Words: Jeff Galbraith 2017-10-31 17:29:16
Beginning as another East Coast transplant gone west for college, Flip graduated from Colorado’s Western State in 1984 before making the final leap to the Pacific and Pasadena, CA’s reputable ArtCenter College of Design. After graduating in 1989, he went on to work as an art director in advertising before eventually heading back to Colorado. “I didn’t like the art director job—which I worked so hard to get—very much,” he says. “Long days, up to 16 hours, and schlocky regional advertising was not all that. Even though I was fresh out of too much school, going to photography full time just seemed the right path.”
A friend who was living in Vail at the time invited Flip to shoot the Pro Mogul tour stop. He came, he shot and he submitted his images. The tour’s organizers were impressed enough to invite him back to the next event in Aspen. After the weekend, a photographer hired by the tour was caught selling his comped lift ticket. He was summarily fired, and Mr. Philips McCririck picked up the gig. “Lesson learned: Never sell a free ski pass,” Flip says. “I never have.”
On the Pro Mogul Tour in the early 1990s, Flip befriended the next generation of skiing royalty, a group that was about to upend everything about ski culture. Shane McConkey, Brad Holmes, Seth Morrison, Dean Cummings, Kent Kreitler and other now-legendary names all shared hotel floor space, keg cups and luggage carts from Telluride to Tignes to Thompson Pass, in a frenzied several years that changed the game fundamentally.
While snowboarding had gone on to stratospheric cultural heights, featured on MTV as the chosen new sport of rock stars and Hollywood, skiing was sucking industry wind. Years of the same approach, the same gear and the same ideas had stifled a once sexy and vibrant activity. Skiing had gone from outlaw cool a la Downhill Racer, to a sanitized yuppie sport based on condo sales.
Together, Flip and friends managed to blow this all up.
From the emerging mohawks, piercings and parties of the Pro Mogul tour, skiing’s new punk paradigm was going beyond the competition course. The crew poached snowboarding’s halfpipes, parks and traditional haunts. They journeyed to Alaska, pioneering an entirely different scale of terrain. With every first descent and fresh trick, they began to reclaim and redefine skiing for the better. And for the future.
Giving voice to this movement was a relatively short-lived publication produced by Oceanside, CA’s TransWorld Media. Titled FREEZE, the magazine was led by a group of one time Colorado University dorm-mates including Kreitler, McConkey and eventual editor Mike Jaquet. Flip became the photo editor, and it was on.
For several years, FREEZE, along with the emerging videographers it sponsored, disrupted skiing like never before. Now on cultural par with their snowboard brethren, the magazine breathed life back into the industry. Skiing took off again and has never looked back.
When it came time for The Ski Journal to name a successor to Grant Gunderson, our initial photo editor, Gunderson’s nomination was reflexive. “Flip should do it,” he said without hesitation. “He knows skiing, he loves skiing, and he gets it.”
For several seasons, Flip served that role with us, working with old friends and new ones to develop our imagery. And Grant was right—there is perhaps no one who sincerely loves skiing and skiers as much as McCririck. Alongside spending time with his wife LiAnne and their three maturing children, Flip showed tremendous commitment as he continued to travel and shoot for us, and we appreciated every minute he dedicated to The Ski Journal.
Of course, like any truly dedicated craftsman, Flip is a complete pain in the ass. With a laser focus on details, an absolute dedication to his vision and the truth as he sees it, Flip can bring it hard. And not relent. But it is precisely this sometimes-exasperating level of tenacity that makes his work so damn good.
I had the pleasure of spending some time with Flip in the Bahamas a couple of years ago, bonefishing the flats and talking about life.
His father, Capt. Phil Clark, who passed away early in Flip’s childhood, had been a legendary figure in the Keys and Caribbean. Jimmy Buffett even penned a song about him, “A Pirate Looks at 40.”
Flip had been spending more and more time in the Keys, and increasingly had been gravitating to the saltwater fly-fishing-and-island-hopping scene, a scene his father Phil and friends (including Jimmy Buffett) helped develop in the 1970s. There was a clear genetic simpatico for the area and culture for Flip, and he drank it all in.
One particular day, the guide’s skiff had broken down and he was relegated to walking the flats and bights on his own. While many of the lodge’s sporty guests would have gone ballistic at the idea of one of their precious fishing days being compromised, Flip just picked up a small camera and proceeded to get out there.
At day’s end, he had an amazing collection of images of fish, landscapes, locals and an intimate day on an intimate island. I asked if he was disappointed he didn’t get to go farther out in the boat.
“No way,” he replied immediately, summarizing his whole approach. “It’s good to see it and do it on your own terms.” To Flip: Thank you for your work on The Ski Journal, and mostly thank you for your contributions to skiing as a whole. Keep being a pain in the ass, my man.
Jeff Galbraith is the Publisher of The Ski Journal
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