Alaska Season 2025 – Tony Harrington’s Photo Essay

Mountainwatch | Words and photos Tony Harrington

My whole year is based around skiing the mountains of Alaska, sharing unique moments in big mountain terrain with a special breed of people who love going above and beyond our comfort zones. It’s a place where which pushes both physical and mental skills to a whole new level.

This year’s visit was a little different for me in the fact I was revisiting places where my Alaskan career started off back in 1995, re-connecting with those who forged the pathway forward for many others. Many of these people feature and are celebrated in “Defining Moments”, a 1350-page coffee table book that has just been released. As I put the final touches of the book together, I reached out to athletes, mentors and pioneers from surf and snow locations around the world for their input to the project and the response of overwhelming, no more so than Alaska.

I originally envisaged a two-week trip to Alaska, but on the back of a hugely successful book launch tour in resorts across Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorada and California, the invites came in from Alaska destinations to bring it to local towns. The end result was a visit back to where many defining moments took place and a five-week slide show tour that began in Juneau, moved on up to Haines, across to Valdez and down to Cordova.

It was very grass roots and, in many ways, very defining. It brought a vast array of people from out of the wood work to reconnect and share stories, smiles and to celebrate special moments of events, both in life and death.

This article is not about what’s in the book, it’s a continuation of my journey into the fifth decade of capturing images of action sports – a documentation of the 2025 Alaskan Heli ski season. It is a journey that I quite often think that sometime soon will have to ultimately slow down, although I can’t see it doing so just yet – even though in just a few weeks’ time I turn 60…

All in all, Alaska had a very weird season. Warm temps, typical in La Nina cycles, were warmer again then ever experienced. The season started off great, then went dry and very cold, followed heaps of snow up high, very little down low, and as I write this in mid-April it’s been exceptionally wet and warm. This has cut season short for many operators and I left a week early due to a seemingly never-ending storm cycle that had enveloped the mountains. This was not a typical Alaskan Heli ski season.

The snowpack in some regions up around Anchorage and the north Chugach was quite dangerous and nerve-wracking for the avalanche forecasters. A persistent and stubborn deep week layer made it near impossible to provide accurate snow pack assessments, and in others places isolated pockets of faceting snow (nice snow to ski but dangerous as all hell if fresh snow sits on top of it) were both obscure and hard to know where they lay.

Heli ski operations were on extreme tenterhooks and the skiing of wildly big steeps vastly toned down. Not to say that it didn’t happen, as there were moments of glory for those fortunate to be in the right place at the right time.

The risks are real in Alaska. However, this should not deter a person who has the right skills and mindset and a personal goal of claiming a big mountain line in AK. Nothing in skiing comes close.

I feel like an idiot on how best to describe it in words, so every time I go out in the mountains I try and capture a photo that portrays what it looks and feels like. These are some of my best shots of my time in Alaska in March and April this year.

Juneau Alaska Powder Descents

Haines Alaska Heli Skiing  

Valdez

Cordova Points North Heli Skiing 

Legendary Australian photographer Tony Harrington has been shooting snow and surf for over 40 years. His new book, Defining Moments, brings together a vast collection of Harro’s work into one hefty 1350 page volume of powerful images and inspirational stories gathered during his extraordinary and nomadic life.

To find out more and to order a copy head to harroart.com