The two were working on a magazine piece in the Las Leñas backcountry when tragedy struck. The avalanche that took Tenas’ life sent Trull to the hospital for three days. Aside from some frostbite and blisters on his hands, he emerged unscathed, but it wasn’t until returning to Spain without his best friend that the gravity of his loss really set in. Back in Baqueira, nothing felt right. As the last person to see Tenas alive, he became the de facto sounding board for friends and family, all while trying to navigate his own grief. If they had just moved the tent, would Tenas still be here? By December, Trull had booked a ticket to Japan, spend-ing the next three months skiing powder with friends from the Andes—others still reeling from the loss of their friend. “It was an escape,” he admits. “Not an escape from skiing or snow, but from the world. [Jordi’s death] made me want to give up skiing, but skiing is my life, you know? Skiing is what helped me get my head right.” Rosa María says her son rarely spoke directly about the ac-cident, and that the family worried about him until he came back from Japan. “When we saw him return to snow, it calmed our nerves a bit in the sense that he had been through this tragedy and had dealt with it very well,” Rosa María says. “Overcome is not the word, it’s more that he continued through the trauma and learned that terrible things can happen, but that life continues.” The following summer, Trull was back in Las Leñas, this time with Navarro, his and Tenas’ mutual friend, in tow. Navarro was from Val d’Aran, the mountain valley home of Baqueira-Beret, and had been a freeskier in Trull’s camera crosshairs since 2008. The two had worked off and on since then, but in the summer of 2014, they started skiing and shooting big South American lines for the first time as a team. Over the next few years, Navarro’s stock grew, both in front of the camera and on the freeski competition scene. In 2017, he made his debut on the Freeride World Tour, com-bining his compact strength with an eye for the most daring lines on the mountain. Throughout it all, Trull was his friend behind the lens. “We understand each other; we don’t need to explain anything,” Navarro says. “Four words and we know what we need, exactly what wavelength we’re on. That connection is developed over a lot of time together and that’s something hard to find.” It’s from that understanding that their most ambitious project, “South Lines,” was born. While plenty of skiers were tagging impressive lines in the Andes, very few were compre-hensively documenting the experiences. Lines were simply too remote, too tight, too rugged. But Trull had studied many of these descents for years and Navarro had made a career of skiing the improbable path. Combining GoPro footage with drone shots and long-lens camerawork, the two, along with Adrià Millan, put together a collection of high-octane descents into a web series that shook the ski world in 2016 and 2017. In 2018, the crew followed up with a full-length South Lines film. For Trull, it was a culmination of more than a decade of exploration in the Southern Hemisphere. More importantly, it was a nod to the friend that helped him carve his first lines in the high-altitude Andes. “He always had Jordi in mind; it’s not something he was just going to forget,” Rosa María says. Navarro’s descents were harrowing—tight, consequential lines, some less than a ski width wide. A fall in those zones would mean pinballing off rock and ice for over 1,000 vertical feet. As part of a lean production trio deep in the mountains, Trull used his past experiences to help the group check their collective ego. “What happened, happened, but now I need to use that to assess situations and keep a cool head,” Trull explains. “Even more importantly, as a cameraman I need to make those deci-sions and say we can’t film in certain areas because if something happens, we are far from everything, we are out of luck.” Navarro says he appreciates Trull’s knowledge in the mountains, but also his friend’s ability to pull a shot out of bad conditions or a blown mission. This past winter, Saharan sand blew into the Pyrenees with a southern storm, depositing a layer of brown and orange silt over the snow in Baqueira. While Navarro was sure it was the end of their shooting season, Trull urged Navarro to come to the resort and carve turns through the Mars-esque snowscape. “Txema always finds some type of story or excuse to get people out to try,” Navarro says. “You might think the day is going in the trash, but he’ll go and find something and make it all worth it. He’ll produce something absolutely potent.” It was the COVID-19 pandemic that ultimately derailed Trull’s endless winter. For the first time in 13 years, Trull didn’t travel to South America in 2020, forced to stay in Val d’Aran and ride things out at home. He says the break was good, that it gave him time to surf and climb, as well as some valuable moments of introspection. He began to think about slowing his South American migration, staying closer to home—estab-lishing some roots. But then came a call to document a group of women split-boarders heading to climb and ride 18,000-foot volcanoes in Ecuador. Stability sounded nice, but the call of a new adventure in new mountains was too much to pass up. This November, he hopped on a plane—skis and camera in tow. Once again, the rest would have to wait. Txema Trull Gallerie 089
The Ski Journal Volume 15, Issue 4: Page 89
