Words ANDY ANDERSON Photos and Captions DREW SMITH DREW Smith was driving to a final job interview, picturing a future life that didn’t include photography. The rosy picture in his mind was that of small-town Montana—a good job at the power company, a nice truck, a wife. Maybe a couple of kids running around. There were no imposing rock walls, no month-long expedi-tions, and no financial uncertainty. There were definitely no years spent living in a van. Over the phone, a family acquaintance at the company had gone on and on about how stable of a career it was, perfect for a young guy like Smith. “You’ll be retired by the time you’re 50,” he had said. Somewhere along that road, Smith’s phone rang one more time. It wasn’t the power company, but Smith picked up, compelled to answer a different call. Over the last decade, Drew Smith has made a name for himself as one the most authentic and dedicated outdoor photographers in the game, entrenched in the mountain life-style and endlessly on the move around the world in search of adventure—from the soaring walls of South America and Yosemite to ski expeditions to Pakistan’s Trango Towers and Canada’s Baffin Island. But back on the Montana highway in 2005, he’d recently dropped out of college not quite two weeks in (it was non-refundable after that). Smith wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself. Partying was a temporary salve, but he had also recently broken his back at a local rager. Wanting to liven things up, he had jumped off the back deck onto what looked like deep snow and turned out to be frozen ground. “Friends were saying, ‘What are you gonna do now, just waste your life away?’” The power company job seemed like a way to get back on track. But a friend who worked in the fishing industry in Alaska had pulled some strings, and the phone call became a summer job offer at a salmon hatchery on a wild section of Pacific coastline. “I thought, ‘If I take this electric job, I know exactly what I’m going to do for the rest of my life’. I could see it,” he says. “But if I go to Alaska, who knows what’s gonna happen?’” BORN TO a ranch-hand father and an artist mother, Smith was the youngest of three boys raised amidst the bustle of a working cattle ranch, an hour down a gravel road from the nearest small town in central Montana. The boys had free reign of the ranch’s 64,000 acres to explore, ride bikes, shoot gophers and generally get into trouble. They were encour-aged in their wild pursuits by their father’s do-it-yourself curiosity and their mother’s creative homemaking. Later the family moved to Miles City in eastern Mon-tana, a quick four-hour drive from Red Lodge, MT, where, in 1998, Smith first started snowboarding at age 13. He worked long summers on a local farm to afford a season pass, and in the winter he and his friends would wake up at 4 a.m. every Saturday to make first chair. “I always had some kind of throw-away camera with me,” he says. “I enjoyed documenting stuff—just messing around— but I remember wanting to preserve these moments.” After high school and the ill-fated attempt at college, Smith was off to Alaska to see what else was out there. That fall, flush with cash from their summer jobs, he and a friend spent the winter surfing and driving down the Baja Penin-sula. At the end of the trip, Smith asked his buddy what he was going to do next. Smith’s friend said he was just going to keep traveling. “It inspired me,” he says. “I was like, whoa, that’s an option. You can just do what you want and not care what people think.” A string of seasonal, high-paying and hard labor jobs followed—construction, rockfall mitigation, wildland fire-fighting—working hard for a few months and traveling and living simply the rest of the year. Smith spent six months in southeast Asia the next winter, South America the following. In Jackson Hole in 2008, Smith re-injured his back snowboarding, and a summer of grueling work was out of the question. He got a job at Teton Mountaineering and fell in with a group of local climbers who taught him the basics. “I loved that I could push myself really hard and not feel like I was going to get injured all the time,” Smith says. Drew Smith Gallerie 085
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 4: Page 85
