Words Lily Krass Photos and Captions Jana Rogers CROUCHED The clouds had shifted allowing the sun to illuminate the rocky ridge above the slope, a photographer’s dream. The skiers dropped in and arced a few perfect turns down the untouched pitch. It was 2018 and Rogers felt an overwhelm-ing sense of peace, living a career she’d so artfully crafted for herself. Only a few years after throwing herself into the world of ski photography, she was packing her schedule with trips to Europe and Japan, working big commercial shoots, like this day in Zillertal, all over the world. Still, she couldn’t shake a lingering guilt. “I felt so much gratitude and joy, but I also felt this pang of uncomfortable hypocrisy,” she says looking back on that winter. “I asked myself, ‘What am I actually doing to give back and protect these places?’” on a ridge in Austria’s Zillertal Alps, photographer Jana Rogers observed the fading light in the snowcapped peaks invasive species or starting an osprey nesting program. It was there that Rogers started to see the world through the lens of conservation, her grandfather instilling the idea of protecting the land you love. Winters, on the other hand, were spent at home in Gleneden Beach, OR, skiing at Mount Hood every chance she could get. “My family had two rules,” she says. “One: You can’t say you’re cold, and two: When your jacket is soaked, grab a dry replacement from the car and keep skiing until the last chair.” Rogers studied design with an emphasis on sustainable products and materials at the University of Oregon. But after graduation, she couldn’t bring herself to take the job she had lined up at a big firm. “I remember calling my dad in a panic and he said, ‘Well if you could do anything, what would you do?’” she says. “Immediately I thought to myself, I would ski .” So she started a small design studio in Bend, OR, and chased snow. She worked from the road, skied almost every day, took meetings from the chairlift and scoured base lodges for free wifi. She coached Mount Bachelor’s freeride team, got her PSIA III certification, and started touring more. The recent college grad discovered she felt most at home in the backcountry, which of-fered her the chance to connect her love for skiing with the wild places she’d grown up exploring. Rogers gradually set her sights on bigger objectives, feeling stronger each year, until a spring 2016 trip to Valdez, AK, changed everything. Her party of four was pitching out a long, exposed Chugach run known as the Hammer. Rogers and two of her partners were perched on what they had all agreed was a safe zone when a massive avalanche ripped out above them, propagating farther than any of them had anticipated. With only a split second to react, Rogers made eye contact with her friend next to her before the weight of a freight train pulled them off the mountain. “Everything got really dark and I was just getting rag-dolled down the mountain. I was sure I was going to die,” she says. MOST OF ROGERS’ childhood memories involve trails, beaches or snow. Exploring tide pools on the Oregon coast. Wandering through the Tetons every school break. Her mom, Janet, was a biologist working as a naturalist for Grand Teton National Park. From the time Rogers was 2 years old she spent summers in her mother’s footsteps, learning about the land and how to take care of it. Living inside the park at the Teton Climber’s Ranch, Rogers was surrounded by park rangers, wildlife photographers and climbers, a community that had dedicated their lives to the surrounding wild spaces. “I was really captivated by these people who worked hard to spend time up in the mountains and were able to do so in a creative, artistic way,” Rogers says. “That was when I first learned to sit still in one place and just be. There’s such a deep connection between being in the mountains and creat-ing something while you’re out there.” Rogers’ grandfather is also a biologist, and lives on a farm in New Hampshire, a land easement that has been in the fam-ily for nine generations. When she visited in the summers, he insisted that everyone in the family be working in some way to care for and protect the land, whether it was removing 084 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 15, Issue 3: Page 84
