(upbeat music) - In this episode, we are celebrating local women who have paved the way for generations to come.

Welcome to "This is Utah" I'm your host, Liz Adeola.

Coming up, see how a Utah woman is helping local families navigate the waters of a more diverse Utah, one curly strand at a time.

Learn how Caroline Gleich's determination helped her shred through the competition to land a spot in a male dominated snow sport.

And check out a new honor in bronze for the first woman ever elected as a state legislator in the nation, Utah's Martha Hughes Cannon.

- [Narrator] Funding for "This is Utah" is provided by the Willard L. Eccles Foundation, the Lawrence T and Janet T.Dee Foundation and the Contributing Members of PBS Utah, thank you.

(upbeat music) - Caroline Gleich has a remarkable skiing and mountaineering resume with peaks from the Wasatch Front to the Himalayas.

As a professional athlete, Caroline uses her willpower and courage to protect and preserve the outdoor spaces she loves.

(upbeat music) - My name is Caroline Gleich and I'm a professional ski mountaineer and activist.

(upbeat music) Whenever I see like the Twin Peaks or Lone Peak, anything along the Wasatch Front, I'm like they just call to me.

(upbeat music) When I was growing up in Minnesota, twice a year, I would take a trip out West with my family.

So four kids, a 21 hour drive, and the four of us would be in the back of the van, just fighting, bickering, sleeping.

(laughs) It was sort of like an Alpine start for mountaineering, where we get up really early and they just power through and then we'd ski.

(upbeat music) I always wanted to be an athlete.

Like I always felt like that was my calling.

When I was 18 and I graduated from high school, I decided to pursue my childhood dream of becoming a professional skier.

But in my family, my mom and my dad, they didn't really think that that was a good career track.

And so as I started in my own life, following my heart, it was also just deeply ingrained in me that I had to figure out a way to improve society and be a benefit to others.

(upbeat music) Growing up with three brothers and being sort of the runt of the litter, I'm pretty small compared to my family even.

I've always felt like people look at me and they're like you're not strong enough, you're not gonna go up there, you're gonna stay at base camp, right?

He's gonna climb the mountain.

It was hard not to take on that underdog mentality.

Sometimes I use that as fuel to prove people wrong.

But as I've grown older, I feel it's really important to make sure I'm not doing things out of spite, especially doing dangerous things, to make sure I'm doing it from a place of love.

(soft music) In 2017, I became the first woman and the fourth person to ski all the lines in The Chuting Gallery, which is a steep skiing guidebook to the Wasatch, over 90 lines, all these narrow couloirs and chutes.

When I was around 16, I first picked up a copy and I remember just thumbing through the book.

And I saw one of the lines was Stairs Gulch, and that's where my half-brother was killed.

And seeing my parents go through that grieving process, I just felt very protective of them.

I knew I always had to come home.

It taught me a lot about risk management.

So I took a really long time learning about avalanche safety and tiptoeing around the back country before I felt comfortable enough to go and ski some of the bigger lines in the Chuting Gallery, because I was terrified.

(soft music) It was a project that took me five years to complete, and I really had to learn a lot of different skills and dig deep to finish that one.

Having a decade and a half long career in snow sports and in the outdoor industry, I had always seen a lot of gender bias and other kinds of implicit bias.

There's these rumors that I just paid or traded guides to take me, to hold me up all these lines and I didn't do anything myself.

And it's really frustrating because I feel like it's this way for women's accomplishments to be unwritten in the court of public opinion.

There's a very strong societal expectation about women's roles and women's place.

And when you don't adhere to those societal standards, there's a backlash, there's consequences.

(upbeat music) I don't like wanna be thought of as the spokesperson for cyber bullying or gender bias, like those are hard things to talk about.

But when you don't talk about them, I think it's even worse.

And so I'm really focusing on that right now and trying to take some of the things that I've learned and teach other athletes and inspire other people to use their voices and their platforms.

- It is without a doubt, probably the most iconic sights on the planet, Mount Everest and these two did it.

With this, by the way, yet you climbed Everest without an ACL.

- I did, it was an accident that happened about seven weeks before we left for our trip.

I just had to really rehab my knee quickly and get the balance and proprioception back.

- And you made it work.

I love this Climb for Equality, that's the two of you, tell me about that.

- We did our Everest Chomolungma climb, and we called it a Climb for Equality to talk about the fact that only 10% of climbers on the world's highest peaks are women.

And when you look at leadership positions across the board, whether it's on Everest or it's Hollywood directors or fortune 500 CEOs, you still see an absence of women at the top.

It was a fun way to talk about something that's really not fun to talk about.

One of the things that I've learned is that advocating for women's equality is not just a woman's issue.

Like we need men, we need all people on board.

So it was a way to invite people in through a social media campaign.

(upbeat music) I feel like from what I benefit that I sort of have a duty to give back.

I really believe access to the outdoors is a basic human right.

We need to be doing everything we can to make sure more people have access to the outdoors.

So I went to DC several times to lobby and meet with our representatives and senators.

And I started to get more involved in Utah politics as well.

In 2015, the Park City Council were debating about different renewable energy goals.

And a small group of us got together from the snow sports and outdoor industries and we helped influence the city council to go 100% renewable by 2030.

(upbeat music) And now it's this whole initiative that they're calling Mountain Towns 2030.

And they're trying to get a bunch of other mountain towns to join on.

You think when you're young that you have to be like at the national level, having these big meetings, but the most lasting change that we've accomplished is at the city council level, in a meeting room with 30 people there.

I think that that's a kind of activism that almost everybody can be involved with.

There's a very big power to just everyday concerned citizen coming to the table and using government as a tool for problem solving.

We're all imperfect activists and what the world really needs is every imperfect activist to speak up.

(upbeat music) (laughs) (upbeat music) (water splashes) - Martha Hughes Cannon, or Mattie broke boundaries here 125 years ago as the first female elected to a State Senate in the US.

She fought tirelessly for women's right to vote so it's only fitting that a statue to honor Mattie stand tall in our nation's capitol.

And a Utah artist is bringing Mattie to life.

(upbeat music) - This is Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon.

She's a Welsh immigrant who settled here in Utah as a young lady.

And the thing that stuck out to me about Dr. Cannon here is that she is the first ever woman that was elected to the Office of State Senator in the United States.

And she ran against her husband.

And that just was like a little detail that just kind of stuck out to me, I'm like that's interesting, that's kind of cool.

And then as I got to know more about her that she was a medical professional, she was a suffragist, she was an orator, I was just really impressed with her.

The primary reason why I'm here working on this right now is because there's been a push thanks to primarily Better Days 2020 to have more equal representation of prominent women in the history of the United States represented in statutes, not only in Statuary Hall in DC, but all over the country.

I think she's a better representation of Utah as a whole, hardworking industrious and problem solving, that's just the type of person she was.

And so I think it's really cool that we have her representing our state, our people.

(upbeat music) I always wanted to be an artist.

I didn't know I wanted to be a sculptor until in high school, my senior year, I went to an artist's studio, Blair Buswell.

So he took us to a foundry and it just blew me away, like all the work that went into it.

So growing up on a farm in Idaho, growing up, building homes with my dad, I just love the process.

(buzzer) (metal clanking) Every time I go to the foundry, if they're pouring bronze, I'll stop what I'm doing and go and watch them do it even though I've seen it 100 times, it's just, it never gets old.

So I'm watching these guys dressed in these silver protective suits, dipping this big, glowing red crucible of molten bronze.

And when it comes out, it's as viscous as water.

If you melted at that melting point, it's just like, it'll fill in all these cracks.

And then they literally just like take a hammer and start pounding on it after the bronze cools and break the shell off.

And it's so cool 'cause the bronze has, you can see fingerprints and thumb prints like that's how much detail it captures.

- Here's like the bottom of her dress, the base.

And these are sections of her dress.

These are fitting really, really well though, you can see.

- Utah County is an interesting place.

It's not only full of sculptors, it's full of artists.

This is one of the most interesting things about being a sculptor casting things in bronze is something that I don't have a lot of control over, I leave it up to a talented artisan to put the pieces together.

Overall, I look at this thing and I'm just really, really happy with the direction it's going and that looks really good.

Sculptors specifically come here because Utah County happens to be a place where there's four large fine art foundries that cast in bronze.

And you don't find that anywhere else.

Which is also cool because the statue of Martha isn't just sculpted by me, it's also cast in bronze here in Utah, worked on by people that live here.

In fact, even the bronze that she'll be cast in, they're using copper from Utah.

It's cool, she'll have a part of Utah in her.

(smooth music) For me she represents my heritage as well as the heritage for many people live here in this state.

I'm also a descendant of people that came from other countries and because of their religious affiliation, they moved here to what they called Zion and wanted to settle here and make this a beautiful place.

From the outside looking in, people can see faith as a hindrance to success, almost like you have to compromise your faith in order to succeed.

And she wasn't successful in spite of her faith, she was successful and driven because of her faith because she thought and believed that there was a lot more to life than just the status quo, that you can rise above your station.

And we should make life easier for people so more people can better their lives.

And it ended up being that it did better our lives healthcare wise, economically, and made life better for women to have more of a voice, not only in Utah, but in the nation (slow music) Women could vote in Utah before anywhere else.

We just celebrated the 150th year of women voting in Utah.

I love that Utah had somebody as far back as we did.

We've had strong influential women early on in our history so that's cool.

(flame blazing) This statue will go to Washington, DC, the US Capitol in Statuary Hall.

To me, that's a little overwhelming artistically, just because some of the artists I admire most have artwork there.

There's the emotional side of it about who she is and what it represents as Martha Hughes Cannon, what she has meant to the state and what she continues to inspire and that's overwhelming enough.

But at the same time, I know Mattie belongs there.

I hope I've created something that's excellent enough that the artistic integrity belongs there as well.

(slow music) - Curly Me is a safe space for young black girls in Utah who may find trips to the salon anything but.

Founder, Alyssha Dairsow launched the organization after a trip to a salon left her in tears.

Alyssha has pushed to empower local girls of color coincides with the national movement to create an open and respectful world for people with natural hair.

(upbeat music) - I don't know if you know the meme, but it's like, it's a meme that says after you do the big chop and it's Eddie Murphy (indistinct) and he has this flower in his hair, that was me.

And I was just like this is what we're doing.

And that was like the beginning of really like loving my natural hair.

(water flowing) It's a stress reliever when I'm in it or when I'm twisting it.

It's something that I probably spend more time on my hair than I do on picking out outfits because I love it.

(smooth music) The things that black women can do with our hair, Oh my goodness.

(upbeat music) The styles that I've seen, the techniques that women have adopted to say, this is how I'm gonna present myself to the world, whether you like it or not.

'Cause when I get done, these are gonna be popping.

(upbeat music) People don't understand how political black hair can be.

Over the centuries we've been in this country, we figured it out from not being able to go into places with our natural hair, to having to cover it up to then being told you can't wear a headscarf because other people are feeling some type of way to then not being able to wear our natural afros to then not being able to wear cornrows to work, you have got to be out of your mind.

And then we wonder why so many people struggle with depression over having the right look.

You're putting me in a box in regards to hair.

You're not accepting me as a whole person.

You'll hire me for my talent, but you won't allow me to come in as my authentic self.

And that's problematic because if you want a piece of me and not all of me, I don't know how that's healthy for me to exist in an environment like that.

It's just like, Oh, well, hair is all the same.

It's not, it is not, not how society and media has made it seem.

It's not all the same and if it was, I should be able to go to any salon in this area and get my hair done and I can't because why?

They don't teach it in schools.

(slow music) I remember my first experience here in Utah, trying to get my hair done again, not knowing much.

So I went to a hair school and I remember crying, leaving the school because there were two women on my hair, both minorities, and they didn't really know what was going on.

And then there weren't any teachers coming to see about them.

And I was just like, I was crying.

I'm a 20 something year old woman crying because these folks don't know how to do my hair.

And as I got to know more families or more people, I realized like, if I'm crying, I already know what's going on in their household.

(soft music) I do like the part where the antiques will be like that.

I'm thinking if I could tell you about it and I totally know it's not someone's (indistinct).

- I would love to do like a gala for them.

- But that's just like a cotillion.

Curly Me is for one my baby.

♪ Brown skin girl ♪ Your skin just like pearls ♪ The best thing in the world ♪ Never trade you for anybody else ♪ There's nothing like it here.

It is a resource for families with children of color, specifically black girls between the ages of five and 14.

We hold quarterly events to help educate, empower, and encourage them to be their best selves.

After really saying, well, they don't need it, or it's not needed here, it is needed here.

(upbeat music) If I'm looking from the outside in, it may not make sense.

But I was once the little girl who didn't see a lot of girls in elementary school that had my hair texture.

I just honestly look at these girls literally as an extended family member.

And I just want the best for them.

(upbeat music) - It's an invaluable resource for us.

We were waiting for a child in Ethiopia and in the meantime found out about Caleb.

So we adopted him and then a year later felt like we should adopt again.

So we had Caleb and Noah 13 months apart.

And then we found out about Yemma.

- You saying that's sloppy?

- I'm saying that's sloppy 'cause you can write much better than that.

- Well, this is my best handwriting.

(laughs) - The first time I went into Curly Me, I did not know anybody except for my mom.

- It was the first time I was in a room with more black people than white people.

When we started, it was super uncomfortable for my husband and I we'd go to activities or different events, and we're like, we don't fit in.

But then we realized that's probably how our kids feel most of the time.

- A lot of Utah, it has a bunch of white people in it.

And so it was kind of nice to be around some people that look like me.

One of my favorite activities was called Change the World with Her.

And so we would go to a table and we would learn about black professions.

- To actually be able to sit at a table and discuss chemistry with someone who looks like you changes, it changes your mindset on what you can do, where you can go.

- This lady that once came, talked to us about some hard things about being black like people always touching your hair and like, and some rude comments and stuff like that.

It felt good to be around people that knew how I felt.

- I want them to have the best life that they can have and so many people said, this is what they need.

They need representation of themselves in their books, in their movies, in their friends, in professions, just everywhere.

You have to seek it out 'cause it's not there.

- Once I got to know outside of Salt Lake City how homogenous it was, I was like, yeah, I can't stay here.

Out here in Utah, you have teachers that don't look like you.

And they may not understand your hair and how big a piece hair is.

Talking to some girls it's just like I don't think I'm pretty because someone doesn't understand how to do my hair.

It's definitely interconnected in regards to how you feel about yourself, how you present yourself to the world.

(upbeat music) What brought me to Utah is not why I stayed for sure.

- (indistinct) I mean if you wanna do this it's fine.

And that's fine.

(laughs) - I found out who Alyssha was here, I found out that a lot of my gifts, what a lot of my gifts are here.

I've found vision here.

And that's what keeps me here.

When you see these little girls and their families come, and parents are just taking pictures and the girls are just living their best lives.

I am one who doesn't have kids, but there've been plenty of times where I've just like cried.

I've literally just cried because I'm just so, I feel so blessed and so grateful to be able to provide this space for them.

And it's just worth it.

It makes me feel like I'm living out a part of my purpose.

- It is so good to see courage on display.

Well, "This is Utah's" on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

You can check us out online to see behind the scenes photos or watch your favorite stories on demand.

Until next time I'm Liz Adeola and "This is Utah."

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funding for "This is Utah" is provided by the Willard L. Eccles Foundation, the Lawrence T and Janet T.Dee Foundation and the Contributing Members of PBS Utah, thank you.

(upbeat music)