Words: ANDY ANDERSON. Photos and Captions: DREW SMITH. 2024-02-08 07:36:35
While in Sylarna, Sweden, our group was hit by a big storm with strong winds that had us thinking twice. Drew Smith was driving to a final job interview, picturing a future life that didn’t include photography. The rosy picture in his mind was that of small-town Montana—a good job at the power company, a nice truck, a wife. Maybe a couple of kids running around. There were no imposing rock walls, no month-long expeditions, and no financial uncertainty. There were definitely no years spent living in a van. Over the phone, a family acquaintance at the company had gone on and on about how stable of a career it was, perfect for a young guy like Smith. “You’ll be retired by the time you’re 50,” he had said. Somewhere along that road, Smith’s phone rang one more time. It wasn’t the power company, but Smith picked up, compelled to answer a different call. Over the last decade, Drew Smith has made a name for himself as one the most authentic and dedicated outdoor photographers in the game, entrenched in the mountain lifestyle and endlessly on the move around the world in search of adventure—from the soaring walls of South America and Yosemite to ski expeditions to Pakistan’s Trango Towers and Canada’s Baffin Island. But back on the Montana highway in 2005, he’d recently dropped out of college not quite two weeks in (it was non-refundable after that). Smith wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself. Partying was a temporary salve, but he had also recently broken his back at a local rager. Wanting to liven things up, he had jumped off the back deck onto what looked like deep snow and turned out to be frozen ground. “Friends were saying, ‘What are you gonna do now, just waste your life away?’” The power company job seemed like a way to get back on track. But a friend who worked in the fishing industry in Alaska had pulled some strings, and the phone call became a summer job offer at a salmon hatchery on a wild section of Pacific coastline. “I thought, ‘If I take this electric job, I know exactly what I’m going to do for the rest of my life’. I could see it,” he says. “But if I go to Alaska, who knows what’s gonna happen?’” Born to a ranch-hand father and an artist mother, Smith was the youngest of three boys raised amidst the bustle of a working cattle ranch, an hour down a gravel road from the nearest small town in central Montana. The boys had free reign of the ranch’s 64,000 acres to explore, ride bikes, shoot gophers and generally get into trouble. They were encouraged in their wild pursuits by their father’s do-it-yourself curiosity and their mother’s creative homemaking. Later the family moved to Miles City in eastern Montana, a quick four-hour drive from Red Lodge, MT, where, in 1998, Smith first started snowboarding at age 13. He worked long summers on a local farm to afford a season pass, and in the winter he and his friends would wake up at 4 a.m. every Saturday to make first chair. “I always had some kind of throw-away camera with me,” he says. “I enjoyed documenting stuff—just messing around—but I remember wanting to preserve these moments.” After high school and the ill-fated attempt at college, Smith was off to Alaska to see what else was out there. That fall, flush with cash from their summer jobs, he and a friend spent the winter surfing and driving down the Baja Peninsula. At the end of the trip, Smith asked his buddy what he was going to do next. Smith’s friend said he was just going to keep traveling. “It inspired me,” he says. “I was like, whoa, that’s an option. You can just do what you want and not care what people think.” A string of seasonal, high-paying and hard labor jobs followed—construction, rockfall mitigation, wildland firefighting—working hard for a few months and traveling and living simply the rest of the year. Smith spent six months in southeast Asia the next winter, South America the following. In Jackson Hole in 2008, Smith re-injured his back snowboarding, and a summer of grueling work was out of the question. He got a job at Teton Mountaineering and fell in with a group of local climbers who taught him the basics. “I loved that I could push myself really hard and not feel like I was going to get injured all the time,” Smith says. Around the same time, Smith’s older brother Garrett, who had gone to school for photojournalism, traded Drew one of his older cameras for a climbing rope. He encouraged Smith to start shooting more regularly and got him to start a blog to share his travels. He named the blog “Drew’s Plan,” an irreverent response to an ex-girlfriend who had told him, “I just wish you had a plan.” “Garrett knew I was going to all these cool places and he’d call me every week and ask me what I was shooting and critique it,” he says. “He’d guilt trip me if I wasn’t taking photos, so I started taking my camera everywhere.” The perpetual cycle of work and travel continued, now with a pointed focus on circuiting the classic climbing destinations—Red River Gorge, Joshua Tree, Indian Creek, Red Rocks, El Potrero Chico in Mexico, and of course, Yosemite. For two seasons in 2015-2016, Smith worked on Yosemite’s search and rescue team, where he expanded both his mountain skills and his network. Yosemite has always been a crucible for the world’s best climbers, and being in the right place all the time had its advantages. When he wasn’t rescuing stranded tourists or injured climbers, he was often dangling on a rope, camera in hand. “It was so easy to stay motivated to shoot, just surrounded by the climbing lifestyle and these amazing climbs,” he says. Soon, Smith was firmly established as one of the Valley’s modern documentarians, uniquely capturing the culture, antics and achievements of climbing’s center of the universe. He shot speed records on El Capitan, difficult first ascents by visiting pros, and the daily comings and goings of Yosemite’s die-hard locals. Patagonia in particular took notice of his unique eye and ability to snap both high-angle action and the quirky side of the dirtbag life. He began selling photos here and there, the latest fleece jackets or stretchy pants a subtle footnote in otherwise authentic moments. “I thought eventually this will work out if I just stick with it—I think that’s how a lot of things are in life,” he admits. Since then, he’s been not only a photographer, but also an integral team member on climbing and skiing expeditions to Peru, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Alaska, Baffin Island, Patagonia and beyond. He’s had images published in Alpinist, Climbing and other notable magazines, done brand work for The North Face, Patagonia, Black Diamond and Roark among others, and shot with some of the world’s most talented mountain athletes, including Brette Harrington, Jackson Marvell, Christina Lusti and the late Hillaree Nelson. He gets the shot, but he also breaks trail, hauls his share of the gear and leads his pitches, often while carrying 20-plus pounds of camera equipment. Smith can capture the action with the best of them—deep pow turns, a surfer tucked into a glassy barrel, a heroic lunge for the finishing handhold 2,000 feet off the deck. But his work really shines in his uncanny ability to capture those fleeting yet precious moments of pause and contemplation. An apprehensive glance up at an imposing bit of climbing. A careful gaze down into the abyss from atop a big wall or a steep ski line. The view through a dusty, cracked windshield at a stretch of sunset-soaked dirt road. Utter exhaustion and the slow drag on a hand-rolled cigarette after days spent on the sharp end or in the no-fall zone. But pursuing and documenting climbing, skiing and alpinism comes with inherent risks, both physical and emotional. Being entrenched in these communities, Smith is no stranger to loss. A tragic number of partners, subjects and friends have perished to their passions, their spirits and best days enshrined by the click of his shutter. “Over the past few years I’ve been conscious of observing and studying my subjects more deeply than I used to, and trying to capture those subtleties,” he says. “I’ve lost so many friends and people I know, that I guess I just want to preserve those things.” Perhaps it’s this collective burden, a kind of vocational patina, that in part gives Smith’s photography its signature grit. Over the last few years, he’s incorporated and mastered the use of shadow in his work—not so much a creeping darkness, but an allusion to the intrinsic duality that anyone who has lived the life knows all too well. Still, it’s joy that triumphs in his photos—a joke over tailgate beers, the innocent grin of a kid recently missing a tooth, the elation of questing into the unknown and coming out the other side with a story to tell. Smith’s photography is friendly mischief and perfect conditions, immortalizing a moment into something recognizable, relatable and truly beautiful. The kind of moments you wish you could taste again if you’ve lived them, and wish you’d done something different with your life if you haven’t. The best of these moments are fleeting, almost intangible and difficult to land. Often, they’re the answer to a question: “Who knows what’s gonna happen?”
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