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Finding the Fine Line

Rocky Mountain Sherpas and Canadian Avalanche Foundation team up to present a youthful new avalanche education film
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Sure Slides Dave Mossop shoots a scene for the Rocky Mountain Sherpas' latest film. Photo by Malcolm Sangster

What: The Fine Line world premiere

When: Thursday, Sept. 25, 7 p.m. & 9 p.m.

Where: MY Millennium Place

Admission: $8

At one point or another, we’ve all been forced to sit through agonizing safety films for work or school. They’re not usually the most fascinating flicks — they often feature stodgy narrators, cheesy dialogue, and bad music — but the Rocky Mountain Sherpas are looking to change all that with The Fine Line: A 16 mm Avalanche Education Film.

Now, before you roll your eyes and suppress a yawn, be forewarned, The Fine Line isn’t anything like that fire safety video you had to watch during Home Ec class.

Malcolm Sangster and Dave Mossop are cofounders of the Rocky Mountain Sherpas, a group of skiers, snowboarders, photographers and filmmakers dedicated to promoting the beauty and freedom of big mountain sports. Founded in Alberta in 1997, the Sherpas are now based out of Squamish. But over the years, bouncing from one resort town to another — Revelstoke, Whistler, and Golden — Sangster and Mossop have seen lots of slides claim lives.

During high school, they lost four friends to avalanches, and in 2003, they were also on the Strathcona-Tweedsmuir school backcountry daytrip when a huge natural slide buried 17 people, killing seven.

“Since then, we’ve seen this happen again and again, and we’ve always been like, ‘we gotta make a video that’s cool and going to speak to the youth and be educational at the same time,’” Sangster said.

The project didn’t become a reality until last summer, when they teamed up with the Canadian Avalanche Foundation (CAF).

Avalanche safety isn’t typically thought of as being particularly wild, or even interesting, for that matter. But Sangster and Mossop have managed to include a bit of “ski porn” — shots of big name riders pulling sick tricks in beautiful places — to sex things up a bit.

“There are a lot of old people in the industry that think you shouldn’t even teach kids about these things — it’s kind of like teaching kids about sex and drugs, or something,” Sangster said with a laugh.

Now, it seems the CAF is taking a forward-thinking approach to avalanche safety, opting to use ski films as a medium for their message to youth.

The timing for the film couldn’t be better — with 16 avalanche fatalities in Canada last season alone, slides are definitely a hot topic for skiers and snowboarders alike.

“We’re not trying to scare people out of the backcountry,” Sangster explained. “We’re trying to convince people and encourage people to go to the backcountry, its just that you need a little time and thought, and with the right planning, you can get after those lines, you can ski that couloir, or you can do anything you want to do.”

The film is definitely a new movement in avalanche education — it takes a youth-oriented approach, using animation, ski pros and realistic scenarios to engage the audience while educating.

“A lot of old avalanche films, they’re sort of geared towards… an average ski tour, and they’re not really addressing the issue that people are going out there and building booters, skiing gnarly lines and hucking cliffs,” Sangster said.

The Fine Line tells intense, true stories about avalanches, including interviews with people who almost died after being buried two metres deep.

“It kind of tells a story of it’s more than just music and shots and all that sort of stuff,” Sangster said. “We do have sections that are quite like that, but we like to tell a story of why we go to the mountains, and why we have to respect them.”

They also go behind the scenes of the ski film industry to find out how the pros deal with avalanches, gathering donated avalanche shots from some huge film production companies, like Travis Rice’s Brain Farm, TGR, Frontier and Standard Films.

“Our film is super multifaceted,” Sangster said. “We’ve got interviews with pros that are talking about slides and safety protocols and we’ve got interviews with avalanche professionals that are talking about these same things… and then we’ve got interviews with just your average, everyday skier.”

They even traveled with Red Bull and Tanner Hall’s Massive project to Haines, Alaska, to talk about the prep work that goes into safety on shoots. Lake Louise, Sunshine, Revelstoke, and Whistler are also featured in the film, with lots of industry professionals — riders, photographers and filmmakers — plus some big corporate sponsors, throwing their weight behind the ambitious project. Featured riders include Sean Petit, Mike Rencz, Chris Rubens, Eric Hjorliefson, Shin Campos and Sky Sheele.

“In the ski films, you’ll see a kid trigger a slide and then it cuts to the next shot of him doing something crazy,” Sangster pointed out. “You never really see what happens or what went wrong or the aftermath.”

While the DVD will include four 15-minute training films that cover everything from understanding avalanche bulletins, choosing terrain, predicting avalanches, and emergency self-rescue, the 50-minute feature film isn’t supposed to be an exhaustive education. Rather, the hope is that it will inspire people to take an introductory course.

Over the next few years, the Rocky Mountain Sherpas are planning to tour Western Canada and visit high schools with the film, and hope to have it added to the educational media marketplace and included in high school curriculum.