Plunging into peril
Athletes like steep skier Jérémie Heitz are taking extreme sports to deadlier terrain, said Simon Akam in The Guardian, with sponsors encouraging ever greater risks.
THE COMBIN DE Valsorey is a rocky Alpine peak that stands 13,700 feet above sea level near the Swiss-Italian border. Its northwest face rises 2,200 feet, at a gradient of about 50 degrees, steep enough that you can stand on the slope and touch the higher ground beside you without bending down.
In May 2016, when Jérémie Heitz climbed the Combin for the first time, the northwest face of the mountain looked like a vertical curtain of white, fringed by bands of dark rock. In several places, smears of grayish ice darkened the snow cover. Heitz’s ascent was nothing extraordinary in mountaineering terms: This face was first ascended in 1958, by Egbert Eigher and Erich Vanis. But Heitz was not climbing the Combin because he cared about going up—his plan was to ski down it.
Heitz, who was 26 at the time, is a professional freerider, a skier who spends his time on wild mountain slopes far from groomed trails and resort boundaries. His specialty lies at the extreme end of freeriding: steep skiing, descending ground with a gradient twice that of some “expert” terrain in ski resorts. This activity combines two of the world’s most perilous sports—alpine mountaineering and backcountry skiing—and regularly kills a handful of its practitioners every year. Heitz had come to the Combin as part of a film project he had devised, called La Liste (“The List”), which involved descending some of the steepest and tallest faces in the western Alps.
Heitz would not be the first person to ski the northwest face of the Combin; that accomplishment was secured in 1981. But the pioneers of steep skiing, who developed the sport in the 1960s and ’70s, had relied on so-called pedal-hop turns, making one staccato leap after another to deal with the impossibly precipitous slopes. Heitz had a different vision.
In its early days, steep skiing’s drama had come from the fact that these slopes could be skied at all. Now Heitz sought to bring speed—up to 75 mph—and style to a sport that once impressed through sheer audacity. The result was something remarkable—and even riskier than before. “That style of skiing is incredibly dangerous,” says Dave Searle, a British mountain guide based in Chamonix. “You can keep pushing the limits of it until you either stop pushing the limits or you die. That’s the two things really.”
At the top of the Combin, Heitz stood on a crest of snow that curved like a frozen wave. He looked down at the clouds in the valleys far below. “You ready?” someone said on the radio. A countdown cued the camera crew hovering nearby in a helicopter: “5,4,3,2,1. Go.”
Heitz slid sideways down the first few yards, made a turn, and then cut down on to the highest gray smear of ice. Skiing on ice is not generally recommended: All skiers control their speed by making turns. That’s how they tame gravity. But on ice, the edges of the ski can’t bite, which means you can’t turn, which means you can’t slow down. Instead, you become a vector, pure speed with no directional control.
Heitz believed he could handle the ice, and he thought it would make good footage. He was wrong about at least one of those things. On the ice he lost control and started sliding. One ski came off and he began to tumble. “No, no, no,” he shouted.
He was lucky. The Combin, unlike some of his other proving grounds, is concave, with the steepest section at the top. He halted himself after falling perhaps 500 feet (he says the exact distance is hard to judge).
The loose ski slid further below him before it, too, came to a stop.
“You OK, Jérémie?” the radio burbled. Heitz drew an ice axe from his pack and hacked at the frozen face of the slope to secure himself. He went down gingerly to retrieve the lost ski. “I really frightened myself,” he radioed back. “Let’s call it a day.”
HEITZ GREW UP in the same region of western Switzerland as one of the pioneers of extreme skiing, Sylvain Saudan, who made his name in the 1960s and ’70s with regular descents of mountain faces that were thought to be unskiable. Heitz’s idea for La Liste had been to redo his predecessor’s path-breaking descents, albeit with a twist. He compiled a list of Swiss and French mountains with enormously steep faces—hence the title— and decided to ski them in grand style, at high speed.
Like big-wave surfing, extreme skiing has always carried an existential charge: Its dangers are not incidental or extraneous, and death is not a rare accident that only occurs when things go terribly wrong. It was for the sake of one of his viewers— his mother—that Heitz had been initially reluctant to include footage of his fall on
the Combin. He was not eager to show her how close he had come to dying that day. But one of the editors of La Liste, a Swiss filmmaker named Nico Falquet, who had known Heitz since he was a child, insisted that the fall belonged in the film. It was, he said, the most dramatic moment.
Heitz eventually relented, and today he says that showing his fallibility on screen was central to the film. This, Heitz told me recently, is the simple reality of this kind of skiing. “There are times when things go well, and times when things go badly,” he said. To see Heitz stumble and fall, in the middle of a film full of inhumanly beautiful performances, was to be reminded just how dangerous what he was doing truly was. Before La Liste, Heitz had been a wellregarded, if largely unknown, professional freerider. After La Liste, his name was spoken with awestruck admiration.
The success of La Liste offered Heitz and his skiing partner on the project, Sam Anthamatten, immediate material rewards. Today, Anthamatten is supported by the U.S. brand North Face, while Heitz has become a favorite for European outdoor brands. Heitz currently makes about 300,000 Swiss francs (about $350,000) a year; many pro skiers would count themselves lucky to make a fraction of that.
The sponsorship money has allowed him to focus entirely on his film projects.
For all the freedom that Heitz’s sponsorships have provided him, it also seemed clear to me that this freedom comes with its own kinds of constraints. Though the brands themselves say they never demand that their athletes take on certain objectives, in reality it’s a more delicate dance. As Nico Falquet says, many skiers feel that if you don’t deliver material that is both dramatic and beautiful, your contract is likely not to be renewed. “It’s business. I mean, if you can no longer deliver your rolls to all the cafeterias in the region, they will look for another baker.”
To spend much time in Heitz’s world is to encounter something like the normalization, even the banalization, of premature death. “To be honest, there are so many deaths that it’s not like it’s the elephant in the room, because it’s not a secret how dangerous backcountry skiing is,” the American skier Drew Tabke told me. I was speaking to him shortly after the death of Tof Henry, a French freerider whose style was sometimes compared to Heitz’s. “Tof, who just died, is one of, like, 20 of our friends who have died. I know dozens of people who have died, and there’s not that many practitioners.”
After La Liste, Heitz and Anthamatten, a specialist in rock and ice climbing, wanted to take their style of steep skiing beyond the Alps. “Sylvain told me, ‘Jérémie, the Alps are over now. You have to be somewhere else, in the Himalayas,’” Heitz said. “For skiing, and for me, that is the future.”
LA LISTE WAS made on a budget of 130,000 francs, most of which was swiftly absorbed by the cost of the helicopters needed for aerial photography. This time Heitz and Anthamatten were able to secure about 2 million francs ($2.3 million) for a film, the majority of which came from Red Bull. That was enough to take a filmmaking crew to the Andes and to the Karakoram in Pakistan.
Their first target was a 19,767-foot blade of ice and rock in Peru called Artesonraju. In 2018, Heitz, Anthamatten and the other three members of their crew set off for the summit from a camp on the glacier below. It took 12 hours to reach the peak, with the final stretch on a narrow ridge. On the way up the snow conditions seemed good, but the winds they met during the climb had transformed the southeast face into a mix of crust and hard ice.
Mika Merikanto, a Finnish photographer and experienced steep skier, went first. He skied down the first third of the face, then radioed to say the conditions meant highspeed sweeping turns were not possible. Anthamatten and Heitz followed, taking on board the advice and eschewing their usual grand style. The two athletes paused briefly where Merikanto was standing, then continued on their way down. In the interim, waiting, Merikanto had become very cold. He set off again, but lower down the face his ski hit a concealed rock and he lost his footing. His skis came off, and soon he was cartwheeling down the mountain.
Watching after his own descent, Anthamatten thought Merikanto was dead. But Heitz, about 500 feet away, traversed furiously and was able to reach Merikanto’s sliding body in time to stop him, using his own body as a barricade. “It was so steep
I couldn’t move,” Heitz recalls. It took an hour before anyone else in their crew was able to reach them.
The team was eventually able to contact the Peruvian authorities on a satellite phone, but they said it would take 24 hours for a helicopter to reach them. It was clear that Merikanto would not make it that long. He had sustained a spinal injury, a punctured lung, damage to both knees and an elbow, and had a bleed on the brain. He was drifting in and out of consciousness, and was rapidly becoming hypothermic. The crew decided to bring Merikanto down the mountain themselves.
Merikanto recalls that Heitz was next to him when he woke up in a rural Peruvian hospital. Heitz told him he was done with skiing. “He was blaming himself a lot for it,” Merikanto told me. “Blaming himself so much for it. And I guess I was just trying to calm him down a bit.”
La Liste 2 premiered in 2021. Subtitled Everything or Nothing, it is a very different production from its predecessor. The film is primarily the story of Merikanto’s injury and rehabilitation, along with Heitz’s growing uneasiness about the risks involved in the project. His decision to turn back on Laila Peak in Pakistan while Anthamatten continues is portrayed as a signal moment.
Merikanto appears to hold no grudge against Heitz—they remain friends— but he finds it hard to justify the risks involved in the sport. “It’s a waste of incredible people, personalities. I feel it’s a waste,” he told me. “Somebody dies and then on the next day you have your social media, full of this ‘ride in peace’ bullshit. And then the circus continues.”
When Tof Henry died, in October last year, he was with Mathurin Vauthier, a French photographer based in Chamonix. Afterward, Vauthier published a long post on Instagram describing what had happened to Henry and Juan Señoret, the Chilean skier who died in the same accident. It read like an anguished howl for lost friends. “They were at the peak of their joy and their reasons to live. Skis on the feet, a sublime mountain, a sunrise, and with a partner who shared the same vision.” Then, below, Vauthier added: “Finally, thank you to the sponsors, without them nothing would have been done in the same way.” I wondered if he was aware of the irony, or if the brands listed were, either.