Photo series captures the stories and passions of Oregon outdoor athletes

Ben Kitching is a commercial photographer in Bend who specializes in adventure photography — think, for example, of an ad for kayaking equipment you might use or apparel you might wear while running rapids on the Rogue River. Last summer, Kitching embarked on a personal project that combines his skill in adventure photography with a documentary-like lens on a particular group of people he admires. The Oregon Outdoor Athlete Project has since grown to nearly 30 profiles of rock climbers, skiers, ultramarathoners and other athletes who live mostly in Central Oregon. They share first-person accounts of not only their introduction to the sport they love but also, at times, candid descriptions of how their pursuit of it helped overcome personal adversity or mental health struggles. Kitching joins us to talk about his project, which was recently profiled by Central Oregon Daily News.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In his day job, Ben Kitching is a commercial photographer who specializes in adventure photography. He is the guy an apparel maker might call up if they need someone to take a picture of a whitewater kayaker wearing their gear for an ad. But last summer, Kitching embarked on a project of his own. It’s called the Oregon Outdoor Athlete Project and it was recently featured in Central Oregon Daily News. Kitching has profiled about 30 rock climbers, skiers, ultra runners, and other athletes who mostly live in Central Oregon. They share first person accounts of what it’s like to do the sports they love, but also personal stories about how those sports have changed them. Ben Kitching joins me now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Ben Kitching: Great to be here.

Miller: Why did you start this project?

Kitching: I’d always looked up to other photographers. And the ones I’ve looked up to have talked about how having a big personal project has had an impact in their life and career, and just getting out consistently has made them really perfect their craft. So it started as looking for a project. And then turned into what do I want to feature? And I was consistently getting out with athletes that had these inspiring stories that inspired me. People who might be working a normal 9 to 5, but even in adulthood were really following their passions and hunting down goals, working to better themselves. And I wanted there to be an outlet for those stories.

Miller: That actually reminds me of one of the people you profiled. You were kind enough to share some audio with us. We’re going to listen to Jaclyn Walles. She’s saying that she had moved to Bend, and she saw just on a random Tuesday afternoon people floating the Deschutes.

Jaclyn Walles [recording]: And I was just like, what is happening? Going for bike rides, biking up skyliners. I just had this revelation of there’s a whole different world out there that I was never exposed to that I didn’t know existed. It was this realization that my entire life, I had done what everyone else wanted, and I never asked myself what I wanted or what was important to me. And I just had this pivotal moment where I’m like, if I stay on this course that I’m on now, I will be unhappy for the rest of my life. I was unhappy. I had nothing that was bringing me joy. And so I was just like, I think I need to start over. I see all these people around me in Bend choosing a different path for their life. And I want to try that and see if I can make it work.

Miller: How much does that describe the way you think about your own life right now? In a way, charting your own course or your own definition of what makes a good life.

Kitching: I think that very much is a reflection of my life as well. I’ve been talking with other photographers about this project, and I think everything we do in art is in some ways a reflection of our own journey. I went to college, got into med school, was on that path. And just realized that I wasn’t going to be happy doing it. It was a plan B because I never had a plan A. And a lot of this adventure photography has come from kind of choosing to go a different path and figuring out what I liked in college. I had guided in Alaska, backpacking, whitewater canoeing trips, and knew that I loved that. And after college, kind of went down a path into guiding and just trying to find what really filled me up. So a lot of this project has been inspired by my own journey too, and trying to do something different than maybe the path I was told I needed to follow in life.

Miller: As Jaclyn pointed out there, she made the decision to forge something closer to her own conception of a good life. For other people you talk to, that’s meant a much more stripped down level of material wealth, living in a van, say. Another person talked about having fewer personal relationships or romantic relationships because they were spending so much time with their sport. What have you heard about the trade offs that people are making?

Kitching: I have tried to highlight a lot of those as well, because I think some people get into outdoor sports and there are things that are hard or challenging about it at first. And I’ve always wanted to share those parts of the journey too. But I also think with anything in life, there’s tradeoffs. An example a lot of people talk about, outdoor sports are potentially dangerous. And at the same time, I think it’s dangerous to just sit inside and miss out on a bunch of things your whole life. So there’s always pluses and minuses to each side of the situation. I’ve wanted to include those in all of the interviews.

Miller: Can you tell us about somebody you interviewed named Anna Soens? A skier, a mountain biker, a boater who had a spinal cord injury.

Kitching: It was fun to get out with her. Oregon Adaptive Sports is a nonprofit in the area that does a lot of work with people of different ablenesses, being able to get them outside. She was working I believe as a wildlife biologist, and had a climbing accident, came to in the hospital not being able to walk, and was worried about what the rest of her life would be like because she’d gotten so much joy from outdoor sports. We did a ski day out. She rips as a sit skier. And it was fun following her around the mountain. It’s cool to hear her stories because she also found a way to summit a couple mountains that she had dreamed of doing before she was injured and she found ways to get up them afterwards, which is cool to hear about.

Miller: Let’s listen to another one of your interviews. This is with the ultra runner, Erica Raggio.

Erica Raggio [recording]: Running for me became this thing that made me feel independent and powerful. It made me feel strong. It made me love who I was. I had a very complicated home life. I was raised in a cult. I actually wasn’t even supposed to be running. I actually got in trouble for running because it was drawing me out towards the world. And I think running gave me the freedom and independence to think freely and figure out what I wanted out of life. Running, to me, is freedom.

Miller: Erica was not the only person you interviewed who put these outdoor sports in such dramatic terms. Jess Moran told you that climbing probably saved her life. What did she mean?

Kitching: I think for a lot of people these sports are an outlet and a way that they find happiness. I know Jess was talking about having some hard times in the nonprofit world, and just working through depression, not knowing whether she enjoyed her life. She went on this multi pitch climb, and found herself holding on really hard, and realizing that she did want to be alive. She didn’t want to fall. She was roped in so it wasn’t necessarily life or death, but that kind of creates that experience. With the extreme, you can realize what you really care about in some ways. That was, it sounded like in talking with her, a turning point in her journey, finding a different path, similar to Jaclyn did, doing what she was told her whole life and finding a path that she found fulfillment.

It seems like a lot of these athletes maybe struggled in school or told they weren’t smart or fit the normal mold, and they’ve found paths that now bring a lot of fulfillment. They’ve realized how smart, intelligent they are, how much they’re capable of doing.

Miller: The photos that you get have folks kayaking or running, or running up mountains on skis, skiing down. Where do you normally do the interviews themselves?

Kitching: Normally, I do them right after we get out. I think it’s fun to get out with a person and spend some time with them in nature and some of these harder environments, and then be able to sit down afterwards. You kind of get an intro and get to know somebody in the activity, and then it’s easier to talk to him afterwards. At least that’s been the case for me. I think others have felt the same. But that’s also kind of what we do in the sports, if we go out and do hard things in the day and then camp out and talk around the campfire about what we just did, some of the goals we’re hunting down in life, and some of the things we’re trying to do.

Miller: How do you think being out in nature where people have just finished doing what they love, ends up affecting the conversations that you have?

Kitching: Something I talk about with these athletes is that outdoor sports are so different than something like basketball or soccer, where you’re in this controlled environment. Nature is unpredictable. It’s interesting because a lot of media portrays climbers or outdoor athletes as people trying to conquer things. There’s been a resounding theme of most people go out to feel more small and humble. I think nature puts into perspective just how insignificant you are in ways, and how little your problems matter. It cuts deeper, and you get to things that are really important to you. You do care about not the things of how you’re perceived by others or the job you have, but where you really find joy and purpose in life.

Miller: How much does religion explicitly, or some version of spirituality more broadly, come up in these conversations?

Kitching: It’s not something that’s talked about in all of them. It comes up in some conversations. For me, nature has always been a place where I could really connect to and feel in touch with my higher power. It varies person to person. I think everyone’s on a different journey with that.

Miller: Let’s listen to part of another interview you did. This is Sadie Ford.

Sadie Ford [recording]: I feel like it just expands my time on earth, is the way that I look at it. When people say the years have flown by, it’s because they’ve experienced monotony. That’s when you think hours fly by, when time flies by, you’re doing the same thing. But by creating more notable, interesting events in hard times, and roller coasters of emotions, you create more things that are memorable, that are noted, that are that break up monotony and break up time. And I feel like that expands my time. Like today, we had this big trip, and fell asleep for like a week. We just experienced so many different conditions, emotions, laughs. It just creates this accordion of memories that stretches out.

Miller: It does seem like the two of you had done something intense there. What does it take physically just to be able to stay with these athletes?

Kitching: We did have a big day. It is hard. That’s a interesting part of the sport, especially with ski touring, is that I’m doing the same things as these athletes, covering the same ground. And I have 10lbs of camera gear with me. So training is a huge part of my job in a way as an adventure photographer. I’m running or doing something cardio just about every day, practicing the sports that I participate in and photograph, and making sure I’m just lifting weights as well to maintain some strength. Because carrying that extra weight in the pack is hard on the body.

Miller: I wonder if you can tell us one more story about Alli Hartz, a skier and ultra runner who told you a story about trying to become the fastest woman to run up and down Mount Bachelor, Broken Top, and all Three Sisters all in one go. She came close but she didn’t finish because it was incredibly hot and she bonked. What did she tell you about that feeling?

Kitching: That was really cool because, in some ways, what she was talking about is she put in all this time over the summer, practicing the route, getting it dialed, knowing what it was gonna take, and just putting in all these hours of training. And she didn’t make it. But she was talking about there being a beauty in this. And the way I interpreted it was that she really put herself fully out there, and was reaching the edge of her capabilities. I think that’s something that we always wonder, how far can I go, how hard can I push it? And she found that line. I think that’s something that not many people do. I don’t know if I’ve fully ever done that myself. And I think it’s cool to really butt against that failure after putting in so much effort. As she talked about, she found where her limits were in that moment.

Miller: You talked about training basically every day so you can stay with the people you’re photographing, whether for this personal project or for your commercial work. Do you consider yourself an outdoor athlete?

Kitching: It depends on how much imposter syndrome I have during the day. Yes and no is the answer to that. I think it’s easy to compare yourself to some of these athletes that I’m getting out with. And I can’t snowboard as hard as Sadie or I can’t run as far as Alli. So there’s always those comparisons of people around me. And at the same time, logically, I know that I’m very fit and I do a lot of different sports, and do them fairly well to be able to keep up with these athletes. So logically, yes, I know that I’m an athlete. But I think emotionally sometimes I struggle to feel that way.

And that’s also something a lot of these athletes think as well. Part of my goal of this project has been to get more of the average person as well, like the guides, the people who are nurses but get out on the weekends. Not just the pro athletes. And a lot of them have the same kind of imposter syndrome, “I’m good at my sport but I’m not as good as the next person.” And I think everyone who spent some time in these sports has stories to share that are really worthwhile for others to hear.

Miller: Just to go back to the beginning, you’d said that you thought maybe you would be a doctor, you were pre-med, and then you changed your life course to live a life closer to what felt right to you. But now you’re doing these things that can be seen as play, but it is your job. Has that taken some of the sense of spontaneity or play out of it?

Kitching: It can at times. In some ways that’s also the way I’m wired, is that I can be very goal oriented and just focused on that, and sometimes miss the journey. Photography, for me, has been an outlet to keep me more in the moment. As I’m walking up the hill struggling, I’m noticing the light coming over the ridge or, maybe a little bird flying by, these different things that I wanna get photos of. Photography helps keep me in the moment and make it more playful.

I think something that I’ve seen with a lot of these athletes as well is that the ones who are best at their sport aren’t just grinding towards the goal. They’re finding things that they really enjoy about it. And their sport is more like play with them. The day I got out snowboarding with Sadie, there wasn’t a specific objective in mind. We just kind of went and saw what the mountain was offering and skied three different big lines because in the moment that’s what looked like the most fun.

Miller: Ben, thanks very much.

Kitching: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Miller: Ben Kitching is a commercial adventure photographer and the creator of the Oregon Outdoor Athlete Project. You can find a link to his photos on our website.

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