The Outdoor World's Tenuous Relationship With Criticism

And the role the writer plays

Desolation, from The Course of Empire, by Thomas Cole (1836)

A single old lamp with a broken leg lights the living room, the sun having long ago left the western horizon behind. My children are asleep upstairs. And I’m standing just feet from my television, fiddling with a tiny Apple TV remote, trying to bring to the screen a ski movie I’ve been told for months I need to see.

Released in the fall of 2025, the Armada Skis team film Ornada, with its ensemble cast, novel cinematography, and a live-orchestrated soundtrack was hailed as the new standard for the medium. “Ornada was an elevated experience of the feature length ski film that had never been attempted,” the website Newschoolers noted at the time. And they weren’t alone. The film enjoyed almost universal acclaim. “Armada’s ORNADA Just Changed The Ski Movie Game Forever,” POWDER declared.

But I’m watching the film because one particular review wasn’t quite as glowing.

“I cannot believe I have to do this again,” SKI’s Sierra Shafer wrote in an early November, 2025 criticism of the film. “I should not still be writing about ski movies without women. And yet—here we are.”

It marked perhaps the only negative reaction to Ornada in mainstream outdoor media. And Shafer’s criticism was met with a range of responses from both anonymous posters and known figures in the ski world.

“Crazy take. Wild to come at a ski company that’s actually investing in freeskiing,” Olympian Hunter Hess wrote on Instagram, while big mountain skier Mali Noyes commented in favor of Shafer’s article, writing on Instagram “you are my hero!”

Meanwhile, Armada athlete Sammy Carlson defended the film. “Who ever wrote this is probably a ski racer!” he commented. “Armada & the athletes are all for female shredders, ask them. Armada or Nada!”

I watch as the film begins with a bizarre airport departure sequence, where the crew jets off to the otherworldly ski destination of Ornada as the pilot narrates what lies ahead. Otherwise the story is diffuse and ancillary. It’s the skiing and the soundtrack that sit at the center. The accompanying music is jazzy, dissonant, and compelling, far from what I have heard in other ski films.

I notice there are indeed women in the film. And they are featured prominently, though they are in the minority. I keep watching. The drone filmography captures skiing at its highest level, chasing the athletes over rocks and features, giving a perspective I’d never seen before. Still, Ornada is unashamedly ski porn. And I find there is no point at which the viewer needs to understand anything deeper than the tricks at hand. Besides perhaps the brand behind them.

“We’re a relatively small industry. Everyone knows each other. That closeness creates a lot of wonderful collaboration, but it can also make honest criticism feel uncomfortable,” Shafer would later say.

The outdoor world has long been averse to criticism.

In the spring of 1910, following his nearly eight years in office, former United States president Theodore Roosevelt took to a tour of Europe. In April, he delivered a lengthy speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, France called “Citizenship in a Republic.” Several minutes into his dialogue, Roosevelt delivered what would become some of the most repeated words in the American canon.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,” he said. “Whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”

Roosevelt was not only a politician, but also the consummate outdoorsman of his time; self-reliant, oft clad in buckskin, and a hunter so knowledgeable that even after being shot in the chest in an assassination attempt two years later, he was little deterred. He had downed more than a few elk. And Roosevelt understood the bullet likely hadn’t reached his lungs since he wasn’t coughing up blood.

More than a hundred years on, the outdoor world of today still holds action and ability dear. Especially over criticism.

“Armada is all about spreading positivity and stoke…most athletes in the film are out there doing the things you sit here and complain about. We’re actually out spreading love and stoke in the mountains, not just creating online beefs like you do,” Sammy Carlson would retort to an Instagram commenter. “Instead of blaming others, why don’t YOU do better.” Carlson did not respond to requests for comment.

Shafer, the Editorial Director of Lifestyle at Outside—a role that oversees editorial strategy at titles like SKI, Backpacker, and Climbing—felt the lower stakes of a ski film still reflected the larger world and its fault lines.

“Part of my job is to ask what stories we’re choosing to tell, and who gets to be at the center of them. Skiing doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” she said over email. “The stories we tell about who matters, who gets centered, and whose achievements deserve celebration don’t stop at the edge of the ski hill.”

That sentiment is often at odds with a skiing populace and industry that sees little benefit in using the sport as a lens for cultural criticism, even from the subculture’s own writers. “It’s click bait posts like this that are just out there to divide. It’s a ski movie. That’s it,” one poster noted in response to Shafer’s article. “Shame on me for forgetting to enjoy a ski movie prior to checking equity boxes,” wrote another.

“I don’t think ski media has a particularly healthy relationship with criticism,” Shafer continued. “Good criticism shouldn’t be confused with negativity...it says this work matters enough to be taken seriously. We celebrate films because we love skiing. But loving something also means being willing to ask it to be better.”

The book had seen its share of abuse. Its pages were warped into waves by at least one spill. And all the edges save for the spine were yellowed like a stack of weathered newspapers. It wasn’t even all from me. I had bought the book used fifteen years before, the evidence being the scribble on the first page’s top right corner with mysterious marks in an unfamiliar hand.

I adored the book, a tattered copy of One Life at a Time, Please, a collection of Edward Abbey essays published between 1978 and 1988. It had accompanied me on a quest of self discovery to Montana after I quit college for the second time. I had even taken the step of personalizing the edition with a sticker from my friend’s long since shuttered lifestyle apparel brand. And next to that Lightpole Clothing decal, I inscribed my own name and the year, Jack O’Brien, 2011.

Characteristic of Cactus Ed, the book is a blend of work, such as the written version of his infamous speech delivered at the University of Montana in April of 1985, “The Cowboy and His Cow,” where Abbey wondered loudly and cynically of the Western myth. He even suggested an open hunting season on range cows.

In that book also lives an essay titled “A Writer’s Credo,” an esoteric and winding manifesto. But for those of us of the freelance persuasion, writing about skiing and the outdoors, it’s something more.

“It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives,” the essay begins. “The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture.”

That writer faces a steep task today. Outdoor media is rife with advertorial, stoke pieces, all set against a heavy world we so often take to the mountains to escape from. And like the comments to Shafer’s article showed, so many in our subculture—from Olympians and legends to the everyskier trawling Instagram—are unwilling to engage in a critical debate.

But Teddy Roosevelt’s words can also be turned on those who so staunchly defended Ornada against a simple critique.

I finish the film from my floor just a few paces from my TV screen. There are enough women in the film that someone could reasonably argue that they are given a fair representation. But they are far from equally showcased. As I turn off the lamp and make my way up the darkened stairs to my room, I find the counterargument—that the film shirks featuring women—is equally valid. And worth discussing. No matter what many skiers may think.

And without the critic, we don’t have that discussion.