Campfire Voices: Lena Stoffel

Words: Daniel Neilson
Photography: John Summerton
Featuring Lena Stoffel
Produced in Partnership with VOITED

A life in the moment

Skier, surfer, climber, photographer and filmmaker Lena Stoffel has spent decades chasing movement. Motherhood has reshaped that momentum, bringing a slower pace, a focused presence and subtle shifts in how she experiences sport, storytelling and the outdoors.

Skiing forces you to be in the present. The obstacles in front of you. The decisions are instinctive. Searching for the flow, chasing the perfect line. On the ocean, surfing becomes an obsession with the water. The next wave, the position, and then, again, the flow, the satisfaction, the risk. But both have an inherent danger, and that’s partly what makes them thrilling. Skiing and surfing are both a compromise of speed versus risk. Your position on that graph changes with skill level, with fitness, with mindset and with your life stage. Perhaps the most significant shift for many people is having children. Apart from the day-to-day time black hole these small, beautiful people create, they also alter your focus and your perception of risk. That’s not to say it won’t revert, but the parenthood season of life refocuses your life, especially if your life previously was spent as a professional skier.

We met Lena Stoffel and her one-year-old son Toni near her home in Patsch in the Austrian Tyrol. We went to a tiny village called Navis, built around the Navisbach, a small river with remarkably clear water. It’s one of Lena’s favourite places. The first snow had fallen in the mountains, and some of the trees were turning yellow. We were here to speak to Lena, a friend of VOITED, as part of our Campfire Voices series. In fact, she’s so much of a friend that she even sewed a hat design for them, which is now in production in the guise of Hat in the Clouds. We wanted to know how her transition into motherhood has changed her relationship with the mountains and the oceans. That, and she’s just one of the loveliest and inspiring people we could ever spend time with.

As Toni, now walking, bumbles around in his little bobble hat, Lena explains how her time outdoors remains the same, but the focus has shifted.

‘We travel way less. Way less skiing, less hiking, but when we go out, we try to take Toni all the time.’

‘In the last couple of years, we started rock climbing and also bouldering. We think it’s really nice to spend the day with friends at the crag, and it’s so mellow. Even now with Toni, going bouldering is such a nice activity. He is outside, we are outside and can be a bit active.’

‘It’s different, but we still love it in a different way, having him with us now. 'Plus, I’m already 41, so I've had that life for a long time for myself and also with my husband. It is the right time to slow down. And also for my body, just take it more mellow.’

And for Lena, it certainly was busy. Sport has always been present in Lena Stoffel’s life. Since the age of two, she’s skied, unsurprisingly, given her parents were skiing instructors.

‘We learned skiing from a very young age, and we travelled to the big mountains,’ she said. So it was perhaps inevitable that she became a professional. She started alpine racing on the junior national team, then moved into freestyle skiing and freeriding on the international stage after moving to Innsbruck at 20 to study. Alongside this, she qualified as a state-approved ski teacher, deepening not just her technical skills but also her understanding of the mountain environment.

After finishing her studies, she moved to Portugal and discovered what would become her second passion: surfing. Different rhythms, different forces, but the same pull. ‘I love longboarding most, because I feel the mood in the water is often way more chilled. I get more waves, and it’s really fun.’ Time spent chasing snow eventually opened the door to the ocean waves, widening her relationship with movement and place. At this time, she also began documenting her travels and her relationship with the mountains and the ocean, first through photography and later through film. She had, after all, spent plenty of time on the other side of the lens. And this also gives her, if not a unique perspective, then certainly an inherent understanding of capturing the movements and moments of the athlete, whether on snow, rock or water.

The thread that pulls all this together is storytelling – and alongside being an athlete, that’s probably how best to describe Lena’s role: a storyteller. ‘For me, storytelling is really important. It’s in all of it. ‘When I tell a story from my travels, I try to tell an authentic story of the place and the people there, what the place is about, and also using local guides.’

A case in point are two short films that grew out of lived experience rather than production plans. Simplicity and Circle of the Sun reflect this approach, tracing parallel lives between mountain and sea, guided by instinct and emotion rather than narrative structure.

Talking about Circle of the Sun, she told Sidetracked: ‘The storytelling for me was a really lovely process because it was just telling what I felt on the trip. I took my time with it; it just came along, and then the music came to it too. In the end, it worked out perfectly.’

It’s an honest approach, it’s reflective, and so it’s perhaps natural that when shooting stills, her tool of choice is often an analogue camera. ‘It’s just slower, and I’m way more in the place I am when I shoot analogue. It’s a slower process, obviously, because I choose my shot more wisely than when I press the shutter. I focus more on the moment.’

‘In skiing, for example, I have only one shot, so I need to know when the turn is in the right moment, and then I press the shutter button. That’s really difficult when you’re capturing action sports shots.’
But as a professional skier and brand ambassador for Patagonia and Voited, she knows the right moment from the other side.

‘I posed for the camera for so many years as a skier. I know exactly where the photographer wants me to be and where the turn needs to be.’

Lena takes time to feed Toni and wraps herself up in a VOITED blanket against the chill. ‘I love the product,’ she told us. ‘We are camping quite a bit and being outdoors, the blankets are so useful and beautiful too.’

She thought the fabrics were so beautiful that, as a keen sewist, she designed a hat that is now in production. She was inspired by cold-water swimmers

and by a pattern in a sewing magazine for a trapper hat. ‘I thought it would be really great to use the leftovers and make a small product with small patches of fabric, so I sewed some samples with this pattern and sent them to VOITED.’ What began as a personal project has since moved into production: the Hat in the Clouds.

And the question is always: what next? But Lena is relaxed. She does want to ski more and hopes the winter will be better than last year's, but the horizon is intentionally loose.

Lines will be skied, rocks climbed, stories will continue to take shape – almost certainly with the inclusion of a small boy – but without urgency or fixed direction. ‘ I have a hard time planning ahead, but to be honest, I’m living so much in the moment right now.’

Just like skiing a steep line, like finding the next crimp, like riding the next wave.