s. It lets athletes say ‘this is what’s cool, this is what’s hard, this is what we respect,’ and I think that’s very cool and I wanted to create that opportunity.”

“You can really feel the difference when the competition is run by somebody who gets it and wants it to feel welcoming and supportive,” said Paulsen. “Jess McMillan let me into the competition before I had any real sponsors or standing as a professional athlete, which I am forever grateful for. When you have a leading woman like that, that you can look up to, who has your back and is rooting for you, just having that support system can make or break your career.”

When McMillan conceived the idea for Kings & Queens, it was a no-brainer that it would be livestreamed, like the Freeride World Tour events in which she had competed for so many years.

Relatively few people can access the event’s viewing areas on the day of the contest, and when there are major history-making moments—such as when Paulsen became the first woman to backflip into Corbet’s in 2020—there’s something special about being able to witness them in real time.

But pulling off a livestream at 10,000 feet is also a Herculean task—much more so than anyone who hasn’t worked in live TV (or skied expert terrain hauling a 45-pound tripod) may realize. The event was not streamed live in 2023, which led to some criticism from fans.

A year in which Kings & Queens is livestreamed, such as in 2022, entails 90 days of planning, a team of 45 people, 6,000 pounds of gear, 4,000 feet of tactical fiber, 1,000 feet of power cables, 1,500 feet of video cables, 1,000 feet of audio to support 15 cameras and almost a dozen generators.

The logistics—and the cost—are enormous. The alternative is what the event did for 2023, filming live to tape with more immediate clipes shared via social media and a replay show to follow.

There are pros and cons to each approach, and McMillan plans to ask the athletes to weigh in for future years. Fans may not realize one benefit of having a non-livestreamed event for the athletes is that they aren’t rushed to keep a brisk clip for their runs, giving them the ability to let a cloud pass and test the speed of their run-ins. At the same time, sharing a successful run with the world in real time is thrilling.

“The effort, expertise, equipment, and expense required to livestream an event at 10,000 feet on extreme terrain is immense,” said Andrew Way, VP of marketing at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. “In previous years, JHMR has relied on Red Bull to livestream the Kings & Queens of Corbet’s. This year the partnership with Red Bull pivoted to produce top quality media in the form of thrilling social media content, full run clips in tandem with a Viewer’s Choice Awards 24 hours after the event, and a fully produced cinematic replay show.”

The replay show, coming in at an eminently watchable hour and twenty-three minutes, aired on Red Bull TV and all JHMR channels on Tuesday, Feb. 14, one week after the event.

People’s Choice Award voting, which can be done through Red Bull’s website, concludes Feb. 15 at 5 p.m. MST. The results will be announced through JHMR social channels.

This year, Claire McPherson was voted Queen of Corbet’s and 2022 Olympic silver medalist Colby Stevenson was named King. For the women, Piper Kunst came in second and Sarka Pancochova, third. Blake Wilson came in second for the men and Alex Hackel took third.

Needless to say, the hunger for Kings & Queens content is immense. The clips have viral potential baked into them—and indeed, the videos of skiers and snowboarders hucking themselves off a cliff to free-fall 20 feet into a 40-degree chute are shared far and wide, even by those who don’t typically follow snowsports.

And even in a non-livestream year, capturing this event is no simple feat. This year, a 17-person camera crew—all local to Jackson Hole and Teton Valley—captured 14 camera angles (in addition to GoPros); JHMR deployed three still cameras and Red Bull added another one, and the show’s director of photography Ben Dann shot drone footage.

The postproduction team of 10 is led by show director Rackauskas, a live TV and broadcast producer specializing in action sports. Growing up around film sets—her mother, Giedra, was a production manager for several major films, including Titanic and Cocoon—Rackauskas wasn’t initally looking to end up in entertainment, but she found her way there after a stint coaching elite athletes.

In 2011, Rackauskas began working with action sports production powerhouse Uncle Toad’s Media Group, producing events such as Volcom Pipe Pro, Vans Triple Crown of Surfing, Vans Park Series and Vans BMX Pro Cup. That led to freelance work with Red Bull Media House (RBMH), which included producing events like Burton US Open of Snowboarding, Red Bull Formation, Red Bull Rampage and, of course, Kings & Queens.

Few people know more about action sports event production than Rackauskas, who’s seen it all—including much-needed changes in the industry. “When I first got into live TV it was like, there’s no women. I remember there was one female camera operator,” she said. “It was an old boys’ club.”

“Front bench is historically all men, especially multicam directors,” Rackauskas continued. Audio, drone piloting and network engineers also skew heavily male. But that’s changing—due in large part to people like Rackauskas being in the position to open the doors wider and build more female-heavy teams.

A pivotal moment was the inception of Red Bull Formation, an all-female mountain biking session, in 2019. As an all-women event on the athlete side, the production team made an effort to bring in as many women as possible behind the camera, as well.

“After Formation, there was definitely a lot of effort to bring on as many women as we could, naturally because there’s so few of us in that industry,” Rackauskas said. “There’s one woman here one woman there, and you just know them and try to work with them when you can.”

However, Rackauskas stresses, live TV is a such a demaning environment that no one is brought on to the production team who isn’t fully capable. “The attempt is not to do a takeover,” she said. “I don’t want to do an all-female team; having the balance is what we’re looking for.”

For this year’s Kings & Queens event, the postproduction team (with some camera overlap) consisted of four women and six men, some of whom were in-house at RBMH—network engineer and DIT Jenny Brunner, network engineer and tech assist Nate Maas and production manager Joseph Guay—with the rest hired freelance by JHMR—Rackauskas, lead editor Jill Garreffi, senior editor Charlotte Percle, senior editor Andrew Boucher, editor Ben Parker, colorist Dan Olsen and sound master Jason McDaniel.

“I’ve never worked with a female network engineer before Jenny, and she’s so smart and multitalented. Her skill set reaches so far past setting up computers and networking,” Rackauskas said. As a digital imagining technician (DIT), Brunner helped the production with ingesting all the cards to turn around content quickly.

“For this event, shooting it live to tape and turning it around in a very fast way is extremely difficult. It really pushes everyone’s ability and capacity” Rackauskas said.

Garreffi is also a camera operator for the contest’s main jump angle—when you see footage of athletes’ runs with the Red Bull logo on the bottom jump, Garreffi filmed it. “She’s a super competent and talented cinematographer,” Rackauskas said. “She led the camera meeting and was able to get everyone where they needed to be.”

Percle was able to manipulate the sound for the replay show to eliminate any unlicensed music that the DJ may have been playing live. “Charlotte is such a talented editor, a really incredible storyteller, and very tech-savvy,” Rackauskas said.

Progression was one of the goals McMillan had in mind when she created Kings & Queens, and she’s thrilled to see that, six years in, the athletes are taking up the charge.

Paulsen attempted the first double backflip by a woman into Corbet’s this year on her first of two runs. On the second run, Paulsen could have gone for the strategy of putting down something she knew she could land cleanly, keeping herself in contention to earn the title of Queen—and the accompanying $10,000 prize. (While the athletes consider progression and difficulty in their voting, they also look at execution.)

But Paulsen knew she was this close to landing the double—and while she still didn’t get it, she came incrementally closer. The widespread feeling is that she’ll win the People’s Choice vote for her attempt.

“All my choices in this competition are about pushing myself and pushing the sport of female freeride skiing,” Paulsen told me. “For me, this competition is not about the prize money, it’s all about progression. With the competition getting so much social media attention I think it’s really important to show the world what we can do as female athletes and pave the path for the next generation of young female rippers.”

Meanwhile, Kunst was the only athlete to drop in from the west wall, a terrifying proposition that even gave her pause, before she uttered a tension-breaking expletive that drew laughs from the crowd and sent it.

Kunst didn’t land completely clean, paving the way for McPherson’s win—who had by far the cleanest run among the women, something her peers validated in the athlete vote. But seeing 2022 Queen of Corbet’s Kunst push the envelope with her creative drop is what the spirit of the contest is all about.

“It’s a great event to showcase everything that we can do here,” JHMR president Mary Kate Buckley said. About Paulsen, Buckley added, “This entire valley was rooting for her. She did amazing.”

That Corbet’s would be home to this level of progression in women’s skiing is fitting, given that Wyoming is known as “The Equality State.”

As we spoke, Buckley directed my attention to a plaque that hangs under a framed 44-star flag at the top of the resort’s Bridger Gondola—the U.S. flag from July 4 1891 to July 3, 1896, following Wyoming’s admission as a state. The flag was donated by the Kemmerer family, owners of the resort.

In 1869, Wyoming became the first U.S. territory to grant suffrage to women. Because of this, when it petitioned to become a state in 1890, U.S. Congress took issue with women’s suffrage. Wyoming governor Joseph M. Carey famously told Congress, “We will stay out of the union a hundred years rather than come in without our women.”

Wyoming has since gone on to elect the first all-woman city council (in Jackson in 1920) and elect the first woman governor (Nellie Tayloe Ross in 1925).

It’s an impressive, if counterintuitive, set of accolades for the 44th U.S. state, whose politics don’t often lean progressive.

In 2020, Donald Trump’s 69.94 percent vote share in Wyoming represented his strongest win in the election. And after Jay Kemmerer hosted a 2021 fundraiser for the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, Patagonia pulled its products from JHMR outlets. In a letter to resort staff, Kemmerer wrote, “I have always kept my personal views separate from my leadership at the Resort and will continue to do so. I would never impose my values on others,” per the Jackson Hole News&Guide.

Buckley, who cut her teeth outside the ski industry with global marketing roles at Disney and Nike, has been a full-time Jackson Hole resident since 2009 and came on as JHMR president in 2018. She was invited by the Kemmerer family to join the resort’s board of directors in 2014, for not only her vast retail experience but also her perspective. “The thinking was more like if it’s a jump ball, if you have candidates with equal skills and experience, we want a woman on the board,” she said.

At the helm, Buckley has been able to implement her business savvy as well as her rising-tide-lifts-all-boats leadership. “We are trying to put development programs in for employees and make sure we’re training so everyone has the skills and experience to be promoted up through leadership roles here,” Buckley said.

Buckley notes that across the mountain—from ski patrol to the resort’s Mountain Sports School to guides, not to mention the executive suite—JHMR has a large female presence in what has long been a male-dominated industry.

When Buckley was installed as JHMR president, Kings & Queens was in its second year, and she was thrilled to provide McMillan and Seymour with the resources they needed to make the event happen. “It does touch across the entire company,” she said. “Our trail crew is up there for weeks in advance creating the features, our ski patrol is integral to all the decisions, security has a role in it—the entire team comes together to put on this event.”

As one of the few women leading a major U.S. ski resort, Buckley also points to Vail Resorts as a positive model—women are at the helm of 10 of 37 ski areas run operated by the company, including two of its biggest, Park City and Vail, and Kirsten A. Lynch was named Vail Resorts’ first female CEO in 2021.

“Hopefully a lot of other resorts will look at that and think it’s worth making sure they fairly evaluate everyone,” Buckley said.

“You look around [Teton County] and the women leading the major organizations in this county and I like to think it’s just because people value what you do and what you bring, your skills, and that you can have a fair shot,” Buckley continued.

“And that’s all you can ever want for women, is to make sure they have a fair shot.”