Photo courtesy of Jake Ingle.

When I meet Jake Ingle for the first time, he’s sitting at his desk in his office – but this is not his preferred place of work. It’s fitting though, that the director of slope maintenance for Steamboat Resort would rather be on the mountain. And luckily, his job allows for that – he starts his workday at 6:30 in the morning, when he grabs his snowboard and heads out to check the grooming.

This is his favorite part of the day, but by early afternoon, he’s back at his desk. “I like my time on the mountain a little bit more,” he jokes, but this is what makes Jake the perfect candidate for his job.

As director of slope maintenance, he looks after a number of departments, including grooming, snowmaking, vehicle shop, race crew and terrain park. Slope, he explains, is the backbone of the mountain. “We basically build the mountain from scratch with snowmaking and finish the trails with grooming,” he says.

And while building a mountain from scratch might seem like a daunting task, Jake is up to the challenge.

“Every year is like a blank canvas,” he says “I get to help build the mountain from zero to 100% and I really enjoy that aspect of the job. I like the challenge of putting it all together.”

He also has the experience to tackle that challenge. Jake grew up in Wisconsin as the child of passionate skiers (his mother was an accountant at a ski shop; a job she took to afford access to cheaper lift tickets and gear). He started skiing at age 4 but when he saw the movie “Back to the Future” he got interested in skateboarding, which led him to snowboarding.

“It was when snowboarding was just breaking through and starting to become mainstream in the late ’80s and early ’90s,” Jake says. His father gave him an ultimatum: if Jake could prove that he was a good skier, his dad would buy him a snowboard. At age 12, Jake competed in the Badger State Games and won. His prize? That snowboard he wanted.

He spent his high school years winning halfpipe competitions. By age 18, his friends were moving to Breckenridge to try out the ski bum lifestyle, but Jake’s father convinced him to go to college.

His field of study was ski area management and after an internship at Copper Mountain, his career was launched. He learned how to cut halfpipes and broke into the contracting world, building Grand Prix events, U.S. Opens and ski and snowboardcross races. For nearly two decades, he built half-pipes and terrain parks.

The highlight of his career was building the halfpipe for the PyeongChang Olympics in 2018. “It was a four-year journey to build up to that,” Jake remembers. “It was insane.” That was the Olympics that American snowboarder Shaun White won a gold medal. After losing four years prior in Russia, Shaun came into the 2018 Olympics with a vengeance. He was in first place, but he got bumped down after his second run. “On his third run, he was the last person to go, and he landed a run that he had never landed top to bottom,” Jake says. “He reclaimed the gold medal. It was the highlight of my career, and he would tell you it’s the highlight of his, too.”

Post-gold medal win, Shaun White celebrates with the team who built the halfpipe: Jake Ingle, Alli Zehetner and Mark Pevny. Photo courtesy of Jake Ingle.

Jake has earned a reputation for being an elite halfpipe cutter. “His experience as a builder has been invaluable when dreaming up and executing our vision,” says local Olympian Taylor Gold, who collaborates with Jake on the Home Break project, which Taylor started three years ago to bring together local snowboarders, build a terrain park and film a movie. “His passion for this project and for snowboarding are what make it possible for us to do this event at Steamboat.”

It’s not all fun, games and snowboarding though. During his time at Steamboat Resort, Jake has been involved in major projects like two Big Air World Cup events and most notably, the Full Steam Ahead expansion, which added major new terrain to the resort.

For the slope team, the expansion was a four-year project that included putting pipe from the bottom of the mountain up to Greenhorn Ranch and the top of High Noon, as well as helping to build the new Wild Blue gondola.

“I took a lot of ownership in the Mahogany Ridge area,” Jake says. “I created a rescue road to get people out of Fish Creek Canyon. I worked a ton on the Edge of the World trail, figuring out how to do grooming and tree cutting. It was a dream come true because I was helping to craft a new part of the ski area.”

Seemingly, no challenge is too great for Jake Ingle – even getting the mountain open this season with a less-than-ideal amount of snow. “I try to have a laidback approach to weather,” he says. “What does stress me out is when there’s four weather reports and they’re all different.”

Once the snow does come, when Jake isn’t at his desk managing his departments, helping to fix a broken vehicle, in the snowcat, or out checking grooming, he’ll be in the trees on Shadows and Closets.

“The reason that I moved to Steamboat was because of a friend from college,” Jake says. “He lived here and I would always drive up and visit him. We used to ride Closets and Shadows 25 years ago and we still do it now; still take the same line. Steamboat always had a sweet spot in my heart.”