Editor’s Note: Core Creators shines a light on the writers, photographers and artists who contribute to The Ski Journal. While we love to go deep with household names and athletes, this series is an opportunity to flip the script and quiz the storytellers themselves.

For Revelstoke-based Matthew Tufts, telling stories about skiing is all-consuming. Boots on the ground, head in the snow—often with a healthy dose of Type II fun. The writer and photographer has been contributing to The Ski Journal since 2019 (his first story on Bulkley Valley, B.C. appeared in issue 13.4) and has since become a regular contributor. 

Whether it’s skiing steep lines in Chamonix, France with speed rider Michael “Bird” Shaffer or reflecting on risk and near-misses in Kyrgyzstan’s Tien Shan backcountry, when Tufts takes on a story, we know he won’t shy away from the weirdness and grittiness that makes skiing whole. 

The Ski Journal: Tell us about your background as a skier

Matthew Tufts: I had a pretty untraditional path into this career. I grew up a mile away from Ascutney [Mountain Resort], VT but I was never into skiing. I was super into soccer and baseball and I spent winter playing indoor soccer as a kid. My dad was the coach. I went to school at University of Southern California to study Broadcast Journalism, hoping I could work for ESPN. 

Luckily, my best friend in college had grown up ski racing and backcountry skiing and planted the seed of skiing in my head. I didn’t really start skiing until senior year of college. I would have learned a lot faster if I’d skied in the resort a lot at the start, but I bought a backcountry setup and learned that way, with friends who were willing to take me out even though I was shit at skiing. I was motivated by fluid movement in the mountains, and touring spoke to me far more than freeriding.

How did you get into photojournalism?

[During school] I became a little disillusioned with the professional sports and TV industry, and I realized that it was making me like the sports less. “In journalism school they taught us to write as if we were a fly on the wall, but to me that was really dry and not creative. But I loved the sports writers who always managed to write from an outside angle, like John Branch from the New York Times, Wright Thompson and Rick Reilly. 

A couple years of hard dirtbagging ensued after college, and it was a huge turning point when I realized I could combine my writing and photography. Skiing–and sports, in general–are vehicles to tell a story, to explain something greater. Summits and descents don’t mean much by themselves–it lacks substance.

What creatives do you look up to?

Kari Medig is a photographer who has influenced me a lot. He documents skiing in such a beautiful and cultural way. He’s a stunning portrait photographer and uses a documentarian style to show the human side of skiing that I really resonate with. I remember seeing a cover of his in Forecast Ski Magazine and it was this wooden sign painted “ski hill” and a dirt road behind it. I love the images like that that capture your imagination and the grittiness of skiing. And I appreciated the editor’s audacity, in a world of face-shots and sunlit powder, to put that image on the cover.

Juggling freelance projects and Moroccan produce, Tufts does it all. Photo: Cody Cirillo

How would you describe your approach to storytelling?

I usually immerse myself in the story, and use my role as a vehicle to move the story. The journalist shouldn’t be the star of the show, but I think you have far more power to tell an effective and meaningful story with impact and depth if you allow yourself to use your first-person voice. One of my favorite quotes is from Italian photojournalist Paolo Pellegrin that I read in a New Yorker story by Ben Taub. It was along the lines of: “the goal of an artist is not to not be seen; it’s to be so immersed that you become invisible.”

Is there a particular story you’ve written that stands out the most?

The most meta thing I’ve ever written was the Kyrgyzstan story [TSKJ 16.2]. It was the hardest piece I’ve ever written—in particular because I had to get a draft done in 10-12 days after the trip, and we had just been in an avalanche. I hadn’t processed it yet, much less found words to process it for the world. It was originally going to be a profile on my ski partner, Adrien Grabinski, but evolved into something else entirely. 

We ended up going through seven drafts of it—the most I’ve ever done with an editor—and every time we revisited it, it was reopening Pandora’s Box. So often we want to put a bow on the end of a story, but that’s not always there. The truest way to end that story was to leave it feeling raw, incomplete, open-ended.

One thing you can’t go without on a ski trip?

After numerous seasons in Argentina, I’ll bring maté on nearly every ski trip. From hut trips in BC to a traverse in Morocco, I bring maté to share with my ski partners. The communal nature of maté builds a sense of camaraderie among us. On my latest cycle to ski trip around Iceland, I carried an extra 2 kilograms of mate–it’s always worth the weight!  

Tell us why you love print media!

I prefer to write longer features that dive into complexity and nuance. Those long format stories don’t work well online. Having something tangible, something that people are going to sit down and spend time with is really important. As writers and photographers, it’s a proud feeling to put a story somewhere where it’s going to last. 

Follow along on some of Tufts’ latest adventures in Volume 18, first issue dropping in September. 

Flying high in Chamonix, France with Michael “Bird” Schaffer for a feature story in Volume 17.1. Photo: Matthew Tufts