Tantalus 1

If you have ever driven the Sea-to-Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler, you know the magnetic pull of the Tantalus Range. It rises dramatically across the valley, and its jagged glaciated peaks and sheer granite walls have a way of stopping you in your tracks.

Nineteen years to get inside

I arrived in British Columbia in 2000, long before I ever embarked on these large-scale alpine adventures, and I looked up at those mountains knowing I had to find a way inside them. It took 19 years of building experience before that ambition finally materialised. In 2019 I planned and executed a gruelling human-powered journey, canoeing across and hiking on foot all the way to the Jim Habrey Hut high in the range, carrying everything required to spend three days inside it.

The winter return

That summer planted the need to come back in winter. I wanted to see those massive granite walls and sweeping ridgelines buried in snow. It took years for the alignment to happen, and it culminated in a remote three-day ski touring mission with a veteran guide and a team of athletes, based out of a backcountry cabin, photographing the range in full winter severity.

Why there are skiers in this frame

There is no shortage of pretty mountain photographs in the world. What pulls me behind the lens is the feeling of being embedded in a landscape: the visceral scale, the biting cold, the profound quiet between storms. The figures here are not there to dominate the frame, they are human anchors. A line of skiers boot-packing beneath an amphitheatre of ice gives you an immediate sense of how vast and unforgiving this terrain really is.

Tantalus 1 is one of twelve photographs in The Tantalus Collection, each strictly capped at 25 prints worldwide.