04 The late Dave Rosenbarger and Giulia Monego heading back to base camp through marshland in Bolivia. 05 Dearly missed David Llama deep in the powder right outside of Innsbruck, Austria. Jim Morrison, the late Hilaree Nelson and I were David’s guests for five days back in 2019, and the conditions lined up just right. For him it’s a selfish choice. “I hate to water down my ski experience for the photography. I take pride in skiing for fun first,” he says. “If I’m shooting skiing, then I’m skiing. There’s not many kinds of sports photography where you have to be doing the sport to shoot it.” That choice is what leads to intimate views of the action in dramatic locations—leveraging his own passion and skills to ski the lines that produce cover shots. In the moment, on a big descent, the photography disappears into the skiing. Pondella mentions a shot of the late Dave Rosenbarger, a stunning image of him setting up a rappel on a teetering pin-nacle below Chamonix’s Aiguille du Midi tram that ran as a full spread in Powder. “I don’t even remember taking it,” he admits. “I’m so in the moment that I’m basically shooting unconsciously.” Pondella’s origins and evolution as a specialist ski photog-rapher were almost as pure. When I ask him if he ever had a backup plan he laughs and says, “There never was any kind of plan.” He grew up skiing Mammoth and got into rock climb-ing his senior year of high school. By the time he attended Regis University in Denver he was climbing and skiing at Berthoud Pass as often as he could between classes. As a fine art major he dabbled in photography, but was mostly shooting home video of friends skiing powder on the pass, just documenting fun days afield. After graduating, Pondella moved to Mammoth, waiting tables at night and skiing most days. The Mammoth ski scene in the ’90s was tiny, but with the mentorship of freeskiing masters Glen Plake and Darren Johnson, Pondella’s local rat pack was strong and skilled. The style Plake and Johnson pushed was big, powerful turns on 210-ish Super-G skis, annihilating Mammoth’s open alpine terrain and variable California snow with speed and sound technique. Pondella began taking a camera along in the High Sierra backcountry with friends, still just documenting for fun. One day in 1996 he met David Reddick lapping Chair 23, and the longtime photo editor and art director at Powder encouraged him to submit images. I had done some writing in college and that summer we submitted a story and photos about our spring couloir frenzy in the Sierra—the same that led to our descent of Red Slate—to the mag. Powder ran it, along with a shot of Wallace dropping into Red Slate that was a real standout in the photo issue. And that was it for us. Wallace became his idiosyncratic version of a pro steep skier for Oakley and later Black Crows. Pondella started getting calls to shoot pros with ski-film companies. I moved to Mammoth, tried to keep up with them on backcountry beatdown after backcountry beatdown, and became a correspondent for Powder . Around 2000, Pondella quit waiting tables for good. He’d gotten a call from Matchstick Productions to shoot stills on a Europe trip with McConkey, Davenport and Wendy Fisher. Soon he was linked up with Red Bull, a professional relationship that would endure over the next two decades. As Pondella evolved as a photographer he also grew into bigger and more technical skiing, expanding his mountain-eering skills and soaking up ski knowledge from the athletes, guides and locals on his work trips. After Wallace moved to Chamonix in ’99, it became a regular stop on the annual Pondella Gnar Tour that would typically include Alaska, Europe, Japan and increasingly more exotic expedition-style trips to big mountains in places such as Svalbard, Norway, Peru and Sochi, Russia. A partnership with Red Bull ice climber Will Gadd took him everywhere from Iceland’s wa-terfalls to the remains of Kilimanjaro’s glacier and icebergs in the middle of the ocean. But pushing boundaries eventually comes at a cost. “You play in the mountains as long as I have with athletes who are pushing it, things are going to happen,” he says. “I’ve probably lost at least 20 friends. Some of the best stuff I’ve done feels like a big scar now.” Pondella lost ski partners and legends of steep terrain such as Arne Backstrom, Dave Rosenbarger, and Andreas Fransson in separate mountain accidents within years of each other, and says his own personal close calls are too many to count. There aren’t many cutting-edge skiers still getting after it in their 50s. Have the losses changed Pondella’s risk calcu-lus? As a husband and later-in-life father, is he downshifting? “I skied some great peaks here in Mammoth this winter, just for fun,” he says. “My son Blaise is ski racing now and skiing with him is what’s fun right now…I think that window’s closed for a while, but my love for skiing and shooting it hasn’t diminished.” The operative phrase there is “for a while.” He laughs, the same cackle I’ve heard so many times on so many steep and beautiful mountains, and continues, “Maybe I’ll make a comeback in my 60s.” Christian Pondella Gallerie 079
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 2: Page 79
