“I ended up shooting 10,000 photos by the time I returned to Jackson.”

booked; we were going anyway. We ew into Anchorage and spent a cold night in an RV rental parking lot. e following morning we began the journey to Valdez.

Every day for 10 days, we stayed up late drinking beers and whiskey, thinking the next day was supposed to be another storm day. But then every morning the clouds gave way to pure blue sky. is phenomenon is known as drinking it blue. You wake up to perfect weather after partying the night before, thinking you could sleep in. It turns out we scored the best weather window and snow of the season.

Picture the scene: 10 days in a 32-foot RV with two Japanese Zen Masters using snowmobiles, a bush plane, and a boat to access long runs of glorious powder. e only catch is: You don’t speak japanese… and they don’t speak english. Without the means to communicate with language, we connected via smiling, snowboarding, sweet reggae music, and what I captured through my lens.

I ended up shooting 10,000 photos by the time I returned to Jackson. I wanted to show the homies what I had shot and experienced, but there was no good way of doing it. An Instagram post would not have done it justice. Making prints and having an exhibition could have worked, but there were too many photos to choose just a few to print and frame. In the end, I decided to make a co ee table book—a simple, clean way to present my photos and share them with my community and beyond. e resulting book is called Drink It Blue, and it includes 160 of my favorite images from the trip. It’s the culmination of my years honing my photography skills in the Jackson Hole snowboarding scene.

I started by choosing all my favorite photos that I felt told the story of the trip, and then printing them out as little 5x7s. I laid them out on the carpet and basically designed the layout of the book like that. Seeing them printed out made it easy to cut a handful of the B-grade images and narrow them down to the best of the best. en my good friend Carson West helped me set up the digital les of my layout so they could be sent o to the printer. I really enjoyed the artistic aspect of creating this book and I plan on making more in the future!

Buy your copy of Drink It Blue at keeganricephoto.com or at Franco’s Shape Shack in Teton Village.

@keeganrice