As a ski cinematographer for Sweetgrass Productions, it’s my job to lie to you.This is also the role of every other camera- jockey, photographer, and on slope ego-fluffer in the industry. It is our goal to manufacture a conception of skiing and polish it into a product, sleek and smart, which will entertain, inspire, titillate. To this end we hike lap after lap on the same slope, shooting identical one-turns until perfection is achieved. We curse into the radio for hours arguing about the correct placement of a turn to generate ideal spray. We take our tools—the sun, the snow, the turn, the air, the angle—and we carefully sculpt your dream of the ideal backcountry day. Ski filmmaking is powder, smoke and mirrors. While this might seem depressingly artificial at first glance, there is something to be said for the hordes of camera-wielding magicians flooding the mountains and the movie market. Competition breeds creativity. The ongoing search for a new angle on a stale subject puts cameras in the darkest crevices of the world to escape the old North American haunts. Millions are dumped into helicopters. Skiers strap GoPros to every square inch of their bodies. It’s Hollywood in the hills, all in an effort to capture something you’ve never seen before, to chart out the unknown edges of the skiing world. 
Filmmaking and art are acts of exploration, and we are always searching for the next dark spot on the map to fill in. At Sweetgrass, we think that the void is not necessarily filled with the newest tech gimmick or biggest helicopter budget, but by understanding the nature of a place and conveying it in a new way. After spending a full season in Japan for our film Signatures in an effort to redefine that powder haven, the next gaping hole in our world was South America—a land of whispered legends, incredible terrain and hostile weather. Many film crews have dabbled there, but no one has ever spent a solid season in the gauntlet, producing a full movie showing its depth. Last June we packed bags for Argentina, crossed fingers and hoped for the best as we set out on the first of two years of filming for our new film, Solitaire.
People often tell us that our films are soulful. But the soul isn’t in the skiing—it’s in everything else, those moments hidden outside of the frame, buried under the snow. You must simply dig them up. What we found in South America were individual moments, many and varied, that will hopefully paint a map of Southern skiing that few had any idea existed. Here are two of them worth remembering.
Las Lenas. It’s a skier´s desert dream and nightmare in one. Here, rocks blow uphill. Dry snow sandblasts through serrated rock chokes and the most technical outerwear, and the sun cracks deep lines into windswept snow and frostnipped face alike. It’s a raw, dead desert, vast and vertical, ripped right from the frames of a spaghetti western.
The wind and sun and rock compose everything here, and the skiing and filming adapt, always on their toes, edges sharp. This informs every shot we compose as we perch atop the looming cliffs. Like the condors spinning in the thermals above, we watch, and our muscles tense as the skiers on the opposing mountain step into their skis. 
A few moments of tension as buckles are tightened and arms are raised—then the button is pushed, breaths are held, and there’s the drop. Everything goes silent and focused. Gusting winds threaten to knock us from our roosts into the abyss, but also pick up the rooster-tails below as the skier smears through 45-degree pockets of fresh, sending quadruple-overhead clouds cascading through the air. Ever ahead of their personal tornado, skis wrap arcs through the monolithic vertical spires that spackle the face. The slopes are huge, and endless features erupt from them, begging for creative lines and powerful turns. The glory of it all makes tired legs rise to the challenge, dropping knees into perfectly cut chutes and raising heels through the curving spines of wind lips.
For these seconds the entire emptiness of the desert glows, and the place that was just an empty and bitter monstrosity outside the scope of human living now seems dynamic and alive. Just a few turns, this meeting of man and mountain in one of the rawest places imaginable sparks a flame in the cold, and for a moment the entire scene is cocooned in it. There is a feeling that the world is watching, I’m filled with the odd realization that thousands of people will see this moment on a screen and feel its heat too.
Then the valley floor arrives, emptying out into a cratered battlefield of windswept rock and ice. The silence of the moment fades back into the roar of the wind and cast and crew ease back into the desolate loneliness of the desert, sun, wind, and blood. But the track is in, and to the rebounding soundtrack of hoots and hollers echoing from the cliffs, it begins again.
Bariloche is underwater, and we are neck-deep in the skin track and drowning. It is deep, so deep, but a wet deep that pulls you down and combats your every move like a quicksand. Indeed, we seem to have been pulled into some twisted, snowbound jungle, and a rain forest just riding the freezing line. All around, bamboo shoots sprout without direction in psychedelic patches from the baseless walls of white. Wide-trunked trees stacked with fluorescent green moss sway hypnotic. If ever the Amazon were to see nuclear winter it must look like this place now, buried so deep in the heart of Argentina’s infamous
annual storm, the Santa Rosa. 
For half an hour we’ve been waiting for athletes to slog high enough to set up for this one-turn, and now we’re in a screaming match in the white. Snowflakes muffle words like water, as we struggle to pinpoint the line, until, eventually and like always, we cumulatively mutter screw it and hope for the best. Rendered blind by water, we can only point and pray that something emerges from the murk of the undersea forest.
A strangled call for the drop leaks through the trees, and a shape glides forward. Little more than a head surging through the snow, it approaches. Not turning, just plowing. An uncertain submarine. Just above the landmark tree, the thing makes a desperate attempt to throw down a right turn for the cameras. The knee drops, colors and a beard and a man emerge, and there is a wonderful frozen moment thinking that this might actually happen, that a being can in fact function in this mania… and then the face drags through the snow, skis and senses catch and are gone, inertia engages in unpredicted ways, the whole body spins, flops on its side—and disappears completely in front of us.
A few uncertain moments pass, as we first consider the amount of time spent on this bonked shot, then look towards the quiet and cavernous hole, heads cocked. Chuckles boil into laughter, and soon everyone involved is howling hysterically, our waterlogged heart of darkness churning with cackling monkey gasps as a helpless hand finally arises, groping for daylight. Amid the howls I look down and discover that the water has finally worked its way through the camera and it won’t turn on. The day is done, and not a shot to show for it.
But I can’t be angry. It wasn’t filmed, and it shouldn’t have been. It was for us, a crazed moment in the hurricane eye of Argentina’s legendary snowstorm, when we swam and screamed until we finally opened ourselves up in laughter to the insanity of that white jungle. Not every golden moment is for the world to see.
Indeed, the perfect soul ski flick, the camera would be left at home shooting snow falling outside the window for 45 minutes, while we would all be out skiing until our legs collapsed. That is the dichotomy of ski filmmaking. Much of it is a vast artificial emptiness, a spin-doctor’s game of smoke and mirrors— but behind the camera, in the uncharted corners of the art, there is an enormous capacity for stories, for life, and for conveying a most simple emotion and sensation. You find those soul moments, those treasured seconds that convey something never seen before, not with camera tricks or a bigger budget, but by being there in unfamiliar lands with the third eye open. I shamelessly admit that I don’t think we do it for the skiing—real skiers get far more turns. No, it’s witnessing those rare and perfect glimpses of truth between the turns that keep the cameras and the ski bags rolling.
In the end, if I’m a frostbitten liar until the day I die, it’s still worth it, crouching in the shadows and waiting for those little flashes of heaven
that can be shared with the world.
*This originally appeared in TS#16