Did I Get the Shot?
It was 1992 — a long-held dream achieved. I first saw Greenland at the end of the 80s as I flew home to the US after a ski trip to Austria, where I’d been reporting a story for Powder Magazine. I woke from a nap and looked out the plane window to discover seemingly endless lines of mountains, covered with white from top to bottom, set in a landscape of nothing but snow and ice. Still a little foggy with sleep, I felt as if I’d been transported to another world.
I vowed to find a way to get there. It took years, but in the spring of ’92, underwritten by Powder and its sister magazine, Snowboarder, a team of skiers, snowboarders, and filmmakers and I gathered in Nuuk on the west coast of Greenland. We boarded a vessel and sailed north. We disembarked on the island of Maniitsoq and then took a small boat to a peninsula called Kangerdluarssuk, where a lonely collection of huts clustered on a windswept plateau.
We toured from the huts and ventured to other islands. It was intense—the ever-present cold, the remoteness. Every turn marked a first descent. Then, early one evening, we rallied from the hut, took snowmobiles, and headed north, where a slope rolled sweetly toward a fjord. The most recent storm had laid down a blanket of new snow untouched by wind.
After the steeps and couloirs of the past week, this north slope felt like a playground: stable snow, no rocks, good light, brilliant blue sky, and sleds to loop us back for another run. We were unhurried, happy, joyful.
On one of the runs, set up below with my camera, I signalled skiers Mike Hattrup, John Egan, and snowboarder Mark Fawcett to drop in. Perhaps Mike hit a deeper pocket; at least he caught a couple of face shots, gasped from the snow, and lost a little speed relative to the others, falling behind. Mark and John angled to the rider’s left. Mark was intensely focused, and John had a grin spreading across his face.
And then — disaster. John was turning right as Mark went left in a transition from toe to heel when something sent John off balance. He bent at the waist, his upper body pitching forward, and somersaulted head-first into the snowpack. Tumbling, the bases of his skis clipped the bottom of Mark’s board right as Mark dropped into a deep heelside trenching turn. John disappeared in a cloud of snow and came up laughing.
It was an epic moment — but did I get the shot? We had no idea. I was shooting with film, pulling focus manually. I wouldn’t know until weeks later, back home in California, after the film was developed. For the most part, those slow marching days of building anticipation are gone, but this particular wait is still a clear memory for me.
And so it was with considerable expectancy that I spread the finished photos out to see what I’d managed to capture. It was an extraordinary bounty. Happily, the picture of Mark spraying an upside-down John was in focus – but it was just one of hundreds of images we had produced together. Some were used in a feature in Powder, some in Snowboarder Magazine, and some by the sponsors of the snowboarders and skiers. However, the collision shot became somewhat notorious as a centerfold poster by Sims Snowboards, published in Snowboarder, with “Etiquette” written above it. That label perfectly captured the tension between skiers and boarders in the early ’90s — an exclamation point to the unstoppable ascent of snowboards.
The funny thing was that I don’t think we saw it that way on the trip. We were just a bunch of people deeply passionate about being in the mountains, entranced by snow, and privileged to be together in a cold, wild place. Looking at the photo today, I don’t see a trace of division. Instead, I see stoke and friends having the time of their lives. It’s astonishing how the image became so popular, appearing on numerous magazine covers and still hanging on many walls. However, what’s remarkable is how hard we laughed and that Mark, John and I will always be connected because of it.
