On February 19, my friend Erme Catino and I met up for a trip to Mapleton, Utah, to ski and photograph Spanish Fork Peak. Some years past, there’d been a fire on the mountain above town, leaving a ghost forest that transitioned from oak to large spruce, sweeping to an alpine environment near the summit. Starting in the mud, we shouldered our skis until there was enough snow to skin. Thoughts of contrasting shades, snow and faded tree trunks lured us higher, and it reminded me why I began making ski photos.

At the age of six, Elena Hight traded sunny beaches of Hawaii for snow when her family relocated to Lake Tahoe, California. “My dad was a surfer his whole life, so the first thing he did when we moved to the mountains was teach us all how to snowboard,” says Hight, who joined the professional competition circuit via the halfpipe at age 13. Since then, Hight has reached the highest stages of snowboarding, including two Olympic Games, a Winter X Games superpipe gold and becoming the first snowboarder to land a double backside alley-oop rodeo during a halfpipe competition. After retiring from the competition scene in 2018, Hight refocused her energy into exploring the world of backcountry freeriding.

Avalanches are serious stuff. You can go out and play, but getting caught in slides is inexcusable behavior. What’s worse is when folks jump on social media sites and the local avalanche center pages to tell stories about how they “didn’t mean it but didn’t get hurt. What’s the big deal?”

For the last two years, Cody Townsend has been on a mission to ski all 50 lines listed in the book Fifty Classic Ski Descents in North America. Then in March 2020, Covid-19 hit and states instituted stay-at-home orders and travel restrictions, and Townsend had to get creative in order to ski some of those lines before the snow melted. The Mountain Why, a film released December 2020, tells the story of how Townsend devised “a plan to travel safely, away from people.”

Zahan Billimoria, better known as Z, is a Jackson, Wyoming-based mountain guide with an extensive résumé. He’s guiding seasoned athletes and professional skiers alike. He’s guided for Teton Gravity Research (TGR), Redbull, works with Exum Mountain Guides and runs his own training and big mountain-focused company, Samsara Experience. Through it all, Billimoria has learned that […]