From Eastern Carnivals and U.S. nationals to the Youth Olympic Games and World Junior Championships — young Leadville-born cross-country skiers don spandex suits draped in red, green, blue and yellow.

Most them, however, started in Panther purple.

“I think it’s kind of cool to see how everyone is from the same place but in different uniforms,” said Ella Bullock, a two-time Colorado High School Ski League state champion for Lake County who now skis for Ski and Snowboard Club Vail (SSCV).

“I am so excited by the amount of incredible athletes Leadville has managed to produce,” added Adele Horning, a freshman skiing for perennial NCAA power Dartmouth.

At the beginning of January, both competed at U.S. senior nationals in Midway, Utah. Joining them at the 2002 Olympic venue were Adele’s sister Rose — who claimed two junior podiums competing for SSCV — and her cousin Josiah, racing in the Cloud City Mountain Sports (CCMS) kit. Jace Peters, now a freshman at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, came back to the continental U.S. for the event as well. Meanwhile, Leadville-grown Nina Schamberger was right at home all week wearing the University of Utah red and white.

“So far, I’ve been loving the NCAA experience,” Schamberger said. “It’s really fun to have a driven team around me and the resources they have for us are amazing.”

The 18-year-old rounded out the national podium in the opening 10k classic interval start but didn’t finish the 20k freestyle on the final day. Overall, she “wasn’t super happy” about her nationals performances, but said she learned a lot about how to approach the rest of the year.

“I was having issues in December with tendonitis and illness, so I was happy to be able to race and I’m looking forward to what I can do later in the season,” Schamberger said, adding that she’s approaching her rookie campaign with a process-oriented approach.

“The biggest goal for me is to gain experience racing at the competitive collegiate and international levels, and to become a better racer,” she said. “To me, that means approaching races from a place of excitement and positivity, really working on my mental game, and practicing different strategies, including pacing.”

Adele Horning said she’s also loving NCAA skiing. U.S. senior nationals was her first race trip with the Big Green. Before the 10k skate mass start, her coach, Cami Thompson Graves — who also coached Adele’s mom in college — told her to take a risk and try to stay with the top girls for as long as possible.

“I surprised myself,” Horning said of finishing 15^th out of 128 junior participants.

“I have historically struggled with skating, and this was somewhat of a breakthrough race for me.”

Horning’s season continued at her first EISA Carnival at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center on Jan. 13-14 , an experience she described as “incredible.”

“There were many fast skiers to race with,” she said regarding her 42nd-place finish in the 10k freestyle individual start. Horning hopes submerging herself in the EISA’s traditionally deep ocean of talent weekend-after-weekend will help develop her mass-start tactics.

The strategy’s working so far.

In last weekend’s Harvard Carnival, she placed 27^th in the 15k classic mass start.

“I don’t really have any results goals yet for the season. I tentatively hope to get top 10 in a carnival, but this may be adjusted based on how the first carnivals go,” she said. “However, I hope to grow overall as a skier and person.”

Bullock raced all three days at senior nationals, despite battling illness. She finished 45^th in the 10k freestyle.

“Skate distance is my kind of thing and I just had the mindset for that race,” Bullock, who is targeting a top-10 finish at Junior Nationals in March, said.

On her return trip to Soldier Hollow at the end of January for the ‘SuperQ’ — a meeting of all the best Rocky Mountain Nordic and Intermountain Division junior athletes — Bullock improved dramatically, placing seventh out of 85 U18 and U20 skiers in the 7.5k interval start.

“She is a skater girl and she fought it out there on Saturday,” SSCV head coach Lenka Sterling said, adding that the “self-assuring performance” should make it easier for the Lake County junior to achieve the rest of her season objectives.

Big stages

It’s hard — even for a full-time sports reporter obsessed with Nordic skiing – to keep track of all the trails Leadville kids are traversing this winter.

Peters and Adele Horning will continue their respective Rocky Mountain Intercollegiate and EISA circuits, with Peters’ UAF team stopping at Maloit Park in Minturn for the DU Invite Feb. 9-10. If either qualifies for NCAA nationals, they’ll return to the Centennial State March 6-9 in Steamboat Springs.

Meanwhile, Schamberger is currently in Planica, Slovenia for her third FIS Nordic Junior World Ski Championships. In two weeks, she’ll make her World Cup debut in Minneapolis, the first World Cup held on U.S. soil in 23 years.

Rose Horning made her junior worlds debut last year in Canada as a 16-year-old. Even though she qualified for the event again this year, she opted for the Youth Olympic Games (YOG) in Pyeong Chang, South Korea.

“I think it’s a cool opportunity,” she said of the quadrennial event while cheering for her Panther friends at the first Colorado High School Ski League race of the year back on Jan. 12 at Tennessee Pass.

“I talked to a few other athletes who had gone in the past and they said it was a lot of fun.”

At senior nationals, Horning finished as the top U18 skier in the 10k individual start classic and was runner-up to her Youth Olympic Games teammate, Neve Gerard, who shares her birthday, on the final day’s 10k mass start skate race. She placed 18^th in the sprint, 13^th in the individual start classic and was on the fifth-place mixed relay team at the Youth Olympic Games, which wrapped up on Feb. 1.

Bundled up in one of the several Team USA jackets she’s acquired from her slew of development team camps and race opportunities, Horning — undeniably the most accomplished Panther Nordic alumni at this point —was merely an anonymous fan on the subzero January CHSSL season-opener. It’s a circuit where she also won a state title as a freshman.

Even though she’s since soared to international heights, the accomplished student-athlete (she’s also a pretty good musician) isn’t too cool to sprint alongside her little brother and yell encouragement as he finishes his middle school race.

The camaraderie is part of the Cloud City culture.

“It’s such a strong support group. When we’re there, we’re cheering for each other,” Rose Horning said.

When athletes from America’s highest city congregate at big races – even if they’re in different uniforms — Horning said it’s “like a Leadville reunion.”

“Everyone comes back together,” she continued. “That’s definitely fun.”

For Josiah Horning, traveling to U.S. nationals wasn’t about trying to earn an international start.

“I went in expecting to just race with some really fast guys and not necessarily place well, but more just going just to get experience racing at a national level,” he said. “And it was good. I need to work on sprinting,” he laughed.

Trips to ‘SoHo’ have been a confidence boost for the senior, who is shooting for a state podium.

“And it was really good to see like, ‘oh, ok, these are some people that I’m competitive with. These people who look like they’re so much better — like, ‘oh, you’re almost catching them.’ So, it was encouraging in some senses,” he said.

Horning spent the first three years of high school chasing Peters, who embodies the Leadville pipeline better than most. During his freshman winter, Peters infamously participated in not one, not two, not three, but four winter sports — Alpine, Nordic, basketball and hockey.

He wound up runner-up in the skimeister state competition that season — to his own teammate – a theme that stuck with him through subsequent cross-country, track and ski campaigns. Peters kept on showing up, however, and slowly, the grind of before-school lifting sessions with his dad, morning runs in the dark by himself, and frigid October mornings spent double-poling in the tire tracks on Turquoise Lake all paid off.

In his final prep ski race, Peters finally took his first and only state title. Later in the winter, he earned a junior national slot, a significant, blue-collar accomplishment for an athlete not directly affiliated with a robust, Rocky Mountain Nordic Ski Club equipped with multiple full-time coaches.

If Horning and Schamberger outgrew Dutch Henry before they could even go to prom, and Peters only just in time for graduation, Bullock’s development is somewhere in the middle. She’s split practices between both SSCV and Lake County the last couple of years. She’s leaned more into what SSCV coaches Lenka Sterling and Eric Pepper can offer at Maloit Park as her abilities have required. That schedule is something Lake County coach Karl Remsen is all for.

The math teacher and ski savant happily accepts athletes all along the ability spectrum — no matter their background — and shepherds them through Lake County’s skinny-ski Proverbs 22:6 upbringing.

“Karl is an incredible coach who helps his athletes grow in many ways,” Adele Horning said, adding that he teaches young people to truly love the sport.

“Many of his athletes become lifelong skiers, and some have even become coaches,” she continued.

“He is much of the reason why Leadville skiing has grown so much recently.”

Remsen has teamed up with Christine Horning to help kids at each step of their growth. It’s a process which sometimes ends with the athlete spreading their wings to leave the nest.

“My mom has done a wonderful job of providing additional opportunities for those seeking it,” Adele explained.

“She ensures the athletes who want to try racing beyond high school have the opportunities they need to do so, and supports all of her athletes’ needs.”

Horning said she sees a “culture of grittiness, determination and fight” in Leadville. She said it’s a big reason why the tiny town has produced some of the country’s best skiers.

“And I’m so fortunate to have grown up surrounded by it,” she said.

“I’ve found that, because of the community we are surrounded with, young athletes from Leadville grow up thinking differently about sports and the grit endurance sports require of us,” Horning continued before adding that a Leadvillian’s outlook on what is ‘normal’ is truly unique.

“We’ve grown up in a community where many of our parents or aunts or uncles or close friends have biked or run 100 miles across mountains, so we see the challenging aspects of our sport as simply part of life. They do not intimidate us, because we’ve seen others do things way beyond what we thought would be possible.”

Despite its humble, rural Scandinavian genesis and symbolic embodiment of Idraet — the Norwegian word for ‘sport,’ which implies a transcendent ethic to athletic endeavors — cross-country skiing today is an activity where money matters.

Expensive waxes, fleets of skis, grind options, pristine grooming — all seem to be modern requirements for excelling in a sport that started out as a means of transportation on wooden planks. And even though the inconsistent grooming of their home trails can be a constant drip of annoyance — “we got to ski in tracks,” one Panther said at the Tennessee Pass season opener…..“We never get to do that” — it’s a thorn in the flesh Leadville skiers make the most of. No conditions — soft and slow or Pisten-Bully-firm — come as a surprise.

Schamberger explains the Leadville ethos as being almost organically joyful. Pure. Tied back to skisports ‘idraet’ heritage.

“I think skiers from Leadville thrive because we start skiing not to compete,” she said.

“But simply because we want to be outside and have fun in the snow.”