Max Romey, Anchorage, Alaska-based trail running artist, videographer and photographer, is undertaking a project that will likely take the rest of his life—or even multiple lifetimes. Romey has an impressive filming background for brands including Salomon, Nnormal, KEEN, as well as trail running races including UTMB and Mount Marathon. Romey has made friends with some of the most well-respected names of the sport such as Courtney Dauwalter and Kilian Jornet, but his current project is much more personal.
In 2024, Romey began the most unique artistic scavenger hunt of his life—to find all 6,000 locations across the world from his grandmother’s sketchbook. In addition to finding these locations, his goal is to stretch his own pieces with watercolor in the exact spots where she stood. The project, My Grandmother’s Sketchbook, is currently an ongoing video series that documents Romey’s explorations of these locations. Watch the trailer here.
Romey’s grandmother, an avid adventurer and “daring soul” passed over a decade ago, but was a major inspiration for Romey’s art career and love of adventure. Her career as a geologist allowed her to travel the world and sketch in remote and diverse areas including Antarctica, Mozambique, Hawaii, Norway, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Galapagos, Tonga, and many more exotic destinations around the world. Romney is currently playing detective and traveling the world to find these locations. As of August 2025, he has only sketched eleven locations from his grandmother’s sketchbook, “It’s almost kind of scary to think about that at my current pace it is going to take me about 350 years to complete this project,” said Romey. “I want to stand where she stood in everywhere that I can. I want to fill these places in with color, which means I need to be in the places where she stood. It’s my way of bringing her work back to life.”
Running storyteller
“As a collegiate runner, I was really good at getting injuries.”
Romey, a collegiate runner for Western Washington University, found another passion in college besides running—filming. While Romey had several impressive sub-fifteen minute 5-kilometer race performances on the track, a string of shin splints and other nagging injuries led him away from competitive collegiate running. Romey spent the majority of his time “cross training” and biking along with his team, filming them as they ran. Although Romey didn’t have the opportunity to run as he wanted in college, his storytelling skills landed him a job after college with Olympian Nick Symmonds (founder of Run Gum).
In 2019, Romey ventured into his own creative film project to document a story of a raft adventure in the Grand Canyon. The project did not go as planned, “Over the course of the twenty-five days that we rafted, I managed to break all seven of my cameras. It was total carnage. I lost a couple in the river and several were just drowned in water and never worked again.”
But in spite of this mishap, Romey continued his love of documenting outdoor adventures. His work, particularly for local Alaskan race Mount Marathon, attracted the attention of trail running professional Rickey Gates, who connected him to the world of trail running storytelling. “Rickey was hugely responsible for bringing me into the trail running film world, especially for all of my Salomon projects. Before I knew it, I had this strange Venn Diagram of skills that set me up to be able to perfectly capture these races. I knew my way around the camera, I was willing to run way too far in trails to get shots, wherever the story was taking place is where I went.” Romey filmed several of Salomon’s most viewed trail running video series.
Sketchbook pace
While many know Romey as a filmmaker, his watercolor sketches are an equally defining part of his character, “I always bring a sketchbook with me, but I never shared it for the longest time because I was embarrassed about it.” On the sides of mountains (waiting for runners to zip by him in trail races), Romney would sketch slow moving landscapes.
But watercolors are “janky” art, thought Romey, and didn’t think runners would want to look at his art as much as watch his films. Romey even went so far as to start a separate Instagram account to share his sketches where his name wasn’t attached to it. To his surprise, the art account quickly became more popular than his own professional account.
Romey describes how watercoloring has changed his perspectives on the places and pace in life, “My sketchbook was a way to pass time at races, but also to capture something a little bit slower. Instead of trying to catch people running through landscapes as fast as they can, I’m using a different medium which makes me sit and look at these places in greater detail. I’m able to see the landscape move around me, it’s an entirely different experience. Even if it’s a place I might be very familiar with, sitting and waiting a little while longer shows a very different view of it.”
Alaskan wild child
“Alaska doesn’t make you want to come home. It makes you unfit to live anywhere else.”
Alaska has shaped Romey’s love for adventure more than anywhere, but he’s lived in many places that have lit up his outdoor passions. He was born in Maine, and moved frequently while growing up to Utah, New York, Ohio and eventually Anchorage, AK, as a teenager (where he currently still calls home). “In every single one of those spaces growing up, I have had very fond memories of wide open places. Having the freedom to explore as a little kid lasts forever. It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment when the ‘outside bug’ kicked in, but it’s amazing how much I become that same little kid whenever I’m in nature.”
In spite of growing up in a variety of beautiful states (and traveling the world for filming), Alaska still calls him stronger than anywhere else. “When you see enough of the world, you start to realize what’s the most unique. I haven’t found anywhere that’s even remotely close to Alaska. The expansive nature, trails and wildness are not something you’re going to find outside of Alaska.” Romey continues jokingly, “But as much as I love being in Alaska, I do enjoy traveling to other places that have exciting things like grocery stores!”
Beautifully incomplete
“The more places you see, the more the more you appreciate home, and the more you appreciate the world.”
Undertaking a project as grand as My Grandmother’s Sketchbook requires recognition that there’s a possibility not to finish it. But for Romey, that unknown is the draw, “It’s pretty crazy to look through some of her sketches and imagine myself trying to find out the exact location where she was in the Galapagos or Antarctica. That’s the coolest part…how incomplete it is.”
Many of the sketches lack labels and locations. In addition, locations change over time due to climate or development, which has been another challenge. But these difficulties have also led to some of Romey’s greatest connections, “Going to many of these places, it’s hard to see beyond the surface of what’s there and imagine what my grandmother saw. That’s what’s led me to seek out those who know these places well. It’s been an amazing excuse to meet different people who I might never have crossed paths with.”
In particular, Romey mentioned renowned ultrarunner Hillary Gerardi, who helped him locate remote sketches in the French Alps near Mount Blanc. He comments on a sketch of a rapidly receding glacier, Mer de Glace, in the Mont Blanc region that his grandmother had sketched. “It took me two days to find the spot because the glacier is just completely gone.” He says on his personal connection to the Mont Blanc area, a place he frequented for trail running film work, “I don’t think I’d ever sat still for that long on the side of Mont Blanc. It’s amazing to see an entirely different thing in a place I know so well.”
But in contrast to Mont Blanc, Romey comments on other sketch destinations that haven’t changed at all, “There are other places that are like a time machine. Places where the same types of birds are even in the same locations.”
Secret languages
“Her style is my style.”
Romey views sketching as a “secret language,” one that allows him to better understand his grandmother through her sketches. Romey compares sketching to his work behind the camera, “The photograph captures everything. It’s scientific. It doesn’t think, it records. But when you’re painting, it’s very intentional. I’m intentional about the lines I put, what I erase, and what catches my eye. It’s more than just pointing a camera. It’s like you’re putting a little bit of yourself down on the paper. When I can bring my grandmother’s sketchbook back to wherever it was thirty, forty, or fifty years ago, it’s like I can see what she was thinking.”
Romey shares the influence of her grandmother on his own art career, “It’s her sketches that got me to where I am today as an artist. When I can bring her sketches back to where they were, it’s almost like I can find those pieces of her that I knew and appreciated so well.”
Leonardo and grandma
“My grandmother was the best sketch artist I knew. In my world growing up, it was her and Leonardo Davinci.”
Romey took to sketching in part due to his dyslexia, but also because of his grandmother. Unable to express himself fully through writing, sketches opened up a whole new door of possibilities to find himself, “I felt like reading and writing was closed to me. I couldn’t spell and then nobody could understand what I was trying to say, But, sketching was amazing…you don’t even need to speak English to get it.” Romey looked up to grandmother, whom he calls, “The best sketcher I knew!” His grandmother encouraged him to always have a sketchbook in hand.
Romey reflects on how sketching has shaped his life, and continues to do so with his current project, “Sketching helps me understand my thoughts. I am free of my worries of misspelling. It dissolves language and walls between people. I’ll be painting and people just come up and talk to me. It somehow gives them permission to peek over my shoulder and see what’s going on.” Romney remarks comically, “It gives the artist permission to sit and stare at a tree for forty-five minutes. Do that without a sketchbook and you’ll be institutionalized.”
While art might seem unapproachable to some, Romey argues that we all have inner artists who can assist us in seeing the world from new perspectives, “Everyone’s done watercolors. Even if you don’t think you did, you just don’t remember. The problem with art is that most people stop when they’re five or six and start back up again when they’re forty. Their drawings then look like a five or six year old drew it, but it’s because they just haven’t been sketching consistently.”
The simplicity and expressiveness of watercolor painting, according to Romney, is its greatest beauty, “In a world of quick photos, AI and filters, we focus too much on the comparison of the fact that sketches don’t look as fancy as photos. But it’s not about what you end up with. It’s about the process, and a major part of that process is using the sketch as a tool to look at and understand the world.”
Miles on the brush
“It’s no wonder I’ve been drawn to both running and sketching.”
Romey’s draw to both running and sketching compliment each other, while tapping into similar parts of his personality. He explains the comparisons in more detail, “When I’m on a long run, I’m immersed in it, doing one step after the other. A painting is nothing more than hundreds and 1,000s of little, tiny brush strokes and little tiny decisions. When I get lost in it, it’s just like one of those runs. I follow my feet, I follow my brush. Painting is really just running I can do while sitting down.”
Follow Romey’s journey to find his grandmother’s sketches on his Instagram here. Also see his water coloring projects on his other Instagram account here.
Stay tuned for the videos in My Grandmother’s Sketchbook series and watch the pilot episode here.
