REMEMBERING CARL SKOOG: A 90-minute interview with brothers Lowell and Gordy
On Oct. 17, 2005, Seattle-based photographer and ski mountaineer Carl Skoog perished while skiing on Argentina's remote Cerro Mercedario (22,210'). Carl was skiing with longtime partner Rene Crawshaw when the accident occurred. Crawshaw watched helplessly as Carl tumbled 4,500 feet to his death. Crawshaw hiked for a day and a half to find help, and then contacted Carl's family.
Carl, 46, was a celebrated photographer whose shots graced covers and features of several well-known ski magazines, including POWDER. Once a product developer for Outdoor Research, Carl contributed greatly to ski mountaineering and ski photography, particularly near his home in the Pacific Northwest.
Carl isn't the only Skoog to receive notoriety for his skiing exploits. Oldest brother Gordy, 53, was a nationally ranked freestyle skier in the 1970s and skied in Dick Barrymore films. He currently works near Seattle at altrec.com. Older brother Lowell, 49, is currently writing a book (alpenglow.org/ski-history) about Washington state ski history. He also co-edits the North West Mountaineering Journal (nwmj.org).
Together Carl and Lowell pioneered multi-day ski tours through the wilder sections of the North Cascades. Also among Carl's many skiing achievements was a successful first descent of the Mowich Face on Mt. Rainer in 1997, a slope once considered nearly impossible to ski.
As Lowell, Gordy, and Carl grew older, their forays into the mountains with each other as partners grew less frequent, but their brotherly bonds remained as strong as ever.
The following is the transcript of a 90-minute interview with Lowell and Gordy that took place on Tuesday, Nov. 15 in Lowell's north-Seattle home-three days after a public memorial for Carl and nearly a month after the fatal tragedy occurred. A far shorter version of this conversation will appear in the Feb. 2006 issue of Powder.
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POWDER: The world knew Carl as a ski mountaineer and as a photographer, but what was he like away from the mountains?
Lowell: It’s interesting, my life with Carl was pretty much outdoors. That was kind of all we really talked about. Of course I’ve never been one to ask. I never asked about his girlfriends or anything like that. It was always about trips.
Gordy: He was a pretty private guy outside of an outdoor environment. There were the little nuances of those special relationships, we didn’t necessarily know. And his other interests, even though they weren’t mountain- or ski- or climbing-particular, they were still outdoor interests. As much as he’s known for a winter portfolio, he had this extreme interest in the desert, and he had a really high interest in third-world countries and in particular there was something about South America that really connected with him.
Lowell: He liked Latin music and Meringue and things south of the border. He became pretty good at Spanish and chose to do a lot of trips down there. Carl also had a pretty strong environmental ethic. He and Gary Brill and some other photographers would go down to the desert, some place on the Colorado Plateau, where there are these wind-eroded shapes. The ethic is that you don’t walk on those things because you can break them off. They’re so fragile. And he has a picture of some tourist who was there standing on this stuff to get a better view. I think he took a picture of the guy’s foot print which had broken some of the feature. He was very conscious when they would go to Native American sites, about not disturbing them. He also was really rabid about the whole Fee Demo thing and outdoor land management.
POWDER: So Carl was politically active?
Lowell: Yeah, vocal at least.
Gordy: He was personally very active with the Fee Demo.
Lowell: Another thing that’s pretty hard to explain is that Carl and I shared a pretty conscious awareness of the effect that media and publicity can have on places—on places becoming overrun. We both agreed that there were some places we wouldn’t publicize. I went so far as to put in writing the philosophy behind it. The way that I justified it to myself and explained it was essentially that there are three kinds of places. There are places that everyone knows about and are easy to get to; nobody worries about the publicity for those. And there are places that, whether or not everybody knows about them, they are hard to get to; and those are kind of protected by their remoteness. Then there are the places that are actually not hard to get to but for some reason aren’t that well known. And those were the places that we decided that we wouldn’t put in our slide shows, and he wouldn’t necessarily sell pictures of those places.
People say, “Oh you’re just selfish.” But to me it came from the delight we had in this feeling of, “Wow, I’ve just discovered this place that I never knew about.” And the sense that you can help preserve that by just kind of being quiet about it; let other people discover it. It’s not like you’re hoarding it for yourself. I mean, you could look at it that way, but the other way of looking at it is why not keep some places like that, places that you can on a weekend stumble into? Doesn’t take a plane ticket, doesn’t take going around the world. And so that was part of his approach, which is a difficult balancing act for somebody whose business it is to sell pictures.