Alex Strohl has well over 2 million followers on Instagram and a growing YouTube channel. He’s 30 and lives in Whitefish, Montana. By way of France and Spain. He loves good coffee and hard cheese (separately). But you already knew that. What you likely didn’t know is that he thinks Facebook killed Instagram, TikTok is a waste of his time, and at age 15 he was sent to foreign boarding school for problematic—and often super smart—kids after getting kicked out of high school for, as he puts it, “being a little asshole” and “having a healthy disrespect for authority.”
You may also know that after discovering photography at university in Quebec he moved to Vancouver, BC and opened his content agency Stay And Wander. But maybe not that he won the government of Canada as a client by bribing them with muffins, and a little sweet talk. And what brought him to the US? Dreams of following in his father’s footsteps—the man had spent the Sixties roaming the U.S. working jobs ranging from ranch hand and lumberjack to private chef and personal driver.
You already know he regularly spends eight or more months of each each year on the road, exploring the world’s most naturally beautiful and remote places photographing for blue chip clients. But just like for the rest of us, that pre-COVID life is no longer. When we recently got Alex on the phone to catch up and talk about the launch of his newest endeavor, Wildist, he had just received news that a major client had canceled a shoot scheduled for upcoming weeks. After our call he’d have to break the news to a whole crew that that gig—and its paycheck—was off the table, pre-production be damned. In other words, even for big time outdoor influencer Alex Strohl, shit is real right now.