How a new freeride festival is helping women+, non-binary, and gender-diverse riders find confidence, community, and the courage to push their limits.
Written and photographed by Hannah Truby
Snow sports come with no shortage of barriers. The first—just getting started—is already substantial. Culturally, financially, and logistically, the mountains aren’t always easy to access. And these challenges feed into a broader obstacle: representation, shaping who feels welcome and supported on the slopes.
Enter Empowder, a non-traditional freeride festival created to meet riders exactly where they are. Designed for women+, non-binary, and gender-diverse participants, the festival offers the guidance, encouragement, and supportive community often missing in traditional freeride spaces. By turning the mountain into a playground without pressure, Empowder helps riders settle into their comfort zone—and then gain the confidence to push it a little farther.
It’s a necessary approach. Gender disparities remain stubborn in snow sports: In the U.S., just over 50% of skiers are men, while women make up 47%. The split is even wider in snowboarding, where women account for only about 30% of riders. (It’s important to note that snowsports also remain overwhelmingly white: Nearly nine out of ten skiers are Caucasian, with Asian-Americans at 4%, and Black/African Americans at 1.5%.)
Perhaps more telling than the overall gender gap is how sharply women’s numbers drop as the sport becomes more advanced. While women make up nearly half of recreational skiers and riders, they are far less represented at upper levels of participation. In the competitive pipeline, for example, girls represented only 26% of participants in FWT Juniors competitions last year—a figure that dropped to 24% in the FWT Qualifiers.
The dip in female participation isn’t just a number—it reflects a real barrier. Thinning representation at higher levels highlights how progression—the next step in skill, confidence, and comfort on the mountain—can feel out of reach for many women. According to the Freeride World Tour, this stems in part from structural gaps in training, limited mentorship, and cultural norms that make it harder for women to find support and role models early in their freeride journeys. Many freeride academies and training environments are still geared toward male participants, and women often lack female coaches and mentors, which makes it harder to develop confidence on technical terrain.
Progression is one of the quieter pressures in snow sports, but not everyone has the same guidance, encouragement, or inner confidence to keep pushing forward. That’s why the goal of the Empowder Festival isn’t simply to funnel more women into competition—it’s to create a space where progression feels within reach, and where community, support, and confidence-building are just as valued as technique and airtime. With few established spaces for women in Tahoe’s freeride scene, last year’s inaugural multi-day festival at Sugar Bowl was a milestone. The kickoff event sold out, with 45 participants taking part in the coaching and festival programming—and another 40 on the waitlist.
Co-founded by Mariah Grover, Daphne James, and Brigid White, the idea for Empowder was inspired by Sugar Bowl Resort’s redesigned Silver Belt Qualifier, where an innovative athlete-judging format celebrated creativity, personal expression, and community spirit over purely technical scores. White was inspired by the collaborative atmosphere and emphasis on personal expression—but she also left with questions: Why were there only nine women among more than 40 men? And why was there such a gap between the difficulty levels in men’s and women’s runs?
Through an independent study at Stanford’s d.school, White developed the concept for a non-traditional freeride event designed for women+ (including women, non-binary, and gender-diverse riders) that would be “inclusive, celebratory, and community-centered, all while maintaining room for progression and competition.”
Personally, I’ve spent more years snowboarding than not. But at some point—as happens for many riders—my progression slowed. Outside of lessons when I was a kid, my stepdad taught me the basics and was always the one encouraging me to try the runs that scared me. It’s been years since we’ve ridden together, and somewhere along the way, I realized I’d quietly plateaued: happy to gobble up hot laps whenever I could, with whoever I could, with leveling up rarely the goal for the day. That’s why I was so stoked to see this year’s Empowder Festival kick off with a Day 1 dubbed Skill Progression Saturday.
This year’s 80 attendees were divided into small groups based on both discipline and skill level. I was placed in the Orange Group, identified by the ribbons we threaded through the backs of our helmets. There were eight of us riders in total, including our coaches, Danielle Green and Tracks of Her Own’s Sammy Rubin.
Ahead of the first run, Rubin broke the ice: “Why don’t we go around, introduce ourselves, and share what we most want to improve on?”
Collectively, we were solidly beyond intermediate, somewhere between confident intermediates and advanced riders. Our goals for the day—getting more air, riding switch, carving tighter down steep terrain—boiled down to one thing: testing our limits and having fun while doing it.
The workshops, while less technical than I expected, were a pleasantly surprising mix of skill-building and playful experimentation. Green and Rubin were attentive and hands-on, meeting us exactly where we were. Tips and technique guidance came when asked, but encouragement ran like a steady current.
When it came time to pick our next line or decide which feature to hit, we largely made the call as a group. Normally, that might have given me pause—after all, we were all strangers just that morning—but somehow, it felt exactly right. My group—and I heard this was true across most groups—was insanely supportive; I never felt nervous to try something new or embarrassed if I ate it (both of which I did). It was all just good vibes. For the first time in a long time—since I was a kid—trying new things and improving no longer felt out of reach.
Throughout the day, signs of our collective presence appeared across the mountain: flashes of tinsel, swaths of tie-dye (marks of the brand’s visual identity as designed by White), and yoots that echoed off the legendary shark-fin spines of the Palisades—surely ours alone. This year’s festival saw a big jump in turnout, both in participants and coaches, with women traveling in from Oakland, Santa Barbara, and Salt Lake for the weekend.
The real measure of any event, though, is in the voices of those who attend. From those I chatted with, feedback from Empowder participants was overwhelmingly positive:
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“I have never before felt such a jump in confidence after just one day of riding!”
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“The highlight for me was meeting new friends to ski with! I feel like I'm leaving the weekend with several new connections, which is so exciting!”
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“I've been taking the smooth, easy line for so long—it was habit. The girls in my group changed that in a single weekend. Big chutes and small airs are in my future!”
Progression brings its own questions—Who belongs on certain terrain? Who’s “good enough”? Who feels ready to push themselves farther?—But here, it doesn’t have just one definition. Instead of asking, “What can you do?” Empowder asks, “What have you always wanted to try?”
By meeting riders where they are, spaces like Empowder turn the mountain into a playground without pressure—a place to find community, settle into your comfort zone, and gain the confidence to push a little farther. Which, when you think about it, makes freeride the perfect canvas for that approach: unlike racing, it prizes creativity on natural, off-piste terrain, emphasizing line choice, flow, and style—giving skiers and snowboarders the freedom to interpret the mountain on their own terms.
Empowder’s vision may extend beyond snow sports altogether, with the team imagining more themed events and meetups in the future: “We want to continue making it accessible and inclusive, and just build from here.”
