REMEMBERING CARL SKOOG: A 90-minute interview with brothers Lowell and Gordy

POWDER: You use the word “art” which is interesting, because in a way it sounds like a couple of engineers putting a project together. Carl was a mechanical engineer, correct?

Lowell: And I’m electrical.

POWDER: So do you think there’s some of that mindset that goes into it too?

Lowell: Maybe. The engineer having an eye for detail and an eye for connections... There have been traverses done in other parts of the Cascades too, particularly farther east and northeast in the Pasayten mountains, but the area that we focused on was the more glaciated part, along the spine, and it’s the area that’s most like the Alps of anywhere in the country. It’s just beautiful country. It’s just very satisfying to be able to ski through this area and take runs and bag peaks and have an extended experience out there on skis.

Gordy: Lowell, you talked about at one time finding your spirituality after you read The Power of Myth, and how that kind of helped you to understand what the spirituality of the mountains was all about. I know for me, and I have to think for Carl and you, is that…why do you keep going back? And I know for me it was like going to church every weekend. When we were doing so much stuff every weekend it was like there was this refilling of your personal spirituality. And I think that’s a big part of it.

POWDER: Did Carl have that side to him?

Lowell: Not overtly religious, I don’t think, but yeah there is this sense of being nourished by the experience.

Gordy: You know, there’s an emotional experience to it, whether you want to…you feel close to God or something. I don’t think we’ve been those kinds of people but I think we definitely appreciate the emotion, the filling up that it brings.

POWDER: So there’s being filled up by what you did, but there’s also just being there…

Gordy: Well that was probably number one before what you did. For the three of us it started as, and always has been about, the view. Being there in a place where you sit and it’s almost like, “This is for me.” This is mine for this moment, and it’s pretty powerful stuff.

POWDER: Especially if you felt like these places were yours and you weren’t necessarily going to share them with the world…

Lowell: Well it wasn’t like they were ours, we discovered them. We didn’t own them, we had discovered them.

Gordy: It’s the reward of that discovery that you recognize in your leaving it. By not telling it, you’re leaving it for someone else to have that same discovery-reward. If you tell them, they can’t get the same response…

Lowell: …they were led there by the hand.

POWDER: Lowell, at some point did you and Carl say to each other, “We have something here as long as you stick with the writing and you stick with the camera?”

Lowell: Yeah, a little bit. We had some sense of that, though I guess I decided early on I didn’t want to be in the outdoor industry. I didn’t want to have that be my job.

POWDER: It would take away some of the purity?

Lowell: Yeah.

POWDER: You’d just leave it to you brothers then…

(Laughter)

Gordy: Well it does, judging from my early experience, and I think it did for Carl at some point. When it becomes your job then your passion for doing it does fade. It does become a job.

Lowell: I actually—I call it my midlife crisis—I quit my engineering job in about 1994 to be the editor of an outdoor magazine here. I’d been working for 15 years in quite a good-paying job and I had been there long enough to get lots of vacation and all these good things. And I was itching to do something. This was before Tom (Lowell’s son) was born, and I quit my job to work for this magazine. In those days I had the same very strong sense of not wanting to commodify everything, not wanting to market everything. During the first issue it just hit me straight in the face that I was going to have that conflict constantly. Fortunately the magazine went out of business. And I’d already said this isn’t going to work.

POWDER: How did Carl make the two—business and art—work? Did he? Could he?

Lowell: He was able to because he wasn’t marketing all of his “precious”…I don’t know what the word is. He didn’t have to sell his soul.

POWDER: Kept a little for himself…