Insights and stories covering the world of skiing and ski travel from around the globe.
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
