A foot wrecked by 100 miles in the rain, two runners lost on the shore of a lake in the middle of the Australian desert, a runner floating above a sea of clouds in the Pyrenees: here are the 20 finalists in the Trail category of The Illume Awards 2026, the international adventure photography contest. From Zegama to the Grand Canyon, from legendary races to spontaneous runs behind the house, across four continents, the photographers tell the story behind each image. Eyes wide open, let’s go!
Inés Veintemilla, Pyrenees (Spain)
Inés Veintemilla and Yhabril know this route by heart: they run it regularly. But on this particular day, the first snow of the season, the low clouds filling the valley and the last light of the day turned the familiar landscape into something almost unreal. The photographer waited for Inés to reach the ridge, looking for her long, fluid stride, so that she would cross the opening above the sea of clouds at exactly the right moment. “For me, the image is not really about the act of running. It is about what running in the mountains can make you feel: freedom, presence and the sensation of being completely alive.”
© Yhabril / The Illume
Ida Amelie Robsahm, Zegama-Aizkorri, Sancti Spiritu (Basque Country, Spain)
Sancti Spiritu, during the 2026 edition of Zegama-Aizkorri, the legendary Basque race. A spot where things happen all the time, and really fast: “You can’t afford to blink for too long or you miss it.” Having raced herself, Ágata Dominguez anticipates the facial expression, the movement, the composition and the energy of the crowd. In the women’s race, she looks for that fierce female energy: focus, exhaustion, strength and determination. “As a female photographer, being able to capture and create images for other women feels even more special.”
© Ágata Dominguez / The Illume
Francesco Puppi, Grand Canyon, Arizona (United States)
Daniele Molineris followed Francesco Puppi in Arizona in the weeks leading up to Black Canyon. What interested him wasn’t the race but everything that comes before it: the hard training blocks, the tapering, and that strange, empty phase lived thousands of kilometres from home. One day in the Grand Canyon, officially for heat training. Late in the afternoon, the photographer climbed to a viewpoint above the trail and waited. The promontory the runner was about to cross was the only lit ground left, everything below falling into a black void. “He’s the smallest thing in the photograph and the first thing you see.”
© Daniele Molineris / The Illume
Marwan Ali, The Speed Project, Powerline Road, Mojave Desert, California (United States)
The Speed Project 2024, from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. More than twenty hours into the race, just after sunrise, on Powerline Road. The night had been long, the terrain unforgiving, and the OMRC team’s support Jeep had got buried in the sand: they had to dig, push, and eventually accept help from another crew. When they got moving again, the landscape opened onto a road running beneath an endless line of power lines. Marwan Ali moved forward, almost swallowed by the desert. “One road, one runner, one direction, even with the finish still far away.”
© Agu Losso / The Illume
Mim Stevens and Michael Bertram, Simpson Desert, Queensland (Australia)
Torrential winter rains lashed the Simpson Desert. The once barren dunes and gibber flats came to life with lakes of water, making navigation tricky for the runners. Calumn Hockey was in Birdsville, Queensland, covering a 100 km desert ultramarathon. With the rain, most of the course could only be photographed by drone. The result: two runners beside a vast desert lake.
© Calumn Hockey / The Illume
Sam Osborne, Whakarewarewa Forest, Rotorua (New Zealand)
The water in this stream, which comes from a spring hidden in the Whakarewarewa Forest, is incredibly clear. In trail running, some days you run straight through streams: Graeme Murray wanted to show what it looks like underwater as the shoe and leg come down through the water. He called local runner Sam Osborne, put on a wetsuit and booties, and got into the cold stream with his camera in its underwater housing. With the water so crystal clear, the concept worked perfectly.
© Graeme Murray / The Illume
Philipp Ausserhofer, Puig Major, Serra de Tramuntana, Mallorca (Spain)
This should have been a race day. In November 2024, Philipp Ausserhofer travelled to Mallorca for the UTMB race there, long marked in his calendar. But the day before, it rained so heavily that the trails turned to mud and the race was called off. So they went into the mountains anyway, in the north of the island, on a ridge below Puig Major, the peak topped by a military station. Towards sunset, the fog moved through the ridge, opening and closing the view of the Tramuntana. A beautiful evening, Moritz Klee admits. “But in the end a good sunset cannot compete with a race.”
© Moritz Klee / The Illume
Robert Greso, Dolomites (Italy)
Both photographer and runner, Robert Greso spent a day in the Dolomites trail running and linking sections of via ferrata. His goal: a viewpoint he had seen in a video, with no location given. He spent hours on satellite maps, comparing peaks, until he tracked it down. Rather than the shortest way, he took the longer route through the mountains. Along the way, he climbed onto this ridge above a deep drop, facing peaks wrapped in cloud. By the time he reached the viewpoint, the storm had beaten him there. No regrets: this detour became his favourite spot of the whole trip.
© Robert Greso / The Illume
Holly Rush, The Speed Project, Nevada (United States)
The end of Holly Rush’s run from Los Angeles to Las Vegas at The Speed Project: 550 km, with a crew of four running alongside her, shooting content and driving an RV for the occasional nap and much-needed water and food. On the border of California and Nevada, she cools off in the ice box outside a convenience store: during the day, temperatures were in the high 30s °C. Jake Baggaley spotted the scene while running with her. The retro feel of this old western town, the “Ice” logo matching her sponsor’s shoe colour: it all came together.
© Jake Baggaley / The Illume
Kuba Orłów, Beskidy Ultra Trail, Siodło Gibasowe, Beskid Mały (Poland)
At the Beskidy Ultra Trail in Poland, the BUT Challenge consists of three loops starting and finishing in Szczyrk: 410 km and 22,000 m of elevation gain, self-supported, with a 100-hour time limit. Katarzyna Gogler met Kuba Orłów a dozen hours after the start, in the midday heat. He was looking for something to drink at this cottage. While the owner had gone inside, he sat on the doorstep, exhausted, watched by two puppies. “There was a kind of connection between them, a quiet dialogue between the dogs and the exhausted human sitting in the shade.” Leading the race, Kuba withdrew after the second loop. Nobody managed to complete the full 410 km.
© Katarzyna Gogler / The Illume
Trail Ribeira Sacra, Galicia (Spain)
The early hours of the Trail Ribeira Sacra mountain marathon, in north-western Spain. The race crosses ancient woodland overlooking a vast river canyon, a place shaped by centuries of history, legends and mythology. As the first sunlight filtered through the branches, Miguel Rúa turned around and saw two runners emerging from the dust. For a few seconds, the particles in the air caught the light, and the silhouettes seemed to belong to the forest itself. “The moment lasted only a few seconds. Its fleeting nature is precisely what made it so magical.”
© Miguel Rúa / The Illume
Anna Maria Klocker, Kyrgyzstan
In the middle of nowhere, in a region of Kyrgyzstan whose name he can’t remember, Tom Klocker and his wife Anna spent five days with a local farming family. That day, they headed up the trail behind the house to explore the surrounding mountains, running, camera in hand.
© Tom Klocker / The Illume
Philipp Ausserhofer, Achensee, Tyrol (Austria)
Tom Klocker had had this location in his head for a while, but was always missing the right model. Philipp Ausserhofer, already seen in Mallorca, was immediately up for it, and the weather was completely on their side. The runner went up and down the ridge again and again, and the shot came pretty quickly.
© Tom Klocker / The Illume
Pauline Vuillemin, France
“Adventure has no address, it demands neither a passport nor a distant departure,” writes Justin Galant. It lies in the present, in the angle of a gaze, in the shifting light of a familiar trail. Seen from below, Pauline Vuillemin’s silhouette in full stride stands out against the treetops. “The extraordinary hides in the ordinary.”
© Justin Galant / The Illume
Mathilde Petitjean and Chloe Margot, France
Sometimes the angles from the ground are already so impressive that you don’t even think about getting the drone out. Yet that is exactly when it can leave you speechless. The shoot was over, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in France, and the sun was gone. Moritz Ablinger flew the drone up with no expectations. “The whole area looked like a moonscape.”
© Moritz Ablinger / The Illume
Mathilde Petitjean and Malo Thomas, Algarve (Portugal)
Usually you bring radios when the athletes are far from the camera. In trail running, you’re usually rather close. Not this time, on the coast of Portugal. With no phone reception, Moritz Ablinger ended up waving his arms like a maniac and shouting at the top of his lungs to tell them to wait for a big wave to hit the little island behind them. “No idea if they ever understood what I tried to say, but it worked out. After 25 takes.”
© Moritz Ablinger / The Illume
Keaton Blovad and Joshua Oblad, Moab, Utah (United States)
Taken at the crack of dawn, to show how big the world can look when you take a step back. The sunrise was blocked by a mesa, so what Erica Hinck intended as a “first light” shot became a play of silhouettes.
© Erica Hinck / The Illume
Marine Grange, Lac du Poursollet, Livet-et-Gavet (Isère, France)
Louis Garnier only started shooting trail running recently. From a photographer’s point of view, he sees a lot in common with skiing, only easier without the snow when it comes to moving around and finding angles. The client wanted beautiful natural light and a clean silhouette against a ridgeline. But the ridge never really worked: change of plan, head for the lake. “These are the rare images that stay with you, the kind every photographer hopes to make but doesn’t get very often.”
© Louis Garnier / The Illume
Romane Tschirhart, Pyrenees (France)
Rain, fog and dense vegetation create an atmosphere of quiet mystery. Romane Tschirhart’s figure emerges from the landscape, playing with the shapes and textures of the Atlantic Pyrenees flora until subject and environment seem to become one.
© Matt Georges / The Illume
Shane Johnstone, Grampians Peaks Trail, Dunkeld, Victoria (Australia)
Shane Johnstone, one of Australia’s top 100-mile runners, lined up for the Grampians Peaks Trail 100-mile race. On the high peaks of the course, conditions deteriorated: rain lashed the runners and freezing weather made for a brutal night. Calumn Hockey photographed Shane’s foot at the finish line: he had suffered trench foot, and the skin of his toes was peeling. Despite this, he finished 12th in a world-class field.
© Calumn Hockey / The Illume