Full Throttle Frenchie: Richard Permin can't stop, won't stop

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Photos by Blake Jorgenson_MSP.

Richard Permin is having a bit of a heater. Bounced from his snowmobile during another unsuccessful hill climb, he’s digging again. It seems he’s been digging all day. Then he’s cursing because he can’t find his ski pole. When he finally arrives at the top of the hike to a short pillow line amongst the snow-laden spruce of Chatter Creek, he’s sweaty and frustrated. He surveys the scene, then methodically stomps out a takeoff atop a 30-foot tombstone of rock. For the moment, skiing appears to be a job. Richie needs shots. He needs to perform for his sponsors. He needs to execute.

A couple of hours later, Richie is on his laptop in the sprawling Chatter Creek lodge, deep in the British Columbia woods, scrolling through ESPN’s Real Sport entry tallies. “Look at this,” he says, pointing his finger at the frontrunners of each action sport, determined by online voting. “USA, USA, USA, Canada, USA, Canada, USA, Austria.” He shakes his head with disdain. He’s right. Every sport on the site shows a similar pattern. The Europeans clearly get little respect across the board. It’s pretty safe to say that the world of freeskiing is no different. If you’re not Candide Thovex or Henrik Harlaut, you’re just another ripping Euro, lost in the mix.

Of course, Richard Permin is far from just another ripping Euro. Over the past few years, he has blossomed from a young gun with promise into one of the preeminent stars of his generation. His segment in Matchstick Productions’ 2012 release, Superheroes of Stoke, could be argued as one of ski-film history’s most impressive displays of the sport’s holy grail—combining freestyle and true big-mountain skiing. Yet, for Richie, that’s not enough. His threes off 50-foot cliffs, flawless hand drags and dub 12s in the park are, in his perspective, standard fare. And despite his top-tier sponsorship with Red Bull, a signature Swatch watch and now his own clothing line by Oakley, he still questions whether he has arrived. Patience isn’t one of his attributes.

He doesn’t want to go through the steps to which ordinary people are relegated. A fire burns within Richard Permin to progress our sport and be the best. Right now.

The 29-year-old was coached through his teens as a racer and says, “I loved racing. It was my sport and my passion. But I was not that good.” And for the racer, La Clusaz’s ski area, La Balme, had its distractions. The mountain is teeming with natural undulations that provide countless opportunities to get in the air, and at the time, the area also built one of the few parks in the region. “All of the big-mountain and freestyle guys were from La Balme,” Permin recounts. “Seb Michaud, Baptiste Collomb-Patton, they are the people who led the way. Skiing in Balme—it’s like a culture. You need to combine [features all over the hill]. It’s like the best training you can have. You ski and you jump.”

Of course, it was local star Candide Thovex who really put La Balme on the freeskiing map as he routinely exploited the ski area’s potential. And as a kid, Permin just soaked it up. “We just kind of followed him around and saw him do something and tried to do what he did. Everyone wanted to be Candide at that time. He was the example. But he was super nice, and we started skiing with him.” And when you’re exposed to a whole other level of possibility, well, your perspective of human limitations might just be a little skewed.

Permin stands atop another rock pillar at Chatter surveying, determining the possibilities in the natural gap before him. Far below and way out is a potential landing area, but the margins for error are slim. If he were to come up short … well, he didn’t want to come up short. And if he went too big, a clean stomp would send him hauling ass into a boulder field. And it’s all complicated by a tricky inrun. The blue skies rapidly deteriorate, leaving no light on the landing, and he’s frustrated. “I want to hit it. I want to hit it now.”

We cameramen respond, “We’ll come back.” Days later, after thinking about it for several nights, Richie stomps a massive three off the donger, goes screaming through the mine field and comes out laughing.

Through the past four MSP films, Permin has emerged as one of the hardest charging big-mountain skiers on the big screen. He attacks burly Alaskan lines with abandon and always goes large. When he takes a beating, he gets up for more. MSP cinematographer Guillaume Tessier puts it this way, “He has one speed: full throttle. Going balls out is what he’s all about.”

Watch his latest big-mountain footage, and you might be surprised to learn that in his early twenties, Permin was your typical elite park skier, competing in X Games slopestyle in 2006 and city events like freestyle.ch. In 2007, in Stockholm, he won King of Style with a switch-10 double tail. His sponsor at the time, Nike, asked him what he wanted to do, and he replied, “I want to go to Alaska!” Then, he admits, “I started watching Alaska footage in MSP movies, and I was like, ‘What the fuck? Why did I say I want to go to Alaska?’”

Permin in the editing room.

Just prior to the Alaskan venture, Permin would be served a healthy dose of fear in a big mountain setting. Straight out of the park he was invited to compete in the Swatch O’Neill Big-Mountain Pro on La Bluet, a serious 1,000-meter face riddled with cliffs on the French-Swiss border. He found himself clawing his way along a knife-edge arête with the likes of Jeremy Jones, Seb Michaud and Xavier de la Rue. “There was a 100-meter cliff on one side (certain death) and a steep rocky face on the other (almost certain death). Jeremy Jones was behind me saying, ‘Keep going!’ I was like, ‘Fuck this! Get me a rope! Send me a lock!’ I didn’t know the word for carabiner. The next day, they all made fun of me for it.”

It’s James Heim’s birthday at Chatter Creek, and the boys start getting a little loose. Jimmy, Heim’s renowned alter ego, has yet to make an appearance, but Permin’s other side has. He’s suddenly engaged in one of his favorite drinking pastimes and seizes Heim’s collar. With a violent downward swipe, Heimer’s T-shirt is gone. Shredded. Heimer disappears for a few minutes and returns reclothed. Within seconds, Richie tears away another shirt from Heimer’s body, not for a moment realizing that Heim was sporting one of Richie’s own shirts, pilfered from the duffel bag in Richie’s room.

Heimer again disappears, only to return wearing another of Richie’s shirts—a technical Oakley underlayer. This time the ploy is more obvious, and Richie’s now clued in, but after a moment of hesitation, he swipes again, needing a solid flurry of tugs to rip the shirt away. As a shirtless wrestling match on the floor of the bar ensues, I can’t help but look around at the Chatter Creek guests watching the melee. Prior to this sideshow, the crew had already been recognized as “the MSP skiers.” Clearly some of the guests have watched the films, and I figure they probably already think these guys are a little crazy. Now, here the clients are, fifty miles from civilization, out in the middle of the British Columbia wilderness, watching the fracas unfold before them. Any suspicions of the MSP skiers being crazy are pretty much confirmed.

One side of Permin is fiery, intense and supremely competitive; the other side is a fun-loving prankster. He’ll hand you a beer, and the moment it hits your lips, you realize he’s swiped the rim with Dave’s Total Insanity Hot Sauce. As you spend the next several minutes suffering, he’s rolling on the floor, laughing so hard he’s crying. The games and playful physical abuse are unending. Cinematographer Tessier would know. He’s been Permin’s punching bag for years now. “The problem is he’s so strong,” says Tessier. “You always lose.”

It would be easy to mistake Richie for a loose cannon. Anywhere he ventures, meager snowpacks and dreary down days leave him lost. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard him—in lodges, hotels, at dinner—restlessly muttering, “I just want to send it, man.” But while he relishes flooring the peddle on the right, he does have a brake.

Among the more memorable moments in Superheroes of Stoke are two of Permin’s encounters with avalanches. With the Alaskan spines he’s riding fissuring like spider webs beneath his skis, Permin elects to point it. At each movie venue, rabid fans gasped with apprehension, but as Permin somehow hung on and outran each slide and threw a triumphant fist in the air just beyond the grasp of the billowing cloud, theatergoers went nuts. They were dramatic “wow” moments, for sure. But what the audience doesn’t see is helmet-cam footage of a flustered Permin skiing up to the crew at the bottom of other lines in which he set off minor slides claiming, “Dude, I don’t want to do this anymore.” He doesn’t like playing with avalanches. And he doesn’t enjoy being a slide magnet.

Permin has seen the consequences of fragile snowpacks firsthand. In December 2012, while traversing a slope in Verbier with Phil Maier and Dom Daher, he heard a rumble and rounded a corner to find massive blocks of snow from an avalanche right beside the piste. Others were already on scene digging, but as the dust settled, Permin and Maier spotted the back of an inflated ABS bag. They managed to dig out a 23-year-old Swedish woman, but she was white from hypoxia and gone. As patrol arrived and took over the scene, Permin slipped away, but the ghastly image of her had its repercussions. He didn’t ski for a couple of weeks due to shock, and reflected on his own brushes with slides. It was a reality check. “Like, wow, that could have been me,” Permin says. Now he always wears a beacon, shovel and probe, both inbounds and out.

Somewhere in the teens of April, we’re awaiting a heli pickup in the mountains outside Seward, Alaska. Cody Townsend blew his knee the previous day, leaving Markus Eder and Permin as the remaining twosome shooting for MSP’s Days of My Youth. After a disconcerting run on wind-hammered snow in the morning, a serac collapses and sends a boulder of ice rolling towards us. It stops well short, but moments later a loaded gully slides naturally above us. Neither the ice chunk nor the slide is an immediate danger, but Richie is quick to comment, “When the mountains are speaking, we have to listen.”

We flee to a new zone and make the most of the day until the sun wraps around a prow and lights up a fluted ridge in a late afternoon pink hue. Permin doesn’t feel right but goes about his business, picking out a fairly rowdy double stager on the ridge. He lifts off with Markus and is soon peering through the tips of his 193 Bent Chetler’s at the line below him. Permin drops first, entering on a flank banking more towards the sun than the rest of his line. Three turns in, the slope pops. It’s a shallow avalanche, but the sun-affected snow tugs on his skis, and in an instant he’s on his side, accelerating towards a rock wall. With Permin now lost in the cascade of snow, we hear a sickening crack, the intersection of human body, gear and granite. The slide continues pouring to the bottom of the face. We hear screams of agony, then our guide comes over the radio, “He’s on the surface!”

Photographer Grant Gunderson and I rush to Permin’s side. He’s buried to his neck, pleading, “Get me out of here!” I dig out his right arm, which is wrapped behind him. His knee is on fire and he fears his ass is spilling blood. We later find that the rock wall blew a hole in three layers of clothing down there. He begins slipping in and out of shock, periodically gazing right through us, and we call in the heli, there on the spot, to whisk him away.

That evening, when he returns from the hospital, he’s sporting stitches in the smiley- faced gash in his knee and a hell of a limp from his butt contusion. His season is over, but he’s feeling lucky, knowing the outcome could have been far more devastating. “I saw I was headed towards the wall,” he says, “And I got my skis in front of me.” Part of the rock remains embedded deep in the hard plastic of his boots, and his skis are splintered accordions. “I pushed too much, and this is what happens. It’s super, super important to listen to yourself. If you don’t feel it, don’t do it,” After a pause, he smiles. “But … how do you say it in English? What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Only a certain breed truly feed off their fear. Permin not only accepts that he is among that sect but embraces it. He admits, “I’m afraid at the top of every line. I think being afraid pushes my skiing—I ski better when I’m scared. If you’re not scared, that’s when it starts getting dangerous.”

Facing fear is routine in the Tordrillo Range northeast of Anchorage, Alaska. These mountains harbor a bigger, rawer, scarier side of AK than what we typically see in ski movies and provide a rowdy playground for skiers possessing a mindset like Permin’s. Having experienced the magic of the Tordrillos in 2012, Permin and Cody Townsend were adamant that filming for MSP’s Days of My Youth had to conclude with a return to the range for the ultimate big-mountain feast.

They’d been mind-skiing favorite “Tords” zones for two years, dreaming of different ways to attack particular lines and hits. And it’s not like going to a terrain park—with big mountains, there’s always the anticipation surrounding the variances in snow coverage from year to year. Maybe new things would open up that weren’t even possible when they were there last. They were heading to a skier’s ultimate playground. A giant, scary, dangerous playground. And they couldn’t wait.

We’ve been grounded in the Winterlake Lodge under sunny skies for 12 days, waiting for a reset. Even Permin can’t charge in hardpack conditions, and his patience is put to the test as he tries to quell his drive to stack groundbreaking footage. Who would have ever thought we’d go three weeks in Alaska without a storm? It’s hard to complain as a pro skier, but budgets, segments and dreams are all at stake here, and as each bluebird day passes, each one of those is being eaten away.

While sitting in the lodge’s main room with its tall windows framing the distant range, I ask Cody what he thinks about Richard’s personality, and he says, “He’s a polite Frenchman.” Richie walks in, and I tell him what Cody said, and he says, “Fuck no. I want to be badass.” We all manage a momentary laugh. “Ahhhh,” he then groans. “I don’t know what to do.” He kneels on the carpeted floor in the middle of the room, and I hear clunking but can’t see what he’s doing. Then he gets up, and I see he’s stapled his socks to make a divider between his big toe and other toes. He laughs. “I made special socks.” He proceeds to pick up random objects strewn about the room and staple them to his thighs. Then he stands there, admiring his handiwork. He looks up and asks Cody and Markus, “Who’s going crazy?” He raises his own hand as high as possible.

Hours later, it’s finally snowing in the Tordrillos. The sight of flakes has Richie anxiously pacing the lodge, looking out the windows and pumping his fists. We don’t know how much snow we’re going to get, but Permin’s brain is churning. He sweeps by and gives me a high five. “Oh, that first line is going to be stressful,” he mutters. “F#ck.” The fire that drives Richard Permin is back. Tomorrow we get to see something special. Because tomorrow Richard Permin will send it. That’s just what he does.

Related: Q&A: Scott Gaffney on seizing the moment with 2014 ski film, “Days of my Youth”

Note: This article appears in FREESKIER magazine Volume 17.4, The Backcountry Issue. The issue is available via iTunes Newsstand. Subscribe to FREESKIER magazine.