By Gregory Crofton
The helicopter hovered near the peak, blowing the velvety powder into the air, while the pilot tilted his bird just enough to safely drop a lone skier atop a wild mountain in the Chugach.
“Standing on top of those peaks in Alaska is one of the coolest feelings I’ve ever had in my life,” says pro skier Shane McConkey. “It’s all up to you at that point to take care of yourself. It’s a pretty cool feeling knowing you’re about to do something dangerous and drop in.”
“Steep,” a 2007 film written and directed by Mark Obenhaus, a long-time colleague of the late ABC anchor Peter Jennings, documents the evolution of big mountain skiing by telling the personal stories of Bill Briggs, Doug Coombs, Eric Pehota, McConkey and others.
These are people willing to get to deep powder and steep, dangerous terrain one way or another, either by climbing a mountain with skis strapped to their back, or getting dropped in by a whirring helicopter. The goal, as naturalist John Muir said, is “to go to the mountains and get their good tidings.”
The origin of American big mountain extreme skiing can be traced to one man, a somewhat nerdy guy named Bill Briggs. He was a skier and mountain guide in Wyoming who in 1971 decided that the Grand Teton, the tallest of the Teton range at 13,775 feet, could be hiked up and skied down.
He took one fall near the top, but overcame it and went on to descend 6,000 feet on skis in five hours. This was after three of his buddies, who had agreed to hike ahead and break trail for him, aborted the mission. As they waited for him to return, an avalanche occurred. They were sure Briggs had been buried by it. Instead from out of nowhere he swooshed right up to them with a smile on this face.
The next day the editor of the local newspaper and Briggs went up in a plane over the Grand Teton to document his story with photographs.
“The beauty of the mountains enhanced a bit by human contact,” Briggs recalled. “It was fabulous. You dream up what you want to accomplish in your life and I don’t know that many people get a chance to fulfill that. But at that point I had fulfilled a dream, totally.”
Cut to Doug Coombs, maybe the best known big mountain skier in the history of sport. Coombs had heard about Brigg’s triumph but was still a teenager and didn’t really know what the Grand Teton was.
He grew up skiing in his backyard in Massachusett. His high school yearbook quote was: “No such thing as too much snow.” Coombs headed West for college, eventually drawn to Jackson Hole Resort where he ran with an aggressive but fun-loving crew called the Jackson Hole Air Force that tested the boundaries of the resort and pushed skiing to a new extreme.
While the American skiers had to work hard to find challenging terrain at Jackson Hole, big mountain skiers in Europe had the dangerously wide-open Chamonix, the highest mountain in the French Alps, on tap.
Chamonix allowed a mix of alpinism and skiing extreme steeps to explode in the 1970s and 80s with pro skiers like Jean Marc Boivin and Stefano DeBenedetti. There was no such thing as backcountry or out of bounds skiing at Chamonix. There was just a massive lift that took you straight up to deadly steeps.
By the late 80s filmmaker Greg Stump had had enough of the insurance requirements and strict boundaries of American resorts. He grabbed his camera and headed to France to capture hot shot American skiers Glen Plake, Scot Schmidt, Mike Hattrup and Coombs as they discovered the extreme steeps of Chamonix.
The film Stump shot at Chamonix is “The Blizzard of Aahhh’s.” Released in 1988 and available on VHS, which made repeated viewings possible, it is one of the most influential ski movie ever made.
Why? Partly because Plake, a Califiornia punk rocker who skied with his long blonde hair gelled into a huge mohawk, was in it. But mainly because “The Blizzard of Aahhh’s” show the terrain of Chamonix to the masses for the first time. It also showed the group of rowdy Americans having fun.
“I had never seen a glacier before. I had never seen lifts that took us up to those type of places,” Plake says. “We were just good skiers out ripping around and I think it showed.”
Americans found their own Chamonix in 1991 when Coombs, at the behest of a sponsor, went to the Chugach Mountains in Southern Alaska to compete in the first World Extreme Skiing Championships. The experience changed his life. He won the competition and fell in love with the region’s velvety powder (wet snow clings to steeps then gets dried by cold wind) and sea of untouched peaks.
“No one could tell me where I could ski, what I could ski, when I could ski,” Coombs says. “That was a really big freedom and I think that freedom led into all those first ascents.”
By 1995 Doug and wife Emily had moved north and opened Valdez Heli Ski Guides. The business thrived and the money that came in allowed them to go explore deeper out into the Chugach Mountain range.
“Valdez became the North Shore of skiing,” Coombs says. “It’s the total Mecca. I still remember every first ascent. That’s how vivid the memories are.”
While Coombs was likely the best technical extreme skier of this time, the most daring was Shane McConkey from the North Shore of Lake Tahoe. McConkey mixed his BASE jumping skills with big mountain skiing. To him mixing the two sports made sense because the lines he wanted to ski often ended with a 500-foot cliff.
“Everybody is going, ‘You’re crazy. You’ve got no fear.’” McConkey says. “But I don’t see it that way. For me it’s all about trying new things.”
In 2009 McConkey died in Italy doing what he loved. One of his skis failed to release right away and he didn’t have enough time to deploy his parachute.
Death is a big and important theme in “Steep.” Big mountain skiers, a tight knit community, know there is no great reward without real risk. Consequently many have lost friends to the mountains.
Another mountain in the French Alps, one perhaps even more savage than Chamonix, is La Grave la Meije. It’s about three hours south of Chamonix and where Coombs and his wife lived at least part of every year after they decided to leave Alaska. At La Grave, when locals see the big black crows flying in the sky, legend has it that the crows are people whose lives were lost on the mountain.
Coombs says he’d become numb to all of the death. “It’s still terrible and you don’t like it, but it doesn’t make you stop,” he says. “I know it’s gonna happen, it’s just part of it.”
The last 15 minutes of “Steep” tells the story of Andrew McLean, an expert chute skier and someone who is meticulous about minimizing risk on ski adventures. Even so, “Steep” shows us real-time footage of an avalanche that he experienced in Iceland. All three in his group survive the slide, but it was a very close call. They hugged grateful to be alive, standing amid huge chunks of snow dislodged by the slide.
“Taking a dangerous situation and figuring out how to do it safely, that’s the ideal” McLean says. “I know it’s dangerous but if I give it up, what’s the future going to be like?”
“Steep” was the first production by The Documentary Group, which has gone on to make many more great nonfiction films. It was released back in 2007 but its importance and power still resonant today.