”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 years. Douglas´s message to the […]
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 the planet, with only South […]
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 skis with two banners, one […]
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 fresh coat of powder snow […]
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 only a couple of minutes […]
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, that will shape his future. […]
Swedish film director Ruben Östlund, 44, grew up with his mother on Styrsö, a small rocky island on the south coast of Sweden with only 1400 inhabitants. He learned to ski in Lapland during regular visits to his grandparents. While Östlund continued windsurfing with his friends in the sea surrounding his home island, skiing soon […]
It´s the summer of 1984 and Barry Levinson, a young college business graduate from Colorado, is driving a rental car in Lapland towards Kemijärvi, a small provincial town in eastern Lapland, less than an hour´s drive from the Soviet border. Van Halen´s Jump is playing on the radio. As the seemingly endless forests lining the […]
28 December 2017: Koli National Park, Finland It should be a busy ski day after the Christmas holidays, but the lifts and cross-country trails remain closed. The Koli ski resort has given an official warning to stay out of the surrounding forests due to the heavy loads of frozen snow in the trees. Aided […]
The Red Bull Playstreets event is a unique contest on the international freeskiing competition calendar. Held on the 14th and 15th of February 2019 in Bad Gastein Austria for the eight time, it is arguably the only in-city slope-style event in the world. Although the town center is conveniently located on a down slope, building the […]