Kari Medig photo blog

Pete Goodier has been my ski buddy for a long time.  I can’t even count the number of missions we’ve done together.  From dawn patrols to weekend peak bags, from multi-day traverses to ski hill bottomless powder days.  Once we even took a train across China to ski crappy – 38c snow for two weeks.  You name it, we’ve skied it (or tried to at least).

And in the last few years, there’s been a CO spewing component integral to pulling all this off: Pete’s 1991 Mazda 323 hatch back.  It’s dark green and has a $70 ski rack from funhogz in Cranbrook.  Its winter tires are pretty good.

On a trip last fall I noticed that it had accumulated quite a layer of debris. Then it dawned on me.  I was looking at an open air art installation symbolic of Pete’s life.  And when I say symbolic, I mean that in a good way.  ”Man, I’ve got to do a photo essay of your car.”

So I did.  Here’s the result of a couple hours with my medium format camera and PGood’s Mazda  323.

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Excited to be nominated for a National Magazine Award for Magazine Cover of the Year amongst some pretty stellar competition.  High fives for the fun collaboration with enRoute’s photo editor and art director for that Dec 2011 cover.

A lot of times these things aren’t so cut and dry though.  The one on the left is the final product, and the right are all the different possibilities they ran through the folks at the top before a decision was made (and this was just my imagery, who knows what else was being tested!).  Further proof that shooting a variety of options sometimes pays off.

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It’s hard to believe that it’s already been 10 years since our Over the Top expedition: the first full ski traverse of the St Elias Mountains in BC, Yukon and Alaska.

Skiers Lena Rowat, Jacqui Hudson, Merrie-Beth Board & I set off from Haines, AK in spring 2002.  We spent the next 2 months navigating the route’s countless glaciers through the most beautiful mountain amphitheatres on earth.  At the end of June 2002, skinny and sunburnt, we arrived in Cordova, AK, nearly 700km from where we started.

Our route took us up Mount Logan’s east ridge and down the King’s Trench. To this day, the 10,000′ powder descent though the thickening oxygen stands out as my favourite ski run ever.

Check out some old scans from the trip if you get a chance. And if you’re lucky you can still see the two part film I shot that still plays (probably late at night) on the National Geographic channel’s Total Adventure series.

And of course, a big high five to all my wonderful expedition-mates.  This trip still stands out as one of the best adventures of my life.

Wow, the poor old blog has taken a beating since I started submitting to the oh-so-interactive tumblr.  Sorry for neglecting you of late wordpress!  If you’re hankering for a dose of a few Kari Medig photos, check out karimedig.tumblr.com. The good news is I’ll be back soon with fresh new images from some exciting adventures at home and abroad.  Stay tuned!

Here are two of my favourite images from a recent 7 day bike tour with Em from Havana to Viñales, Cuba (be sure to click on it to see it big).  Our 20 kg rustic bikes were donated by kind folks in Nelson, BC and we managed to make the 350 km journey with only 1 flat.  Special thanks to Nelson Rocha for the shop time and Pat Morrow for donating the panniers.

The bikes will be put to great use rolling through the winding roads of Viñales for the rest of their days.

I finally got my hands on the Winter 2011/2012 Norrøna Magazine from Norway.  Wow.  What a great clean new lay-out with amazing stories and photography showing one of the worlds top adventure clothing brands in action. (High fives Eivind!)  Super excited to have a feature in there on a spring ski traverse that three friends and I did from the Bugaboos to Rogers Pass.

If you get a chance check out Jonas Bendiksen’s story The Road.  I’ll admit, I never thought I’d see the day where I’d be sharing pages of a magazine with my favourite Magnum photographer.

If you happen to find yourself on an Air Canada flight this holiday season, feel around in that little flap just below your fold-up table (don’t grab the barf bag or that laminated safety card) and pull out the latest copy of enRoute Magazine.

I’m excited to have a couple of feature stories in there from Yellowknife with wordsmith extraordinaire David McGimpsey and a ski-ish one from Kicking Horse Mountain Resort here in southeastern BC.  A guy wearing a full, and I mean full, downhill suit from the KHMR story was lucky enough to make the cover!

Writer Colin Field and I keep getting mileage out of a story we did originally for Skier Magazine here in Canada.  It’s about a trip we did to Gulmarg with skiers Ryan Oakden, Kevin Hjertaas, Chris Winter and Ride Guide’s filmaker Mike Benedek.  Gulmarg is an exotic ski destination in India’s volatile Kashmiri Himalaya on the border with Pakistan.  If you ever feel like having a very wild cultural experience that boasts a strange combination of AK-47′s with blower powder, I highly recommend this part of the globe. This time Colin’s words have been translated to German in Raus Magazine.  Wunderbar!

I’m really excited about a little story in the latest issue of the The Ski Journal that I did with my good friend and writer Colin Field.  The story profiles Bruno Imboden, a Swiss inventor who builds most of the electric cars that buzz around the streets of Zermatt, Switzerland.  The people of Zermatt realized long ago the value of clean, exhaust free air and made a law that banned the use of vehicles with internal combustion engines.  This keeps the view of the Matterhorn clear and shows us mountain town dwellers what can be done with a little bit of vision!

Here are a couple of recent portraits of freeskier extraordinaire Eric Hjorleifson at his home in Whistler and Westcomb clothing entrepreneur Gabriel Cote in Vancouver commissioned by Mountain Magazine out of Boulder, CO.  Thanks to creative director Dave Cox and high fives to writer Steven Threndyle for his awesome words that accompany the images.  Or did my images accompany his awesome words?!  Let’s just call it a symbiotic relationship.