Steep: The Story of Big Mountain Skiing

By Graham Gephart

“When I go out, I become more alive. It’s probably the endorphins everyone talks about. And I guess the more you produce, the more you want. So I think I’ve been producing a lot for a long time, because I want them all the time.” Doug Coombs, Steep: The Story of Big Mountain Skiing

We’re all addicted to something, and if you’re not, you should be. Indeed, substitute one or two words from Coombs or the other narrators of Steep – skiing mountain men like Bill Briggs, Anselme Baud, Shane McConkey, Seth Morrison and Andrew McLean – and the natural dialogue starts to sound uncomfortably like the confessions of a cocaine addict. These are people who are driven to tuck away the reality of risk to chase after the freedom found skiing down remote, unsanitized mountains.

Produced by NYC-based The Documentary Group, Steep offers a thoroughly developed and beautifully shot history of big mountain skiing. Leveraged by the distribution power of Sony Pictures Classics, starting December 21st the movie began a nationwide tour with 90 stops from Aspen to Atlanta, where it will undoubtedly expose a mainstream audience to the kind of skiing they may have never even imagined. It’s definitely not the movie you’ll send your parents out to see if they still think your avalanche shovel is for digging out the car.

Far from the action-porn collection of clips that make up most ski movies today, the mood of Steep is inescapably heavy as it works through the risk and the uncomfortable truth of how dramatically risk escalates as you spend more time in the mountains. It’s impossible to ski day-in and day-out in the backcountry without feeling the loss of a friend gone off to ski the slopes of Valhalla, a fact that becomes increasingly evident as Steep chronicles the pioneers who one day never made it back to the lodge.

Looming over it all is the story of Coombs. An international big mountain legend for his skill and grace in the most death-defying situations, he is initially woven through the storyline as a narrator. His death during production, in a fall down the Couloir de Polichinelle in La Grave, France, quickly turns him into yet one more example of the ease with which the scale can tip. By the time mountaineers Andrew McLean, Matthew Turley and Dylan Freed get caught in a slide just feet from the camera, the hair-raising footage only provides more visceral proof of what the subjects have been saying all along.

Beyond its big league production value and seamless documentary approach alone, the honesty of those skiers is what makes Steep a compelling film for audiences beyond the ski town. The film’s power comes from how openly they accept and how eloquently they explain why they gamble for each turn.