Dirk Collins

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Dirk Collins

With his friends and ski partners, Steve Jones, Todd Jones and Corey Gavitt, Dirk Collins co-founded Teton Gravity Research (TGR) five years ago in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Five films later, TGR has successfully captured the spirit of big mountain ski and snowboard culture in the '90s.

Skiing in remote places is nothing new for Collins. He started skiing at age three in Idaho. When he was six his family moved to Alegnagik, a small village in western Alaska with population of 100, where and his brother grew up snowmobile skiing and cross-country skiing. After another move, this time to Anchorage, Collins started skied at nearby Alyeska Resort where he later served five years on pro ski patrol. Collins now calls Jackson Hole, WY, his home, where, in 1991, on his way to France for the winter, he stopped to visit friends — and never left.

	Collins filming in Alaska

Collins has worked on previous projects, or simply pursued mountain adventures, with almost every member of this Antarctica expedition. In 1990, in his old Volkswagen Rabbit, Collins picked up a hitchhiking Doug Coombs in Valdez, AK, and went on to film and guide with Coombs' heli skiing operation, Valdez Heli-Ski Guides, for two seasons. In 1992, on a trip to Denali, Collins and Stephen Koch established a new route on the southwest face and spent time skiing around Denali's West Rib and West Buttress routes. While on that trip, the pair ran into Mark Newcomb, who also joins them on this trip.

Between adventures, Collins is constantly drawn back to Jackson Hole, where Wade McKoy was one of the first professional photographers to shoot Collins and his friends, launching TGR into the ski industry in the mid-'90s.

TGR's first film, Continuum, was released in 1996, followed by Harvest, Uprising, The Realm and Area 51 — all of which were shot on 16mm film. Collins, hoping to capture beautiful footage for TGR's next ski film project, is the chief cinematographer on this expedition. He has filmed on other beautiful mountains around the world, including those in Alaska, Sweden, France, Norway, Canada, and New Zealand. In Antarctica, he is using a 20-year-old wind-up Bolex camera to alleviate the problem of charging batteries.