02 Will Gadd climbing icebergs to raise climate awareness in Disko Bay, Greenland. 03 The late Arne Backstrom lower down in the Cunningham/Passerelle Couloir. This shot was taken two months later than my self-portrait and with a lot more snow. Words HANS LUDWIG Photos & Captions CHRISTIAN PONDELLA WHEN I first met Christian Pondella in 1996 in Mammoth, CA, he was a skinny, cackling bundle of energy with a ponytail halfway to his ass, and a penchant for 208-centimeter Volkl GS skis and steep northy couloirs. I had connected with him during a spring trip from Colorado to visit my college buddy Nathan Wallace and ski Mammoth, maybe even some of the legendary peaks of the surrounding High Sierra. Nathan had been backcountry skiing with Pondella all season and I jumped right on their train. The highlight of many descents we did was an over-night mission to the north couloir of a mountain called Red Slate, an exposed and aesthetic line right off the summit, one of the crown jewels of the area. It was the scariest and most exhilarating experience of my young life. The images Pondella captured there were stellar—steep, technical skiing with a wild backdrop of soaring rock faces. We knew we had the goods—this was the kind of cutting-edge skiing we wanted to see in magazines. The ponytail is just a memory now, but the skiing isn’t, and today Pondella is one of the world’s most accomplished adventure photographers and a ski mountaineer with an extensive list of descents on six continents. snow flying around and catching light, an angle-emphasizing composition, and a skier at a decisive moment. While he has his share of heavily setup, nighttime strobe shots or Red Bull events in his decades-long history, his signature ski images are made on slope, in the backcountry, about 10 feet from a rip-ping skier on steep and exposed terrain. “I think the on-snow perspective is what defines my work,” he says. “Ski mountaineering is the passion—camera or not—but I love documenting the experience.” IN 2011, I made the mistake of accompanying Pondella and Davenport on one of Davenport’s missions to ski all the 14ers in the United States. The target was White Mountain on the California and Nevada border, at 14,252 feet, the third-highest in California and a marathon day that started on dirt in a rugged desert canyon seven miles away and 7,000 feet below. Just under 14,000 feet, fading fast after seven straight hours of grinding uphill, I looked across the slope at Pon-della and he was accelerating, lengthening his skinning strides until he was loping like a wolf, as if the summit was food. There may be better big mountain skiers and better endurance athletes, but Pondella is as strong as anyone in the mountains. He’s basically just tendons and a cardiopul-monary system with a predator’s instinct and a camera. Anyone who has ever tried to shoot skiing with a wide-angle lens knows how it flattens terrain and shrinks moun-tains. But that’s the key to Pondella’s greatest ski images—he doesn’t shoot out the door of a helicopter or from the other side of the valley with a huge telephoto lens. Instead, he prides himself on shooting a descent while skiing, camera in hand and close to his subjects. PASSION CAN TAKE YOU a long way; in this case, from the sunny smog of the Los Angeles suburbs of Pondella’s childhood to the world’s great ranges. For 25 years Pondella has been at the forefront of modern freeskiing—AK big moun-tain skiing, technical high-elevation ski mountaineering, pure Cham-style steep skiing, remote wilderness expeditions, park and pipe shoots—with the covers and campaigns to prove it. His subjects and ski partners are a Who’s Who of generations of great skiers—Glen Plake, Chris Davenport, Shane McCo-nkey, Andreas Fransson, Seth Morrison, Eric Pollard, Chris Benchetler, Hilaree Nelson, to name more than a few. Pondella has built his career on images that embody light and dark, bright colors, palpable textures, majestic backdrops, 076 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 2: Page 76
