Photo: Nate Abbott

GETTING FAMILIAR WITH OUR MOTHER.
WORDS: JACOB WESTER

It’s early fall, usually the slowest part of the year for a professional skier. Days and days of working out, eating right, and being bored pass as summer waves goodbye. The snow hasn’t started falling yet. The Southern Hemisphere snow is quickly melting, and the European glaciers are still a cold tint of blue and brown. Even though summer was a great time for honing other skills and hobbies such as skateboarding, surfing and drinking, the urge to go skiing quickly grows into a withdrawal-like state, especially as the ski and snowboard films start dropping. Lately, I’ve been staying up late, and instead of the usual television brainwashing, I’ve been watching nature documentaries like Planet Earth and BBC’s Life. I’ve always been deeply fascinated and humbled by nature, and with the instant gratification era of today, watching your favorite animals in crystal clear 1080p is only a couple mouse clicks away.

The more we delve into the mysteries of nature the more connected to it we feel and the more the symbiosis of all things and events around us feels obvious. We truly are connected to nature, each and every day, no matter how bad we are trying to escape it, be it by moving into cities or spending more and more time in front of various electronic screens. Painfully reminded of our irrelevance by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and hurricanes, we keep rebuilding and reorganizing ourselves to prepare for the next time Mother Nature shows up at our doorstep. Unfortunately, humanity as a whole has still not come together and asked ourselves: Do these things happen to us because we keep pushing it too far? Maybe some areas of the world aren’t meant for human beings to live in?

Maybe the population of the world is growing too rapidly? Maybe the connectedness of it all has to be paid more respect. You disrupt one part of her kingdom, and another part is sure to lash right back at you. 

This spring, I went on a backcountry skiing trip to Chatter Creek, deep inside British Columbia, accompanied by Sean Pettit, Richard Permin and the Matchstick Productions film crew. Sitting amongst some of the gnarliest big-mountain terrain in Canada, we had a rough time with the typical unpredictable weather that haunts the region but ended up getting plenty of shots for this year’s film, Attack of La Niña. I had the pleasure and entertainment of watching two experienced backcountry skiers do what they do best on some impossibly steep first descents that I got nervous just looking at from the heli. No matter how much you have skied before, be it park, groomers, pow kickers or tree skiing, how many ski movies you have watched, and how soft the powder snow looks from a distance, when you are on top of a real big-mountain line for the first time, you are, to use a popular metaphor, shitting your pants.

There really isn’t anywhere else on the planet you feel so insignificant, so small. Many aspiring big-mountain skiers have told these stories, but you have to experience it firsthand to get even the slightest idea of what pure fear means. And the most important thing is, you chose this. You decided to go out there and put your life at risk to experience the ultimate form of skiing, and you have no one else to blame. Unlike families running from a surprise tsunami, nature didn’t come to you, you went out there and looked her right in the eye and made yourself vulnerable to whatever she felt like doing to you.

Now your knees are shaking uncontrollably as you’re making the “dropping in 10” call. In an instant, you realize that this is not you watching a nature documentary, this is you being right inside of it, up close, and there is really nothing you can do about it except make sure you survive. Skiing big mountains is the closest I have ever come to nature in its wildest form, and even though I realize that lines of this magnitude are only possible for a privileged few, it really is important for us as humans to rediscover our home, planet Earth, no matter how we go about doing it. Watching nature documentaries is a great start, but don’t get stuck behind the screen.

I came out of the trip with a few good shots, plenty of good crashes, an empty bank account and some amazing memories. Words will always seem inadequate to describe the feeling of pointing your skis down a mountain face you know very few other people, if any, have ever set foot on. You know that for the next 30 seconds or so you are in nature’s grip, and your control over the situation is limited, even if you tell yourself otherwise. In a world so overpopulated, we still manage to find the last few untouched areas, where we become pioneers and where our perspective on the world around us forever changes.