Mike Hattrup Still Isn't Tired of Talking About Skiing

Hattrup says it feels like he’s come full circle at Eleven, having originally been thrust into the limelight during the filming of Greg Stump’s Blizzard of Aahhh’s in the late 1980s. It was while filming the Chamonix segment for that film that Hattrup credits guide Murray Bell with showing him how to use the equipment that many skiers now consider obligatory. “I had never used a beacon or a harness; I was a bump skier,” he says. “Stump and I got ice axes because we thought it looked cool on our packs, but we had no idea how to use them.”

You know the rest of the story, of course, with Aahhh’s changing the course of American skiing, and making household names out of Hattrup, Scot Schmidt, Glen Plake, and Kim Reichhelm. 

Now, almost 40 years later, Hattrup says he feels like he is in a similar position as Bell was back in Chamonix: to help provide life-changing experiences for people in the mountains.

Here in the Monashees above a run called Bam Bam, we are not wearing harnesses and Hattrup doesn’t have to show me how to use a beacon—though he and the Eleven guides were damn serious about doing beacon checks and practice that morning. 

It just means that he turns to me with a big smile and says, “After you.”

Aside from his notable—and noted—achievements as one of the stars of Stump’s seminal films in the late 1980s, Hattrup’s impact on the ski world as a product developer and marketer is undeniable. And you could say, more impactful. Over the years, he has worked with more than a half dozen ski and apparel companies, influencing everything from what we wear to backcountry safety equipment to how we aspire to ski. 

In 1988, the same year that Aahhh’s was released, Hattrup the athlete started working with K2 as a product manager to influence the direction of a new line of freeride-oriented skis. The work led to the release of the K2 Extreme, a ski that, like Aahhh’s, took the world by storm. Detractors might scoff that the Extreme was just a factory slalom ski with a clever name. But no one can deny that it ushered in a new way to test and bring a ski to market: by harnessing the personality and style of skiers who had no interest in racing. In this case, the test team included Hattrup, Schmidt, Plake, Reichelm, and Darren Johnson. The K2 Extreme remains the brand’s best-selling ski of all time, and will always be a hallmark of the so-called ‘extreme’ era.

A few years later, Hattrup was laid off as a K2 employee, which he says was the “best-slash-worst thing that happened to me in my career.” Instead, he signed on as a K2 athlete for “a quarter of the pay and a fraction of the work,” and it marked the beginning of his crafting contracts as an athlete with other brands, such as Oakley and Leki. This came at a time when very few non-racing skiers were offered any formal deals within the ski industry.

“All of a sudden, I was making more money than when I had just been working at K2, and I also had more time,” he says. And so, he continued to expand his horizons. “That’s how I was able to go learn how to be a guide.”

Having grown up in Seattle, where he skied Alpental and Crystal Mountain as a kid, Hattrup’s literal skyline was Mount Rainier. Not content to just be a bump skier-turned-film star, he dove into the world of guiding and backcountry safety, spending two years guiding on Rainier and earning his AMGA certification. Around the same time, in 1996, he went back to work at K2 to lead the brand’s nascent telemark ski line. 

That summer, he took K2 Tele to the Outdoor Retailer show in Reno, unaware that hardly any ski brands went to the summer show. But it was there in Reno that he signed with K2 Tele’s first retailer, Wilson Backcountry Sports, a small, core ski shop at the base of Teton Pass, Wyoming. It was also during this show that he met his future wife, Claudia. A sales guy from POWDER pushed Hattrup and Claudia together during the performance of a ska band. They were married a few years later, settled in Ketchum, Idaho (where they still live), and raised two children. 

Within three years, K2 Tele would be the top-selling ski brand in the category. As telemark gave way to the rise of alpine touring in the mid-2000s, Hattrup led the launch of K2 Backside, which included backcountry-oriented skis, skins, packs, and shovels, helping to take backcountry skiing into the mainstream. He influenced K2 to place skin attachments at the tip and tail of the Backside line of skis, and brought forth a product called the “Shaxe,” a shovel that doubled as a “non-technical” ice axe that could also help you build an emergency sled to get an injured skier out of the backcountry.

“All that happened because of my time guiding,” Hattrup says. 

In 2016, he left K2 to become the U.S. Alpine Product Manager for Fischer. In 2021, he was named the Business Director for Black Diamond Ski, and that year was inducted into the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame. 

“I’ve been super fortunate that each time that something was petering out or mundane, something new came up,” he says. “Part of it is embracing the moment, and another part of it is a deep network within the ski community.”

Which was how it came to be that in the summer of 2024, he embarked on a new journey with Eleven Experience, helping to define the skiing experience at the company’s six ski lodges.

About halfway down Bam Bam, I pull up next to Devlin, who has parked his skis just uphill from a steep rollover. I look up the mountain to see Hattrup skiing down to us through perfect powder, arcing around the trees with ease, and I can’t help but think to myself, “I know that guy.” 

Watching Hattrup ski is like running into an old friend. The recognition is instant and automatic. His quiet, fluid style is unforgettable. His black and white gloves—personally signed by the Mahre twins, as an ode to his Cascadian roots—reach out for the easiest of pole plants. He does have a new hip and a new knee. So perhaps he has the aid of modern medicine, but Hattrup makes skiing appear effortless.

The best run of the day is on what the guides call Shellshock, named as such because of how it just goes and goes and goes: 3,400 vertical feet of just about every kind of skiing you could ask for. It starts above tree line and, like the others we’ve already skied today, dives into steep, furry trees. Just when we think it’s over, Devlin leads us left on a traverse. Hattrup is ahead of me, slyly moving across the traverse—pole plant, sidestep, hop—with the efficiency of a fox.

We exit the traverse onto a giant slope that drops another several hundred vertical feet. It’s a wide-open powder field that allows us to open it up, one by one. At the bottom, near the heli LZ, we’re all exhilarated and breathing heavily in between high fives. It may not be life-changing, but it’s one we won’t soon forget.

Hattrup’s blue eyes are wide open; he’s beyond stoked. Bringing it back full circle, it’s an honest expression of an ethos he would explain to me later.

“People ask me, ‘Don’t you get tired of talking about skiing?’” he said. “Actually, I don’t. And I don’t get tired of skiing.”

This story originally appeared in the print magazine POWDER 2026 Photo Annual. Copies are still available while supplies last. Click here to get yours.