It’s the beginning of December and thanks to a storm, that has brought 80 cm´s of fresh snow in the last 48 hours, Laax Ski Resort in the Graubünden Canton in Switzerland, has just opened it´s lifts. I’m standing above the treeline on a knoll, focusing on a skier above […]
The lore of real skiers and small ski areas that rock Little ski areas rock, the mom-and-pop owned operations are keeping it real, saving the sport of skiing from McDonaldization by the evil empire, that the big ski resort corporations present. Although exaggerated a little, this is the lore […]
”The internet and gaming are our biggest threats”. The quote was made in a 2013 by Mike Douglas in a ski resort marketing website´s interview, where the freeski pioneer and producer of Salomon Freeski TV was asked to name the biggest challenge for the ski industry in the next coming 10 […]
The Himalayas, Nepal, fall 2018 It´s the morning of the last day of September and high above the clouds on the sunny top of Mount Lhotse at 8 516 m, two people are carefully putting their skis on. It´s a mere stone´s throw to Mount Everest, the highest mountain on […]
We´re sitting on sofas made out of pallets in a wooden ex-warehouse building in Oberaching, a small town with 13 inhabitants, some 15 km south of Munich, the capital of Bavaria. On my left is a workbench, but instead of a state-of-the-art espresso machine, standing behind is a row of […]
From above, our group of skiers and snowboarders looks like a slowly moving pearl string necklace, as we navigate our way through snow-covered thin spruce trees to the Karhunjuomalampi wilderness hut, following the ski track laid by our guide Katja Heikkinen. The surrounding Pyhä National Park has received a foot-deep […]
The ISPO Munich held yearly in between the end of January and beginning of February in the capital of Bavaria, is arguably the biggest sports fair in the world. Dozens of halls filled to the brim with the latest offering by the biggest companies (and the occasional startups and SME´s) […]
It´s a cold winter day in 1988 and our gym teacher has decided that instead of playing outdoor ice hockey we would watch a movie instead. The class is packed with runny-nosed 15-year-old kids watching skeptically as the moustache wearing middle-aged ski coach sets up the VHS system. It takes […]
The border formalities on the Finnish side go smoothly, but on the Russian side the bureaucratic Soviet influence is still evident: I have to fill several small entry forms and then queue with them from one counter to the next. As I am crossing the border by car I have […]
Professional snowboarder, ski magazine owner, freeride contest organizer, FWT judge, snow safety author and lecturer, husky musher, mountain guide, ski area developer – the common denominator in Jarkko Henttonen´s CV is his passion for the mountains. I sat down with him to talk through his career and current resort project, […]
