Season 2 / Episode 3
The Entrepreneur
Louise Sanseau grew up in Oakland, California, an outgoing and outdoorsy kid from the start. She picked up telemark skiing while in college in Colorado and after graduating, she followed a couple of friends to the ski town of Jackson, Wyoming, thinking she’d spend a year or two ski bumming before figuring out the rest of her life.
In Jackson, she worked multiple jobs, as ski bums tend to do—helping at-risk youth, waiting tables at a high-end restaurant, and teaching yoga—and she skied every day she could. “My first couple of winters there, we got over 400 inches of snow,” Louise says. “You’d get five or 10 runs inbounds before crossing another track. I was hooked.”
After a couple of winters, she started entering big-mountain telemark competitions, traveling to Alaska and Crested Butte and Tahoe to huck herself off cliffs in front of a panel of judges. It was fun, sure, but it wasn’t a career. Louise was itching for something more.
So by 2010, Louise had an idea: Why wasn’t there a hot yoga studio in Jackson? So at the age of 25 with no prior business experience, she made a deal with a silent investor and opened her own yoga studio, called Inversion Yoga, which has since been voted best yoga studio in Jackson and now employs over 20 yoga teachers. “I had no idea what I was doing at first,” Louise admits. “I was just going with it.”
It's visionaries and entrepreneurs like Louise that resonate most with us here at Flylow—people who see a void in a mountain town and come up with a solution to fix that problem while also creating jobs in a place they want to live.
Westward Series: Season 6
What is it about Vermont? There are places with bigger mountains that get more snow and less subzero temps. But there is no place with a more committed core of skiers. Raining? No problem. Bulletproof? They invented bulletproof. Negative 20 and 30mph wind? Better be ready at 6am so you can get first chair at Stowe.