The Ski Journal - Volume 17, Issue 1
LESLIE HITTMEIER’S STEADY GROWTH
Words: Lily Krass. Photos and Captions: Leslie Hittmeier 2023-09-15 11:22:04
Passing the time playing with reflections. In an ideal world, the media team is ready to hit record well before the athletes say, “Three, two, one, dropping.” This leaves ample time to kill, usually passed by eating snacks, shooting scenics and checking focus about 100 times. In this particular photo, I’m waiting while Elena Hight, Michelle Parker, and Robin Van Gyn ascend a face near base camp in the Southern Alaska Range.
After a relentless spring storm, the clouds finally parted. Leslie Hittmeier stared up at the East Ridge of Mount Bertha, a 10,204-foot glaciated peak in southeast Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park. She had to decide if she could ski the line.
Hittmeier and a media crew had traveled with athletes Griffin Post, Elena Hight and Jeremy Jones to shoot a first descent of Mount Bertha for HBO’s Edge of the Earth docu-series, an arduous endeavor that included a 125-mile boat ride and 20-mile approach from the North Pacific Ocean to base camp. Hittmeier had been hired to shoot the descent on-slope, over 4,000 vertical feet of mostly no-fall skiing, including an icy, exposed ridge close to the summit nicknamed “the Plank.”
It was a dream line. Hittmeier worked her way up and down it, quietly making some of the most exposed turns of her life while occasionally ducking behind a rock to stay out of the filmer’s aerial shots. She traveled with a slimmed-down camera pack by photographer standards, but even an extra 10 pounds is significant in critical terrain.
In order to capture athletes on a long ascent, she has to (literally) stay one step ahead, in front at snack breaks or practicing a quick transition from skinning to booting so she has a few extra minutes to set up a shot. “If I can’t keep up with them, that’s my problem,” she says. “I try to fall into the rhythm of the day and capture what I see, trying not to hold them up or adding extra stress.”
Over the years, that’s translated to growing as a skier as she grows behind the lens. Specific mountain skills are needed to enter these lands of giants. It’s not just the ability to get up or down a massive peak with a camera pack, but to be able to do so in a way that doesn’t negatively impact anyone else on the team.
In the past six years, Hittmeier has made a name for herself by shooting top mountain athletes on major expeditions for the likes of HBO, Teton Gravity Research, Patagonia and The North Face. The 31-year-old has earned a reputation for capturing ski descents in high-consequence backcountry terrain, garnering the trust of athletes not only for her approach to the mountains, but also for her ability to capture the nuance and human element of these harrowing journeys. Suddenly, on the flanks of one of North America’s most commanding ski descents, Hittmeier chased both as she straddled the ether.
Born and raised in Billings, MT, Hittmeier grew up skiing the mom-and-pop slopes of Red Lodge Mountain. She’d always felt at home on skis—far more comfortable in the mountains than playing team sports—but her relationship with skiing was casual, more of a social thing. When she picked up a camera around her senior year of high school, merging skiing with photography redefined how she saw the mountains.
Hittmeier attended the University of Montana in Missoula, skied at Snowbowl and brought her camera everywhere. She wasn’t sure what to study and followed a photojournalism track at her mom’s recommendation. The budding photographer fell in love with backcountry skiing halfway through college and spent the next few years trying to turn every homework assignment into shooting photos of her friends skiing. “It didn’t lead to the greatest grades,” she says. “But I immediately knew I wanted to go work for a magazine and shoot skiing.”
After college, Hittmeier briefly became an editor at Skiing. That’s where I first met her as a shy intern in Boulder, CO, in 2015. I was slightly in awe of this woman, just a few years older than me, who seemed to have it all figured out. “It’s funny because at the time I had no idea what I was doing,” she says, laughing. When we met, she was getting ready to chase a story in South America. I just remember thinking, “I want to do what she’s doing.”
But that perceived ease wasn’t always automatic for Hittmeier. She spent a lot of time writing, yet craved more photo work. The visual world proved harder to break into. “I’m definitely not someone who was crushing it from the very beginning,” she says. “I remember wanting it so bad, and it took me so long to get good enough at shooting photos and being in the mountains to be able to do what I really wanted to do.”
While she waited for her break, Hittmeier realized that what she had her sights on—shooting photos deep in the backcountry, often in technical alpine terrain—depended on technical ski ability almost as much as her photography skills.
“You can feel like a rock star skiing at a small mountain [like Red Lodge],” she admits. “Then I moved to Jackson, and I was like, ‘Oh no, I’m actually really not that good at this at all.’”
Undeterred, Hittmeier sought out on-hill mentors, spending as much time on skis as possible. She moved to the Tetons to work as part of the editorial team at TGR. While interviewing local pro skier Hadley Hammer in 2016, the two struck up a fast friendship, which Hittmeier says impacted both her photography and skiing. “At the time, Hadley was already really far along as an athlete, but she was still willing to go out with me and shoot, even when no one was hiring me,” Hittmeier says. “She also gave me ski lessons, which was huge.”
“I remember recognizing in her a lot of the opinions and values of women in the industry that are similar to my own,” Hammer says. “One of Leslie’s amazing strengths is that she makes people feel so comfortable exactly as they are, and I see that when she interviews people.”
The pair skied a few big objectives, including the coveted Grand Teton, and they traveled together to cover the Freeride World Tour in Verbier, Switzerland. “Our friendship was like zero to 100 really quick,” Hammer says jokingly. “I even third-wheeled her honeymoon in Chamonix and we all became roommates back in Jackson.”
Hammer thinks it’s a combination of action shots and an eye for the in-between moments that make Hittmeier’s photography stand out. “I want to know what kind of emotion is behind whatever adventure you’re doing,” says Hammer. “In one to three photos [Leslie] can tell an entire story about what happened on the whole trip.”
The brief moments of self-doubt in the middle of a climb, wonder at the first glimpse of a remote peak, bone-deep exhaustion hanging over a skier about to collapse into their tent at basecamp—Hittmeier’s images tell a story of both what the team accomplished and how they accomplished it. It’s a people-first approach, and it’s working.
“Often in the mountains you see people so fixated on getting better that their priorities jumble and they lose sight of what else is important,” Hammer says. “What’s so impressive about Leslie is that she’s getting better every year, but not at the expense of the people around her.”
As Hittmeier became more accustomed to skiing in steep, technical terrain, her opportunities behind the camera and her community of athletes grew. Her friend Julie Ellison, who she’d met while interning at Climbing Magazine in 2014, asked her if she wanted to help out with a climbing movie she was making called Pretty Strong.
Encouraged by the film’s success and with enough prospective projects as both a photographer and filmer, Hittmeier left her desk job in 2017 and started working as a contractor. Within a year, she was picking up work for The North Face, Patagonia, TGR and HBO. In 2018, she was brought on as a second shooter for TGR’s project Blank Spaces with Elena Hight and was soon traveling to Alaska for ski expeditions, hunkering down while storms raged through their base camp and following athletes up (and down) big objectives.
While Hittmeier wouldn’t turn down a heli shoot if she was offered one, she says she’s drawn to the challenging nature of human-powered expeditions, and the bond it forms between the whole team. “You become a really good group of friends, whether it’s one day, overnight or weeks. You’re all out there surviving together,” she says. “Everyone has to take turns digging out the latrine, or helping remodel the kitchen when it starts to melt. You’re all one unit working together to make this happen, which makes it really special.”
Developing a sense of camaraderie throughout the trip makes the work feel natural, and in Hittmeier’s mind the incumbent trust makes it easy to communicate and tease out the story. Indeed, shooting on-slope in high-consequence terrain requires true partnership, and Hittmeier continues to come to the table prepared, confident and with the ability to adapt as needed. Usually carrying just two camera bodies, two lenses and batteries, with a shoulder clip to keep her camera close at hand, Hittemeier has built a minimalist approach designed to keep her as close to her athletes, and the story, as possible.
It’s a formula Hittmeier takes to the mountains both on and off the clock. This spring, I catch up with her at 11,000 feet in the Southwest Couloir on Teewinot Mountain, a 12,325-foot peak in the Tetons. Or rather, she catches up with me. Although Hittmeier and her husband, Ben Hoiness, moved to Red Lodge, MT, a few years ago, she’s back in Wyoming for a film project with Arc’teryx. She’s with the owner of Exum Mountain Guides, Nat Patridge, and another guide, Gavin Hess. Today Hittmeier, Hess and Patridge aren’t really working. They’re just enjoying a calm, high-pressure day in the mountains, climbing high into the alpine to salvage some steep, sunny powder.
As they pass me on the bootpack, they slow down to chat, offering some insight on the new-to-me terrain. They wait for me and my partner at the top, quickly down-climbing the exposed notch into the 5,000-vertical-foot East Face. The three of them offer to merge our parties to minimize risk. We take turns leapfrogging pitches, and work our way down the steeps, savoring long sections of cold snow.
Although Leslie’s not punching her time card, she’s still got her camera. She snaps a few photos deftly, then leads us down a long pitch. I can’t tell if she was totally sandbagging when she claimed she was a “shit skier” when she moved here less than 10 years ago, or if I’m just witnessing a decade of hard work in action. It might be a little bit of both.
“Right now, I’m just curious to see it play out and see how far I can take it and still be this happy and fulfilled,” she says. “If that changes, I’ll do something different, but as long as I’m fired up, I want to keep going.”
When she traveled to Mount Bertha with Post, Hight and Jones, Hittmeier had to decide then and there if she could ski her line. Other times, she’s backed off, knowing that if she struggled it could pose a risk to everyone. One shot just isn’t worth it.
“I really try to listen to my gut and it’s really surprising how much that can tell me,” she says.
On Mount Bertha, Hittmeier felt up to the task, letting her mind focus on finding angles instead of the massive exposure below her as she climbed away from the safety of base camp. But she knew that once she put the camera away, fear could set in.
She dropped in after the athletes, cautiously linking jump turns on barely penetrable ice and following the faint etching of Elena’s tracks. It required a side of her mind that she’d never tapped into before and she made a ski descent that required she overpower the warning signs in her brain. She trusted her skills, getting down the mountain safely and in control—proof of how far she had come.
“Sometimes I can struggle with confidence in my normal life,” she admits. “But when I’m in that [big mountain] environment, the body and mind just kind of know what to do.”
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