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A mountain profile built around attention instead of fame

Matthew Tufts frames “Ski(tour) Mountaineering” as a profile of Andrew McNab, but the piece is really about a way of moving through mountains that has become increasingly rare in an era of public tick lists, famous zones, and aggressive branding. McNab is introduced not as a ski celebrity but as the kind of local skier other strong skiers quietly rely on: born and raised in Revelstoke, deeply knowledgeable, technically gifted, and far more interested in overlooked terrain near home than in building a public mythology around himself. Tufts places him in the middle of one of North America’s most famous ski landscapes while emphasizing that his preferred terrain often sits just outside the obvious spotlight. The point is not that he rejects big mountains, but that he has learned to see possibilities in their margins.

That background matters because McNab’s style did not emerge from nowhere. His parents took him touring as a child, long before Revelstoke became a ski-tourism magnet, and that early familiarity with nearby drainages shaped how he thinks about skiing. Later, skimo racing gave him fitness and efficiency, while guiding gave him a deep working sense of snowpack, terrain, and timing. The article presents those influences not as resume items but as ingredients in a mature mountain style. McNab is not chasing spectacle for its own sake. He is building long relationships with terrain, storing away partial observations for years, then returning when conditions, access, and intuition finally line up.

What “ski-tour mountaineering” actually means

The article’s central idea is McNab’s half-joking term “ski-tour mountaineering.” At first glance it sounds like a contradiction. Ski touring suggests rhythm, efficiency, and movement; mountaineering suggests technical tools, siege tactics, and direct confrontation with steep terrain. McNab’s point is that the two do not need to be opposites if a skier stops trying to overpower the mountain. His preferred line is not the brute-force version of alpinism where people claw straight up faces because that looks serious. Instead, he looks for ascents that respect contour, angle, and snow conditions: skin when possible, switchback when useful, boot only when necessary, and arrive at technical descents with enough energy and composure left to ski them well.

Tufts makes this philosophy concrete by contrasting it with a more macho idea of steep skiing. McNab’s kit is often lighter than expected. His evenings-before texts tell partners to bring a rope and powder skis but leave crampons and axes behind when the terrain allows it. That is not anti-technical posturing. It is a sign that he has already imagined the terrain carefully enough to know which tools will help and which will only weigh the day down. In his version of mountain craft, style comes from allowing the landscape to lead. The right ascent should feel fluid rather than forced. Technical difficulty is acceptable, even welcome, but only when it grows naturally from the terrain instead of from ego.

The article keeps returning to one word: flow. For McNab, flow is not a vague spiritual cliche. It means choosing an uptrack that works with microterrain, noticing subtle contours in bad visibility, understanding how current snow interacts with slope shape, and making decisions that keep the whole outing coherent. Tufts describes McNab navigating whiteout glacier terrain and bushwhacking with the same alert, adaptive attention he brings to skiing. That is the article’s quiet claim about expertise: mastery is not just about surviving hard lines, but about reading the landscape so well that the hard line becomes part of a larger, elegant movement through it.

The larger argument about home terrain

What gives the piece its weight is that it treats local knowledge as something deeper than familiarity. McNab’s home range is not just convenient terrain close to town. It is a living archive of unfinished ideas. He may spend years noticing a feature, linking one ridge to another in his head, or returning to the same zone under slightly different conditions until the larger pattern comes into focus. Tufts shows how this long accumulation of partial knowledge eventually opens the door to ambitious objectives, including a six-of-seven-north-faces push that covers roughly 20,000 vertical feet and nearly 40 miles in 38 hours. Even then, the achievement is presented less as conquest than as an evolving conversation with terrain. One peak remains. Another idea waits across the river the next morning.

That refusal to treat any single outing as a final answer is the most interesting thing in the article. McNab’s skiing is bold, but the governing ethic is patience. He values lines that make sense in good conditions over lines that merely look impressive on paper. He is suspicious of forcing objectives. He prefers to leave projects unfinished rather than bully them into existence. Tufts uses that attitude to push back against a broader culture of optimization in ski media, where value is often measured in steepness, novelty, or public visibility. McNab’s example suggests a different standard: a good mountain day is one where terrain, conditions, fitness, timing, and imagination all line up cleanly enough that the movement feels inevitable.

By the end, “Ski(tour) Mountaineering” reads as both profile and manifesto. It argues that the highest form of ski craft may not be the loudest or most obviously extreme version, but the one that blends fitness, restraint, observation, and deep place-based memory. McNab emerges not as a hero to imitate move for move, but as evidence that there is still room in backcountry skiing for subtlety. The article’s closing takeaway is that real progression can look less like adding more hardware, more exposure, or more publicity, and more like learning to move through familiar mountains with enough patience and sensitivity that new terrain keeps revealing itself.