Steep Page #7

---

-Yeah, dude, have a good jump.

-Yeah.

-Enjoy.

Awesome.

Triple gainer, yeah?

It's all about getting creative and original

with different ideas and to do fun stuff.

Everyone else is going, "You're crazy.

You've got no fear," stuff like that.

But I don't see it that way.

-Yeah, Shane, nice one.

-Ready, set...

Watch out for that porcupine

in the landing area.

See you.

With the addition of a parachute

to my ski gear,

I'm looking at these mountains with totally

different goggles than all the other skiers.

There's a lot of lines that are really

aesthetic, really cool-looking lines,

that you can't do

because it ends in a big, giant cliff.

Well, if you throw a parachute on your back

and you have some BASE-jumping skills,

you can totally ski those lines.

For most of us it's a stunt.

It's completely crazy and kooky,

but for Shane it isn't.

I mean, if you have that ability

to BASE-jump,

and you have the ability to ski some

of the steepest, most radical things around,

putting the two of those together

makes complete sense.

It makes total sense. Why not?

I got to ski a line a couple years ago

in Bella Coola

that was a big, open powder field,

really nice snow

that came, that rolled over

and then came down into this choke

with ice on one side and rock on the other

and then it opened up again

to this big, slanting ramp

that ended in a massive cliff.

Above that ramp was

like a flat spot with a kicker.

You know, I got to ski that powder field

down through the crux

and then boom, off the kicker. 500-foot cliff.

And that was amazing.

You can't do that without a parachute.

Complacency is what gets everybody.

Accidents, deaths, problems,

you know, whatever, you know.

And I find myself getting

complacent in places.

Like when I was in Alaska

for year after year after year,

I was setting off class three avalanches,

six-foot fractures,

four-foot fractures,

going 1,000 meters, 3,000 feet.

Oh, darn it! Too bad I ruined the mountain.

You know, let's go on to the next slope,

but, you know,

you're looking down there at 50, 60 feet

of snow that you could be buried under.

And it's like I almost got numb to it.

Something in the back of my mind just said,

""Why don't you just step back

and take a look at all this?""

And so I left Alaska.

La Meije is the peak that looms over

the small French village of La Grave.

La Grave is like Chamonix 50 years ago,

a wild, alpine world

with a lift to take you there.

It's where Doug Coombs and his family

now spend part of each year.

Well, we fell in love with France

and La Grave partly for the chocolate

and the red wine,

but mostly for the mountains.

The power of the mountain

and the mystique of La Meije.

And we were just drawn to it.

It's very raw and wild and it has moods,

ups and downs. But we thrived on that.

Everyone said it was

the last frontier of wild skiing.

You know, it's ski sauvage, as they say.

I instantly felt like I belong there.

That was fun.

Okay, let's go to town,

we'll go to the bakery.

We'll go buy some bread.

Wanna go to the store?

You can instantly get off the lift here

and get in the most amazing,

dangerous situations of your life.

You can go from sipping a nice cafe au lait

to almost killing yourself in five minutes.

I mean, to be able to have that freedom

of just wandering off the mountain

and getting into this wild spot right away.

You know, right from the restaurant,

it's like no other, no other, and I love it.

One, two, three, four, five.

Ten.

-Eleven.

-Twelve.

Fourteen.

-Fifteen.

-Fifteen.

Seventeen.

I haven't been slowing down very much.

A little here, and a little there, but...

I don't know how Emily puts up with me.

I think my wife is super tolerant.

She must think I'm just a complete kook.

She always calls me that. But I don't know,

I think she's the most tolerant person

in the whole world.

And to make me stop doing something

that I love, she knows it is not possible.

On April 3, 2006,

Doug Coombs died in a skiing accident

in the mountains above La Grave.

He fell to his death trying to reach a friend

who had slipped and fallen off a cliff

while skiing the Polichinelle couloir.

We never questioned our life.

The other people might have, but we knew

that the risk that we encountered

was worth every bit of it.

He knew and I knew,

you're never above the mountains.

Mountains have always had the last say.

Mostly they give,

mostly the mountains just give you

incredible amounts of pleasure.

And sometimes they swallow you up.

I just can't imagine a better way

for Doug to have gone,

even if it was too soon.

You know what they say

in the mountains around here,

all the birds, all the blackbirds,

that's a dead person.

And there's a lot of birds

in the mountains here.

And they're all blackbirds.

That's their spirits flying around.

That's the rumor.

And there are a lot of deaths here,

because the mountains are so intense.

They're so gnarly, they"re so big,

and they can be so friendly one day

and so mean the next.

I remember being really shocked

when a friend died skiing.

And then the next friend died skiing.

And then the next friend died skiing.

And you're like, I don't know what it is,

it's weird, you just become numb to it.

It's still terrible, and you don't like it,

but it doesn't make you stop.

I hate seeing people that I know die,

but I know it's gonna happen.

I think that's just part of it.

It's like saying you know someone

who's died in a car accident.

You know, what's worse, a car accident,

or falling off the mountain?

I don't know,

I think the car accident's worse.

At least when they're falling off the

mountain, they loved what they were doing.

I was just getting ready to tell him,

if he runs into any of my family out there,

to steer clear of us.

Let's jump right in to that real quick

and take a phone call from Andrew McLean

calling from Iceland.

-Good morning, Andrew.

-Top of the morning to you, trail master.

Top of the morning to you, sir.

How's the weather in Iceland?

Well, the weather in lceland is a lot

like our last trip to Patagonia.

I woke up and I wasn't really sure

where we were.

It's dumping snow, a total white-out,

and we're camped on a glacier.

It's kind of like deja vu.

I'm kind of wondering

what we're doing here.

Okay, Andrew,

for people that aren't familiar,

you were up here doing a little skiing

and decided Iceland had not been skied

a whole lot

so it was a great place to take off to.

Yup, so the skiing terrain up here

is phenomenal.

What we're doing is called

ski mountaineering.

And that's where you hike up

and then ski down.

And we're specifically looking

for steeper slopes

Iike couloirs and slopes

that are above 40 degrees.

And there's no shortage of them up here.

We can't see them at the moment,

but we know they're out there.

But just kind of reading some big,

thick, fat books and waiting it out.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes