In the opening of Powderwhore’s new movie, “Choose Your Adventure,” there is a line that clearly tells viewers who are unfamiliar with the Utah-based backcountry ski film company’s past efforts that they are about to view something a little bit different.
“No face shots this year, just face shots full of Cheetos,” a voice says to a blank screen before the skiing footage flicks on.
Like its past productions, Powderwhore’s latest film is dedicated to the art, lifestyle, and pure joys of backcountry shredding. “Choose Your Adventure” is the antithesis of the modern ski movie formula that all mountain dwellers know so well — a concoction of Red Bull-addled teens, dubstep soundtracks, whirling helicopter rotors, and slow-mo rodeo 1080s.
Powderwhore celebrates the guy on a 170-plus month skiing streak who breaks his neck in a mountain bike accident, but slaps on his neck brace and his skins to keep the streak alive.
Poised at the top of a 10-degree slope, with one inch of snow covering the rocky ground, Darrell Finlayson pauses for a moment to implore, “Please God, don’t let me suck,” and then poles into a remarkably stiff and awkward Telemark turn before eating it, neck brace and all, in perhaps one of the more cringe-worthy crashes captured on film.
Finlayson caps the unsuccessful ski descent with a word to the cameraman: “Don’t show this to my neurologist.”
Powderwhore excels at telling the quirky and authentic stories of mountain culture, at articulating the genuine love and true spirit of backcountry skiing. In “Choose Your Adventure,” the company continues to branch out from its Telemark-only roots. Renowned AT skiers like Andrew McLean and splitboarders like Neil Provo and Forrest Shearer are highlighted in the film.
And while Provo drops some steep, high-consequence lines in the Wasatch Range, and McLean and Noah Howell ski Artic steeps in Spitsbergen, Norway, the film is strongest when it focuses in on the anti-heroes, archetypes that every ski town citizen knows well.
Take Todd Stuart, an aging Telemark skier who lives in a hut deep in the mountains of Northern Utah. Wearing a conical, red-and-white striped hat that looks like it could be one of the Cat in the Hat’s oversized socks, he grasps a bottle of liquor and takes a moment to philosophize on the restorative powers of backcountry skiing.
“If you doubt the beauty and the crystalline magic of snow, and the power that it has — we need to talk,” he says.
The sentiment may have been aided by a couple deep drags on his bottle of Schnapps, and the inhalation of some introspection-inducing herb, but any backcountry skier looking forward to a cold winter morning alarm clock, a steep skin track, and a untouched line down a perfect panel of Tahoe powder, will totally understand.
You may tune in to “Choose Your Adventure” for the banger segments of long, steep, Chilean powder, but I bet what you will remember is the wild-haired humor of Robert Athey, who laid to rest a past of barbiturate abuse to find a new obsession in backcountry skiing, or, if you know even a smattering of Spanish, the belly laughs at the hilariously inaccurate Spanish translations ascribed to the Chilean lodge owner.
