LEFT TO RIGHT Yakutat is an hour from Haines, AK by airplane. It’s home to a little slice of surf paradise known as “The Far North Shore.” The day before the Haines Freeride World Tour competition, Anne-Flore Marxer was not able to sleep, so she checked the Alaskan wave report. It was pumping in Yakutat and dropped me a line in the middle of the night. Are you in? She didn’t sleep at all knowing what was in store. We met this guy on the beach. His wife is a local nurse and he travels back and forth to Haines, where he is a teacher. Apparently, he is also a surfer—and a darn good one. I don’t remember Gemini’s real name. We stayed in touch through Instagram and one day he deleted his account. He was sleeping in a tent on the beach and ended up on our couch in Yakutat, AK. He was from Puerto Rico and was learning videography in Juneau. Life is full of surprises. mountain biker, climber, and now, road cyclist (after years spent despising the discipline). “I am following [the skiers’] passions in the summer-time—mountain biking was a big one, but most of the skiers were doing the crazy stuff like base jumping and climbing, so I got involved with that, too,” Daher says with a laugh. His success outside of skiing garnered attention from cli-ents, including Swatch, who enlisted Daher’s talents to shoot surfing from a helicopter. Although that’s not a common technique in surf photography, Daher’s experience shoot-ing the FWT from the sky translated perfectly to the project. Daher has shot surfing for five years since, taking on projects for elite clients like Red Bull. Daher has also zoomed out on the action sports world, entering the realm of documentary photography and film-making. He launched an environmental protection com-pany, One Bouteille Á La Mer [A Bottle in the Water], that produced a project showing action sports athletes engaged in their particular sport over landscapes of trash—ski tour-ing on a garbage heap, for example—in order to encourage recycling. This summer, he worked on a project called The Great Descente, a story about a young diver distraught over the pollution in Leman Lac, said to be the cleanest lake in Europe. The documentary showed humans floating down the Rhone River from the Rhone Glacier to the lake, simu-lating the journey of a piece of trash down the waterway. It’s a natural pivot for Daher, a man whose most cherished memories are ones that celebrate the surprising and thought-provoking—the types of ideas that give his ability to see potential in any situation a platform to flourish. “It doesn’t matter if it’s skiing or not,” says Daher. “I want to shoot interesting stories.” Dom Daher 093
The Ski Journal Volume 14, Issue 1: Page 93
