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“You never know what tomorrow has in store for you,” says skier Stan Rey. That became startlingly clear to him in November 2015, when his sister Olivia was paralyzed in a terrible car accident.
In the next several months, Rey spent a lot of time driving Highway 99, going between Vancouver, where his sister was doing rehab, and his home in Whistler, passing the Tantalus range along the way. Those mountains had always piqued his curiosity—and in the wake of the accident, he knew that skiing them was something he had to do. “Every time I’ve driven the highway I’ve always looked up and always wanted to ski up there. With my sister’s accident, it made me realize you can’t wait for things to happen—you’ve got to go out and make your dreams come true.”
So in April, the Salomon Freeski TV crew headed out to the Tantalus range and took a short heli ride up to the Jim Haberl Hut. It didn’t take long for everyone to realize the place is special. “They’re not like the other mountains around that area,” says photographer Eric Berger. “It’s kind of a bigger, jagged anomaly in the Coast range.”