Photos by Anastasia Wilde
Words by Sophie Tsairis
Anastasia Wilde captures community and belonging at the limits of human effort.
Anastasia Wilde didn’t grow up equating the outdoors with recreation or sport. In Russia, where she was born and spent her early years, time outside was spent picking mushrooms in the woods or tending land with purpose. When she came to the United States she first lived in New Jersey; then, as a “troubled teenager,” was sent to a ranch in Montana. The wide open spaces changed her perspective and how she viewed herself in the landscape. The freedom she felt in the mountainous terrain did something to her nervous system, she said. It slowed it down. It let her settle.
Decades later, Wilde is one of Montana’s most compelling outdoor adventure photographers. Specializing in ultra running, she captures the intimate moments that test the limits of the human body and mind, often in rugged and remote landscapes. She shoots footraces of all distances but is particularly inspired by the 200-mile races where athletes run for four consecutive days, sleeping as little as they can manage. To capture these events, she hikes out before dawn—sometimes with upwards of 30 pounds of gear, including her camera equipment, water, food and warm layers—to reach a ridge by sunrise. She shoots until the last light fades and does it again the next day. She sleeps in her car. She gets lost. She figures it out.
“When I’m in job mode, it doesn’t matter if I don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t drink,” Wilde said. “I’m all in.”
The fortitude is not unlike that of the athletes she photographs, but it didn’t come naturally or all at once. Her first overnight shoot, following a friend’s FKT (fastest known time) attempt through a route in the Beartooth Mountains, was a revelation. She didn’t know people did things like that, or that she could play a role in their journey. Her first 200-mile race, Destination Trail’s Bigfoot 200 in the Mount St. Helens area of Washington, sent her hiking alone into the dark at 3 a.m., hearing things rustling in the bushes, terrified and completely captivated. “I slept maybe 12 hours over five days,” she recalled, “because I was just so excited.”
Wilde describes herself as introverted, but she’s found a sense of belonging in the ultra running and outdoor adventure community, especially where she lives, in Missoula. At endurance events, there are no pretenses. People take care of each other. Runners stop mid-race to ask if she has enough water. Strangers become familiar faces across a season of events. The shared suffering strips away everything but primal, basic needs, and has a way of bringing people together in ways that ordinary life rarely manages to do. It’s an individual sport, but it doesn’t feel that way.
“You really get to build these special relationships,” Wilde said. “Everybody involved, whether they’re volunteering or running, is so lovely, so down to earth. In that moment, you’re just focused on that one thing, and I feel like that connects all of us.”
While Wilde said she has no intention of jumping into the competitive world of ultra running herself, she holds close the adventure it provides her. “I still get to be there, and I get to experience all those highs and lows,” she said. “And it’s like I still get to be a part of that community.”
What draws people to seek out long, strenuous pursuits in the backcountry, she believes, is the rare combination of solitude, scale, and self-discovery that ordinary life rarely offers. “It’s mostly about mental strength. After a certain point, your body either wants to do it or it doesn’t.”
For her, the connection runs even deeper than community to include the land itself. Montana’s mountains—the Beartooths, the Crazies, the ridgelines above Big Sky—are, in her words, dear to her. Through her lens, she gives her subjects and the landscape they move through the attention of someone who understands what it means to arrive in a place that demands something from you and embrace its challenges with an open heart.
In her work, human figures appear small against vast, rugged terrain. They’re tiny specks against bonecrusher ridgelines, dwarfed by mountains and sky. These landscapes don’t care how fast you run or how much you’ve trained. They ask only one question: Do you have a strong enough reason to keep going?
Wilde has spent the last decade documenting the people who answer “Yes.”
Anastasia Wilde is an adventure photographer specializing in ultra trail running. Over the past five years, she has documented more than 20 races of 200-plus miles and hopes to continue capturing these remarkable feats of human resilience and strength. Wilde is based in Missoula, Mont., where she lives with her husband and German Shepherd.
Sophie Tsairis is the managing editor of Mountain Outlaw.
