PHOTO:
9/14/2025 // Thanksgiving 2024
Digital // Shot on Sony A74// 24mm-70mm
These photographs are from my second trip out to Sandpoint after meeting Justus just a few weeks prior.
Rolling into Thanksgiving that year, Bluewood had received quite a bit of early season snow pretty quickly. We were poised to have one of the earliest openings in decades, or at least that’s what people working at the resort had remembered. With this being the case, I didn’t really have an option to head back to Chicago and spend Thanksgiving with my family, as I had done every year since I can remember. So with loads of snow an a potentail early open at bluewood, it was looking like I would be having my first Thanksgiving away from home, and I didn’t really know what I was going to do. I thought I might be able to kick it with my roommate or a good friend who was living in Yakima, but after checking, both of them already had plans, and some other friends from college were already back home getting ready. So as the holiday was closing in, it looked like my first Thanksgiving away from home was also going to be spent alone.
Just a few weeks prior to this I had met Justus, aka “Stu,” for the first time, and we really connected over shared similarities and outlooks on life. As a last-ditch effort, I thought he might be the perfect person to hit up and see if he was going to be around. About halfway through telling him the situation over the phone, he stopped me and said I was absolutely welcome to come spend Thanksgiving with him in Sandpoint. He didn’t have any concrete plans but would make sure I had a place to be. So after I hung up with him it was settled, I would be heading up to Sandpoint for the second time and spending Thanksgiving with Stu.
Thanksgiving day was rad. We rode Schweitzer with a handful of the 7B crew and found a sick side country zone to session until it started to get dark. Once the session wrapped and the lifts stopped spinning everyone else had plans. So one by one the crew of about six of us trickled down until suddenly it was just me, Stu, our trucks, boards, a bag of trail mix, and my camera.
Now being the incredible planners we are, Stu and I didn’t plan a thing for dinner or have any idea what to do for food. There was no food to make back at the spot Stu was staying, I didn’t bring any food because there is always food on Thanksgiving, and the grocery store in town was closed. With our prospects for dinner looking sparse, we both hopped on our phones and started googling the classic “food open near me.” Low and behold, listing after listing was closed. We thought we were in for a gas station dinner until somwhow we found a fancy restaurant that claimed they were open. Now Stu and I aren’t really fancy restaurant people, but we were starving and it was looking like if we wanted to eat something decent it was going to be fancy or nothing. So we drove over with our snowboard gear still on, rolled into this place, and after looking us up and down they thankfully let us take a seat at the bar. Now I don’t know if it was because we hadn’t eaten all day or if it was actually that good, but that meal with Justus might have been one of the best dinners I’ve had. It was different from your classic family feast with people yelling, forced conversation, and the usual questions you don’t really feel like elaborating on. Instead, it was just him and I chatting it up, a super mellow atmosphere, good food and a couple of drinks.
After dinner we left the restaurant to find that the town was completely dead, no cars on the streets, nothing going on, nowhere to be, and not a thing that either of us had to get back to. So we sat in the trucks for a while and thought about what our options were. Turns out it wasn’t much, either go back to Stu’s place and kick it until I had to leave in the morning or maybe try and find something to ride. I had just gotten some flashes earlier that year and hadn’t really used them yet, but I was itching to try shooting some photos at night since I had seen a couple go across Instagram and wanted to give it a try myself. So at about 11:30pm we headed back up to Schweitzer and just started walking, looking to make something out of nothing.
After a short hike up one of the neighborhood cat tracks, we found and built a small spot over a bush, wasn’t much but it was something. After it was built we went back and forth hitting the spot and I shot some photos of Stu, but it still didn’t feel like we had accomplished what we both wanted. At this point we were still feeling good and my camera/flash batteries were still going strong, so we grabbed that bag of trail mix just incase, and kept going. We ended up hiking probably another mile, borderline halfway up the resort or so it felt like to myself, a Schweitzer newbie, until we found another cat track with a nice sloped landing on the looker’s right side.
While Stu was building up the kicker with a tuffy, I was setting up lights and mapping out where I wanted to shoot from. During the whole jump build, I had the flood lights on my flashes going so we could see what we were doing and get an idea of what the spot was looking like. Now, not really knowing how long the batteries would last, since I was new to this tech, after about 30 minutes we found ourselves with a blinking battery icon, and what I figured would be maybe five tries for Stu to crank a method. At this point I needed to turn the flood lights off so we still had power to actually shoot what i thought would be about 5 tries. Turned out we had less than that. After about two goes, with the inrun being pretty much blind for Stu and my viewfinder being less than helpful the resulting image was shot at 3:46am and sure enough, right after we got the image all the flash batteries died and we were left in complete darkness.
Looking back on this whole endeavor, the situation, the scrambling, and the hail mary of an idea, we got a photo and it turned out. It’ll always be up there as one of my favorite photos just becasue and definitely a night I’ll hold onto for a long time. Because even though I wasnt back home, it was time still spent with family.