These women are leaders in the Midwest recreation industry

By Brian Clark

For WisBusiness.com

When Charlotte Skinner was between her sophomore and junior years in college — nearly a decade ago — she decided to drop out and seek a spot on the U.S. Olympic freestyle ski cross team.  

Ski cross is often described as something akin to roller derby on snow, with big-air jumps and high-speed, high-banked turns. Knocking competitors out of the way, however, is not allowed. Still, crashes are common because four skiers are on a single course at the same time.  

Skinner said her parents were upset with her plans and informed her they would not support her quest. Her mother, a surgeon, was especially upset, she recalled. 

“For my mom, ski cross was a nightmare because it’s so dangerous,” explained Skinner, who had competed as a slalom racer and top tennis player in high school.

“But I told them I’d made my decision,” said Skinner, whose family owns three major ski areas in the Midwest: Granite Peak outside Wausau, Lutsen Mountains on the north shore of Lake Superior and now Snow River (formerly Indianhead and Blackjack) Resort just across the Wisconsin state line in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. 

Skinner, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, is one of several women who are leaders in outdoor companies with a major presence in Wisconsin. Other prominent female leaders in this sector also profiled here: Tania Burke, president of Trek Travel; and Lyn McMurray, who co-founded the Sol Alpine ski goggle firm. Both are in Madison.

Skinner, 30, spent two years pursuing her dream to compete in the Winter Olympics. In the process, she became the second highest-ranked female ski cross racer in the United States. 

“Most of the women I was competing against had suffered head and back injuries,” said Skinner. “Over time, it came to the point when I was at the top of a course, I’d be thinking about how much I had to lose if I crashed. When that happened, I decided to return to school.”

She was able to resume her studies in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. After graduation, she landed a job in the finance department at the Adobe computer software company in Silicon Valley. 

She thrived but found it difficult to move up without an MBA. So she went to graduate school at Columbia University, where her father, Charles, 64, had earned his law degree. 

She said she wrote her application essay on her thoughts about joining the family business because she was the only one of four cousins who was interested in running ski resorts. 

After graduation from Columbia in 2021, she got a job with VMware, a cloud computing company. She also began working part-time with her father, who heads the family business. But when the company bought Indianhead and Blackjack this past fall, she came on full time. 

Her titles now include vice president of finance and chief of staff for Midwest Family Ski Resorts, the new company that was created to manage all three of the family’s resorts. The Skinner family originally bought Lutsen Mountains from its founder in 1980 and took over Wisconsin’s oldest and largest ski area, Granite Peak, in 2000.

She said her duties as finance chief include ensuring “that the company has financial information in a timely manner so that we can use it to drive business decisions. 

“Whether it’s marketing, capital projects, food and beverage, inventory management, etc., all areas of our business are now run using financial data as the primary driver.” 

Her days are busy and as chief of staff, she is also in charge of making sure the “vision of the president (her father) is getting executed and communicated so that it gets acted upon in operations. With the Midwest Family Ski Resorts entity being new this year, there are a lot of moving pieces and structure that is still evolving.”

Skinner said goals for the three resorts her family owns “are to continue to offer family oriented ski vacations and foster the growth and learning of the sport. To do that takes a constant investment of capital to stay competitive with the larger conglomerates.”

Of the three, she said Granite Peak is the farthest along in its development. In 2022, it received permission from the state Department of Natural Resources to expand, a move that Skinner said will mean the creation of more beginner runs from the top of the resort. Lutsen is somewhere in the middle, a high-quality resort that needs infrastructure upgrades, she said. 

And at the newly renamed Snow River, which Skinner described as “tired, to put it nicely,” the company will spend $10 million on lodging renovations, snowmaking infrastructure and a new high-speed, six-person chairlift that will go in this summer. It will replace three lifts which date to the 1960s. 

Another aim, she said, is to turn Snow River into a year-round destination.

Skinner said the company also will be investing heavily in its employees. 

“One of my goals is to be better at communicating what our visions are and what effect that has on each person’s job,” she said. “Then getting them to really feel like they are a part of what we are trying to accomplish.  

“Because frankly, if we don’t do that, we won’t be able to achieve what we are hoping to achieve.  These are huge projects with a long time frame. If our employees and team leaders don’t buy in at every level, we’re sunk.”

Lyn McMurray, Co-Founder of Sol Alpine Goggles 

After Lyn McMurray stopped tumbling from an 80-foot fall through a steep cliff band at the Crested Butte Ski Resort in southwest Colorado, her skull was cracked in three places. 

It was 2001, before most skiers began wearing helmets. 

“In hindsight I should have been,” she recalled. “I was revived by the ski patrol, taken by toboggan to where a helicopter could land and flown to a hospital. It was a very serious accident.”

She was prepped for brain surgery, which ultimately was not needed because her skull was so fractured that swelling on the brain was released. 

“I was incredibly lucky,” she said. “I walked out of the hospital a week later.”

McMurray, who moved to Madison a year later, said her crackup and subsequent rescue were the impetus for starting the Sol Alpine (solalpine.com) ski goggle company. (Sun glasses may be added this summer.)

“Sol Alpine came out of wanting to develop a product that would support the ski patrol, which saved my life,” she said. “So I did research on what items do well at on-mountain retailers, though we also sell to shops that are close to resorts. 

“Goggles and gloves are the things that hit the mark because they are easy to lose and forget at home. Or maybe you simply didn’t think you needed goggles, but it’s snowing when you get to the slopes and there you are.”

She said her company, which she founded with her husband Dave — general manager of Planet Bike — donates 1 percent of its sales to ski patrols at resorts at or near resorts where her goggles are sold. Her official title is sales director, though she said has many other duties. 

“It was in 2008 when we first started talking about this,” said McMurray, who joined the National Ski Patrol in 2010 and began volunteering at the Blackhawk Ski Club on the western edge of Middleton. 

Once McMurray and her husband, who has connections in manufacturing because of his job, focused on goggles, she said she talked to fellow patrollers about what features they liked and didn’t like about the eye-wear.

“Then it was onto how do we do this, what do we want them to be and what makes a good pair of goggles?” she said. 

By 2012, they were testing their first products. But it wasn’t until 2016 that they began offering the Sol Alpine goggles — which now range in price from $60 to $125 — through ski patrol swaps. 

“After that, we got into retail stores and the vision really took hold,” she said. 

McMurray said her goggles are on sale at stores and resorts mainly in Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Minnesota. The Monarch Ski Area in Colorado also carries them. 

She hasn’t been able to get her goggles into shops at Crested Butte Mountain Resort, she said, in part because it is owned by the Vail Resorts and it’s been difficult for her small company to crack that market. 

McMurray said both she and her goggles have been well received. 

“As a woman, I really haven’t had any difficulties starting and running a small business,” explained McMurray, who said she’d received support from Doyenne, the Monona-based entrepreneurial group founded by two women. 

“Overall, I’ve found the outdoor industry to be tremendously supportive and collaborative,” she said. “I was at a dealer on-snow demonstration day last winter in Minnesota and I was the only woman out there in terms of all the vendors. It was dumping snow and really cold. 

“I was wondering how’d I’d fit in with all these guys who’d been doing this for years and were with well-established brands. But they were quite welcoming, which was a relief.”

McMurray said it’s been good for her high school-aged daughters — who are on the Madison West High School and Black Hawk ski teams — to see her build her business and also become a patroller. 

“They each began skiing when they were 3 and always come to the hills with me,” she said. “They’ve seen me learn and figure out all the things needed to do to connect with people. Now they give me advice about social media, so it’s helpful to have a couple of teens in the house.”

McMurray said she hopes to continue to grow her company in the years to come. This year, she said Sol Alpine added goggles with photochromic lenses that adjust to changes in light. 

“I believe there is a space for smaller brands that have a story to tell,” she said. “We are happy to work with small, indie shops and give them good service. Nor does it hurt that we are a Midwest-based company when we’re dealing with resorts in this region. 

“And finally, I love being able to support the ski patrol,” she said. 

Tania Burke, president of Trek Travel

Growing up with four older brothers and jostling with them on the basketball court and in other sports was the norm for Pewaukee native Tania Burke.

“I guess it gave me a certain confidence,” said Burke, who was recruited by Marquette University and other universities.

“I’d walk up to a court in a park and there’d be a bunch of guys playing basketball. I’d ask if I could join  in and they’d look at me like ‘are you kidding?’ But it never crossed my mind that I couldn’t hang in there with them.”

Though Burke enjoyed cycling and often pedaled the 16 miles around Pewaukee Lake in junior high and high school, she never imagined she’d one day run one of the country’s largest bicycle touring companies, Madison-based Trek Travel. 

“But I knew then that I loved cycling,” said Burke, who also competed in triathlons. 

“My family would do bike, skiing and camping trips,” she recalled. “We’d load up the camper and go to Door County and ride bikes for our vacations. My older brother had cancer and I remember learning how to ride when he was just beginning to bike with a wooden leg.”

Burke toyed with the idea of coaching or getting into sports management during college. But after earning a degree in finance at Marquette, she took a job in Phoenix with an insurance company doing underwriting. 

“The people were fun, but sitting at a desk wasn’t and I got antsy,” said Burke, who transferred to a job in California. While out for a run, she met an older couple who were riding their bikes on a self-supported trip from Alaska to the southern tip of Baja, Calif. 

“By that time, I had a goal of riding my bike across the United States,” she said. “And it’s still a dream in my head. They told me ‘do it now.’ So I gave my notice and moved to Aspen where one of my brothers was living and working as an architect.”

She was only going to stay for the summer, but the “visit” lasted four years, she said.  While in Aspen, she worked for the ski school in sales, as a raft guide and volunteered as a coach at the high school. 

Because the whitewater company shared an office with a bike shop, she said she was able to convince her rafting boss to use his outfit’s vans and trailers to rent bikes and offer bike tours. 

“It was because of that experience that I got the idea that I wanted to start my own bike travel company,” she said. “But I needed experience. So after reading about a Utah tour in Sunset Magazine, I landed a job with Backroads and led cycling trips for five years.”

She and several others from Backroads — which provides active travel experiences like cycling and hiking tours — were recruited by Trek Bicycles to start Trek Travel in 2002. The company offered its first tours in 2003 and by 2007, she was running the operation as an independent business, which she owns with her mother-in-law and several minor investors. Her husband is Trek Bicycles President John Burke, whose father co-founded the company.  

“When we first started Trek Travel, four of us came over from Backroads and we just sat down and listed all the things we would do differently — but were often expensive,” she recalled. “Then right out of the gate, because we were started by Trek, our bikes were the best. No one has the bikes we do.”

Burke said her company also invests a lot of money in hiring, training and then recurrent training of guides. 

“We are meeting this year in Girona (Spain) and we’ll do four days of training and a half day of riding and having fun,” she said during a late January interview at the Trek Travel headquarters on Williamson Street in Madison. “We’ll go through hospitality, reinforcing all of our standards. 

“We’re also doing our own version of wilderness first aid training and new mechanics training. All of our guides are Trek-certified bike mechanics. They can do anything with bikes on the side of the road and that makes a huge difference. We get a lot of great feedback from customers because of things like that. 

“I’m certain that focus on hospitality and training makes a big difference.”

About 45 percent of Trek Travel’s 120 guides are women and the majority of the office staff is women, something that Burke said has happened “organically.”

And Burke said men who come on Trek’s tours often have “to check their egos” because the women guides are such strong riders. 

Burke said she hasn’t experienced any major challenges being a woman and president of her company. 

“That question (about gender) comes up a lot,” she said. “People say it’s so great that you are woman-owned business. Honestly, I never thought that much about it.”

Burke said she participates in at least a couple of tours each year to ride with guides and talk to customers. 

She also said she tries to mentor women (and men) on her staff, focusing on leadership skills developed by Jim Collins, author of numerous management books, including “Good to Great” and “Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0”

“Collins talks a lot about ‘Level 5’ leadership. So the advice I give is to focus on being an awesome leader. That’s made a huge difference for me at Trek Travel and can make a difference in your personal life, too.”

— Clark

Brian Clark is a Madison-based writer and photographer who also contributes to the LA Times and Chicago Tribune.