10-02-2025
The POWDER Cover That Changed Skiing Forever
This article appears in the 2025 Photo Annual print issue of POWDER Magazine. The magazine is still available on newsstands near you, and can be shipped directly to your front door.
Not only was the photo on the November 1996 cover of POWDER stunning—and, for the time, shocking—but also a Masterclass in recording something that had never been seen before, let alone done, while also capturing details that layered the stories within the story. To understand any of it you need to start in the middle of mountainous nowhere on the Sweden-Norway frontier, 300 km (about 186 miles) north of the Arctic Circle an hour equidistant between the iron-mining town of Kiruna to the east, and the port of Narvik, Norway, to the west. When an iron-ore railroad opened between these points in 1903, a customs house erected on the national border—riksgränsen in Swedish—adopted that utilitarian name. With little else to do in their spare time but ski the wild peaks backing the rail line, customs officials were soon renting rooms to other skiers, who ultimately erected lifts and opened the eponymous rail-accessed ski area.
What seemed an improbable geographic proposition somehow prevailed. Too far north to open before the sun breaks the horizon in February, and too remote for the continent's alpine race circuit, Riksgränsen nevertheless became northern Europe's most important ski stop: a vibrant hot-dog destination in the 1970s; a snowboarding and telemarking ground-zero in the 1980s; host to some of the first ski and snowboard freeride comps in the 1990s (the Scandinavian Big Mountain Championships is now in its 34th year); and a ski-film staple—propelled by Jesper Rönnbäck's infamous leap over an iron train. With its terrain a treeless alpine playground, riders famously made pilgrimage to 'Riks' each spring to build hits and ski under the midnight sun. Most in the snowsports milieu first heard of it when one of those features—a quarterpipe—became a worldwide magazine sensation in the late 1990s. Which is why, on my own pilgrimage to Riks, I was delighted to meet a skier named Janne Aikio, who had a story to grew up freestyle skiing on Luossabacken, a small local hill outside Kiruna. Once a road to Riksgränsen opened in 1985, however, he'd spent every minute he could there. Eventually he cut the commute and moved to the mountain. 'It seemed natural because the season was long and there was so much snow,' Aikio told me when we sat down to chat in April 2015. 'It was just like a big terrain park with rolls, gullies and steep landings everywhere.'
That afternoon, Aikio led me on a long, looping journey from Riks' uppermost lift across rocky, wind-battered summits into Norway. Picking our way down an avalanche slope into the area known as Bjornfjell, we landed at the base of a giant wind-lip where it had once taken two weeks to dig out the notorious quarterpipe by hand. Aikio, who hadn't been here in years, stared at the adjacent hillside where hundreds of spectators once sat. 'I can still hear the roar of the crowd,' he said with a far-away smile. I just gazed around, in the way you do when you finally understand May 1996, doubtless amused at the novelty of it, a friend had asked Aikio, a mogul skier, if he'd forerun the quarterpipe for a snowboard event called King of the Hill. He agreed. Arriving late due to his work as a cleaner in the area's only hotel, Aikio reached the quarterpipe after snowboard legend Ingemar Backman and other pros had already warmed up. Without knowing how high they were jumping or where best to drop-in, Aikio hedged by hiking 50 meters above the snowboard start.'People told me that I put pressure on the snowboarders, but I didn't know it at the time because I was just there to do someone a favor and have fun,' recalled Aikio. 'Before I dropped in, I thought: Am I calculating right? I was nervous because the in-run was sketchy and I had to jump a little cliff to gain speed into the track. The compression hit me like a wall, but I stayed calm and focused in the air. I didn't grab because I just wanted to land—but I could hear cheering so I knew I'd done something good.'
Not just good, but unprecedented. Boosting 7 meters (23 feet) off the lip on his only hit, Aikio set the bar high (a pun all but unavoidable in the telling). It would take Backman six tries, the rest of the evening and a longer snowboard to max out at 8.5 meters (28 feet), a new world quarterpipe record (only in the snowboard world, of course, because, well, skiers didn't quarterpipe yet). Numerous photographers had assembled, but German shooter Richard Walch's frame of Aikio at his high point would become a clarion call to freeskiers everywhere, its minutiae declaring this was something entirely new, from Aikio's suddenly tiny-looking Hart mogul skis to the mechanics of the moment: while it appears he's styling in or out of a cross-up, this isn't the case—at the weightless apogee, his left hip is just starting its nod to gravity, rotating downward before his right leg has even thought about it; and he's so unexpectedly high that several photographers on the lip are too stunned to even put cameras to their faces, staring slack-jawed into the air. A world away in POWDER's California office, Walch's shot landed on photo editor Dave Reddick's light table. It was the staff's habit to vote on covers shots (I was Managing Editor at the time) and we unanimously picked it for the November 1996 issue. Still, it was a challenge for art director Regina Frank: in order to include the lip for scale, she had to position Aikio partially over the magazine's logo. With the intervening gap leaving plenty of room for cover blurbs, she went large with the title for a series launching in that issue—'The Next Big Thing'—unintentionally guaranteeing skiers would forever associate Aikio's feat with that headline. Though the article it referred to actually concerned big-mountain freeski contests, the cover echoed—and handily eclipsed—the visual whispers then emulating from Whistler's Blackcomb Glacier of a rag-tag group of mogul skiers known as the New Canadian Air Force who, challenging snowboard park-and-pipe hegemony, would forever change the face of skiing.
After his moment of infamy, Aikio would go on to be a quiet mover and shaker in the Scandinavian ski industry, coaching freeskiing in Norway, and then freestyle again in Luossabacken (including three-time Olympian and X Games medalist Jesper Tjäder as well as the ski/film collective The Bunch), where he now also runs a café and restaurant. Indeed, the cold, dark winter days of Luossabacken have produced many notable top-flight skiers and snowboarders who went on to various types of notoriety or World Cup careers, but Aikio remains the only one who can claim a cover of POWDER on his résumé.'I was heading south to Åre that fall,' recalled Aikio, of a move from the Arctic boondocks to the country's largest ski area. 'I had a cellphone, and as I drove a friend called and said 'Hey—you're on the cover of POWDER!' Of course, I didn't believe him. When he insisted, I almost drove off the road. I mean, that was the dream when you were a kid, even in northern Sweden, and out of nowhere it came true.'
The POWDER 2025 Photo Annual is available. Click here to have it shipped directly to your front door.
