Meet Chris Owens, Alaska's Miracle Maker
This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.
Advance Team
Only 18 percent of Alaska’s land mass is accessible by car. It’s that remoteness—along, of course, with the massive mountains and maritime snowpack—that has cemented AK’s place as skiing’s final frontier. It can also make the 49th state a risky and expensive place to do business. If your plans involve getting into the backcountry, it’s good to have Chris Owens in your contacts.
Since 1997 and TGR’s release of “Harvest,” Owens has been a go-to fixer for film companies looking to utilize Alaska’s still nascent heli-skiing industry. As a native of Alaska and co-owner and operator of Chugach Powder Guides, he was in a unique position to help outfits produce their epic AK segments on budget and safely. When he divested from CPG in 2012, his phone just kept ringing.
“My whole life I’ve been kind of about the Alaskan backcountry, summer and winter,” Owens says. “I found myself getting a lot of phone calls from everything from traditional ski media to reality television. It was a piece of the industry that kind of spoke to me. I’ve always had an interest in making really difficult things happen in hard places.”
Owens relies on a wealth of historical knowledge and an immense contact list that comes with working the Alaska mountains for decades. He can tell you which zones favor certain weather patterns, what the snowpack was like in big years, whether it’s sitting on rock or ice, and where you might encounter crevasses. It’s the type of expertise that can only be attained by studying the same mountains year after year for decades. Once he has an idea of where a group wants to go, he has an extensive list of pilots who can take him up to get a look.
“I always have thoughts in mind about what might fit a particular bill,” Owens says. “I can get in the air in a Super Cub, and I can confirm or deny that I’m thinking in the right way. Or sometimes a crew already has an area in mind for themselves, and they need an eye on viability before they start putting a bunch of people on airplanes and setting money on fire. If they pay for a little bit of airtime for me before they come, they can really save a lot of money.”
While running CPG, Owens relied on helicopters for these missions. He has since pivoted to fixed-wing aircraft. “Film support was always kind of part of our gig at CPG, although in a lot of ways it’s not an awesome match for heli-ski operations,” he says. “Helicopters are expensive. I try to include them in my world wherever I can, because they’re your own personal teleportation device, but they’re not always budget-friendly. So for scouting and that type of thing, the best way to get around is in a small airplane.”
If he wants to land for any reason, Owens insists on a second plane. “Nobody else is going to come flying by,” he says. “If we’re going to dig a quick pit, or if I want to be on the ground and scratch my head and think about things, then there has to be a second Super Cub, because in certain areas you’re far enough out that if you do something as simple as bend a ski, you’re super fucked.”
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He only works with pilots he knows and trusts, and flies about 18-24 flights per winter for around six projects, with about half as many trips in the summer. The majority of his work is still in the snowsports realm, but Owens gets calls for a variety of jobs. “I get a pretty interesting cross-section knocking on my door,” he says. “I do a lot of advance work for media projects and for expeditions and sometimes scientific projects.”
In addition to the scouting work, he will also handle on-the-ground logistics, providing things such as tents, a kitchen setup, crevasse rescue kits, trauma kits, and contacts of guides. For the right crew, he’ll even hang out and act as a bear guard to keep the local wildlife at bay. Which, in the end, is part of why Owens is in this business to begin with.
Logistics is basically a giant, very complex side hustle for Owens, whose full time job is running a marijuana cultivation, productions and retail business. A tumor on his spinal cord about three years ago left him paralyzed from the knee down on one leg. “I’m walking around pretty good,” he says. “But a ski boot isn’t working out right now.” This has paused his ability to ski and mountain guide, but did little to quiet his fascination with the Alaskan bush. He still hunts and will guide the occasional fishing trip.
“I always have my eyes open for my own recreation,” he says. “Kind of the whole reason that I do this… a lot of it is just scratching that itch to get into the backcountry and feel small.”
This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.
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