Gallerie

Leslie Hittmeier Gallerie

Leslie Hittmeier’s Steady Growth

Leslie Hittmeier Gallerie
Passing the time playing with reflections. In an ideal world, the media team is ready to hit record well before the athletes say, “Three, two, one, dropping.” This leaves ample time to kill, usually passed by eating snacks, shooting scenics and checking focus about 100 times. In this particular photo, I’m waiting while Elena Hight, Michelle Parker, and Robin Van Gyn ascend a face near base camp in the Southern Alaska Range.
Words: Lily Krass. Photos and Captions: Leslie Hittmeier

After a relentless spring storm, the clouds finally parted. Leslie Hittmeier stared up at the East Ridge of Mount Bertha, a 10,204-foot glaciated peak in southeast Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park. She had to decide if she could ski the line.

Hittmeier and a media crew had traveled with athletes Griffin Post, Elena Hight and Jeremy Jones to shoot a first descent of Mount Bertha for HBO’s Edge of the Earth docu-series, an arduous endeavor that included a 125-mile boat ride and 20-mile approach from the North Pacific Ocean to base camp. Hittmeier had been hired to shoot the descent on-slope, over 4,000 vertical feet of mostly no-fall skiing, including an icy, exposed ridge close to the summit nicknamed “the Plank.”

It was a dream line. Hittmeier worked her way up and down it, quietly making some of the most exposed turns of her life while occasionally ducking behind a rock to stay out of the filmer’s aerial shots. She traveled with a slimmed-down camera pack by photographer standards, but even an extra 10 pounds is significant in critical terrain.

Back to Issue 17.1