Words: Kade Krichko. Photos and Captions: Txema Trull 2022-01-19 15:17:56
My kind of self-portrait. Lines like these are why I became a ski photographer. I’m crazy for skiing these long and steep descents. Photography is my way of staying in the environment that I love. Cerro Entrerios, Las Leñas, Argentina. The alarm was set for 6 a.m. It had been dumping for 24 hours, but the storm was set to clear out just in time for first light. Photographer Txema Trull and freeskier Jordi Tenas had spent four days skiing and camping under the iconic Cerro Torrecillas near Las Leñas, Argentina, and tomorrow was the day. After a dry winter in the Southern Hemisphere, the Spanish duo was buzzing. They forced themselves into sleeping bags and tried to nod off ahead of the morning wakeup call. But that alarm would never come. At about 3 a.m., Trull and Tenas awoke to a freight-train roar. A sudden impact of hardened snow crashed against their tent, and the floor gave way. Suddenly the pair was suspended in air, frantically swimming toward what felt like the top of their tent, and a chance at survival. The previous afternoon, they’d made camp on a mound of glacial deposit far from the cirque’s main wall on the other side of a deep basin. Trull had wanted to move the tent farther away, but Tenas said the location was more than safe from an avalanche. The two agreed that even a large slide would have a hard time breaching the basin. What they didn’t account for was the entire valley giving way to an impossibly large wall of snow that had just gobbled them up alive. When the world stopped moving, everything was black. Trull was encased in snow from the waist down, but the tent wall had preserved a small pocket of air around his head. He could hear Tenas, and the two worked to breathe through the darkness. After 15 minutes, they realized that help wasn’t on the way. Trull thought of his parents. Then he slipped into the abyss. He woke up in an ambulance. He’d been rescued after 15 hours under the snow—hypoxic, but alive. Two PistenBully snowcats had pulled the tent out from under six feet of snow. Fighting to save his life, mountain EMTs were rushing Trull to the nearest hospital, 125 miles away in San Rafael. And Tenas? Tenas was gone. In the years leading up to the 2013 accident, Trull and Tenas had emerged as a powerhouse media team, both back home in Spain and in the growing Andes freeskiing scene. They had produced magazine features and photography for Spanish magazines like Solo Nieve and they were getting noticed by outlets in Europe and South America. The avalanche should have been the end of it, Trull knew. But he also knew South America—the mountains, the skiing, the community—had a hold on him, that this adventure couldn’t be over just yet. “Behind every mountain is another mountain, another peak to climb up and ski down,” Trull says. “Our world, our livelihood is the same—you always want to discover more.” Since that fateful September day, Trull has become the ski photographer of renown in Southern Europe. In addition to publishing photos with major ski publications around the world, he is the eye behind “South Lines,” one of the most innovative video series to emerge from South America, bringing a raw and gritty beauty to the world of ski photography. For Trull, it’s a style forged between two mountain ranges and the friendships that grow there, fueling the pursuit of a winter he hopes never ends. Girona, Spain isn’t a ski town. The sport might not be out of sight (La Molina Ski Area is about as close to Girona as Denver is to Vail), but it feels a world away from the patchwork of terracotta roofs and tight streets that make up the northern Spanish city. A population of over 100,000 set at the confluence of the Galligants, Güell, Onyar and Ter rivers, Girona is intersected by medieval city walls that guide the eye toward Roman ruins, intricate stone stairways and the postcard views of stoic cathedrals rather than towering alpine facades. Still, for Josep María “Txema” Trull, the mountains were never far off. Born and raised in the Catalonian city, Trull joined his parents Josep María and Rosa María and older brother Euldad on regular adventures into the nearby Pyrenees Mountains. Josep María, a maxillofacial surgeon, and Rosa María, an art teacher, met skiing the range decades before, so when snow blanketed the mountains forming the natural border between Spain and France, those family adventures came on two planks. It was the perfect pastime for a child Rosa María describes as “continuously in motion.” Josep María says his youngest son was always climbing or jumping off something, and even agreed to belay the then-elementary schooler as he climbed natural rock faces around Girona. By the time Trull was 8 years old, he started venturing to the mountains alone, catching the town ski club bus at 5 a.m. for the 2.5-hour ride to Formiguères Ski Area in France. He says he was carsick most the time, throwing up more than he cares to remember. But with wide-spaced trees and short pitches, the family ski area was the perfect place to score laps and exhaust overflowing energy. Trull started shooting photos in middle school when his dad loaned him an old Nikon F2 from his medical clinic. Trull enjoyed chasing shots around his home city, but on weekends, he’d put his camera down and coach at the ski club. It wasn’t until college that he even considered a career in photography, enrolling in a digital photography program at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, more to continue his studies than pursue any sort of professional dream. That dream space was reserved for sliding on snow, something he chased right out of college. In 2005, a few months after graduation, Trull turned down a newspaper job in Girona and moved to Baqueira-Beret, the largest ski resort in Spain. He found a job as a bellboy in an area hotel, a gig that earned him enough to cover his share of the rent, but not enough time on snow. That’s when Trull’s two worlds collided. Fototur, a local photo shop, was looking for help shooting tourism photos on-hill that season, and Trull was uniquely qualified for the job. Thus, a professional photography career began, complete with a colorful vest and plenty of photos of amateur racers and Spanish vacationers. But Trull saw his opportunity and ran with it. He already had an eye for picturesque landscapes and, through covering races and freeride events, mastered capturing the decisive turn, huck and slash. Those were the two elements Trull still looks for in his photography today—pivotal split seconds in beautiful places. “I like to talk about visual for the sake of visual,” Trull explains. “I’m not always looking for photos with messages or to tell a story. I’m looking more for spectacular moments both in the mountains and on skis.” Trull was gaining momentum in Baqueira. But seasons end, and with them, seasonal work. He knew he wanted to keep his nascent photo career going, but didn’t know how. When his Chilean boss suggested he chase snow to South America that summer, Trull suddenly had his answer. He landed in Valle Nevado, Chile, that first summer, living in the freezing basement of a hotel with an assortment of random roommates, working at a local photo shop and skiing as much as possible. It was a rugged baptism into the cult of endless winter, but also the start of a snow-chasing journey that persisted for the next 13 years. “What was supposed to be a season became my life,” he says. Trull considers himself a winter nomad. But unlike the modern-day definition that chases Instagram sunsets and food pictures around the world at a mile a minute, the Spaniard’s movements are more like the herders and hunters of old—calculated, repetitive and built around sustaining a way of life. In fact, almost all of Trull’s travel has been between the Pyrenees and the Andes, a photographic migration that is by design. “It’s not about spending one week in each place, it’s about going to a place and spending a long time there—learn it, see how it moves, how it changes,” he says. “By finding those places and shooting there over and over again, it gives you a chance to improve upon what you’ve done before, on what’s possible with your photos.” For Trull that meant long scouting days in the mountains and lots of study. Light, contrast conditions, time of year—he examined subtle changes over time, developing an internal shot list before working with any athlete. The work suited Trull well, giving him a chance to ski as much as scout, and to develop a method amid what, to the outside, seemed a constant state of motion. “Sometimes you only have a few days on assignment and it’s like swinging a machete, hacking out a few easy shots to make sure you have your bases covered,” Trull explains. “If it’s more up to me, I want to learn these places that I shoot intimately up front, know where to go and how to get there in order to produce specific kinds of photos.” He has even chosen his travel and ski partners according to this methodology, linking up with other Spaniards chasing winter between the two continents. It’s how he began working with Aymar Navarro, a Freeride World Tour competitor and arguably the most well-known freeskier from Iberia, and how he met his best friend, Tenas. Trull had been traveling to Chile for three years by the time he met Tenas, a motivated freeskier from Barcelona, Spain. He caught the up-and-comer slicing a line down Tuc de Baciver, the mythical peak near Baqueira, snapping a couple of photos before tracking down the athlete in town. The bond was immediate—Tenas a relentless go-getter and Trull an endless supply of energy and enthusiasm with an eye for good skiing in tough-to-get-to places. It was Tenas that convinced Trull to move his South American base to Las Leñas, a freeskier’s paradise with big, consequential lines between impressive rock spires. He and Tenas made it to Las Leñas in 2009, and quickly started picking off lines in the extensive Argentinean backcountry. Tenas forced him to push farther into the mountains than ever before, showing Trull that his athletic ability helped him stand out as a photographer. Many of his shots were taken from across the valley, perched on a steep outcropping of rock or blustery ridgeline, but many were taken from a much more intimate point-of-view perspective, bringing the viewer into the heart-gripping crux of a dramatic line. The extra effort abroad started to gain attention at home, with Baqueira-Beret bringing Trull on as a staff photographer and Spanish and European ski magazines plastering his images throughout their pages. “With Jordi, we were skiing these huge 3,000-foot couloirs and we were just so motivated,” Trull says. “He motivated us. I got so much better technically and mentally just by being with him in the mountains.” The two were working on a magazine piece in the Las Leñas backcountry when tragedy struck. The avalanche that took Tenas’ life sent Trull to the hospital for three days. Aside from some frostbite and blisters on his hands, he emerged unscathed, but it wasn’t until returning to Spain without his best friend that the gravity of his loss really set in. Back in Baqueira, nothing felt right. As the last person to see Tenas alive, he became the de facto sounding board for friends and family, all while trying to navigate his own grief. If they had just moved the tent, would Tenas still be here? By December, Trull had booked a ticket to Japan, spending the next three months skiing powder with friends from the Andes—others still reeling from the loss of their friend. “It was an escape,” he admits. “Not an escape from skiing or snow, but from the world. [Jordi’s death] made me want to give up skiing, but skiing is my life, you know? Skiing is what helped me get my head right.” Rosa María says her son rarely spoke directly about the accident, and that the family worried about him until he came back from Japan. “When we saw him return to snow, it calmed our nerves a bit in the sense that he had been through this tragedy and had dealt with it very well,” Rosa María says. “Overcome is not the word, it’s more that he continued through the trauma and learned that terrible things can happen, but that life continues.” The following summer, Trull was back in Las Leñas, this time with Navarro, his and Tenas’ mutual friend, in tow. Navarro was from Val d’Aran, the mountain valley home of Baqueira-Beret, and had been a freeskier in Trull’s camera crosshairs since 2008. The two had worked off and on since then, but in the summer of 2014, they started skiing and shooting big South American lines for the first time as a team. Over the next few years, Navarro’s stock grew, both in front of the camera and on the freeski competition scene. In 2017, he made his debut on the Freeride World Tour, combining his compact strength with an eye for the most daring lines on the mountain. Throughout it all, Trull was his friend behind the lens. “We understand each other; we don’t need to explain anything,” Navarro says. “Four words and we know what we need, exactly what wavelength we’re on. That connection is developed over a lot of time together and that’s something hard to find.” It’s from that understanding that their most ambitious project, “South Lines,” was born. While plenty of skiers were tagging impressive lines in the Andes, very few were comprehensively documenting the experiences. Lines were simply too remote, too tight, too rugged. But Trull had studied many of these descents for years and Navarro had made a career of skiing the improbable path. Combining GoPro footage with drone shots and long-lens camerawork, the two, along with Adrià Millan, put together a collection of high-octane descents into a web series that shook the ski world in 2016 and 2017. In 2018, the crew followed up with a full-length South Lines film. For Trull, it was a culmination of more than a decade of exploration in the Southern Hemisphere. More importantly, it was a nod to the friend that helped him carve his first lines in the high-altitude Andes. “He always had Jordi in mind; it’s not something he was just going to forget,” Rosa María says. Navarro’s descents were harrowing—tight, consequential lines, some less than a ski width wide. A fall in those zones would mean pinballing off rock and ice for over 1,000 vertical feet. As part of a lean production trio deep in the mountains, Trull used his past experiences to help the group check their collective ego. “What happened, happened, but now I need to use that to assess situations and keep a cool head,” Trull explains. “Even more importantly, as a cameraman I need to make those decisions and say we can’t film in certain areas because if something happens, we are far from everything, we are out of luck.” Navarro says he appreciates Trull’s knowledge in the mountains, but also his friend’s ability to pull a shot out of bad conditions or a blown mission. This past winter, Saharan sand blew into the Pyrenees with a southern storm, depositing a layer of brown and orange silt over the snow in Baqueira. While Navarro was sure it was the end of their shooting season, Trull urged Navarro to come to the resort and carve turns through the Mars-esque snowscape. “Txema always finds some type of story or excuse to get people out to try,” Navarro says. “You might think the day is going in the trash, but he’ll go and find something and make it all worth it. He’ll produce something absolutely potent.” It was the COVID-19 pandemic that ultimately derailed Trull’s endless winter. For the first time in 13 years, Trull didn’t travel to South America in 2020, forced to stay in Val d’Aran and ride things out at home. He says the break was good, that it gave him time to surf and climb, as well as some valuable moments of introspection. He began to think about slowing his South American migration, staying closer to home—establishing some roots. But then came a call to document a group of women split-boarders heading to climb and ride 18,000-foot volcanoes in Ecuador. Stability sounded nice, but the call of a new adventure in new mountains was too much to pass up. This November, he hopped on a plane—skis and camera in tow. Once again, the rest would have to wait.
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