In the mid-2000s, Nate Abbott sat atop the world of freeski photography. And then he left the mountains for a stint in the cutthroat confines of the New York photography world. However, in 2008, at the urging of Sammy Carlson, Abbott returned to the ski world with a new perspective and quickly reclaimed his place in the ski media pecking order. Nate Abbott and 14 pages of hot fire on snow.

“I’m not trying to get out of the industry. I just need some time away from the snow to figure out what it is about the snow that draws me to it.”

Photographer Nate Abbott said that four years ago, in response to a question about what the hell he was doing spending $1400 a month to live in New York City’s Williamsburg neighborhood. It was a fair question. At the time, he was more or less knighted as one of skiing’s elite photographers, with a pedigree that began at the knee of former Freeze photo editor Flip McCririck and evolved into a trusted place on the travel crews of some of the sport’s most innovative skiers. Also at the time, there were few things more tired in the world action sports than the well-positioned photographer who was “so over it,” that he had to decamp to some urban trend factory in search of a gig assisting a coked out fashion photographer.

But if Nate was over it, “it” wasn’t the sport or the scene as much as it was the tail end of the kind of year that makes lesser men search for answers in far darker places than a bed bug-infested sixth-floor walk up loft shared with five other people looking in the wrong places for New York’s upside…

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