Process & Result
The end result—a magazine completed, a line skied. From the pre-dawn darkness of the trailhead or the first discussions of an assignment, it can be difficult to visualize the final product, how the line will flow or how the magazine will fall together once the pages are printed back-to-back. One way or another, though, it always works out. Through hard work, long nights of strategizing, early morning alarms, whatever it may be—everything always falls into place.
It begins with a plan—where to ride, which stories to print, what day to make the trek, which photos to choose that will bring each piece to life. Drafts flow between the FREESKIER editors and the contributors in the same way conversations between ski partners set the course. Imperative to the process, however, a plan is just a draft, an initial sketch, an idea and, all scheming aside, there’s always something that goes awry, something that forces us to pivot and maneuver to stay on-track.
Maybe it’s the weather, an unforeseen storm or a threatening change in the snowpack. It could be a missed deadline or a photographer that we can’t track down. On-the-go evaluations and in-the-moment decisions are the crux to success, the key to the outcome. The need to pivot, to edit, to change the plan—it happens in a flash, our minds tuned into the situation so acutely that thinking and acting become simultaneous. “Do or do not… there is no try,” say the Jedis…
