Each month we share a dozen or so pictures offered as fine-art-quality prints. Click the images below to order yours.
This month, in honor of the coming season, we feature my unique, enthusiastically reviewed and ongoing “Chairlift Pictures” project: a fun journey into the wild weather, characters and scenes that comprise skiing and riding on lift-served mountains. Many pictures are from my book Altitude Adjustment, which you can learn more about here.
This project began decades back, when we lived in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. There, you have to use the word “snow” in front of skiing, or folks get confused. Yet we traveled each winter as a family to ride “white ribbons of death” on the hills of southern Appalachia. As I relaxed on the chairlift from outfitting, dressing and corralling three children, I looked around at a world quite different from the tidal river we called home. Cables led my eye (and me!) uphill as lines of chairs faded into fog and snow. Colorful outfits sparkled against a stark-white landscape.
I started carrying a pocket camera. And when we moved to a high Colorado valley in 2013, I redoubled my efforts with a larger camera in a waist pack, documenting real mountains with real powder.
Along the way, I began to define and capture the unique elements of lift-served resorts: from hot dogs on the grill to hot dogs shredding the hill. I photographed the weather, the action under my chair, the parties around the lodge and the lifties who keep it all spinning. After a decade of this, I realized I had a book and published it. But my visual obsession with an obsessive sport continues, and you’ll still find me wrapped in a waist pack, baring my chilled fingers on a camera as I glide up the hill – and ski back down.
I bring 50 years of photographic printing experience to – and personally sign – each print, using Lucia Pro archival photo inks on natural-fiber papers. Please let me know if you want yours on matte-surface cotton rag, rather than the semi-gloss/luster paper specified. We can also have custom prints made on other media, such as metal and canvas. Please ask.
Printed and signed by Greg on natural fiber, semi-gloss paper; available as an 8×10 matted to 11×14, 13×19 or 17×22 bare prints.
The scene: Light snow falling under a blue sky highlights a pair of skiers crossing a ridge along the Continental Divide to reach the steep Curecanti face on a powdery March morning at Monarch Mountain, CO.
Printed and signed by Greg on natural fiber, semi-gloss paper; available as an 8×10 matted to 11×14 or as a 13×19 bare print.
The scene: Snow guns coat the slope, trees and chairlift at West Virginia’s Timberline Ski Resort on a bitter-cold January day.
Printed and signed by Greg on natural fiber, semi-gloss paper; available as an 8×10 matted to 11×14, 13×19 or 17×25 bare prints.
The scene: A family rides the Pioneer Chair through a sunlit snow shower at Monarch Mountain, CO.
Printed and signed by Greg on natural fiber, semi-gloss paper; available as an 8×10 matted to 11×14, 13×19 or 17×25 bare prints.
The scene: A red fox saunters across the snow, looking up at riders of the Garfield Chairlift at Monarch Mountain, CO.
Printed and signed by Greg on natural fiber, semi-gloss paper; available as an 8×10 matted to 11×14, 13×19 or 17×25 bare prints.
The scene: The afternoon sun backlights chairs, skiers and blowing snow at Monarch Mountain, CO.
Printed and signed by Greg on natural fiber, semi-gloss paper; available as an 8×10 matted to 11×14, 13×19 or 17×25 bare prints.
The scene: A snowboard rider cuts fresh tracks among others as the morning sun casts shadows on fresh powder at Monarch Mountain, CO.
Printed and signed by Greg on natural fiber, semi-gloss paper; available as an 8×10 matted to 11×14, 13×19 or 17×25 bare prints.
The scene: Skiers ride the Garfield chair over a ridge on the way to the top of Monarch Mountain, CO.
Printed and signed by Greg on natural fiber, semi-gloss paper; available as an 8×10 matted to 11×14, 13×19 or 17×25 bare prints.
The scene: Skiers and riders fill the Pioneer quad and Garfield double chairlifts on a busy January Saturday at Monarch Mountain, CO.
Printed and signed by Greg on natural fiber, semi-gloss paper; available as an 8×10 matted to 11×14, 13×19 or 17×25 bare prints.
The scene: A ski and boot rise from a cloud of February powder during a fall on steep Sheer Rocko at Monarch Mountain, CO.
Printed and signed by Greg on natural fiber, semi-gloss paper; available as an 8×10 matted to 11×14, 13×19 or 17×25 bare prints.
The scene: A Ski Patrol member on telemark skis steers through powder below the Garfield chairlift at Monarch Mountain, CO.
Printed and signed by Greg on natural fiber, semi-gloss paper; available as an 8×10 matted to 11×14, 13×19 or 17×25 bare prints.
The scene: Fresh powder covers trees as flakes fall on a single rider of the Panorama Chair at Monarch Mountain, CO.
Printed and signed by Greg on natural fiber, semi-gloss paper; available as an 8×10 matted to 11×14, 13×19 or 17×25 bare prints.
The scene: A sign warns riders of Telluride’s Lift 12 not to ski a tempting hill that leads into small basin they would need to walk from.