ARAPAHOE BASIN — The snow crunched and squeaked in the subzero morning mountain shadows at this Summit County ski area as Thomas Lutke and his students clicked into their bindings and headed to the chairlift to take their first run of the day together. High school senior, Autumn Alcock, was about to load the lift when she felt a tap on her shoulder.
“Those skis are sick,” the lift operator said. “Who makes them?”
“I did,” Alcock responded, glancing down at her one-of-kind skis.
“No, you didn’t.” The lift operator was clearly unconvinced.
“Yes, I actually did,” Alcock said, before the lift carried her up the mountain.
The ski day was a celebration of a semester’s work. Alcock was one of two girls and 30 students in Summit High School’s Ski Business and Manufacturing class — one of the only classes of its kind in the nation — in which students learn to design and build their own skis and snowboards, and market their products to their intended demographic.
“They’re building more than a ski,” Lutke said. “They’re building a business.”
The class is the newest addition to the school’s ski and bike tech program, under the Career and Technical Education program, originally designed to give students the skills and experience to work in the resort community’s many ski and bike shops.
For Lutke, who came to the mountains of Colorado as a college dropout to pursue his love for skiing before returning to college to become a high school teacher, this class is a passion project.
“I’m living the dream, helping kids build skis and snowboards,” he said.
It’s not that the students taking this class necessarily intend to pursue careers in ski design and manufacturing. It’s that the kids — most of whom have grown up in Summit County’s ski towns — are obsessed with their snow sports. By tapping into that passion, students will naturally put more energy into the class and learn more along the way.
“The skis and the boards are just a vessel to teach valuable business lessons,” Lutke said.
As students learn how to take a concept from design to a finished product, they learn hands-on building skills, as well as graphic design, marketing and entrepreneurial business skills.
“It wasn’t all these hypothetical projects that they’re usually doing in school,” said Erin Scott-Williams, a visual arts teacher who worked with one of the two classes this semester to help with their graphic design and marketing. “They got real world experience.”
A week prior to the ski day, when students finally put their boards to the snow to see if they responded as intended, Lutke and his students gathered at RMU Breckenridge, a ski manufacturer that entered the business making handcrafted skis, to display their handmade, one-of-a-kind skis and snowboards to the public. The retail space was packed with adults — parents, industry professionals and people off the street — who peppered the students with questions about the flex, camber, turn radius and inspiration behind their creations.
The skis and snowboards ranged from park and powder boards to all mountain and racing skis. Graphics included mountains, bicycles, horses, astronauts and flowers, inspired by the love of outdoors, seasons, and exploration, to name only a few. Some students designed the ski of their dreams, while others experimented with untraditional shapes, length and camber. Senior Nico Novotny built a 6-foot snowboard, while Ollie Dixon, a junior, designed skis with reverse camber.
Senior Dillon Butson designed a snowboard with a swallow tail and a swallow tip, even though Lutke warned him he’d never seen a tip designed with that shape.
“I wanted to try something new and inventive,” Butson said.
Si Andersen designed a pair of skis he dubbed “The Horseman” with torpedo-shaped tips and tails, intended to be playful park skis. His graphics include a war horse, mountains and topographic lines. Andersen was so pleased with the results, he didn’t even want to mount his skis with bindings and take them to the mountain.
“I just want to put them on the wall,” he said.
RMU Marketing and Events Manager, Eric Conrad, was among the industry professionals that spoke with students about their products, flexing their boards as they answered his questions.
“I was really impressed by every ski that I flexed,” Conrad said, who added he was also impressed with the level of teamwork and camaraderie he saw among the students. “I would have loved to have a class like this in high school. I feel like it teaches you a lot more than building skis.”
While all of the students were drawn to the class for the unique opportunity to make their own boards, each named a different takeaway from the semester.
For Alcock, the only girl in her class, the prospect of working with power tools was intimidating.
“At first it was really hard, but after I got comfortable with (my classmates) and the tools I was using, it was really empowering,” she said. Alcock wasn’t the only student in her class inexperienced with tools, but “it’s different as a female,” she said. “It’s a stereotype.”
Butson was also new to power tools, but while he enjoyed learning hands-on skills, he said he particularly appreciated the business insight he gained.
Students also listed life skills, including teamwork, problem-solving and perseverance. While each student designed their skis or snowboard individually, they worked in teams for each step of the building process.
“We ran into a lot of problems,” said Annika Kramer. “To figure out ways around that and still be able to make skis and snowboards was such a cool lesson to learn.”
Nico Bonta, who created skis he named the Fish Sticks, with graphics reflecting his love for fly-fishing, said he appreciated how Lutke gave them the freedom to create whatever design they wanted and the responsibility required to build them.
“I think it’s cool to have a class that we’re not telling the kids what to do all the time,” said Erik Hagburg, Lutke’s friend and SHS colleague. “It’s important to allow students the opportunity to explore and just have fun.”
Lutke was a social studies teacher and relatively new to teaching nine years ago when a local sports shop approached the school administration to suggest it offer a class in which students learn the skills, including tuning and waxing skis, to work in a ski shop.
For Lutke, who had worked in numerous ski and bike shops over the years, the class seemed like a perfect fit. He updated his resume, approached the principal and proposed that he teach it.
“I told him: I can build this program,” he said.
There was no building space for the class at the time, so Lutke taught it outside, which, in Breckenridge, at an elevation of 9,000 feet, inevitably meant class in the cold and snow.
“Luckily, I had a super excited group of students that didn’t care,” he said. “There were days when they had to shovel out spots for their tuning tables before they could start working.”
The next year, Lutke’s class moved inside. First, to a section of hallway dubbed the “room to nowhere” that had been used to store tables, and, eventually, to its current location, an old weight room at the end of a hallway that leads outside. Lutke has since added two bike tech classes to the program and he is now a full-time CTE teacher.
At one point, the principal asked Lutke: “Where do you go from this?”
Lutke didn’t even pause before answering, “‘We’re going to have students make their own skis.’ I always had that idea in the back of my head … and I believed that we could do it,” he said.
One day, Hagburg reached out to Lutke to tell him about Community Skis, an Oregon-based business that travels around the country in a trailer teaching folks to build skis. The co-owners of Community Skis were scheduled to teach a class in Carbondale. The two colleagues signed up.
“It was obvious (from the start of the class) this was something we had to have at Summit,” Lutke said. “The learning opportunities through this program were incredible. We could hardly contain our excitement.”
Back at school, Lutke prepared a presentation for the administration and proposed the Ski Business and Manufacturing class. The administration liked the idea, but there was no money for the class. So Lutke began the search for funding. When Lutke approached the Summit Foundation, a local community foundation in Breckenridge that works to support local programs by providing strategic partnerships and grants, the response was so enthusiastic, the Summit Foundation offered to fully fund the program.
Summit High School launched the class in the fall of 2023. The response from students and the community has been overwhelmingly positive. Though Lutke envisions a year-long class, it can only be offered in the fall due to space constraints. This year the school offered two classes, but still it was not enough to meet demand and many students were turned away.
Lutke’s class inspired Ben Shay to add ski manufacturing to his Outdoor Rec and Tech class this year at Clear Creek High School in Idaho Springs. The year-long class also teaches students ski and bike maintenance and repair, snow science and safety, and trail development and maintenance, in an effort to get them outdoors. While many of Shay’s students are passionate about skiing and snowboarding, many of them don’t have the economic means to even try these sports.
Shay believes classes like these are imperative for reaching students that don’t thrive under the traditional educational approach. For some of his students, the class is the only reason they show up to school. Once there, they are more likely to attend their other classes. But it’s not the same as a wood shop class.
“There’s a bigger sense of pride, because it’s a larger product than turning a wooden bowl on a lathe,” he said. “There’s a tangible outcome.”
Kids that don’t have the money to buy equipment now have their own snowboard or pair of skis they can take to the mountain. He often sees his students using their creations on the hill at Loveland Ski Area. He can tell they are thinking about what they would do differently if given the chance to build yet another snowboard or pair of skis.
“I think it makes kids think a little more critically than if they’d had another elective class thrown in their schedule,” Shay said. “That’s my hope that at the end of the day … to spark curiosity and a sense of (critical thinking). I think those questions and that process will translate to their other courses.”
Hagburg believes Lutke’s Ski Business and Manufacturing class can be an inspiration to any school — not just those in Colorado’s ski towns.
“It could have easily been an idea that never went anywhere,” he said. ““Kudos to our administrators who allowed this to happen. I think if you can let teachers brainstorm and come up with cool ideas, there’s probably other classes out there as well. It’s a risk … but I hope that other schools see what we’re doing and use it as a launch to do whatever they want to do.”