Can a hike heal Washington? Utah’s next senator thinks so

Call it single-track diplomacy. Or maybe just an excuse to take the campaign trail to higher ground. But regardless of who wins in November, Utah’s next U.S. senator thinks the best place to discuss economic policy, energy goals and global affairs is in a pair of hiking boots.
The preferred town hall tactic for both the Republican and Democratic nominees vying to replace Sen. Mitt Romney is this: pick a top problem facing the federal government, and instead of debating it on the stump, or online, take it to the steep climbs and vibrant fall colors of a mountain path.
Taking in the Beehive State’s natural beauty makes it harder to focus on disagreements, the reasoning goes, and allows for long conversations about solutions that matter. Rep. John Curtis, a climate-minded conservative, and Caroline Gleich, a liberal green-energy lobbyist, have both made constituent nature walks a fixture of their Senate bids in an attempt to appeal across inter- and intra-partisan divides.
The Deseret News went on a hike with each candidate to pick their brains about what they see as the country’s most concerning challenges and why they remain hopeful about America’s future.
Curtis chose to field questions on the Lake Mary Trail above Brighton Resort in Big Cottonwood Canyon. Curtis hosted his first hiking meet-and-greet on Mount Timpanogos the year following his election to represent Utah’s 3rd Congressional District in 2017.
What has now become an annual tradition for Curtis started out as a way to help voters and activists understand his views as a fiscal conservative who prioritized clean air initiatives after he was elected mayor of Provo in 2010.
“I knew that we had tons in common, and that if we would get out on a trail and just enjoy each other, the nature, that we would tend to focus more on what we had in common than what we differed on,” Curtis said.
Curtis believes “everybody should have to be a mayor before they go to Congress.” His time as Provo’s chief executive taught him that most problems can be solved with one-on-one conversations, Curtis said. With his constituent hikes, Curtis has attempted to bring this ethos to the House, and hopes to do the same in the Senate.
But this kind of face-time between lawmakers is becoming increasingly rare, he said. In its place, Curtis sees a growing temptation for elected officials to perform for a camera rather than cultivate relationships on Capitol Hill that lead to policy becoming law. If lawmakers take a stand against legislative leadership and catch the attention of social media and cable news, they are rewarded by a boost in small-dollar donations, Curtis said.
These incentives were all too apparent during the past legislative term when GOP representatives took turns torpedoing efforts to follow regular order in the spending process, Curtis said. The way he sees it, Congress will function more seriously if it takes a “Brighton hike” approach over a “cable news” approach to policymaking.
“Your ability to just talk frankly, and let your partisan walls down just a little bit is enhanced so dramatically,” Curtis said. “Everything about the Washington, D.C., environment builds those walls up.”
For Gleich, a first-time candidate with a background as a professional skier and climate activist, the problem underlying congressional malpractice is large donors, not small ones. While walking the Logan River Trail at Canyon Entrance Park, Gleich — herself a social media influencer — said lawmakers who are beholden to big-moneyed special interests are to blame for inaction on important issues.
“It’s undemocratic that billionaires can put tens of millions of dollars into basically buying an election; and that’s something I want to change,” Gleich said. “Nobody’s buying me.”
Like Curtis, Gleich believes spending time in the outdoors can help candidates step beyond partisan pressures and communicate across ideological differences. Gleich is excited to see more athletes and brands “using their voices” to speak out on political topics. In her campaign, she has attempted to “mobilize the outdoor community” by taking voters on nature walks.
“When you sit down and go for a hike with someone, you realize we have a lot more in common than we realized,” Gleich said.
Looking away from Brighton’s north-facing slope covered in golden aspens, Curtis listed the things that keep him up at night: national debt, the peaceful transfer of power and the emerging unity between Russia, Iran, North Korea and China.
If he had to isolate one issue as the most immediately concerning, it would be an escalation of tensions between Israel and Iran, Russia and Ukraine or China and Taiwan — where he served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and learned to speak Mandarin fluently.
“I’m very, very concerned about our relationship with China,” Curtis said. “It’s at a tipping point, and if it tips the wrong way, it’s not going to be good for us, it’s not going to be good for China, it’s not going to be good for the world.”
With situations escalating across the globe, Curtis says the proximity of global warfare is the most neglected topic in American politics. On Monday, Russia proposed record military spending as it makes territorial gains in its war with Ukraine. On Tuesday, Iran launched a missile attack against Israel, almost ensuring a direct response in the rapidly expanding war in the Middle East.
The United States is “clearly, clearly, clearly” not prepared to handle the growth of these conflicts in a way that secures American interests, Curtis said. One of his biggest worries is that the country will be caught unaware by a massive cyber attack “that could decimate our electric grid.”
Americans must be willing to break from the “momentum of prosperity” that prevents the country from making sacrifices to shore up its national security, Curtis said. He pointed to the blowback Congress received when his committee voted to advance a bill that would force China to divest itself of TikTok.
“We’re enabling the ease of an enemy disrupting us by that unwillingness to damper that prosperity,” Curtis said.
In addition to democratic backsliding and the influence of money on politics, Gleich also listed foreign conflicts as the most immediately threatening problem for America. Gleich described a recent shift in her perception of the importance of military spending.
The “life-defining” moment came earlier this year while visiting a NATO aircraft carrier off the coast of France with a group of other internet content creators. She said the trip opened her eyes to the “larger implications” of “the growing threat of Russia and China.” Military spending is important to defend “America’s place in the global order,” Gleich said.
Gleich grew up talking about “geopolitics” around the dinner table with her father, a Korean War veteran, she said. These conversations convinced her that “politics really touches our lives in many more ways than we realize.”
Gleich also worries about “the erosion of democracy” across the globe and “the influence of big money in politics.” She said she would support the campaign finance reforms in the “Freedom to Vote Act,” which would tighten disclosure requirements around online ads and establish small-dollar donor matching for congressional campaigns.
Gleich has focused much of her campaign messaging on protecting access to abortion. She said restrictions on “reproductive freedom” can have unintended consequences that negatively impact access to other forms of women’s healthcare.
Gleich mentioned reporting that indicates states with abortion restrictions, like Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee, are losing obstetricians leading to a lack of gynecological care. “It’s not that complicated,” Gleich said. “It’s that we have to trust people to make their best decisions and to get the government to stop interfering in these decisions.”
But Gleich reserves the word “crisis” for the issue she has spent her entire career working on.
“The climate crisis is here, it is widespread and it is a public health crisis,” Gleich said. “We have the solutions, we just need people that have the courage to fight for them in Congress at scale.”
Gleich spent years lobbying congressional lawmakers on “clean energy bills,” including the massive Inflation Reduction Act, and has said the country needs “systemic” investments to overhaul the energy grid, public transportation and electric vehicle infrastructure.
Gleich said she doesn’t understand why climate policy “became something that has a blue or red or a D or an R attached to it.” Gleich said she has rarely found Republicans willing to work with her on the issue and suspects it may have something to do with campaign “funding from the fossil fuel industry.”
Curtis disagrees with Gleich’s approach, despite their shared emphasis on climate policy. Curtis is recognized for having formed the House Conservative Climate Caucus and for spearheading legislation on energy permitting reform. But Curtis said he believes it is counterproductive to label increasing global temperatures a “crisis.”
“Here’s the problem,” Curtis said, “when everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis. And a lot of my colleagues on the Left elevate everything to a crisis.”
Curtis takes the impacts of climate change seriously, he said. While he didn’t vote for the green energy-focused Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed without Republican votes in a budget reconciliation process, he thinks there are enough good provisions on nuclear energy and carbon capture that he doesn’t support it’s immediate repeal.
Curtis’ approach differs markedly from that of Gleich by focusing mostly on deregulation to allow the market to lead the way in the transition to “affordable, reliable, clean energy.” Apocalyptic rhetoric about climate policy pushes away those who worry a “crisis” will be used to justify drastic alterations to people’s way of life, he said.
“It’s kind of a scare tactic rather than a thoughtful discussion about meaningful change that will make this world better,” Curtis said. “The reality of it is, it’s possible to institute changes to accommodate climate change that are worse than climate change.”
Despite campaign consultants’ predictions that Curtis’ climate focus would spell his “political demise,” Curtis said he has found success in giving Republicans a place at the table in climate discussions by “talking practical not hair on fire.”
But when it comes to the national debt, the latter approach may be more appropriate Curtis said.
Conversations with economic experts have led Curtis to believe that there is an unnervingly short runway before the world’s confidence in America’s borrow-to-spend behavior runs out.
With $35.5 trillion in debt, and interest payments that now exceed defense spending, Curtis worries it is only a matter of time before people stop buying U.S. treasury bonds, the country becomes unable to service its debt and the dollar loses its reserve-currency status around the world.
“Having just complained about calling everything a crisis, I do believe the debt is a crisis. We’re in crisis,” Curtis said. “Every day we don’t do anything about it, it gets harder to get out of.”
To right the country’s sinking fiscal ship, Curtis said Congress must make structural reforms to its budgeting process to discourage massive omnibus spending packages and encourage more careful and transparent appropriations of American tax dollars. Gleich also said Americans should be more concerned about saddling future generations with enormous amounts of debt.
Curtis said he has a proposal that is gaining traction among House lawmakers to mimic Utah’s baseline budget, where lawmakers agree at the beginning of each year that if they can’t pass a new budget, the previous year’s budget will be renewed without any spending increases.
This removes the threat of a shutdown which is often used to push through wasteful spending and will incentivize actual negotiations on important spending items, Curtis said. While this likely would not result in immediate slashes to spending, Curtis said it would change the spending culture in Washington, D.C., enough for the debt to slow, and then stop, its exponential climb.
“I think everybody would feel comfortable if the trajectory was down, even if it was very slow,” Curtis said.
Ultimately, the country’s biggest problem on a given day happens to be whichever bad outcome is most imminent, Curtis said. He hopes this never applies to the peaceful transfer of power following this year’s presidential race. Curtis said both parties will be susceptible to harmful reactions in the case of a close election.
Curtis called on fellow Republicans to consider that many of the most worrisome states during 2020′s COVID-19 election, have “totally revamped their election laws.” The founders decentralized presidential elections among the states intentionally, Curtis said. Congress’ job is to honor the results.
“When the states send those election results for us to ratify, the Founders intended us to ratify him,” Curtis said. “That’s what I did, and that’s what I’ll do.”
As the overwhelming favorite to become Utah’s next senator, Curtis said he has worked to better articulate the direction he wants the GOP to take in future years. He said his brand of conservatism is defined by “Pioneer values,” which include self-reliance and independence, as well as a pragmatic view on addressing homelessness and welfare through family-friendly government policy.
Ideally, the Republican Party will once again reflect “the optimism, the civility, the patriotism, the belief in a country and that we could prevail in any circumstance” of Ronald Reagan, said Curtis, who has recently gone “down a rabbit hole” of listening to Reagan’s speeches as president.
However, the GOP has strayed from those ideals, according to Gleich. Republicans’ refusal to back a bipartisan border security bill earlier this year was an instance of politics taking precedence over the public good, Gleich said. “People don’t want weaponization or political games. They want action and they want solutions, and they want people who will get it done,” Gleich said.
Gleich believes that when regular Americans look past partisan labels they are able to see “there’s a lot that we have in common, and there’s a lot of things that do make America really a wonderful place to live.”
Like Gleich, Curtis rejects claims that America is destined for decline — despite conflicts sparking up around the globe, and crushing debt and cultural polarization at home. As he took a rest at the end of his hike, Curtis said his trips to over 30 countries around the world have taught him something about American exceptionalism.
“I’ve never been anywhere in the world where on our worst day, everybody didn’t want to be us,” Curtis said.
Yes, social media and cable news punish bipartisan problem solving. Yes, Americans are struggling to talk to each other in an age of internet isolation. But no, this has not compromised the country’s unique “self-healing” character. With the mid-day sun shining brightly down on Brighton’s epic arena of autumn colors, Curtis couldn’t help but arrive at a hopeful conclusion.
“The DNA of our people, the Constitution, all of those fundamental things, mean that everybody will still look to the United States for leadership,” Curtis said. “We have fabulous days ahead of us.”