For pros and amateurs alike, skiing usually has a temporary expiration date. The snow melts away, the mercury rises, and for a few months that can feel agonizingly long, mountain denizens are required to find something else to do with their time.
Forced might be the wrong word, though. Among other things, skiing can be exhausting and time-consuming, particularly when you do it for a paycheck. Summer, then, is an opportunity to rest, recalibrate and explore activities that don’t involve freezing your butt off on a far-flung peak. Depending on the pro skier, that could involve signing on with a wildland fire crew or spending hours crafting new films.
Here’s how two of our favorite pros, Janelle Yip and Nikolai Schirmer, stay busy during the off-season.
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Before moving to Squamish last year, Yip was based in Revelstoke , a (excuse the pun) hotspot for wildland fire crews. Yip had lived with a few folks who worked in the field, so when looking for a job one summer it only made sense to give it a try. Yip spent the next four summers working on one of the many wildland fire crews out of Revelstoke. Her time working as a wildland fire fighter both helped with physical fitness and her mindset in ways that carried into winter. There’s a fairly rigorous bootcamp and interview process that firefighters have to go through, which as an athlete, Yip found herself grateful for.
“It's required for you to push yourself to your maximum physical limits, and there's not a lot of opportunities for you to do that if you don't have someone breathing down your neck, telling you to push harder,” she said. The days she wasn’t actively on a fire, she was effectively getting paid to work out with her crew. A badass on and off skis. Janelle Yip. While a day out in the mountains might be 12 hours on a snowmobile stacking film clips, a 12-hour day in the woods fighting fire prepared her perhaps just as well for prolonged exposure to the elements.
“You’re in these obscure, natural spaces firefighting where no human has set foot before. And that’s similar to the winter, trying to find cliff walls to slide down on skis. I participate in a lot of strange human activities,” said Yip.
After three years on a fire crew, Yip spent the winter filming for a project alongside the rest of The Blondes (Emily Childs and Tonje Kvivik), titled How Did We Get Here? with Nelson-based production company CK9. As summer rolled around and Yip geared up to join a fire crew in Nelson, Clay Mitchell and Simon Shave from CK9 were in the process of getting approval to film a documentary on wildland fire in British Columbia.
In order to grant the filmmakers access to their fire operations crews, the British Columbia Wildfire Service required that the production company had crew members with wildland training and that they "could teach how to hold a camera," said Yip. It just happened that she fit all the requirements, so Mitchell and Shave offered her a job for the summer. Yip dove headfirst into the production world that summer and spent several weeks out filming with the fire crews—as well as working in the CK9 office and learning the ins and outs of filmmaking. Yip spent much of that summer in the edit cave as well working on deliverables for How Did We Get Here?, and she ended up editing the film’s trailer herself. Her foray into production with CK9 carried her into new work as a production assistant on film and TV sets near Squamish, where she’s based now.
It’s hard to say where the production world will take Yip next, but for now, CK9’s docuseries, Wildfire, is out on BC’s Knowledge Network. To watch How Did We Get Here? you can click here .
Schirmer goes on surf trips during the warmer months and also busies himself with climbing and biking. Rather than planning ski-specific workouts, Schirmer’s summer sports mainly serve as his form of pre-season training. The biking and climbing he does, as you might expect, involve endurance fitness. He pedals uphill to bike trails and often hikes into climbing routes, keeping his cardiovascular system active.
Is Schirmer a skier who dreads the arrival of summer? Nope. In the winter, “I become this manic skier guy just living after the forecast,” he said, so the summer provides Schirmer a break from constantly thinking about where to score fresh snow next, and frees up his schedule so he can, for instance, plan a social event a week in advance.
It also presents a reprieve from the chilly Norwegian winter weather . One of the things he looks forward to the most about the summer is enjoying a beer outside at sunset, he said.
Usually, Schirmer continues heading into the backcountry to ski until the end of May, with a possible bonus day in June, depending on how the snow conditions look. When we spoke over the phone during one of May's first weeks, he was on the skin track, still earning his turns, kindly answering my questions as he caught his breath.
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Forced might be the wrong word, though. Among other things, skiing can be exhausting and time-consuming, particularly when you do it for a paycheck. Summer, then, is an opportunity to rest, recalibrate and explore activities that don’t involve freezing your butt off on a far-flung peak. Depending on the pro skier, that could involve signing on with a wildland fire crew or spending hours crafting new films.
Here’s how two of our favorite pros, Janelle Yip and Nikolai Schirmer, stay busy during the off-season.
Want to keep up with the best stories and photos in skiing? Subscribe to the new Powder To The People newsletter for weekly updates.
Janelle Yip
If you don’t know Janelle Yip for her big sends on skis or firecracker personality on and off camera, you might know her as one of The Blondes. The Calgary-raised skier has made a name for herself in film parts with companies like Teton Gravity Research and Matchstick Productions while spending her winters traveling the world to find the deepest snow. Through a series of well-timed events and connections, what was a summer job for Yip has now taken her to the other side of the camera in warmer months.Before moving to Squamish last year, Yip was based in Revelstoke , a (excuse the pun) hotspot for wildland fire crews. Yip had lived with a few folks who worked in the field, so when looking for a job one summer it only made sense to give it a try. Yip spent the next four summers working on one of the many wildland fire crews out of Revelstoke. Her time working as a wildland fire fighter both helped with physical fitness and her mindset in ways that carried into winter. There’s a fairly rigorous bootcamp and interview process that firefighters have to go through, which as an athlete, Yip found herself grateful for.
“It's required for you to push yourself to your maximum physical limits, and there's not a lot of opportunities for you to do that if you don't have someone breathing down your neck, telling you to push harder,” she said. The days she wasn’t actively on a fire, she was effectively getting paid to work out with her crew. A badass on and off skis. Janelle Yip. While a day out in the mountains might be 12 hours on a snowmobile stacking film clips, a 12-hour day in the woods fighting fire prepared her perhaps just as well for prolonged exposure to the elements.
“You’re in these obscure, natural spaces firefighting where no human has set foot before. And that’s similar to the winter, trying to find cliff walls to slide down on skis. I participate in a lot of strange human activities,” said Yip.
After three years on a fire crew, Yip spent the winter filming for a project alongside the rest of The Blondes (Emily Childs and Tonje Kvivik), titled How Did We Get Here? with Nelson-based production company CK9. As summer rolled around and Yip geared up to join a fire crew in Nelson, Clay Mitchell and Simon Shave from CK9 were in the process of getting approval to film a documentary on wildland fire in British Columbia.
In order to grant the filmmakers access to their fire operations crews, the British Columbia Wildfire Service required that the production company had crew members with wildland training and that they "could teach how to hold a camera," said Yip. It just happened that she fit all the requirements, so Mitchell and Shave offered her a job for the summer. Yip dove headfirst into the production world that summer and spent several weeks out filming with the fire crews—as well as working in the CK9 office and learning the ins and outs of filmmaking. Yip spent much of that summer in the edit cave as well working on deliverables for How Did We Get Here?, and she ended up editing the film’s trailer herself. Her foray into production with CK9 carried her into new work as a production assistant on film and TV sets near Squamish, where she’s based now.
It’s hard to say where the production world will take Yip next, but for now, CK9’s docuseries, Wildfire, is out on BC’s Knowledge Network. To watch How Did We Get Here? you can click here .
Nikolai Schirmer
During the winter, Norwegian skier and filmmaker Nikolai Schirmer immerses himself in the mountains with high-intensity backcountry missions, later chronicling the action in videos that expertly blend the vlog and ski movie format. He shares these films on his popular YouTube channel, which, after the snow melts, Schirmer tends to, editing footage in a Tromsø, Norway, office he shares with his friends. Last summer, the post-production duties were all-consuming for Schirmer as he prepared to release Ski , a feature-length movie (check it out here ) about his childhood friend Vegard Rye, who planned to climb and ski 27 mountains in northern Norway in one push. Mountain man and filmmaker Nikolai Schirmer. “It was more like, nine to five, seven days a week, sort of thing,” said Schirmer, noting that this year, he’s hoping to have a more regular video-editing schedule and take weekends off. Regardless of the workload, though, Schirmer is committed to spending time outside in the summer. “I try to do something fun every day in between all the computering,” he said.Schirmer goes on surf trips during the warmer months and also busies himself with climbing and biking. Rather than planning ski-specific workouts, Schirmer’s summer sports mainly serve as his form of pre-season training. The biking and climbing he does, as you might expect, involve endurance fitness. He pedals uphill to bike trails and often hikes into climbing routes, keeping his cardiovascular system active.
Is Schirmer a skier who dreads the arrival of summer? Nope. In the winter, “I become this manic skier guy just living after the forecast,” he said, so the summer provides Schirmer a break from constantly thinking about where to score fresh snow next, and frees up his schedule so he can, for instance, plan a social event a week in advance.
It also presents a reprieve from the chilly Norwegian winter weather . One of the things he looks forward to the most about the summer is enjoying a beer outside at sunset, he said.
Usually, Schirmer continues heading into the backcountry to ski until the end of May, with a possible bonus day in June, depending on how the snow conditions look. When we spoke over the phone during one of May's first weeks, he was on the skin track, still earning his turns, kindly answering my questions as he caught his breath.
