Underdogs

Photos by Elina Lehmkuhl and text by Joy Dutch

The unstoppable force of the human spirit meets the immovable object of the vas Alaskan wilderness. Is it a fierce battle between the two, or a delicate dance with both sides working in Harmony? The unwavering curiosity and thirst for adventure of humanity strutting a cat-like tango in Mother Nature's most unforgiving but most spectacular ballroom. 

DREAM BIG.

This isn’t a story about snowboarding, per se; it’s a story about people. About exploration, about adventure, about determination, about the beauty of the natural world and our infinitesimally small place within it. But most of all, this is a story about women who smash glass ceilings, who defy the odds and who are blazing a trail through the wilderness. This is a story about The Underdogs.
Snowboarding’s vast and snowcapped Emerald City, Alaska, has long drawn in discerning adventurers like moths to a flame. Earlier this year, four women set their sights on North America’s final frontier, a place known for testing the limits of human endurance and resilience.
When Celina Weber, Kate Ediger, Anto Galmez, and Shawna Paoli, aka “The Underdogs,” embarked on their trip to the Talkeetna Mountains, they’d never met in person. Complete strangers united by a common passion, they dreamed of heading north to experience the terrain they’d grown up seeing their heroes riding. Forgoing helis, the group instead relied solely on leg power to earn their turns, a pure splitboard trip that stripped back all the noise and returned to the very core of snowboarding. When we heard about their expedition, we knew we had to learn more, so we sought out Celina Weber to find out just what it takes to bring a project like this to life, and what she learned in the process.
“I’d had a big accident a couple of years ago, it was pretty intense; I almost died and had to work my way back to snowboarding, and that was pretty rough. But before that, I was on an expedition in South America, and I was like, ‘fuck, this is the stuff I really wanna do.’ That was just a kind of spark that was there; I wanted to do that again. But then the accident happened, so I had to wait and recover. And then I was finally ready to go.

Forgoing helis, the group instead relied solely on leg power to earn their turns, a pure splitboard trip that stripped back all the noise and returned to the very core of snowboarding.

I had always wanted to go to Alaska because I had this dream of riding spines; there’s nowhere else in the world where you can ride that kind of terrain. I had this vision of either going back to South America or to Alaska because that’s a dream situation. And then I thought, who can I do it with?

I had connected with Kate (Ediger) a while ago on social, but we had never met or jumped on a call or anything. I thought it could be cool to ask her randomly to do something, but I hesitated. And then on a random Tuesday, I was at home vacuuming, and suddenly I got a message from her asking, ‘Hey, do you maybe wanna do a project next year for Jones or something?’ And it was almost scary, you know? After that, it probably took 15 minutes to lock down a very rough plan. Okay, we’re doing Alaska, flying into camp with the plane, and then we’ll go from there. Then the actual planning started, we had to figure out a pitch deck and a crew, and all of those details developed over the months following.”

THE UNDERDOGS.

The term underdogs carries connotation, and the all-women riding crew who were total strangers before landing in Anchorage that Celina and Kate assembled for the trip were certainly playing the role of David in this Goliath retelling. But we all know how that story ended, don’t we? The fact that they pulled off a trip of this scale on a tight budget with cross-continental logistics and stacked enough primo footage to make a movie that’s being shown at screenings worldwide shows how impactful the “little guy’’ can be. The public appetite for women’s adventure media has increased exponentially in the last few years, and it’s people like Celina and the rest of the crew who are helping to make this happen.
“When we were putting together the pitch deck, it was the idea that we’re not the typical candidates for riding big lines in Alaska, you know? We haven’t been there before. We know we have the skills, but we haven’t been there. We don’t necessarily have the huge sponsors or the big-name riders to show up there, but we wanna show that you can still do it. If you have that desire, then go chase it. Go and do everything in your power to make it happen.”

REALITY CHECK.

The reality is, any snowboarding we consume, whether it’s watching clips of Ylfa Rúnarsdóttir throwing hammers in the Helsinki streets or reading about Elena Hight bagging gnarly faces in far-flung regions, what we actually see is just a fraction of what is actually going on.
The planning, the logistics, the prepping, the training, the downtime, and everything else that goes into a trip of this magnitude is a phenomenal amount of work. The actual snowboarding is just the tip of the iceberg. As we were chatting, Celina was super transparent about the struggles of pulling something on this scale off. “We got a lot of no’s from potential sponsors, and that’s for sure always a bummer. Every time you get a no, it’s like, ‘fuck, are we gonna be able to do this?’ But at the same time, I kept saying, not sure how, but we are going to pull this off.
It was actually just a month before we actually flew to Alaska that we got enough funding together that meant we could go. And then it was a fucking maniac situation getting all the logistics dialled. The riders are from three different continents — Anto came from Chile, Kate from Canada, Shawna from the States, and then the two filmers, Elina Lehmkuhl and Henry Bunney, and I were from Switzerland, so we had to try and organise all the gear and the logistics.
That took so many nights and so many spreadsheets. And between time zones! And then everybody has a life too, you know? Certifications, life transitions, work — so much happens in everyone’s day-to-day existence. For example, Anto was in the Southern Hemisphere, where it was the middle of summer, and I was in the middle of competitions and finishing my master’s degree. So, it was a bit chaotic for sure… or maybe a lot chaotic. The fact that we even made it there was pretty cool. And then you think once you get there, it’s gonna be a bit more flowy, but it’s really not laughs.”
This peek behind the curtain is refreshing. It often feels like there’s a shroud of secrecy that envelops the hard work that goes into producing media, but honest communication around the creation of projects like this surely lowers the barriers to entry by allowing people to know more about the behind-the-scenes steps. And if anything, hearing about the nitty-gritty and the hardships makes anything produced even more worthy of applause.

COMMUNICATION.

Open lines of communication are what can make or break these expeditions; the relay of feelings and information has to be on point. There’s no room for things left unsaid in a group that big, in a space that tight, in a situation that potentially risky. If something hurts someone’s feelings in the moment, you can work it out after the fact, but you gotta say it.
As Celina explained, “I’m grateful for every single person who helped make that happen. We made it out there as a team. No matter the differences, no matter if you got pissed at someone because it’s kinda like you’re a family, you know? You don’t necessarily always choose the situation or what’s going on, but at the same time, you know that you care about the other person, and you love them in each of the ways that they are. Sometimes you fight, or you get pissed, but at the same time, you laugh, and you hug it out, and it’s all part of it.

What I really learned is to have roles clear from the start. To clearly communicate and discuss with everyone what are each person’s roles, their strengths and weaknesses, and what are everyone’s expectations? For us, that definitely diverged quite a bit, so that was a pretty big learn for the next project. From the start, we communicated quite differently, but at the same time, we were fucking winging it. None of us had been to Alaska before, and none of us had ever had such a big group as well on an expedition with people you don’t know. In retrospect, you always have twenty-twenty vision, right? So it’s super cool to take that away as a learning, but I think in this situation, we did a super good job in making it work together.”

TRUST.

The more Celina spoke about her experiences, the more I realised a trip like this is essentially a cross-continental trust fall. Not only are you in remote terrain thousands of miles from home, with people you’ve just met, but for every bit of work and prep going on behind the scenes, there’s an equal amount of variables that are completely out of your hands. Weather systems, snow conditions, mechanical faults, lost luggage… For every step you can control, there’s another where you’re at the mercy of circumstance. You have to learn to trust the process.
But aside from believing that things will work out the way they’re supposed to, the trust being placed in what is essentially a group of new acquaintances is gargantuan. Whilst on the glacier, your entire world shrinks to the group of people in your camp; you rely on them for everything, from social interaction to emergency rescue should the need ever arise. Thanks to the huge amounts of alpine and backcountry experience between the team, Celina felt confident that the crew would have her back just as hard as she’d have theirs. “When I go on a trip like this, I know it’s my responsibility to be ready for that (rescue) and to only go on that trip if I know I have the knowledge to do it. When I went on this trip, I felt like I knew the others could save me. They have X amount of years in the mountains as well. Maybe some of the crew hadn’t camped on a glacier before, but they know the ropes in the backcountry. So I felt like if something were to happen, I trusted them that they knew what to do.”

And perhaps most importantly, you have to learn to trust your instincts. Intuition is such an important part of our human psyche, a key tool in our subconscious decision-making process. Celina touched on the fact that the most important thing was that they all made it back safely, so listening to their bodies and feelings became crucial. “There was a line on a mountain called Apollo with this crazy, cool, super thin, steep couloir combination that up top kind of diverged into two couloirs. In my mind, I was calling it ‘The Claw’ because it looks just like a tiger’s claw ripped it up. I had been wanting to try that, and we were discussing whether or not we should do it or see if The Wizard was maybe on again. I just had an immediate gut feeling about The Wizard. No, I’m not doing it, I don’t feel good about it. I felt the other was more manageable, but between us, we had different gut feelings. In the end, we thought, you know what? Let’s just leave it like that. Let’s leave it as it is. If it’s meant to be, we can come back to ride it.”

The trust being placed in what is essentially a group of new acquaintances is gargantuan. Whilst on the glacier, your entire world shrinks to the group of people in your camp.

COMMUNITY.

It’s been said that “Alaska is a big state, but a small town,” and on their trip, Celina and the crew saw this concept brought to life myriad times. The kindness and generosity of both the local and transient snowboarding community were offered freely, and even Travis Rice pitched in with some spot tips. We all know the snowboard community can be an incredible force for good, but to hear from Celina just how impactful every small act of kindness can be is a powerful reminder that if we want to go far, we must go together. “We were spending a lot of time in the Domo, which was the big dome tent that Christina Lustenberger loaned us, which was so, so kind. That one thing that was so interesting and so cool to notice was that the whole backcountry community up in Alaska was supporting and kind of rooting for us as a crew. We got tips from people, or insights, and also some frustration care. Or people would say, ‘I know that contact. Reach out to them if you need something.’ It felt a bit special, how people were kind of rooting for the underdogs.”

PERSEVERANCE.

In 1975, Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei became the first woman on record to summit Mount Everest. She said of her record-breaking feat, “Technique and ability alone do not get you to the top; it is the willpower that is most important.”That’s a lesson that we can all take heed of, that if we want to succeed, having the determination to keep going, and try and try again, is an invaluable art.

“Courage does not always roar; sometimes it’s the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, I will try again tomorrow.” — Mary Anne Radmacher.

After dealing with all the uncertainty that came with whether or not they’d have a weather window to even fly onto the glacier in the first place, Celina and the rest of the crew were once again at the mercy of Mother Nature. But rather than becoming despondent, they doubled down on their determination to make the most of the trip, whatever was thrown their way. All experienced freeriders with a wealth of backcountry knowledge, they knew they had the skills to be there, and it became a battle of willpower and determination to continue to pivot and film despite the ever-changing conditions.

“One day we went up to what we called 420 ridge to try and ride a face called the wizard, and we dug a pit and looked at the snow, and then it broke 50 centimetres deep and then another 50 centimetres below. So it was back to turning around, making the smart decision, and just trying. Every day you try, and you try again, and you try a different route, and you try again. That’s also part of it. You know? Part of an expedition, I think, is also just to try again and again, and you don’t give up until the end. And either you come home with something extraordinary, or you come home with something and be like, yeah, I fucking tried every day, and I’m proud of it.”
“It’s super cliche to say the journey is the reward, but there is always a truth to it. If it were all easy, if we got to Alaska and rode 15 spine lines, and it was all perfect on the first go, then you probably didn’t learn that much, actually. Maybe there’ll be another trip where I go back to Alaska, and it all just flows, but I can appreciate it so much more because I know how it can go differently. The fact that we made it despite all the weather, all the challenges, all the logistics, everything that could have gone wrong. The pure fact that we made it on that glacier was a big gift.”
“Courage does not always roar; sometimes it’s the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, I will try again tomorrow.” — Mary Anne Radmacher.

for every moment you spend wondering if you made the right call, waiting for weather windows, or even debating the validity of your presence there at all, there are moments that make it all worth it

UPS AND DOWNS.

Some days you’re on top of the world, others you feel like you’re being crushed under the weight of it. But that’s just life, we take the bitter with the sweet, we learn to roll with the punches, and find joy where we can. When you’re camped out on an Alaskan glacier, everything is heightened (and not just because you’re thousands of meters above sea level), every emotion is felt so intensely, whether it’s elation at riding from the pass above “Birthday Suit Couloir” shirtless back to camp or the chaos that goes hand in hand with last-minute flight changes where the majority of your cooking equipment not making it to the glacier and having a saucepan and a single Jetboil to feed seven people.
“There were many hilarious situations, but it wasn’t all bubbles and laughs. There were moments where you cried, and there were moments where you were fucking down and frustrated. That whole spectrum of emotion is all part of it. But for every moment you spend wondering if you made the right call, waiting for weather windows, or even debating the validity of your presence there at all, there are moments that make it all worth it. Celina remembers, “After Birthday Suit Couloir, we went over to what we called ‘The Warmup Spines’, which were more mellow. And that whole day felt like a parting gift from the mountains. Almost like the mountains were saying, ‘We allow you guys to do this now.’ I rode that first, so I cut it. I was roped up while Nat Murphy, our guide, belayed me, and then I really needed to tune in. But because I felt all the dynamics, all the energies, that kind of whirls you up internally. I thought, okay, I need to connect to my own intuition right now. Like, body, can you please help me now? I went through all of the checklist, and I had this pang to go. And then I went, and that was my first taste of baby spines in Alaska. It felt so good. That was so, so fun. And I knew I wanted more of that. Riding those two lines was such a relief internally. Just being out there and sleeping in the middle of nowhere on a glacier for that time, and being able to be with the mountains out there. That makes it all worth it.”

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If you want to support Celina, Kate, Anto, Shawna, and women’s snowboarding in general, make sure to check out The Underdogs when it drops in January. We can all help to keep projects like this alive by supporting women’s media, engaging with riders, showing up to events, and championing causes that resonate with us. Huge thank you to Celina for taking the time to give us this peek behind the scenes, and we can’t wait to see what you ladies have in store next.