New Favorite Person
Joe Cronquist Skuggles the Tetons
In the fall of 2020, 26-year-old Joe Cronquist went out to meditate while juggling on his slackline. He had an epiphany—as the line snapped back and forth, his upper body stayed quiet and centered, tossing the clubs. It felt similar to skiing moguls. An image of himself skiing while juggling popped into his head. Cronquist couldn’t unsee it. “I knew I was going to do it,” he says.
A lifelong skier based in Jackson, WY, Cronquist had been questioning his “Why” when it came to the sport. He worried that pushing himself further, higher and steeper had started to toe a line with risk he was no longer willing to cross. He hoped that skiing while juggling—skuggling, as he calls it—would allow him to find the high that adrenaline sports offer, but in a way that was less likely to put his body through the wringer.
So Cronquist showed up at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, WY, that year with clubs in hand. A slow start to winter had everyone confined to the lone strip of machine-made snow that snaked down the mountain. Which meant that the entertainment was a welcome, if unexpected, distraction. “People were pretty stoked on me, because we were all just stuck there,” Cronquist remembers.