Four Teams, Three Days, One Book: What Click on the Mountain Was and How It Worked

The contest that ran on this domain for ten winters was easy to describe and hard to execute. Four teams, each built around one professional photographer. Three days on the snow above Courmayeur, in the Aosta Valley, under the Italian flank of Monte Bianco. One edited body of work handed to a jury on the Saturday, projected in public that evening in the middle of the town. What made it unusual among photography competitions was not the prize or the panel. It was the rule that nothing about the route could be fixed in advance.

A ski school's idea, 2009

The town's ski and snowboard school, the Scuola di Sci e Snowboard Courmayeur, founded the event in 2009. discoveryalps.it, writing on 27 February 2014, called the contest the idea of Manuel Castelnuovo, president of the school, and said it had been built up over the years under the coordination of the Centro Servizi Courmayeur-CSC. It is the only independent outlet located for this piece that names him; the rest of the corroboration is the organisers' own. Their release of 6 February 2013, archived from the old PHP site, says the event was born out of the ski school and was conceived by Castelnuovo. An earlier release, dated Courmayeur 22 March 2012, names no individual: it describes that year's edition as organised by the ski school in collaboration with CSC Courmayeur and local operators — the first documented appearance of the service centre in the credit line. The school's page on the event's site placed the contest alongside SnowHeroes Challenge, a 2008 project it says was broadcast by Sky Sport: a small institution in the habit of building media events around its own terrain.

That provenance explains the shape of the thing. A ski school is not a magazine and not an agency. It has instructors, it has a relationship with the lift companies, and in Courmayeur it sits a short walk from the Società delle Guide Alpine di Courmayeur, founded in 1850 and, by its own account and that of montagna.tv, the oldest alpine guides' society in Italy. The contest was assembled out of what a ski school could actually convene.

The first edition was larger than the format it settled into. The archived historical roster for 2009 lists five teams, each a photographer with one skier and one snowboarder, and marks Team 5 — Vasco Coutino with Stefano Gex and Kalle Frassy — as the winner of the first edition. From 2010 the field is four teams, and something appears on the roster page that was not there the year before: a named alpine guide against each team. Luca Blanchet, Mario Mochet, Gianluca Marra and Francesco Civra Dano are listed for 2010, each under the heading Guida alpina.

The guide arrived in year two, but the published record does not show it running unbroken from there. The archived rosters name a guide per team for 2010 and again from 2014 onward; the 2011, 2012 and 2013 team pages and their matching archive entries list a photographer and riders only. Whether that reflects three years without guides or three years of incomplete roster pages, the archive does not say.

The rule was no plan

The founding premise, stated on the event's own origins page in both Italian and English, was that no itinerary was prepared and no location scouted for the teams. The photographer chose the riders and then chose where to take them, inside a window, with a jury waiting at the end of it. Everything the contest is interesting for follows from that single decision.

It means the photographer was carrying the editorial problem, not just the exposure problem: no fixed feature, no dug takeoff, no rehearsed line to return to if the light failed. It means the weather was not an inconvenience but a co-author: the organisers' own day-by-day bulletins from the 2015 edition record cloud on the first shooting day, upper lifts closed by wind on the second with the teams pushed down among the woods of Val Veny, and a clear, windless third day used for the helicopter flights. Klaus Polzer, the German photographer who runs the freeski title Downdays and who was competing that week, told the German magazine skiing.de on 8 March 2015 that this kind of reversal is simply the nature of outdoor sport and that his team would find something anyway.

And it means the work was judged as a set. The unit of competition was never a single frame — it was a book, and the specific number of pictures in that book took four different values in ten years.

The shape of the week

The published programmes are consistent about the architecture and inconsistent about the calendar.

The architecture: an opening evening for the briefing and the presentation of the teams, at which the competition formally began; three days of free shooting across the lift-served area and, weather permitting, by helicopter and — on the 2017 and 2018 pages, which are the first to name it — from the Skyway Monte Bianco cable car; a day set aside for editing; then delivery on the Saturday, a public projection of all four projects in the centre of Courmayeur, and the awards.

The calendar moved. The archived 2015 programme puts the team meeting on Tuesday 3 March at the Sunny Side Café, shooting on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and the prize-giving on Saturday 7 March at the Jardin de l'Ange. The 2017 and 2018 programmes both run Monday to Saturday: briefing Monday, shooting Tuesday to Thursday, Friday for editing, media and rest, delivery and awards on Saturday. The 2018 programme contradicts itself about that Friday: it marks Friday 9 March as free shooting as well as media day and editing day, while the same page's free-shooting block lists Tuesday to Thursday only and its awards entry still speaks of three days of shooting. Whether the tenth edition had three shooting days or four, the archive does not settle. The 2017 programme gives its Friday as media and editing alone. That matters, because two shooting-window figures circulate and neither should be treated as canonical — the organisers' English pages repeatedly say 72 hours, and montagna.tv used the same figure on 13 March 2017, while the same outlet on 7 March 2018 wrote that the four teams had 96 hours to produce their material.

Guides, locals, thirty minutes of flight

The support structure grew faster than the creative brief did. After the alpine guide appeared in 2010, the next addition was a designated local rider. The 2014 rosters published by discoveryalps.it on 27 February 2014 show a five-person team: photographer, freeskier, snowboarder, local rider and alpine guide, with all four guides and all four local riders named. That is a photographer accompanied by someone who knows the snow and someone who knows the ground — a materially different proposition from a photographer alone with visiting athletes.

Rosters as published by discoveryalps.it, 27 February 2014. That report printed the fourth photographer's surname as "Schwaiger"; skiing.de, 28 February 2014, and the photographer's own site give Schwager. Both spellings are recorded here rather than one being chosen.

The team numbers in that table are not the only ones on the record. The event's own archived 2014 team pages number the four teams differently — Rönnbäck as Team 1, Schwager as Team 2, Lloyd as Team 3 and Repo as Team 4 — while giving the same photographer, local rider and alpine guide groupings. The numbering above follows discoveryalps.it, 27 February 2014; the pairings are the part both sources agree on, and the disagreement is left standing rather than resolved.

Helicopter access was added in 2013. The organisers' release for that year presents heliski as the edition's headline addition and frames it as a way to put teams quickly onto snow nobody had crossed. By 2015 it had a fixed allocation: the event's own daily bulletin for the third shooting day states that each of the four teams had thirty minutes of flight time, flown by GMH Helicopter services. Thirty minutes is the hardest deadline anywhere in the format. It is not thirty minutes of shooting; it is thirty minutes of aircraft, inside which a team has to be delivered, positioned and recovered.

The 2015 opening night added a second constraint that is rarely reported: the heliski spots were drawn by lot. The event's own news page for that edition records that the drop points were drawn on the Tuesday evening from four classic Monte Bianco itineraries — Aiguille de l'Aigle, Col des Pyramides, Lex Blanche and Mont Fortin — and that photographers and riders met their local riders and their alpine guides for the first time the same evening. A team therefore learned its terrain, and its guide, in the evening the competition opened: the origins page places the official start at the end of that presentation.

What the guides were there to do was stated most plainly in the press near the end of the run. Reporting on the tenth edition on 7 March 2018, montagna.tv wrote that alpine guides from the Courmayeur society would accompany the teams and would be responsible for verifying that safety rules were observed. That is a compliance role, not an escort. How a disagreement was settled is not on the record: nothing in the archived pages or the press located for this piece says whether a guide could stop a photographer taking a position, or a photographer overrule a guide.

What is recorded is the load the arrangement carried. Reporting the ninth edition on 13 March 2017, montagna.tv wrote that it ran under the slogan "Don't go crazy, be creative" and that photographers, filmers and riders worked in poor conditions with the support of guides from the Società delle Guide Alpine di Courmayeur, through what Fabrizia Derriard, then mayor of Courmayeur, called one of the season's most complex weeks for avalanche-risk management — her characterisation, not this publication's.

The book kept changing size

The deliverable is the clearest index of what the organisers thought they were commissioning, and it is the single most misreported fact about the contest.

For the first three editions the teams handed in thirty photographs. The organisers' release of 22 March 2012 announced the cut to twenty for the fourth edition and gave a reason on the record: fewer frames so that photographers and riders could take more time over each one. The same release widened the shooting ground beyond the freeride area to the Vallée Blanche, Val Ferret and the Chécrouit-Val Veny sector, and told the field that the jury would weigh the artistic character of the book as heavily as the difficulty of the riding.

Twenty held through 2015. The 2016 edition, announced on the event's own pages as the first Video Edition, restructured the team and the hand-in together: a filmer joined each squad, and the stated deliverable became five photographs and a video of up to two minutes. By 2017 the photographic component was back up to ten and stayed there. The 2018 figures come from two different pages of the event's own site, neither carrying the whole specification: the Italian news page lists ten photographs and a 120-second video; the Italian team page gives the same video length and adds a fifteen-second Instagram video, with no photograph count. montagna.tv, on 7 March 2018, put the Instagram element at thirty seconds, the same length it had given a year earlier. Both figures are on the record and neither is corroborated by the other.

Sponsors, and one undatable prize

The money and the access came from three directions, local before they were international. The lift operators appear as partners throughout — Funivie Courmayeur Mont-Blanc and Funivie Monte Bianco, alongside GMH Heliski Mont Blanc and a set of Courmayeur hotels. The resort marketing body Courmayeur Mont-Blanc is listed on the event's organisation page beside the ski school and Alpine Adventures Travel, a Courmayeur tour operator the same page describes as having grown out of work with the school. Monster Energy is the sponsor named on the site from at least the 2015 pages onward. For 2014 only, the event carried a title sponsor in its name: it ran as "Killer Loop Click on the Mountain by Courmayeur Mont Blanc".

One claim on the archived site cannot be resolved. An English news item, captured on a 2017-era page, states that Click on the Mountain won "Best Snowboard Event" at the Modena Skipass Awards, and dates the ceremony to "Sunday 31st October". The Italian trade site surftribe.it, writing on 28 September 2016, describes that year's Skipass awards as running seven categories with the relevant one titled Best Event in Italia, covering the 2015/16 winter, at ModenaFiere from 29 October to 1 November 2016 — a run in which the Sunday was 30 October, not the 31st. No independent record of the result has been locatable. The award stands here as the event's own claim, with the date it gave and the mismatch stated rather than tidied away.

A wildcard from an open contest

One year, the fourth photographer's seat was not an invitation. For the 2014 edition, boardsportsPR.com reported on 25 January 2014 that three of the four teams were invited to the event and that a photographer could put work forward for the fourth through a Killer Loop photo contest hosted by the freeski title downdays.eu. discoveryalps.it described the same arrangement a month later as the novelty of that edition, and added the detail boardsportsPR did not: the online contest was open to professional and amateur photographers alike. The seat went to the German photographer Marius Schwager; skiing.de listed him on 28 February 2014 alongside Tero Repo, Daniel Rönnbäck and Tim Lloyd at the opening night.

It is a small detail with a large implication. For one winter the qualifying test for a place in the format was a portfolio submitted online and judged cold — a different selection mechanism from a curator's address book, and the only documented instance of the contest recruiting that way.

What the book had to do

The published judging language shifted from technique towards coherence. The organisers' 2015 verdict, printed on the event's own news page, lists the criteria the jury worked to: creativity, post-production, composition, the standard of the riding, and the overall idea behind the book as a whole. That last item is the one that separates this format from a single-image competition. A team could return four excellent unrelated photographs and lose to a team whose set argued something.

The comparison worth making is with the Banff Centre's Mountain Photo Essay Competition, which asks for three to five images and states its requirement explicitly: each image "strong enough to stand on its own while conveying a greater narrative when viewed in the photographer's desired sequence". That is the same demand, made of a photographer who chose their subject over months rather than one working a three-day window with an aircraft booked for half an hour.

What stopped and what did not

Ten editions ran, from 2009 to 2018. The tenth, held from 5 to 10 March 2018, was the last. There is no public record of an eleventh, and no source located for this article states a reason for the end.

The institution behind it is a different matter, and the distinction matters. The Scuola Sci & Snowboard Courmayeur trades today from Via Marconi 4 in Courmayeur, publishes an active booking system and lists more than eighty AMSI-qualified instructors across group lessons, private tuition, snowboard, freeride and telemark. It is a going concern, and a third party here, described from its own published material and from press only.

What is left of the contest is a format worth understanding on its own terms — a photographer handed riders, a valley, a guide and a clock, and told that the route was theirs to find.