The Ski Journal • Volume 13, Issue 2 • KARL DIGS SNOW: Crazy, Calculated Karl Fostvedt

As the season wound to a close in late April 2019, the Chilkat mountains were starting to awaken from a long Alaskan winter. It had been a spring of limited snow and weather windows. With a high-pressure system lingering and a smattering of fresh paint still drying on the jagged glacial landscape, I called Karl and told him if there was ever a time to pop his AK cherry, that time was now. Within 48 hours, Karl was in Haines. He didn’t bring a big budget, expectations, or major film goals. Karl was simply ready to learn how to navigate the spine capital of the world.

Our first morning out, Karl warmed up with Lynsey Dyer and Freeride World Tour snowboarder Chris Galvin under the lead of guide Reggie Crist. After lacing his third line on a simple but beautiful spine on the headwall of the Willard Glacier, we turned our attention to Chris, who was dropping next.

“It was just a little wind buff for the first 10-20 feet and then gets really nice in there,” Karl told him over the radio.

Chris dropped in. Karl kept eyes on him. Then came Karl’s next radio communication, panicked but clear, as he began rapidly sidestepping uphill: “Big problem! He’s in the crack! Yo! We need help down here ASAP! ASAP!”

It was tough love in the Fostvedt household growing up. Being one of six siblings—Stephen, Hans, Luke, Sigi, Karl, and Mattias—was a little bit like survival of the fittest, according to Hans, the second eldest. Mattias, the youngest, remembers wrestling matches that Stephen, the eldest, would set up between the two young brothers, which usually ended in tears. Tears of laughter for Karl, reminisces Stephen, watching Mattias go ape shit trying to take Karl down. Mattias also fondly remembers the feeling of cold water on the back of his neck from swirlies administered by Hans and Stephen. The Fostvedt brothers traveled as a pack and the eldest were instrumental in encouraging the coordination and confidence of the younger siblings. Stephen would set up obstacle courses for Karl when he was 3 years old. Climbing up and over couches, chairs and tables and jumping off things, “Karl had a unique curiosity,” Stephen says. “We knew he had a special potential from a very young age.”

Karl’s folks, Karsten and Teri Fostvedt, moved to Sun Valley, ID from Santa Barbara, CA in 1989, the year before Karl was born. The story goes the family had grown tired of Santa Barbara. They went on a family camping trip through Wyoming and Montana, stumbling upon Sun Valley as a camping spot. A year later, they moved there. Although the Fostvedt clan hails from strong Nordic lineage, Karl and his siblings are its first generation of skiers.

Karl brought his knack for obstacle courses to the skatepark and began inline skating with a local crew. “Karl was insane on rollerblades!” Mattias says, recounting him dropping into the vert wall backward at age 9 and tossing misty 540s and backflips off the wooden launch ramps. He would often rally a crew of friends for adventures. Mattias remembers a time when Karl snagged roughly 10 kids from the skatepark to jump on the KART bus and ride to the top of the steepest hill in town.

“Before anyone could get off the bus, Karl jumped out and started bombing down the bike path switch. We all stayed on the bus and watched Karl bomb the entire hill switch until the very bottom when he went to jump a 180 back to regular, caught an edge, and slammed straight to his face,” Mattias says. Their dad, the local veterinarian, stitched him up in the clinic later.

“It was beautiful to see him get away with some of the shit he did,” Hans says, recalling Karl’s mischievous spirit with pride. Stephen remembers riding the chairlift with little Karl and an older guy who claimed to have just cleared the infamous Plaza Gap on Bald Mountain the run before. Karl, trying to impress his older brothers and their buddies, didn’t tell anyone and attempted to hit the gap his next run. He came up short with a knee to the face and fractured his orbital bone. Highly concussed, Karl started vomiting during the toboggan ride down, but couldn’t move his arms to wipe his face. Luckily, the patroller looked back right as he began choking and immediately flipped the sled over mid-run. Through all his youthful shenanigans, no one can really recall when he officially earned the nickname “Crazy Karl.” But he certainly had a defiant spirit. Karl spent some time on the Sun Valley freestyle team, where he won every major mogul contest he entered from ages 8 to 13 years old. He also rebelled against his coaches and that regimented style of competition.

“I didn’t want anything to do with that mogul skiing bullshit,” Karl says, “and you can quote me on that.”

Karl was also unashamed to state his opinions and goals. He recalls watching professional skier Mark Abma in a ski flick at the Sun Valley Opera House at 13. After the film, Karl, practically in tears, approached Abma to tell him, “One day I’m going to be in a movie with you.”

In high school, Sun Valley Resort didn’t have a terrain park, so he transferred to the Lowell Whitman School in Steamboat Springs, CO. He knew that Pep Fujas, a childhood idol, had gone there, so he wrote in an application for financial aid stating that he was inspired to come because of Pep. It worked.

“His ability to focus on what he wants to do, why, and I’m going to show you how was evident from a very young age,” Stephen says.

Despite his loose reputation, his brother Luke says that even among a doctor, lawyer and statistician, Karl is the smartest sibling. Hans also cites his loyalty to his friends, explaining how Karl’s always made sure his friends came up in the ski industry with him. And his uncanny ability to rally a crew is something Mattias believes has kept the fire burning and his career thriving to this day. As Karl, now 29 years old, says, “When you’re out filming and do well on the day, everyone wins.”

Indeed, Karl considers his current practice of skiing a team sport, saying, “Whether you’re fixing a landing, getting the second camera angle, schlepping tripods, doubling on sleds, on radios, all players need to be connected to get shit done.”

That morning in Haines, Karl stopped strategically at the bottom of his line in a safe zone above some icefall with eyes on Chris as he dropped. They had closely inspected the bergschrunds at the bottom of the face and knew it was best to exit to the right. As Chris jammed right at the bottom of his line, so did his fast-moving sluff from above. As Murphy’s Law would have it, in the midst of Chris’ sluff battle to keep himself upright, his board caught the lip of the bergschrund, which sent him backward and upside down into the crack where the slope met the glacier below. His sluff— hundreds of pounds of snow—quickly filled in above him, burying him in a matter of seconds.

Karl was the first to react and started hiking uphill at a ferocious pace. His recent training as a wilderness first responder and in multiple avalanche courses kicked in. Reggie couldn’t see the bottom of their lines from his perch above, but they had discussed a clean path over in case of a worst-case scenario. Not knowing how deep the schrund was, we all held our breath. Seconds seemed like minutes, and minutes ticked away.

We had the last-seen point still frozen in the monitors of our hovering drone, but as the helicopter fired up to bring our second guide, Joe, in for backup, we pulled back from the face—the wrong move in hindsight, as we should have stuffed that drone into the slope where Chris disappeared—but luckily we had Karl on the charge. He had eyes on where Chris went down and shouted to Reggie traversing down to the last-seen point.

Reggie immediately got a beacon signal and pulled up within two meters of the barely visible lip of the bergschrund. Karl had his shovel out and was ready to do what he does better than most: shovel and move snow. The rescue was nearing the time we hate to consider, 15 minutes, which is when the likelihood of survival in a burial decreases dramatically by the minute. The helicopter toed into the slope to drop Joe off, who needed to put Reggie on a rope as he dug deeper into the crevasse. With Joe on belay, and Reggie delving deep into the crack, snow removal became the priority. Karl hurled snow out of that hole like all his brothers were buried below.

Karl digs snow, literally and metaphorically. He’s known for his massive builds and his creativity in designing and crafting features most people wouldn’t even think to attempt. In high school for his senior project, he petitioned the powers that be to let him hang out with the terrain park builders of Sun Valley Resort during its inception. Tal Roberts, a photographer and close friend of Karl’s, was one of Sun Valley’s first builders. He remembers a young Karl coming on hill to ride in the cat and help shape jumps.

Seeing potential, Tal tasked Karl with crafting designs for some features. Karl came back with a wild rendition of a video-game park run with features neither Tal nor anybody else had ever seen.

“There were crazy redirect hips and curved rail features that would be impossible for us to build with a cat,” Tal says. “He had pages and pages [of designs] and tried to explain to me how he would hit it; he knew exactly what trick he would try and where he’d land. It was an impressive show of creativity and his super-methodical thinking.”

Years later, Tal has seen Karl’s visions come to life and he’s helped him build and shoot creative features around the world.

Karl has refined his approach from a wild urban and tabletop hucker in tall tees to become one of the more stylish skiers in the game. In 2012, skier Tanner Hall first saw Crazy Karl sessioning a tabletop takeoff to QP landing at Mt. Bachelor that no one else was hitting. “He’s like the rebirth of Pep, only stronger,” Hall says.

By then, Karl, inspired by the likes of Tanner, Pep, and Abma—park skiers who had taken their tricks to backcountry terrain—had been competing in slopestyle with some success. He was backed by brands like ON3P, a longtime sponsor who sold a line of Karl-inspired skis called the Kartel until this season. He shifted away from competition after a few years and few hundred bucks on the Dew Tour. He focused on filming and secured solid showings in segments in films by Poor Boyz and 4bi9 Media. In 2014, Karl went back to contests, won three of them, and earned $25,000. In the last five years, he has podiumed in all five of the contests he’s entered, including the inaugural Kings and Queens of Corbet’s in Jackson Hole, WY. The thing that mattered most to him? Sharing the win with iconic snowboarder Travis Rice at Kings and Queens.

“I’m super-stoked on the integration of skiing and snowboarding,” Karl says about the event. “I want to be an ambassador for the [snowsports] industry as whole. I think it’s fun to use snowboarders as a form of competition to see how we can push each other and progress our sports.”

Despite his competitive success, Karl sees his greatest achievement as being able to buy a snowmobile, build a trailer, and gain the knowledge to read weather and find the best zones for his creations. He’s put time and effort into learning how to access the backcountry safely and strategically and is quick to give credit to his local crew, Jeremy Lato, Michael Franco, WingTai Berrymore, and Collin Collins, who have helped him get out there. In 2018 the stars aligned for Karl and he realized a major career goal while on a film trip to Revelstoke, BC with Matchstick Productions. Also on that trip was his childhood hero, Mark Abma.

Filming with Abma was 16 years in the making, but being able to integrate tricks into high-consequence backcountry lines and adding bits of his own flavor was on Karl’s bucket list. He also wanted to be filmed with a Cineflex. Most notably, though, was being bucked by a helicopter’s rotor wash while dropping into his line. Murray Wais from MSP was quick to apologize, but Karl could not have been more stoked.

“I’ve been waiting my whole life to get that! Thank you!” he said. Scott Gaffney, director of the annual Matchstick film, has great regard for Karl after filming with him. “He has an inventiveness I’ve always appreciated,” Gaffney says. “Almost like an otherworldly ability that we’ve never shot before. He was spinning midline where no skier would ever think of tricking. The shot didn’t stop when the line was done. We had to keep the cameras rolling on Karl till the very bottom.” By all accounts, that’s Karl. He will never have enough skiing in his life. You’ll find him out sledding and skiing corn in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho till late May and then camped out on Beartooth Pass, MT in June. His next goal is longevity in his career. “I want to feel like I’ve peaked, and that time has yet to come,” Karl says. “He’s in it for all the right reasons,” Gaffney says. “I think he’ll influence people largely and inspire both parts of skiing. He’s already done that on the jib side with insane urban parts like his Detroit segment in the Poor Boyz film [Tracing Skylines] And now he’ll open some eyes to what’s possible in the big mountain world.” Hall backs Karl’s progressive nature as well. “Karl is carving his own path and pushing the sport into new avenues of progression,” he says. “If he stays on course with what he’s doing, he’ll go down as one of the best to ever do it.” Midway through this past winter, Karl signed with K2 Skis and he’s expected to have a 12-minute-long MSP segment. Early word is that it’s going to blow minds. Yet Karl feels like he’s still warming up in the big mountain arena. “As a youngster I think I learned what not to do,” Karl says. “Now I’m pretty confident on how I assess risk, when to turn it up and let my guard down, and when to keep it tight. I want to keep learning how to access the big mountains, find those honey holes, focus on skiing natural shit.”

We later laughed at the deep wheezing heard in the GoPro footage as Karl continued shoveling for Chris, an indication of just how hard he was working. He turned on his head cam shortly after Reggie established an airway. Chris was alive and talking. The footage is a bit gut-wrenching and pretty astonishing to watch as they pulled a completely uninjured Chris from an upside-down position 15 feet in the crack after nine minutes under snow. The crew hugged it out on the side of that steep Alaskan face.

It’s possible Chris would not have survived if Karl was not such a tuned-in rescuer. He kept his calm, remembered his training, and was fully prepared—something you might not expect from a guy with the nickname Crazy Karl.

Following the rescue, the group decided to end shooting for the day. Karl, Reggie and I, along with a few hungry clients, stayed in the field to keep skiing. Karl was able to reset and focus on his original intention for the trip: to ski for himself and gain experience in Alaska. That classic Crazy Karl creativity came out again as he buttered and bounced his way down the kind of runs that are puckering for clients.

The next morning, we went out again without the big cameras. We wanted to ski. We let Karl drop first on every run despite his attempts to give the rest of the crew priority. It’s just more fun to watch him paint fresh turns down a beautiful face than to drop first yourself.

On the last run, we put our group of six Idaho-based shred dogs atop a classic Haines run called Sexy Spines. Karl dropped in hooting and hollering and floated down the fluted spine face with overt enjoyment and ease. I can only liken it to a little kid bombing a hill on rollerblades just for fun.

The Ski Journal - Volume 13, Issue 2

KARL DIGS SNOW: Crazy, Calculated Karl Fostvedt

It wasn’t the 40-foot backflip that Karl Fostvedt threw into his first-ever run in Alaska that really impressed me. Rather, it was his reaction to and preparedness for the heaviest rescue scenario I’ve experienced shortly after his third run that did it.

Issue List