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What is a gift, anyway?

When working on the Backcountry newsletter last week, my subject line was critiqued. To be fair, it was pretty shit. I changed it to “Stories are a gift.” Originally, it was just a way to tie into the items in the newsletter, but it also got me thinking about the upcoming holidays.

No matter what you celebrate, in the culture I grew up in, a vast majority of people exchange stuff. Maybe you can tell from my word choice, but I’ve never been that inspired by this version of a gift exchange. I’ve been privileged enough to be surrounded by stuff all the time. I don’t need more of it.

But stories—those are a gift. In fact, they might be the gift. Plenty of anthropologists, in one way or another, have argued that point. Stories make us human. They connect us, they divide us. We feed ourselves internal narratives and create external storylines, all of which chan over time. Meaning is lost and refound. Oftentimes, stories are divine.

I’ve fed myself a story that I’m not a fan of gift-based celebration. But it’s just a story. Or maybe, that’s all anything is.

Take some time to tell a story or receive a story. And if you need inspiration, check out some of our stories. After all, they are a gift. —Liam McGee

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There’s an aesthetic to backcountry skiing. Creative uptracks. Clean lines. Blank canvasses. That haggard tree silhouetted against the rising sun. The cold air as it burns in your nostrils. The sparkle of diamond dust and the silence of snow-cloaked mountains. The weightlessness of a perfect powder turn. 

Every once in a while, a photographer picks up their camera, points it into this magical world and clicks. Often, the very best of what they capture ends up in the inbox of Backcountry Magazine Art Director Mike Lorenz. 

After 16 years, he has perused hundreds of thousands of ski photos from every corner of the Earth. And every year, he chooses a selection that draws you deep into the backcountry; that captures that aesthetic. 

Issue 160, The Photo Annual, is about those moments that stop you in your tracks, the frames that freeze them forever and the stories that accompany them. It’s the wisdom of trees and cricket played with avalanche shovels in the Karakoram. It’s the aesthetic impacts of avalanche mitigation in Little Cottonwood Canyon and reflections on learning the ropes from Hilaree Nelson. It’s a career that supports life in a mountain town without limiting your time in the mountains and the sit skier fundraising for Hatcher Pass Avalanche Center.

As the chaos and joy of the holiday season descends upon us, take the time to sit down, wherever you are, and be transported to skintracks near and far. Grab a copy of The Photo Annual, (or a few) and put it in your favorite skier’s stocking. —The Backcountry Team

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Tele Mike Russell: Turns for All

Tele Mike Russell grew up as a sharecropper’s son in Delaware before attending college and becoming an executive in the pharmaceutical industry. Then he watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center and decided he’d better follow another path, this one to skiing in Colorado, where he’d go on to find a family in the National Brotherhood of Skiers and help found its backcountry program.

Eric Blehm: Meet Your Heroes

Eric Blehm’s roots in snowboarding run deep. He started riding during the sport’s infancy, and after college became an editor at Transworld SNOWboarding Magazine. Years later, he was in a lift line when a fellow rider saw the “Craig Kelly is my Co-Pilot” sticker on his board, and asked Blehm: “Who is Craig Kelly?” He was floored by the notion that there were snowboarders out there who didn’t know who Craig was. And this inspired him to write The Darkest White.

The Photo Annual

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Uphill Travel Guide

Resort Skinning Policies

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