Speedriding incorporates flight; video screen grab
Alaska’s towering glacial peaks offer some of the most challenging big-mountain skiing and snowboarding on the planet, but the vast terrain is limiting because so much of it is deemed unridable.
That, however, is beginning to change.
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A three-man crew of elite athletes, led by Juneau native Jon DeVore, recently brought the evolving sport of speedriding to the daunting Alaska range, and conquered lines that had never been attempted.
Their graceful forays off cliffs, through gaping chasms, and down icy chutes are featured in the new film, “The Unrideables: Alaska Range.”
Speedriding incorporates skiing with the aid of a canopy used for flight, sort of like paragliding. The sport was pioneered over the past decade, largely by French skiers in the Alps.
Speedrider negotiates chute in the Alaska range; video screen grab
But Alaska’s glacial terrain, which features the highest mountains in the world outside of Asia and the Andes, represents a far greater challenge, in part because of the terrain changes from day to day.
“The hardest part for me, learning how to ride the Alaska mountains, is that endless basketball… the never-ending visual, where you just can’t see what’s next,” DeVore said. “It was just really intense to try to figure out the runs and all the different changing terrain.
“Every time we looked at it in a different light it’d look different. Sometimes something would would look steep, and we went back four hours later and it was too flat to even coast across. There were so many things to ingest that it was a hard, hard game of chess with that mountain.”
Said Filippo “Ippo” Fabbi of the learning process: “I want to stay alive… So yeah, you have to learn fast.”
The speedriders make it look easy in the accompanying footage. But this clearly is a sport that requires considerable skill as a big-mountain skier, and lots of flight practice; otherwise the consequences could be disastrous.
However, because the canopy enables flight over rock walls, deep crevasses, and rising snowdrifts, skilled athletes such as DeVore, Fabbi and Andy Farrington, are able to lay tracks where none were previously lain.
DeVore’s dream of skiing every peak in Alaska now seems possible, and he hopes his endeavors will inspire other skiers to add flight to their skill sets, to open new horizons on slopes around the world.
“We hope to introduce speedriding to people who love pushing what’s possible in the mountains as much as we do,” DeVore says.
“The Unrideables: Alaska Range,” produced by Red Bull Media House and Freerider Entertainment, was scheduled to premier Wednesday in Salt Lake City, Utah. The documentary will become available for sale in February.
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