Rogers Pass has long been popular with backcountry skiers, who drive up the Trans-Canada Highway to gain a kilometre of altitude before “skinning” up the next vertical kilometre and a half, on skis covered with a fabric that slides forward easily but in reverse grabs the snow to prevent backsliding. An hour into their ascent, the trail forked. The Sherpas and their two friends bid the school group adieu and pressed on toward a ridge called Grizzly Shoulder. Another hour later, as they neared the ridge top, they heard a sound like an underground train rumbling from the opposite drainage.
“We saw the dust cloud rising through the trees exactly where the group would have been,” Mossop recalled over coffee last winter. “We knew right away what had happened.” A massive slab in the alpine had ripped free, sending more than 1,000 tonnes of snow hurtling toward the school group, just as they were crossing a wide, treeless gully that left them utterly exposed. The Sherpas were too far away to be of any help; two-thirds of avalanche victims suffocate within the first fifteen minutes. They decided to return to the parking lot to see if there was any way to help from there. There was not. Fifteen of the skiers had been buried. Within eighty minutes, eight had been dug out alive by rescuers closer to the scene. Mossop and Sangster watched the remaining seven come down in body bags.
Twenty-two more skiers would die in avalanches before summer arrived, making the 2003 season the most lethal in Canadian history. That fall, the Sherpas released a six-minute documentary about the deadly snowpack called Deep Seated Instability. A modest effort shot with cheap camera gear and amateur athletes, it won a spot at the prestigious Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival.
It was clear that Mossop and Sangster wanted to push the boundaries of the ski movie genre, which typically ignores or glorifies the potential consequences of extreme skiing, instead choosing to profile the antics of a subculture in constant search of steeper mountains, bigger cliffs, and more complex acrobatics. In 2007, they landed a grant from the Canadian Avalanche Association to market their product, avalanche awareness, in 16mm film. To Western Canada’s tightly knit fraternity of off-piste enthusiasts, The Fine Line came as a revelation, a rare combination of action flick and heartfelt documentary. The standard ski porn footage of goggle-tanned daredevils careening down impossibly narrow chutes was there, but so, too, was testimony from mountain guides and avalanche survivors, describing how it feels to be buried alive, or to pull a dead friend from the snow. Hedonism with a message.
The Fine Line sold some 30,000 copies and earned the Sherpas enough credibility among industry sponsors to kick-start their next project, All I Can. Taking two years to shoot, the feature film stretched a budget of less than $400,000 across eight countries and five continents. To help cover the geography, Sangster and Mossop recruited a third Sherpa, Eric Crossland, another high school friend with several years’ experience filming for the ski industry.
Following its world premiere in Whistler, British Columbia, on September 23, 2011, All I Can will be trotted out at more than sixty festivals around the world. This time, instead of death by avalanche, the Sherpas want ski bums to consider another buzz kill: climate change. The film’s opening sequence sets the tone with a beginning-of-life montage in Hawaii, where the blasted volcanic landscape gradually yields to a scattering of green shoots that grow into a pulsing tropical rainforest. The sequence culminates in a frantic scene of urban traffic — a perfect illustration of the modern world’s bottomless thirst for fossil fuel and the Sherpas’ deft manipulation of space-time. Later on, vertiginous white peaks few people will ever ski are juxtaposed with grey panoramas of Alberta’s tar sands and oil tankers floating off Vancouver.
According to their marketing materials, the Sherpas want “to unite global mountain culture and bind us together as leaders of a revolution.” All I Can captures luscious, Baraka-inspired footage to paint a vivid portrait of the earth as a living organism whose well-being is a prerequisite to our own good times. But climate change proves a more challenging theme to link with ski porn than does an avalanche. Can a community of self-involved pleasure addicts accustomed to diesel-powered chairlifts, two-stroke snowmobiles, and $2,000-an-hour heli-drops be made to care about what’s happening in Fort McMurray? If so, how will the Sherpas avoid the same criticisms they level at an oil-soaked Western world? None of their skiers walked to the scenes in Alaska, Morocco, Chile, Argentina, Tokyo, Hawaii, Sweden, Indonesia, or Greenland. Ski bums may well leave the movie with a mind to shrink their carbon footprint, but chances are they’ll be hoping they, too, can squeeze in a few flights before the party ends.
“Some people are already calling us hypocrites,” Sangster allowed when I joined him last March for a day of skiing in Whistler. He described it as their “Al Gore problem,” noting that An Inconvenient Truth was lambasted for the same reason. “But you can’t make a high-end ski movie without using a helicopter or two.”
A record sixteen metres of snow had landed on the resort, and the drifts surrounding Whistler’s parking lots were the size of bunny hills. Such abundance doesn’t clash with climate change models — global warming is as much about increased humidity and precipitation as about higher temperatures — but from a skier’s perspective it does dampen the sense of urgency. Gone was all memory of the previous winter, when Olympic organizers had to truck in snow from the interior so the Games could proceed in the rain.
“We want to give people ideas of how to make a personal change, because they want to help but don’t know what to do. But shit, we don’t know what to do. We’re learning as we go.” The Sherpas had decided at the outset to balance the movie’s fuel consumption by purchasing carbon credits, a task that fell to Sangster. He had been surprised to discover that there was no independent authority to regulate the process. “We could totally fudge our books, and no one would ever know — which makes you wonder, what’s to stop a big corporation from telling the public it has voluntarily offset all its emissions while it ignores its executives’ business flights?”
Sangster, an affable thirty-year-old, functions as the triumvirate’s producer. He had promised to stay off the hills during the week, so he was at some pains to conceal his whereabouts from his colleagues. Because he serves as the prime organizer of the trips, sponsors, and athletes needed for a successful ski movie, Sangster had his cellphone welded to his ear throughout the day, even as he guided me around Whistler’s “slack-country,” the out-of-bounds areas just a short hike from the lifts.
Around noon, a call came in from Lynsey Dyer, the Sherpas’ “star girl” and one of the best women skiers in the world. Fresh back from a shoot in the Himalayas, she had agreed to join the Sherpas the following week at a heli-ski operation outside Revelstoke, in the BC interior, and later at a shoot in Haines, Alaska. Next came a call from an outerwear company that wanted the Sherpas to film their women’s team skiing down the flank of a volcano in Oregon. Every fifth call or so seemed to come from either Crossland or Mossop, wondering where they were going next, and when, and with whom.
