According to the calendar, September marks the start of meteorological fall — the tidy system of dividing seasons into three-month blocks. For years, I didn’t even know that was a thing. My seasonal clock has always run on something else entirely: the arrival of the ski buyer’s guide.
I’m not talking about just one publication. Any of them will do — Freeskier, Powder, Outside, SKI. When I was younger, those thick issues stuffed with glossy images and gear reviews felt like contraband, smuggled straight from Ullr himself. I’d flip through 100+ pages of skis, boots, and jackets, convinced I was getting the inside scoop on the next big thing. Before the internet flattened access, those guides were portals into another world — one that promised snow was just around the corner.
Now, after spending time working within the ski industry, those glossy spreads mean something entirely different. They represent the culmination of years of work: ideas moving from scribbled sketches, to prototypes, to final products photographed in some windblown corner of the mountains. For those of us behind the curtain, the buyer’s guide is less a seasonal novelty and more a living archive of long days, late nights, and a lot of road miles.
n my case, many of those miles were logged in a red Toyota Tacoma, crisscrossing mountain towns and backroads to bring gear to shoots, line up athletes, and make deadlines. What you hold in your hands — on your coffee table, your desk, or maybe even balanced on the back of a toilet tank — is built on that travel.
Here’s a gallery of some of my favorite iPhone snapshots from those road trips. Not the polished spreads, but the behind-the-scenes fragments that carried the gear (and me) from point A to point B.
Enjoy the view from the road.
