THE SOLOIST
On a sunny day in May 2011, photographer Zach Clanton sat on his splitboard eating lunch above the closed Mount Baker Ski Area. Scanning the face of Mount Shuksan through his zoom lens, he saw a fresh skin track. It was like stumbling upon the tracks of a mythical animal—a Sasquatch or a spirit bear. He followed the track until he saw a lone figure near the top of the White Salmon Glacier. He settled in to wait, with his elbows on his knees. Whoever it was—whatever it was—would have to come down. When it did, Clanton would be there to get the shot.
He had a feeling who it might be. He’d seen the signature Toyota Santana camper in the parking lot. The one with the barking dog and plywood/12-pack cases for cushions over the seat springs. He’d heard the stories. Everyone who’d spent any time in the small and scattered tribe of Washington backcountry skiers had heard them. With dozens of hairball solo descents in the North Cascades— some of them previously unimaginable firsts—the man likely at the top of the skin track had become something of a legend.
And this was a land of legends—Thunderbird, Seawolf, Fred Beckey, Steve Barnett, Carl Skoog. This particular legend didn’t have sponsors. He wasn’t tied to a steady job. He lived in his truck with his beloved dog, Sadie, who had long ago, during one of his frequent multi-day absences, eaten the dashboard and the upholstery from the seats.
Clanton sat there for over an hour, watching through his camera as the skier wrapped around the rocks on the ridge below the summit pyramid and then reappeared above the Northwest Couloir. Clanton started firing his camera as the skier ripped through the opening of the Northwest and then, unbelievably, rolled out over the icefall, over thousands of feet of vertical exposure, and made a confident traverse to the Hanging Glacier. From Clanton’s perspective, there was no way through. The stakes were ultimate. To fall was to die.
Clanton marveled at the spirit of it. As far as this guy knew, nobody was watching. “He didn’t give a fuck,” Clanton told me recently. “He just went out and skied one of the craziest lines by himself, with no back-up, just for the joy of it.”
Clanton snapped a series of historic shots then
