Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25123
BLUE: How did you guys meet in the first place? TODD: Steve and I have been skiing since we were very young, you know, before we can remember even, like two or three years old, up in Stowe, Vermont. We knew Cory from skiing up there. Dirk grew up skiing in Alaska. When he was around eighteen or nineteen years old he started to leave Alaska in the winter, just cause it gets so dark up there. And he chose Jackson Hole for its similar aspects to Alaska, and that's where the four of us met. Dirk grew up skiing pretty heavily. BLUE: Is this what you were doing before you got behind the cameras? TETON GRAVITY RESEARCH: We were all doing our riding, heavy riding, in the early '90s, lucky enough to be living in Jackson. This area breeds a lot of big-mountain riders (not that other places don't) but we've been lucky to have this be our home. There are some mentors that we followed, who showed us the way here in Jackson and the way to Alaska, like Doug Coombs. In the last 10 years, there's been really a whole new scene: big-mountain riding and skiing, things are becoming cool again with freestyling. Definitely we feel like we had a big part in that. We met Doug skiing around here in Jackson. When we first came here 10 years ago, it was a pretty intimate group of people who skied Jackson everyday and those were the people that you skied with. Doug was obviously one of the more impressive and we were on the mountains with him on a day- to-day basis, as a friend. Before any of the Alaska stuff went down, you know, nobody had a name and we were just ski bum friends. BLUE: How did Doug contribute to your lifestyle? TGR: Oh, Doug is the grandaddy of them all. We always joke about how Doug's got the most stoke in the world! We call it the stoke-o-meter contest. But every year it's not even a contest, it's just who's going to come in second, because Coombs is so happy everyday. He's here, he's there, he's everywhere. He's the real thing-a real explorer and a traveler. BLUE: When did you get the idea of filming skiing? CORY: I don't know how the flame started, we had such a great days and so many good friends and so much talent, you know, a lot of people were pointing cameras at all of us. Stevie and Todd actually had a filming week with Warren Miller here, and that was kinda when everybody was like, "Hey, we should look into getting our own cameras, cause these guys can't even go half the places we want them to go to film us." BLUE: Is that what prompted your move to the other side of the lens? TODD: Yeah. We also had a lot of problems with the way the ski industry worked, with just photographers and film companies exclusively. They weren't respecting the athletes as athletes. And so we definitely designed our company to be athlete-oriented and trying to force the companies to work with their skiers as athletes and promote them as athletes and not as, you know, just some guy they can get to ski down the hill wearing their gear. BLUE: Is going places where no one else will go a big part of what you do? TGR: Absolutely, that's a huge part of it. We were in Norway this winter and Warren Miller actually filmed there the year before. But our goal was entirely different than his. We were looking for big descents to ski, and I'm not too sure what they were looking for, but they were just kind of working real short, small slopes. We went out and tagged a bunch of first descents, and really explored our way around the Norway and really that's what TGR is really all about. I don't think it's so much that people can't go where we want to go. But it kind of struck us as funny as we were climbing with them that they didn't have the desire to go where we wanted to go, you know? They were like, "We can get the same shit right here on this little knoll and cinematographically we can make it work" Whereas we were like, "Why don't these people want to go out and go over here?" It's not that TGR is better than anybody else, it's just that they didn't have the desire really to want to go and check out the new stuff or exert a little effort and go over here or whatever. BLUE: In the transition from skiing for fun to starting TGR, has the feeling of your skiing and travels changed? TGR: No it definitely hasn't. We still seek the wild because that's what we want and it's the exact same feeling and reason we go out there as we did 10 years ago. All of our existence has been bumming around on the mountain and looking for new stuff. That's gone on ever since we were little kids. Stuff like, "Let's go see what's over on the other side." Or, "Let's walk way the hell over here just for the sake of seeing what's there, for the sake of adventure." As Todd and Cory said, part of our reason [for filming] was like, "Hey, let's keep doing what we've been doing since we were little kids and put it on film as opposed to compromising and genericizing everything." If you compromise on the adventure element or the desire to go explore then you lose a lot of energy and excitement. BLUE: How did you deal with the realities of creating the dream job? TGR: Well, we're still dealing with the realities. It's definitely become a lot more involved on the business end: there's finances to deal with and employees and payroll. There's a lot more at stake and there are a lot of sponsors and people who have invested in TGR and expect something out of that. So there's some pressure. It is really important to us, making sure we don't compromise the authenticity of the product and the feeling and the energy of why we got all into it. And I'm trying to be all professional and deliver to people what they want. So summer's become a lot more office oriented. At least once a week we check ourselves and say, "Are we still getting what we want out of it lifestyle wise) And if not, let's make sure that's still the case." And I think we