Watching “Swift. Silent. Deep. The Story of the Jackson Hole Air Force,” — the recently released rockumentary- style history of America’s most-famous band of ski bums — I kept thinking three things: 1) What made these guys so much more myth-makingly friendly than any other group of “hard charging, hard drinking, hard drugging skiers” (to quote JHAF co-founder Benny Wilson)? 2) Did this particular cadre of high-altitude athletes really play a pivotal role in shaping the present state of American skiing? And 3) Damn, I’d really like to go ski some deep powder right this instant.

The reason thought number three kept occurring — again and again — is because a lot of the ski footage in the movie is flat out fantastic. From archival images of early-’70s skiers throwing giant back-flips into the gaping maw of Corbet’s Couloir, to present-day state of the steep powder sequences, there’s some very fun eye candy in this flick.

But the recurring questions? Those sprang from thinking that every ski hill in the world must have its own loose-knit, like-minded, fast-moving band(s) of backwoods explorers, terrain park posses and assorted powderhounds who charge the mountain all day and crowd the bars all night.

In Santa Fe, I call them the Hippie Jihad because the Jamaicanflag- colored streamers billowing from their poles and coats make them so easy to spot (and because I don’t know what they call themselves). And I remember Mike Hattrup’s “Goon Squad” of hard-partying freestylers who terrorized the mountains of the Northwest, the 10 guys I saw wearing Mogul Assassins leather jackets in a bar in Lake Placid and the guys with British Ski & Wine team badges in France. Growing up, the Ravinos and Lost Legion ski clubs would host spring keg parties with tandem, naked and chemically altered ski-jumping contests off the cliffs of Vail’s North Rim Run until they partied themselves off the slopes. And about the same time, you started to see Planetary Defense stickers on the bumpers of old Saabs and Jeeps from Breckenridge to Aspen. I remember I saw that sticker on the side of David Lindley’s amp once.

So I asked “Swift. Silent. Deep.” producer John “JK” Klaczkiewicz in regards to the JHAF, “What’s so different about these cats?”

The short answer, according to JK is that, “The Jackson Hole Air Force story is just really worth telling, first and foremost. It’s about an amazing cast of characters who were part of this thing — from world-famous skiers like Doug Coombs and Rick Armstrong, and the Hunt brothers, the Miller brothers and Benny and Howie Henderson — where they were all pushing the boundaries and evolving in their skiing, and their passion for what they were doing has left a lasting impact.”

Inspired by the movie “Dog Town and Z-Boys,” skateboard icon Stacy Peralta’s documentary about how a group of California kids revolutionized sidewalk surfing, JK says, “I realized I was cataloging all the legends I heard about these guys, and kind of putting the longer story together, and eventually it just had to come out.”

The long answer is indeed in the film itself, addressing everything from the JHAF’s daily battles with the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort Ski Patrol, their role in the emergence of Alaska as a deeppowder Mecca, and the creation and distribution of the group’s trademark badge, a kind of stoner metalhead’s reworking of a U.S. Army Airborne insignia with the motto, “Swift. Silent. Deep.”

For the few standout skiers that made the grade, the typical JHAF initiation would occur when they were skiing near the bottom of a run or waiting in the tramline. With no fanfare, a current member of the Air Force would simply approach, hand them a badge and say something like, “You earned it.”

Some of the more memorable scenes in the movie are of big mountain stars like Armstrong, Micah Black and Teton Gravity Research founders Todd and Steve Jones getting all jacked up talking about how they first earned those badges, after seasons of skiing big lines, skywalking over cliffs and ducking ropes.

As to why so many of these guys got famous — with Coombs and Armstrong especially crossing over to gain coverage in major American newspapers and mainstream magazines — the bottom line is that they could ski better than anybody else. Maybe better than anyone ever as far as the group’s accumulated roster of first descents around the world could claim. Already good skiers when they migrated from Montana, Colorado, Vermont and all points in between, the act of skiing 4,000-plus feet of vertical off Jackson’s tram almost every run helped make them great. Add in the outrageous steeps, wild snow and the opportunity for any number of lethal mishaps from falling off a cliff to getting caught in an avalanche, and it’s no surprise that, as Alaska began to be “discovered” by skiers in the mid-’90s, Jackson’s Air Force was at the forefront.

According to JK, the first incredible ski film footage that came back to the Lower 48, original helicopter skiing operations like Valdez Heli Ski Guides and Alaska Rendezvous Heli-Ski Guides, and the first World Extreme Skiing Championships, all bore the Air Force stamp.

“Air Force guys won the World Extremes the first three years it was held,” he says. “And that first year, it was all Air Force guys in the top five spots.”

As movie and magazine coverage grew, at home in Jackson, a kind of range war erupted over ski area boundary lines. JHAF’ers, their followers and like-minded powderhounds, were ducking ropes on a daily basis, and a significant amount of JH Ski Patrol manpower was allocated to catching them, pulling their passes and eventually making arrests.

For a while, that seemed like part of the plot. Armstrong says in the film, “I always felt those boundaries were more for people that didn’t know what they were doing,” and readily admits that the thrill of knowing he could be chased made it “funner than hell.” Black compares the game of all-mountain cat-and-mouse to throwing snowballs at cars, and how the adrenaline only really skyrockets, “when the car stops.”

But when Coombs was banned from the mountain in 1996 for allegedly poaching an in-bounds closure — the dispute still lingers, and in the film, current and former members of the patrol and several JHAF’ers remain adamant about their version of the facts — the issue reached a head.

Some patrollers quit, saying they hadn’t taken the job to act as cops. More tellingly, the ski community began petitioning for all the terrain to be open to public use. In 1999, that’s exactly what happened, as open boundary gates were established to the north and south of the ski resort.

Though several ski areas in the Rockies had existing open boundary policies at the time, the move at Jackson only stimulated the concept. Hike-to terrain and backcountry options are now the norm, and avalanche transceivers, ski boots with “walk modes” for touring and wider skis for powder have proven to be one of the growing sales segments in an otherwise moribund equipment market.

As for the Air Force’s greatest success, getting the boundaries opened also made them less relevant. The group still thrives (despite the deaths of members such as Coombs and Steve Haas), but the thrill of the chase is gone, and some of the passion that went with it.

“The patch is still distributed to those who Benny deems worthy,” JK says. “And those guys still ski together, but when the boundaries opened, they kind of lost the reason they were rebels in the first place.” With “Swift. Silent. Deep.” at least we have the document.

Editor-at-Large Peter Kray’s last story for the Gazette was “Ski Chile,” which appeared in #161. He lives in Santa Fe, from where he runs the website, ShredWhiteandBlue.com