The Woman Who Helped Generations Fall In Love With Skiing

by | Nov 12, 2026 | Uncategorized

While it might be that mountain adventurers, cliff jumpers, and ski racers capture our attention when we think of the people who make up the fabric of Tahoe mountain resorts, behind the scenes are a whole lot of folks who quietly spend their lives working to create the winter experiences we love. One of those people is Karen Roske, who in 1991 started a ski school for kids at what is now known as Palisades Tahoe. For 30 years she ran the program and helped it grow to a true powerhouse that requires 150 employees to serve 15,000 students a year.

Roske came to Tahoe in 1984 for an internship at Olympic Valley School teaching skiing. She was in her senior year at the University of Maine in Farmington, located near Sugarloaf ski resort, and working toward her degree in a new field: ski area management. When the internship ended, she graduated and came to work at Palisades Tahoe. 

Roske, one of eight children, grew up near Boston and regularly skied at small Massachusetts ski areas.

“Dad took us on Friday nights to Blue Hills in Canton, Mass. As we got older, he put us in the VW Bus and we went up to King Pine, New Hampshire, to ski,” Roske said.

DOWNHILL SKIER: A Palisades Tahoe employee since 1991, Karen is now the vice president of base operations and facilities at Palisades.

While in college she worked at Sugarloaf. “I coached their Bubblecuffer program, which was similar to our Mighty Mites,” as well as obtaining her PSIA (Professional Ski Instructors of America) Level One and Two certificates.

Roske began her career at Palisades Tahoe teaching in the ski school for several years and worked with the Women’s Way program, as well as providing private children’s lessons. Then in 1991, Ski Corp Chairman Alex Cushing asked her to build a ski school specifically designed for kids. “I created Children’s World, which then became Squaw Kids. We started with a very small staff,” Roske said. It became a raging success.

“All those years, creating and formulating the kids program were great and I met so many people from all over the world,” she shared.

As the program grew, the challenge was hiring seasonal employees, and she found them in South America. “I did a lot of the international hiring. I processed all the H2B and J1 visas,” Roske said. “The J1s are students from the Southern Hemisphere on summer break and the H2Bs are skilled ski patrollers and instructors. I taught myself how to do it.”

For 14 summers, she traveled to South America to recruit employees while also trying to get a bit of skiing in. 

Karen met Pete Roske in 1990; he worked at Palisades Tahoe as a lift mechanic. They married in 1993 and have two children: Ingrid, who lives in Boston, and Max, who is about to leave the Marines as a helicopter mechanic.

There is an old saying: if you want to get something done, find somebody who is really busy. And often in Tahoe that means an active mom. Karen fits the bill. As her own kids grew, she became involved with many of the programs that serve our community’s children. While managing a large kids ski program was more than a full-time job, she still somehow found the time to start a cross-country ski program at Tahoe Lake Elementary, volunteered for Excellence in Education and the parent teacher organization, and donated a lot of her time to help put on the Tahoe Community Nursery School ski swap.

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In addition, for 20 years she worked as a coach for the Strider Gliders program at Tahoe Cross-Country Ski Area. As her director during that time, I always found her to be a dependable, hardworking volunteer who for many years took on the hardest class to teach: beginning skate skiing.

NORDIC SKIER: Karen Roske with her children, Ingrid and Max, at Tahoe Cross-Country.

“There was so much to do. I volunteered for all the programs. I was being really involved as well as running the business. You don’t have forever when the kids are young,” she said. 

“Karen is a doer,” Sydney Earley agreed. “I met her at Tahoe Lake when we had kids in kindergarten. We both started volunteering at the school. She has been a lifelong advocate for education, both formal and skiing.”

In the fall of 2020, Roske transitioned from her position running the kids ski school to vice president of base operations and facilities at Palisades, which has more regular hours, enabling her to spend a lot more time backpacking.

“She is remarkable and inspirational, and also an incredible outdoorsman,” Earley said. “She turned women our age into backpackers. We wouldn’t have done it without her. She will often call you and say, ‘we are going backpacking, here is the route and the trip.’ She was the push you need to actually do it.”

Earley says that Roske has lots of energy and stamina. “I look at her and say, ‘I need to do more.’ Hers is a life well lived.”