CB’s wunderkind on the 2026 Olympics, trail running, and the beauty of slinging hay bales.
To be one of a dozen pinprick lights from a headlamp, one of a dozen people shivering in down jackets and beanies, pacing around a makeshift aid station offering everything from hot soup to gummy bears to a pair of fresh socks — to be one of these people in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, is to be part of the strange world of ultrarunning called “crewing.” Essential, yes. Glamorous? Never.
Last July, Aaron Blunck was one of those people.
A three-time Olympian, a world champion, a skier who has stood atop podiums at the X Games, Blunck could have been anywhere in July. He chose instead to be on the side of a rugged trail in the San Juans, tending to his friend Pat O’Neill as he staggered through the Hardrock 100 ultramarathon.
Initially, Blunck signed up to pace O’Neill — pacing, alongside crewing, is another integral role a non-participant can play in the sport — but an injury relegated him to the sidelines. It turns out that was exactly where he belonged. When O’Neill struggled, as everyone does during Hardrock, Blunck was there with the right words.
“I reminded him that he wasn’t just doing this for himself,” Blunck said. “He was doing it to raise money for people who couldn’t be out there, for Living Journeys. That’s what kept him going. I think that hit home. To remind him that this wasn’t about his own suffering, it was about something bigger.”
Living Journeys, the Crested Butte nonprofit that provides support for those living with cancer, is close to O’Neill’s heart. He sits proudly on its board. In the depths of the race, when his body was begging him to stop, it was Blunck who brought that cause back to the front of his mind.
How did Blunck, a professional skier some 30 years O’Neill’s junior, end up as his middle-of-the-night motivational speaker at the Hardrock 100 ultra? It’s a story, like Blunck’s own, that could only have been born in Crested Butte.
Crested Butte roots
In 1996, Blunck was born into a legacy Crested Butte ski family. His grandfather, Robel Straubhaar, emigrated to the U.S. from Switzerland and founded the ski school at the Crested Butte Ski Area, which he ran for 34 years. Blunck’s mother, Lisa, and her brothers were raised on the mountain; for decades, Lisa carried on the family tradition of ski instruction. Blunck’s father, Michael, although not originally from CB, fully embraced mountain life.
Growing up in Crested Butte meant skiing — and playing other sports — almost as soon as Blunck and his brother could walk.
“We skied every day,” he said. “My parents would pull us out of school on powder days.
Hockey was big here, so we did that, too. I played soccer. But skiing was always the thing.” By middle school, Blunck was narrowing his focus. “I had quit other sports just for skiing,” he said. “I was starting to travel, starting to miss school, convincing my dad on powder days to let us skip school.”
One person who noticed was his English teacher, Pat O’Neill. “He really liked me,” Blunck said. “He was always super into what I was doing and kind of could see the path I was on. I was starting to travel more domestically, starting to miss school. And if it was snowing outside and he knew I wasn’t there, it was pretty obvious where I was.”
While O’Neill, who taught English at the Crested Butte Community School for 28 years, may have turned a blind eye to Blunck’s frequent absences, other school staff weren’t so accommodating. Despite Blunck posting some impressive results at national competitions, the school wasn’t equipped to give him special treatment.
“They weren’t necessarily looking at my results and being like, ‘holy smokes’; they were looking at my school scores,” Blunck said, adding that he was “a C student at best.”
So, Blunck and his family made the decision to transfer him to the Vail Ski and Snowboard Academy, where the staff was accustomed to prioritizing sport alongside schoolwork. Suddenly, Blunck went from being one of the best young skiers in town to a nobody among kids whose parents had been on the U.S. Ski Team for decades or had helped found the Vail ski resort. The tension turned out to be exactly what he needed.
“I finally was surrounded by people who could push me,” Blunck said. “I definitely felt like a little fish in a big pond. But I quickly realized that I could be a big fish in a big pond, if I put my mind to it. And the other thing was that my dad was very adamant about ‘if you mess up, if you get one strike, you’re back home, and you’re not skiing anymore.’”
The challenge — and the ultimatum — were a perfect setup. Blunck already loved to ski and wanted to ski alongside, not simply look up to, his idols in the freeskiing world.
Rising in freeskiing
When Blunck was coming up in freeskiing, the discipline was still carving out its identity. Unlike alpine racing, which is measured in hundredths of a second, or moguls, which adhere to strict form and technique, freeskiing thrived on creativity. Halfpipe and slopestyle rewarded difficulty, amplitude, variation, and execution.
For someone who grew up building his own jumps in the woods outside Crested Butte, freeskiing was a perfect fit. “It wasn’t someone telling you every single move to make,” Blunck said. “That’s what I loved about it.”
Freeskiing gave him the freedom to explore, but also an arena in which to test his competitive fire. He thrived in the halfpipe, where spinning and flipping 20 feet above icy walls became both an art form and a sport. By his teens, Blunck was stacking results. The arc was steady: junior standout to World Cup athlete to X Games medalist. “It just snowballed,” he said. “I started doing well, then made the U.S. team, then started traveling internationally. It all happened pretty fast.”
In 2012, Blunck won bronze in halfpipe at the Youth Olympic Games in Innsbruck. A year later, he was on the U.S. Ski Team. By the time he was 20, he had won X Games gold in Aspen (2017) and halfpipe world titles in Sierra Nevada (2017) and Park City (2019). He would go on to earn multiple X Games silvers, three consecutive top-10 finishes at the Olympics, and more than a dozen World Cup podiums.
Freeskiing demanded a unique balance: fearless creativity paired with relentless precision. Blunck’s upbringing in Crested Butte — where powder days sometimes counted for more than classroom days — had given him both. He knew how to play. He knew how to compete. And he had both the curiosity and the energy to pack both into a suitcase and travel the world in search of the best snow.
Bringing it back home
For all the time Blunck spent chasing podiums around the world, his compass never drifted far from home. Even in the thick of the Olympic grind, he carried Crested Butte with him — its community, its mountains, its way of life.
After years of living away from the valley — in Vail, Breckenridge, Denver, and the Pacific Northwest — Blunck and his wife, Morgan, came home about a year and a half ago, and welcomed their first child, Faye Josephine Blunck, in September 2025.
They’ve put down new roots in Gunnison, which is close enough to CB for Blunck to ski, ride, and visit his family on a whim but also more affordable and low-key. Returning home hasn’t meant slowing down, however. Blunck is still training and has aspirations to qualify for the 2026 Olympics in Italy, which would be his fourth Games. Nevertheless, competition under the bright lights isn’t his sole motivation, and it shows in how he’s living his life. Whether it’s his new foray into trail running or spending time biking singletrack or visiting surf breaks, Blunck “just wants to be a well-rounded athlete at the end of the day.” This summer, he worked on a ranch in Gunnison, slinging hay bales and spending long days in the sun.
It’s all part of what he calls “continuing to learn the mountains” — not just through skiing, but through the rhythm of life that comes with them.
Blunck’s journey, from a kid skipping school on powder days to becoming a three- time Olympian, has always been about seizing opportunities and never taking them for granted. The most important lessons have come not from podiums but from unlikely places: a hayfield in Gunnison, the ultrarunning community, his dad’s relentless fundraising for the Adaptive Sports Center, and his former English teacher Pat O’Neill. Along the way, Blunck has become a mentor himself. “The student has become the teacher,” O’Neill said of his once-pupil’s influence on his own life. But Blunck would be the first to add that he’s still very much the student, still soaking up wisdom from the mountains and the community that raised him.