Jackal Hut

Context
In the early 1940s, the U.S. Army turned Camp Hale, outside Leadville, Colorado, into a winter training ground for more than 11,000 soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division. They learned to ski, survive and fight in some of the harshest terrain in the country. Eighty years later, on a cold January morning, we started from the same valley. Our destination was Jackal Hut, a wood cabin at the edge of timberline at 11,660 feet, with views of 14,000-foot peaks. That meant four miles and nearly 2,500 feet of climbing on skis, with everything we needed on our backs.

Approach
No shot list. No staging. Just the trip as it happened. We shot this as a documentary adventure series, following the story from gearing up at the trailhead and reading topo maps to skinning across open meadows and up into the quiet of the backcountry. Deep Colorado blues and bright winter light carry the color frames. High-contrast black and white captures the scale of the mountains and the people moving through them. The result is an honest look at three days of moonlight ski tours, jigsaw puzzles, percolating coffee and laughter that hurt. A cabin in the woods that felt like home by the time we had to leave it.