-Continuation of yesterday’s blog: Biking on Snow and Skiing on Dirt

In late March I spent a week in the Whistler-Pemberton area shooting with a number of different athletes. Over the week the average daily snowfall was over 20cm. From day to day every line on every mountain we skied filled in and transformed from one other worldly shape to another. Like sand shifting on dunes, the lanscape morphed as time passed. One of the daily missions we embarked on was to the north of Pemberton up the Hurley pass to ski ‘mini-golf’ lines. (Hike-ski repeat on short zones of cliffs spines etc.)

July 6th: North America is nursing it’s hangover from a weekend of Canada/America Day festivities, businessmen are back in offices longing for their week retreat to a beach. Four months after I battled through waist deep powdery bliss I find myself slathering copious amounts of suntan lotion on my all-too-white arms, only a stones throw away from the spot we shot the image above. Skis, poles, boots and skins litter the ground as we gaze through the trees at the patchy remnants of winter littering forest floor.

Everything about that moment was as backwards as it could be compared to the last time I stood in that valley. +20, blue skies, non-existant avalanche danger, sunscreen, sweat in the eyes, sun glasses and a T shirt. Compared to goggles, thermal layers, toe warmers, overcast, puking snow, wind, avalanche pit digging, slednecks within earshot. Ski touring is ski touring, its incredibly fun, tiring, solitary, and methodical but the experience couldn’t have felt more absurdly different.

10 months ago the ski community kicked of the pre-winter excitement with word we were heading into a La Nina winter. Warmer ocean surface temperatures thousands of kilometers away promising of absurd quantities of white heaven falling from the sky. Now, 10 months later, the actual amount snow fall exceded even what our wildest hopes were last fall. Reeking havoc on the orderly tradition of seasons in the mountains.
As far as last week was concerned seasons are irrelevant, who needs to bike in sunshine and ski in winter, when you can bike while its snowing and ski when its +20 C?

Shooting bikes in Whistler has an interesting twist right now, normally the elements a mtb photographer in whistler gets to work with include: dry or tacky dirt, warm weather, and dialed trails. La Nina’s effect was so severe on the Coast of BC the Whistler trail crew has been digging snow rather than building an maintaining trails. In places you’re riding between banks of snow, in others you’re traversing mud pits axel deep, reminiscent of the West Coast Trail.

But its more than funky riding conditions, it is a key element of the definition of biking. Exploration, uncertainty, adaptability and a flowing evolution of the landscape we travel through. A deep snow pack in one year isn’t an oddity, it would be much more absurd to see identical conditions from week to week, year to year.

Tomorrow: Skiing on Dirt

Tell me exactly how it feels to turn the page of an issue of National Geographic. Now what about the dry leaves of a your city newspaper which make sounds reminiscent of fingers on a chalk board. Maybe kids a couple decades from now may talk about the texture of the surface of their first ipad or tablet, but for kids like me who grew up -at the end- of the analog era many different publications hold specific memories of texture, smell (old book store anyone) and character. Maybe we’re in a relatively sterile era of digital media which neglect some of the senses, but for now I am nostalgic about the little pleasures of the analog world.
This roundabout introduction brings me to one thing. Glossy colour pages, those big vibrant pearly white pages from where colour leaps off the page. Neglecting the geeky side of my brain which drifts to technical aspects of colour gamut and dynamic range, I can’t help but love to see images on a big, glossy, page of luminous beauty.

And, well, just this month I got to see two of my shots in Decline Magazine’s big, fat, glossy, sexy, colour-that-punches-you-in-the-face pages. Goodness, I love it.

The shot above is a self portrait from a great evening riding Sideshow Bob in Calgary. A sickeningly fun trail which dips bobs and curves around the chalky ridges of the river valley. Below is an image of Daniel Norton on Bear Cub in Whistler which is also July’s free wallpaper.
1280X800
1680X1200
2400X1500

Every year at the Deep Summer Photo Challenge 5 photographers are invited to the competition, and one wildcard photographer joins the 5 invited shooters. I and 4 other photographers have been selected for the wildcard position, but only 1 photographer win the wildcard spot, based on a vote by the users of www.PinkBike.com

What is the Deep Summer Photo Challenge? Its similar to the Banff Photographer Shootout which I won earlier this year. The basic idea is you and a group of riders have 3 days to shoot a bunch of pictures. 1 editing day. At the end each of the 6 photographers present a ~5 minute slideshow infront of a huge crowd during crankworx in Whistler BC.

I invite you to head over to the voting page and select the person who you think can challenge the photographers in the competition. Of course I’d like to think you’ll select me to go head to head with Barham, Zimmerman, Riga, Olsen and O’Neill, but thats really up to you. The voting is based on 3 submission images, which you can see below, but I also invite you to look over my wider (updated) portfolios

Click Here to Vote

Here are the three images from my submission. With links to download for -and only for- your computer background. (Be nice and don’t abuse the availability of the shots for your background. Santa is watching)

Carter, Whistler BC
1280×800
1680×1050
2400×1500

Andrew Pike, Millenium Calgary
1280×800
1680×1050
2400×1500

Self Portrait, Calgary
1280×800
1680×1050
2400×1500

Click Here to Vote for the photographer you like the most. I’ve got some really great ideas I want to flesh out in a slideshow, and don’t want to wait another to create it.