Words Erme Catino Photos and Captions Jeff Winterton the 1990s skiing underwent a revolution. Big mountain skiers picked up the pace, while an emerging group of park skiers incorporated stylistic expressions in the air and urban environments, influenced by snowboarders and skateboarders. It was the beginning of the freesking movement, a subculture of mainstream skiing, which at the time was driven by racing. At the heart of the park scene was East Coast photographer Jeff Winterton. Winterton, who secured the first published photo of a rail slide by a skier—Jason Levinthal in downtown Albany, NY, in Freeze Magazine -—is now the academy director for Aztec Soc-cer in Topsfield, MA. He recently came across a handful of slides from the ’90s, many of which have never been seen by the public. It’s a collection that documents a critical era in skiing, one that lifted the sport out of stagnation. As for his roots, “I started out just trying to be like Scot Schmidt,” Winterton, now 47 years old, says. He graduated from Saint Michaels College in Colchester, VT with a bachelor’s in economics in 1993. Like many skiers before him, he packed up and headed west, landing in Tel-luride, CO for a pitiful winter, then later taking up residence in Alta, UT, after a couple of epic storm cycles. “We started shooting photos of our buddies, and I was into trying to drop the biggest airs and ski the steepest lines,” Winterton recalls. He landed a sponsorship with a little travel stipend. “Everyone was trying to be like Greg Stump, and Teton Gravity Research hadn’t even released their first movie yet… I got my first published photo in 1995 in Powder . It was a landscape of Alta at night,” Winterton says. Yet Winterton’s legacy in freeskiing took root when he moved back east to coach soccer at Union College in upstate New York. There, he answered a want ad in the newspaper. The position was for a factory-line worker at a snowboard manufacturer—it happened to be for Line Skis and his boss was Line founder Jason Levinthal. “Levinthal asked me if I smoked,” Winterton remembers. “I said, ‘Well, not cigarettes.’ He said, ‘Good,’ because his other guy was killing production with cigarette breaks.” Winterton was a burgeoning photographer and Levinthal was establishing himself as an innovator in the ski scene, pressing his ski blades, which were designed specifically for the terrain park and based on inline skates. “I was fixing edges to ski boards with red and white stripes with no logo and ended up shooting photos of Levinthal and Mike Nick [who won the first Winter X Games in the discipline—Levinthal placed third],” Winterton says. “We also prototyped Line’s first twin-tip ski.” This was before Line produced the Ostness Dragon, the company’s innovative 193cm twin tip. “We’d go up to Mount Snow’s terrain park with them,” Winterton says. “They had pennies pressed in the tip and tail, and I kept breaking them. It was a cool time.” Levinthal and company were out to disrupt the ski indus-try. “We would attend the trade show, and at the time the snowboard brands were in a different building than skiing,” Winterton says. “The ski side was like a tech trade convention, with people in ties shaking hands. On the snowboard side it was a party, and so much cooler. Levinthal was into that scene and had the same motivation and vision as myself: to take back skiing from snowboarding, so it didn’t die forever.” IN 078 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 13, Issue 2: Page 78
