Words: Derek Taylor, Photos: Ace Kvale 2018-12-10 15:38:24
And now, from where I stand Upon this hill I plundered from the pool I look around I search the skies I shade my eyes So nearly blind And I see signs of half remembered days I hear bells that chime in strange familiar ways I recognise... The hope you kindle in your eyes —Roger Waters, “5:06am (Every Strangers Eyes)” Ace Kvale forwards a link to an article in the New Yorker. It’s about 7,000 words, not a single one of which mentions the Boulder, UT-based photographer. Nor are any of the images his. That this is what he sends along as insight into his current sense of place speaks volumes about Kvale. Notably, that when you ask Kvale to talk about himself, you most likely will end up hearing about someone else. In that spirit, this isn’t a profile about Kvale. This is a story about hitchhiking, an odyssey that begins with a teenager standing on the side of the highway in 1970s Rochester, MN, with dreams of big skies, open spaces and deep powder to the west. “I just picked a place on the map and hitched a ride to Steamboat, basically,” Kvale says. The journey that follows—from ski bum and climber to photographer to mountaineer to philanthropist—contains many chapters, a great deal of which start off in similar fashion. The most pivotal may be the ride he and a girlfriend hitched from Chamonix to Verbier based solely on the knowledge that a ski shop there carried the same gear he used. “I walked into the bar, and there’s Marko [Shapiro]. And the girl he was sitting with said, ‘Were you guys looking for a job?’ Within two hours of arriving, we had a place and a job cleaning bathrooms and cleaning out chalets once or twice a week.” In between, and beyond, are dozens more chapters, each, if not life-altering, at least emblematic of the character and resolve that have defined Kvale’s life and career. In short, he’s never been afraid to stick out his thumb—proverbially or otherwise—when the only guaranteed outcome is unforeseen adventure. ”Remember Into the Wild and the hitchhiking trips? I did those trips,” Kvale says. “I hitchhiked from Telluride up to Banff and Jasper, over to Vancouver Island, down to San Diego and back to Telluride on 50 bucks, working along the way and living on peanut butter and honey. I shoveled shrimp on a boat in Oregon. I painted curbs at a gas station. After my first year in Verbier, I arrived back in New York, took trains to Connecticut, hitchhiked up to Maine with a girlfriend, dropped her off, then hitchhiked across Ontario and back to Minnesota. Said hi to my mom, then I hitchhiked back to Telluride. But that was the ’70s. People hitchhiked more then.” Kvale spent close to 20 winters in Verbier, where the exploits of he and his friends living in a chalet in the hamlet of Clambin have been well documented. His crew, led by Shapiro with Kvale and John Falkiner always close by, are credited with creating a new paradigm of ski photography that is still largely adhered to today. Kvale, who started as a model skiing for Shapiro’s lens, is quick to credit Shapiro for launching his own photography career. But it was Kvale’s penchant for adventure that was the true catalyst. Around 1982, Kvale traveled to South Africa with filmmaker Gary Bigham to put on freestyle skiing demonstrations for large stadium crowds. “We were the Arctic Assault Team,” Kvale says. “We made these huge jumps with scaffolding and these nylon bristles on them, and then huge foam rubber. We would go off in these spotlights and do flips and tricks and land in this foam.” When the demos ended, Kvale hitchhiked north, through Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and eventually to Lake Malawi, where he caught a flight back to Switzerland. He had uneasy moments along the way. In Botswana, he arrived in a mining town on payday when the miners were out drinking their wages. With his long hair and backpack, he realized he was a target. “It was nighttime. I was being followed wherever I went,” he says. “I found some police. They let me sleep in the jail. The doors were open, but I was in a cell, on the floor, with cockroaches, with the lights on, where I spent the night until it was daylight and I could leave.” Once he got across the Malawi border, the long hair was no longer an issue. “I had been warned that in Malawi long hair was illegal,” he says. He pulled his hair into a tight ponytail, tucked it under his hat, and attempted to cross. “The guard said, ‘You must learn about the customs of our country.’ He opened his drawer and pulled out these freaking huge scissors. They looked like a hedge clipper. We went outside and sat under a tree. They pulled my ponytail as tight as they could get it, and went chop.” Kvale documented the trip with a little Rollei camera. When he got back to Verbier, he showed the photos to Shapiro, who noticed Kvale’s eye for composition. “Marko was going so big at the time that he was getting jobs that he just didn’t want to do,” Kvale says. “So I became his B-shooter. He bought me my first Nikon F3, and basically gave it to me. And he goes, ‘You now owe me this much. But I’m gonna give you this much in jobs, and it’ll be paid for after you do these jobs.’” After nearly 20 years in Clambin, Kvale decided to move back to Telluride. His career was taking off, and the same things that first drew him out of Rochester were pulling him back to the American West. But there was more. “I had a son born in Telluride,” Kvale says. “I had this young boy, and I just couldn’t be apart from him anymore.” His son Walter is 30 now and still lives in Telluride. “He’s awesome. Still the love of my life,” he says. Artistically, Kvale’s work evolved in 2002 while on an expedition to climb Sepu Kangri, the highest unclimbed mountain in Tibet at the time. Two members of the seven-person team—Mark Newcomb and Carlos Buhler—reached the summit. “It’s a mountain higher than Denali in the middle of Tibet, but it was just a big, scary mountain in a lot of ways,” Kvale says. “But we had this incredible cultural experience. We were in a village where very few foreigners had ever been.” In a sponsored slide show in Salt Lake City following the expedition, Kvale says he didn’t include any shots of Sepu Kangri, opting instead to highlight the people and the community they met. “It was a big, sponsored expedition. We climbed a big mountain, nobody died and, in hindsight, nobody cared,” he says. “But we had this amazing cultural experience, and ever since then I decided that mountain climbing, for me personally, was just a means to go to beautiful places.” Kvale calls the work he has done since the most important of his life. After the Sepu Kangri trip, he started working with the dZi Foundation (pronounced “Zee”), a Ridgeway, CO-based nonprofit that currently serves 32,000 people in rural Nepal, focusing on basic infrastructure such as schools, buildings, toilets, drinking water and bridges. Kvale sits on the advisory board and provides photos to the organization. In 2004, while shooting a story for Outside magazine, he met Dr. Geoff Tabin and got involved in the Himalayan Cataract Project. The HCP has performed more than 625,000 eye surgeries for people in developing countries in Asia and Africa. Kvale says HCP flies him out just about any time he wants to volunteer. The payoff is he gets a trip to these far-off places he has come to love. Once on site, his job is to be part of the “positive flow,” as Tabin puts it. In short, he helps out however he can, whether it’s prepping patients for surgery or helping fix things around the hospital. And, of course, he documents their work. “That has really been some of the best work of my life,” he says. “I have access to people that you would never have as a tourist. I’m basically just another doctor. I’m wearing scrubs and masks and a hairnet half the time, and I’m just helping with patient flow or helping them to the OR. But I’m able to photograph people and have a proximity, working with people one on one, that you would never have.” Meanwhile, like most Colorado ski towns, the Telluride Kvale returned to in 1995 was not the same place he’d discovered in the ’70s. By the mid 2000s, even in the little community of Ophir, tucked away in the mountains outside of town, it started to feel crowded. “I have this weird introvert/extrovert personality,” Kvale says. “I can go to the Gathering [a photography festival that used to take place at Red Mountain, BC] and give a slide show, or teach a photo residency program in Banff. I can pull that off for a week, but then I need to come home and I have to hide for a week.” In 2006, Kvale moved to Boulder, UT, a gateway community to what until recently was Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. These days, Kvale does his hiding around a fire pit or a game of horseshoes on the edge of the last expanse of wilderness in the United States to be mapped. “Even when I lived in Verbier, I lived in Clambin and walked back and forth,” he says. “When I lived in Telluride, I lived in cabins and teepees until I built my little house, and walked back and forth. As Telluride and Verbier expanded, I took to the backcountry and disdained the ski lifts. Over here I found something that I’ve been searching for. I found this kind of wild, remote resourcefulness. Once I got tired, not of the act of skiing, but of what ski areas offered, I found that this wilderness offered me something that I’d been looking for in the West. And I came here to indulge my obsession for wild places.” Kvale no longer sticks out his thumb when he needs to wander. He walks out his door, his 13-year-old blue heeler Ghengis Khan, and maybe a friend or two in tow, and plunges into the vast canyon lands surrounding him, sometimes for weeks at a time. Which brings us back to the New Yorker article. It’s not about skiing or climbing or photography; it’s a deep dive into the political battle over public lands for which this tiny town has become ground zero. It focuses on Hell’s Backbone Grill, a farm-to-table restaurant that’s esteemed as one of the best in Utah, and that over its almost two decades in existence has managed to span the political and cultural chasms that characterize this region—between hippies and rednecks, ranchers and conservationists, Mormons and those who aren’t. Kvale says the restaurant and its owners were part of the allure of Boulder. “I’m not a foodie by any means, but having local food has really been an education,” he says. “Fruit, vegetables, dairy and meat all from our valley—it’s really incredible. So that all hooked me in.” Hell’s Backbone is also taking the sharp end in the fight against the federal government’s recent shrinking of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National monuments, filing a lawsuit challenging the administration’s legal authority to rescind these protections implemented under the Antiquities Act. It’s a movement Kvale has become involved in as well. Professionally, he’s still shooting, including projects for Patagonia based in the Southwest. But this latest chapter is a new priority. “Moving over here, and then having this political theater, this evisceration of the monuments, it made all that shit in Washington—which was always distant—very personal,” he says. “It’s a very personal battle now because they’re taking away what I directly moved here for.” Unlike the philanthropy work he has done around the globe, this latest chapter is not something he actively sought out, but you can expect him to approach it with the same verve, determination and sense of adventure. Photo Caption: John Falkiner and Mike Powers making a climb and ski descent of Mt. Aspiring on New Zealand’s South Island, circa 1989. John and Mike are pictured here on the French Ridge with Gloomy Gorge on their right. They could not see the magnitude of it from their perspective.
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