Free Baby Returned
Guri Bigham has been a free spirit from an early age.
Gary Bigham likes to tell people he found his daughter Guri in the Telluride 鈥渇ree box.鈥� He even has the photo evidence. 鈥淎nyone who knows my dad knows that he is a joker,鈥� Guri says today. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 take anything he says seriously.鈥�
But it turns out that the photo, which ran in the Fall 1993 Catalog, possessed at least a little predictive power. 鈥淪kiing has always been very easy for me鈥攊t鈥檚 like walking, second nature, and I love it,鈥� Guri says. She spent her early years growing up in Taos, New Mexico, with her Norwegian mother; in the summers, she would go traveling with Gary, an American photographer and well-known professional skier.
The pair took two-month road trips every summer. 鈥淓verywhere we went, he always had an eye for a photo. 鈥榊ou have to do this, don鈥檛 look at the camera, be natural,鈥欌� she says. 鈥淚t was a really cool way for him to travel and do his work and spend that time with me鈥攂ut it was also annoying, to be honest.鈥� Those cool-yet-annoying road trips came with a visual record of her youth: Her picture has appeared in Patagonia catalogs over a dozen times.
There鈥檚 a story behind every photo. 鈥淭here鈥檚 one of me in a pumpkin, and he said I ate my way out,鈥� she says. Once on a road trip to Idaho, they spotted a fake marlin on their friend鈥檚 wall. They took it to a freshwater lake and got in a boat; as the friend struggled to hold the marlin in the water, Guri pretended to be fishing it out of the lake. It was a Herculean shot that took two days to get right.
When Guri turned 16, she moved to Hawaii with her mother, who bought her a surfboard the first week. She鈥檚 been there ever since. Now 27, Guri lives on Kaua鈥榠, where she teaches surfing and yoga and has kids of her own. Like her dad, Guri travels a lot, too, especially in summer. Last year, she set sail on a zero-carbon emissions monohull. This year, she聽hopes to be聽the chef for all-girl teams competing on a sail-racing tour of Scandinavia鈥攖hat’s the plan, anyway; like everyone she’s waiting to hear if it’ll have to wait. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like a three-month experiment,鈥� Guri says. 鈥溑凡┗嵩比肟阝檙e going to see if we can make it without any butane, cooking only with solar ovens and the occasional open fire on the islands. When you鈥檙e traveling, it鈥檚 easy to end up eating convenience foods,鈥� she says, 鈥漛ut with a little planning, we think we can eat like locavores even though we鈥檙e not locals.鈥�

Bigham photographed on October 18, 2017, at a yoga workshop in San Onofre, California. Mali Workman

Telluride had one of the best 鈥渇ree boxes鈥� in the 欧博会员入口st, and Gary couldn鈥檛 resist the photo op. Guri Bigham, age 1. Telluride, Colorado. Gary Bigham