"Going Home" with Anna Tedesco: Exploring Belonging in the Alaskan Mountains and Sea

Featured Image: Anna Tedesco

For many of us, home is where the snow is. Sure, we have warm houses we like to come back to at the end of the day and beds to sleep comfortably at night, but the sense of freedom we feel on a pair of skis dwarfs the security any dwelling could provide.

For Anna Tedesco, the soothing chill of the frigid Alaskan waters and the snowy mountains that surround them are the only home she’s ever known. In her new film “Going Home,” Tedesco explores the chase for a place that feels like home and her draw to the mountains to find it. 

After finishing school, Tedesco followed the classic ski bum storyline: spending her 20s living in a van and traveling across the United States to chase snow, wind and waves in an effort to find a place where she truly felt freedom and belonging. This quest landed her in Alaska. Up north, her home took the form of a small yellow tent, which she used as a base camp to ski massive lines in the AK peaks. 

Skier: Anna Tedesco | Photo: Andrew Muse

With nothing but a surfboard, a wetsuit and a pair of heart shaped sunglasses, she and her gang of girls tackled shore breaks in the remote Alaskan shoreline, watching glaciers break apart and fall into the water only a few hundred feet away with the old fishing boat "Milo" as their home base. 

The film strikes a beautiful medium between wide shots of gnarly Alaskan lines and close-ups filmed by Tedesco and her crew, adding a personal touch to the movie. “Going Home” is a raw look into the mind of a true ski and surf bum, and the kind of mentality that keeps us all coming back to the mountains season after season, no matter the cost or conditions. 

Surfer: Malou Peterson | Photo: Nina Riggio

Like many of us, Tedesco felt the push and pull of the term “home.” In some sense, it’s limiting – a place, a group of people or a code to live by. In another, it’s simply a feeling we get when we are truly in our element, and in her case, pushing ourselves to the very edge of our capabilities and comfort zones. 

Check out the full length film below.

From YouTube:

Some people chase comfort. Others chase conditions.

Going Home is a short film about what happens when you trade walls for weather reports and find belonging in motion. Follow Anna Tedesco — pilot, skier, and water woman — as she hunts snow lines through Alaska’s Chugach Mountains and surfs the cold breaks below their peaks.

For anyone who plans their week around wind, snow, and swell, this one hits close. Because home isn’t a place. It’s wherever you’re flying next.