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I would try to ski every day.

And where I live I could even

go skiing in my backyard.

My parents would flick the light on

and I'd ski at night.

You know, I could just go down

a little hill in the backyard.

It was flat as a pancake,

but it was icy because it was New England.

And I would just skate like a fiend

from the neighbor"s house

and then come down

through the other neighbor's house

and by the time I got to my house

I could do some turns.

No one ever said to me,

""Don't go off the trail. ""

We were off-piste skiing

when I was seven, 10.

I just didn't think of it as that. I just thought

it was going through the trees.

And then we'd go down riverbeds

and things like that and jump off waterfalls.

I just thought it was normal.

I grew up skiing maple trees in Vermont,

birch trees in Vermont.

Sometimes we weren't even on the ground.

We were skiing branches

and calling it good skiing.

We weren't even touching the snow.

You're not skiing the ground,

you just ski the trees.

If someone said you have to ski

at a ski area for the rest of your life...

Well, I could maybe do that when I'm 80,

but I can't do that now.

Every mountaineer and every skier

realizes the mountains are

a living, breathing thing.

Where's that chalk? Breathe.

When they're not happy, or just pissed off,

they're blowing, you have to read that.

You can't just say, ""I'm gonna do this, ""

even though they're telling you,

""Not today. ""

That's when you get in trouble.

Being able to feel what the mountains

are saying to you is huge.

They're alive. You know, they're totally alive

and they'll make you more alive.

You know, or they'll make you dead,

you know, if you don't read them.

You know, there's always bad luck,

and I don't know

where bad luck comes in,

but it's definitely there.

When you're always in that element,

the vertical world,

either skiing or climbing,

moving through the mountains,

not just being in them,

but actually moving through the mountains

and with the mountains, you're only a guest.

And you don't know

when your time is up as a guest.

I'm just a cheater. I've been out there

a lot longer than most people

and I just keep doing it

and doing it and doing it.

When I go out, I become more alive.

And that's probably the endorphins

that everyone talks about.

And I guess the more you produce,

the more you want.

And so I think I have been

producing a lot for a long time

'cause I want them all the time.

I just love skiing.

I like the gravitational pull.

It's not a natural motion for the human body

to stand on two planks and slide.

When you ski steep terrain,

all it takes on a 45-degree slope

to just launch into space is

a small tweak of your quadricep muscle.

And if you pop off that snow,

you can sail 20 feet

down the hill with very little effort.

You can almost get a feeling of flying.

You get up to the 50-degree range

and it starts to become

difficult to control yourself.

There's so much gravity pulling you down

that you get to a point

where you can't overcome it anymore.

But anything that produces

this much joy in people's lives

is worth a certain amount of risk,

physical risk, emotional risk, whatever.

But how much risk it's worth

is an open question.

Nowhere in the world are

the risks and rewards of a life

in the mountains revealed more clearly

than in the French valley of Chamonix.

Chamonix is the birthplace of alpinism.

It"s the motherland.

In the "70s and "80s,

it was always kind of held up as

this shining, larger-than-life destination.

It was like, "Oh, Cham, Chamonix."

And it was almost mythical.

You would aspire someday

to go ski in Chamonix.

The mountains are big. They're wild.

They're unbelievably aesthetic.

There are spires everywhere.

I mean, you cannot go there, whether you're

a skier or whether you've never seen snow,

and not be inspired by the landscape.

It will just blow your mind.

You know, in Chamonix,

there is a lot of people.

They come here

from everywhere in the world.

American, Swedish,

Norway, Australia, New Zealand.

There's a lot of very good extreme skiers

from everywhere in the world.

And they come here for the same things.

You can see if you go in the bar after 6:.00,

everybody was going crazy.

After a powder day or something, it's...

It's... You can feel the energy.

They have the same spirit.

So it's very special.

When you're skiing in America,

you're skiing in little,

controlled snow parks.

And everywhere is safe. You go

and you can't really get into trouble.

And in Europe, the ski areas are

basically access to the big mountains.

I mean, they put lifts,

you know, as high up as they can.

They wanted to put a lift

to the top of Mont Blanc.

So you get into a whole different level of

trouble over there.

Chamonix is one of those places

in the world of skiing

where every time you go there,

there is some chance

that you will leave in a body bag.

So this makes it

a little bit higher-intensity spot

than most places that you go to.

It's the place.

You're not a big mountain skier unless

you've skied Chamonix.

In the valley, you know,

the life is not easy when you are down.

When you are in the mountains,

it's very simple.

You have to do something right.

There is no way to do something wrong

because you die.

You know it's very risky, but you go,

because it's every day a new adventure,

a new story. It's magic.

In the 1970s and "80s,

extreme skiing became a sport

here in these mountains

around Europe's highest peak, Mont Blanc.

Europeans watched films of men

like Patrick Vallencant and Anselme Baud,

as they climbed and then skied

some of the steepest,

snow-covered faces in the Alps.

Patrick and I were more than friends.

We were like brothers.

We were always in control.

If we hadn't been...

Yeah, what can I say?

We'd be crazy.

And this is how the first viewers

of our films thought of us.

They thought we were insane.

But that wasn't it at all.

Of course, we were always

very afraid.

The one who's not afraid is crazy.

He's a dead man.

But we never panicked.

Like Jean-Marc Boivin

used to say,

you can either live your

life like a lamb,

or live your life like a lion.

We have a choice in life.

There was no shortage of

lions in Chamonix.

There were many skiers

attempting descents so extreme,

they appeared almost suicidal.

They were the early visionaries.

They were the people who were showing us

what could be done.

In the States,

Bill Briggs" descent of the Grand is

sort of the singular, crystallizing moment

for American big mountain skiing.

But there were dozens of people

doing stuff like that in Chamonix.

A whole series of people who were,

you know, pioneers and legends.

This whole string of people

that kept going steeper and steeper

and bigger and bigger.

You had people who were living and playing

in these mountains kind of

looking out there going,

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