BORN AND RAISED in Billings, MT, Hittmeier grew up skiing the mom-and-pop slopes of Red Lodge Mountain. She’d always felt at home on skis—far more comfortable in the mountains than playing team sports—but her relation-ship with skiing was casual, more of a social thing. When she picked up a camera around her senior year of high school, merging skiing with photography redefined how she saw the mountains. Hittmeier attended the University of Montana in Missoula, skied at Snowbowl and brought her camera everywhere. She wasn’t sure what to study and followed a photojournalism track at her mom’s recommendation. The budding photographer fell in love with backcountry skiing halfway through college and spent the next few years trying to turn every homework assignment into shooting photos of her friends skiing. “It didn’t lead to the greatest grades,” she says. “But I immediately knew I wanted to go work for a magazine and shoot skiing.” After college, Hittmeier briefly became an editor at Ski-ing. That’s where I first met her as a shy intern in Boulder, CO, in 2015. I was slightly in awe of this woman, just a few years older than me, who seemed to have it all figured out. “It’s funny because at the time I had no idea what I was doing,” she says, laughing. When we met, she was getting ready to chase a story in South America. I just remember thinking, “I want to do what she’s doing.” But that perceived ease wasn’t always automatic for Hittmeier. She spent a lot of time writing, yet craved more photo work. The visual world proved harder to break into. “I’m definitely not someone who was crushing it from the very beginning,” she says. “I remember wanting it so bad, and it took me so long to get good enough at shooting photos and being in the mountains to be able to do what I really wanted to do.” While she waited for her break, Hittmeier realized that what she had her sights on—shooting photos deep in the backcountry, often in technical alpine terrain—depended on technical ski ability almost as much as her photography skills. “You can feel like a rock star skiing at a small mountain [like Red Lodge],” she admits. “Then I moved to Jackson, and I was like, ‘Oh no, I’m actually really not that good at this at all.’” Undeterred, Hittmeier sought out on-hill mentors, spending as much time on skis as possible. She moved to the Tetons to work as part of the editorial team at TGR. While interviewing local pro skier Hadley Hammer in 2016, the two struck up a fast friendship, which Hittmeier says impacted both her photography and skiing. “At the time, Hadley was already really far along as an athlete, but she was still willing to go out with me and shoot, even when no one was hiring me,” Hittmeier says. “She also gave me ski lessons, which was huge.” “I remember recognizing in her a lot of the opinions and values of women in the industry that are similar to my own,” Hammer says. “One of Leslie’s amazing strengths is that she makes people feel so comfortable exactly as they are, and I see that when she interviews people.” The pair skied a few big objectives, including the coveted Grand Teton, and they traveled together to cover the Freeride World Tour in Verbier, Switzerland. “Our friendship was like zero to 100 really quick,” Hammer says jokingly. “I even third-wheeled her honeymoon in Chamonix and we all became roommates back in Jackson.” Hammer thinks it’s a combination of action shots and an eye for the in-between moments that make Hittmeier’s photography stand out. “I want to know what kind of emotion is behind whatever adventure you’re doing,” says Hammer. “In one to three photos [Leslie] can tell an entire story about what happened on the whole trip.” The brief moments of self-doubt in the middle of a climb, wonder at the first glimpse of a remote peak, bone-deep exhaustion hanging over a skier about to collapse into their tent at basecamp—Hittmeier’s images tell a story of both what the team accomplished and how they accomplished it. It’s a people-first approach, and it’s working. “Often in the mountains you see people so fixated on getting better that their priorities jumble and they lose sight of what else is important,” Hammer says. “What’s so im-pressive about Leslie is that she’s getting better every year, but not at the expense of the people around her.” As Hittmeier became more accustomed to skiing in steep, technical terrain, her opportunities behind the camera and her community of athletes grew. Her friend Julie Ellison, who she’d met while interning at Climbing Magazine in 2014, asked her if she wanted to help out with a climbing movie she was making called Pretty Strong . Encouraged by the film’s success and with enough prospective projects as both a photographer and filmer, Hittmeier left her desk job in 2017 and started working as a contractor. Within a year, she was picking up work for The North Face, Patagonia, TGR and HBO. In 2018, she was brought on as a second shooter for TGR’s project Blank Spaces with Elena Hight and was soon traveling to Alaska for ski expeditions, hunkering down while storms raged through their base camp and following athletes up (and down) big objectives. 088 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 1: Page 88
